Gore Vidal (97 page)

Having published a devastatingly lucid article about Goldwater in
Life
in 1961 and devoted the less notorious part of his article “The Best Man: 1968” to the political chances of New York's Governor Nelson Rockefeller, Vidal would be on the scene at the Cow Palace in San Francisco for Rockefeller's humiliation by the Republican right wing. Having believed and predicted in 1963 that Rockefeller would be the Republican presidential nominee in 1968, Gore was able to observe what was to him the chilling triumph of the revivified Republican conservative movement. Goldwater
supporters dominated the convention. Well organized, with deep roots in the increasingly powerful Sunbelt; xenophobic; anti-immigrant; fearful of Communism abroad; eager to scale down big government, decrease taxes, and improve business profits at home; strongly beating the drums of battle for their fallen hero, Joseph McCarthy; most of all advocates of Christian morality and tight social control as the key to American prosperity—they hissed down Rockefeller, who represented to them Eastern liberal Republicanism and personal immorality. Rockefeller had recently divorced and remarried. That was disqualification enough. “
Who present that
famous day can ever forget those women with blue-rinsed hair and leathery faces and large costume jewelry and pastel-tinted dresses with tasteful matching accessories as they screamed ‘Lover!' at Nelson? It was like a TV rerun of
The Bacchae
, with Nelson as Pentheus.” As a well-known liberal television personality and political commentator associated with the Democratic Party who did occasional man-on-the-street interviews and appeared each night from a convention-hall studio, Vidal himself was no more popular than Rockefeller among those Republicans for whom the media people seemed mostly devilish enemies. The atmosphere was tense, confrontational, the majority of delegates committed to a Manichaean battle between the forces of good and evil. Goldwater's slim chance to win the election made no difference to his supporters. Only ideology mattered. They were there to make a point, and to capture and revivify the Republican Party for the conservative movement.

Susskind's program at the Cow Palace was, of course, a sideshow, though prominent political people eagerly appeared for the advantage of the exposure. Norman Mailer, writing about the convention, “wanted to be on with us every five minutes, and we were glad to have him,” Vidal recalled. Mailer had become a pugnaciously outspoken television regular in New York, always eager to appear, often on Susskind's show. “One night—I think it was the night Goldwater was nominated—David and I were worn out. We hadn't had a proper dinner since we got there because we'd go from the convention to broadcasting to interviewing. So we didn't go on. Norman was upset: ‘Gore, this is the most important night of our lives.' I said, ‘David and I are tired. We've been on every night.'” Still friendly, their ordinary discourse was banter, competitive witticisms, and Mailer had met his third wife, a young English journalist named Jean Campbell, at a party Gore had given at the 360 East Fifty-fifth Street apartment in spring 1961.
“Oh, yes, she was very attractive, very bright,” Vidal recalled. “Her grandfather was Max Beaverbrook, and her father's family were the Argyles. She was in her twenties, a working journalist. She was having an affair … with Henry Luce. And she didn't have much time for anybody else until she met Norman. She promptly broke up with Luce and married Norman.” Gore, who thought Campbell striking and interesting, gave Mailer the impression that night at Gore's apartment that he himself was amorously interested. “I think Gore had had some idea of possibly having some sort of liaison with her…. But Jean and I really hit it off, and we just left the party together and started living together a few days later and eventually got married and were together for the couple of years we were together. And we saw a fair amount of Gore after that.” When he left the party with Campbell, Mailer thought Gore looked startled. “I think he's always had sexual interest in women. I don't think it ever came to the point of critical interest. I don't think it ever reached critical mass, put it that way. A great many women have adored him and are very loyal to him. Elaine Dundy used to adore him…. A lot of women have liked him a great deal. My present wife likes him. Yes. He's charming with women.” In 1964 Mailer and Campbell were still married. Later, when she was living in Rome, Gore asked her, “‘What on earth attracted you to him?' ‘I had never gone to bed with a Jew before.' I told Philip Rahv this. ‘She might have tried out a few of us before she went off with Norman. To give her a little wider range of choice.'”

Another assiduous pursuer of TV cameras, with whom Vidal had already begun an ongoing series of confrontational television entertainments, was also at the convention. An enthusiastic supporter of Goldwater's conservative agenda, eager to become the foremost young spokesman for what he termed “the radical right,” William F. Buckley, Jr. had from an early age embraced political conservatism with the passion of a religious defender of the faith. The same age as Gore, he was born into a large Irish-American Catholic family whose patriarch had made and lost great sums in the oil business in the Southwest and in Mexico and had settled into insular self-sufficiency in Sharon, Connecticut. Ambitious both for the minds and souls of his progeny, Buckley, Sr., had sent them to study in France and England. The home atmosphere was relentlessly devout, the family's pious and pre—Vatican II Catholic faith its overriding loyalty, the faith and the church transcendent realities. The Buckleys had no doubt that God and the
devil existed in tangible ways, that the dominating structure of life was a cosmic conflict between the forces of good and evil, and that eventually their Catholic God would be victorious. For the young William Buckley secular politics was religious warfare in another form. The only politicians and policies meriting support were those whose values cohered with the Buckleys' Catholic vision. Since the supreme enemy of the Church was godless Communism, the ideological and political conflict, in the light of which all else was secondary, was between Christian America, the bastion of the free world, and the atheistic Soviet Union, where freedom was enslaved.

A bright, sinewy, argumentative mind, a gifted, acerbic debater with a talent for and a love of language, Buckley discovered his lifelong mission as an undergraduate at Yale: to translate his religious beliefs into political philosophy and practical advocacy. The right wing of the Republican Party was his natural home, Senator Robert Taft of Ohio his ideal. His two combative heros soon became the rather simple Joseph McCarthy and the complicated Whittaker Chambers. The enemies (actually, the forces of evil) were Communism, liberalism, unionism, humanism, atheism, the Democratic Party, and any and all movements that did not give highest priority to the forces of law and order. Anarchy and chaos needed to be rigorously suppressed. Buckley did not himself desire to be elected to political office. His talent was for advocacy, not administration or legislation. His vocation was to influence others, to heighten awareness, to serve as a spokesman, to gather like-minded colleagues into an articulate solidarity. An instinctive propagandist, he knew that evasive simplicity works well in public discourse. A talented sophist, he had the ability to use language to simplify complex issues and to complicate simple issues, as he chose. Nuance and shading hardly interested him, though he mastered a variety of rhetorical devices to create the impression that as a debater he paid his dues to intellectual subtlety. When he graduated from Yale in 1946, his intellectual and religious views were strongly in place. So too was his determination to fight God's enemies as tenaciously as possible. In 1951 he published
God and Man at Yale
, a journalistic exposé of the degree to which Yale University had become a center of liberalism in literature and politics. In 1954, in
McCarthy and His Enemies
, he defended Senator McCarthy's anti-Communist crusade. In 1955 he founded the
National Review
, an expressive embodiment of its editor-owner's radical conservatism. A tireless lecturer, eager to
persuade and propagandize, by the early 1960s he was on his way to becoming a national figure.

Vidal and Buckley met for the first time in New York in September 1962, on an
Open End
program in which Susskind pitted them against one another for the entire time. They were, from an even earlier date, natural enemies who gradually became aware of one another's existence. In his mid-twenties Buckley had read
The City and the Pillar
and disapproved of it on moral grounds. For Buckley, homosexual acts were sinful, those who performed them inevitably to be slightly if not harshly identified mainly by this deep perversion. When Gore and Buckley agreed in late 1961, at the request of the Associated Press, to debate in print the “liberal” versus the “conservative” position, their names were publicly juxtaposed for the first time. In preparation for his article Vidal got from a friend at
Life
information from its files on Buckley. In his column Buckley argued the conservative view that liberalism was an intellectually bankrupt political philosophy responsible for most of the ills of the twentieth century. Somehow liberalism was to be blamed for both Hitler and Stalin. Vidal argued that the real conflict was between conservatives, like John Kennedy, and reactionaries, like Barry Goldwater. The reactionaries, who had strong reservations about majority rule, feared democracy. To Buckley and his associates Vidal seemed a dishonest fanatic of the extreme Left and almost certainly a homosexual; they believed homosexuality to be an illness. In mid-January 1962, on one of his frequent appearances on the Jack Paar
Tonight
show, Vidal referred in passing to a recent
National Review
statement harshly critical of Pope John XXIII's liberal social positions. The
Review
had called the Pope's recent encyclical “a venture in triviality.” The Pope supported aid to underdeveloped countries, which Buckley opposed. He also seemed insufficiently distressed about the Communist threat. To Buckley, the enemy was now within the gates. In a following issue Buckley reported to
National Review
readers that many American Catholics, disapproving of the encyclical, accepted the Church as “Mother,” not “Teacher.” Mainstream Catholics were incensed. From Vidal's point of view Buckley's attack on the Pope's views emblemized the extremism of radical conservatism. Paar agreed. Either Paar's office called Buckley and asked him if he would like to respond, as Buckley recalls, or Buckley called Paar and requested equal time, as Vidal recalls.

Buckley's first national television appearance the next week was a splendid success. Irregularly handsome, with a genius for distorting his facial features as if his skin were soft plastic and an ability to contort his figure into an infinite variety of slouches and stretches, he took to television with sly enthusiasm. The camera found him interesting if not fascinating. His face was often a highlight of the show. He knew intuitively that it was better to be a “character,” visibly if not eccentrically distinctive in voice and appearance, than to be ordinarily handsome or conventionally photogenic. Outspoken, witty, clever, aggressively and self-expressively abrasive, with a sense of humor that tended toward ironic repartee, sometimes ponderous with a touch of pretension, Buckley entertainingly fenced for about fifteen minutes with Paar and his colleague, Hugh Downs. His voice and mannerisms were both riveting and engagingly self-parodic. A television star was born. As a liberal Republican, Paar engaged Buckley in an effort to define words like “liberal” and “conservative.” Buckley defended McCarthy, advocated that America invade Cuba, and proposed that serious consideration be given to going to war with Communist China. In passing, Buckley accused President Truman of having called President Eisenhower anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic. To Paar, Buckley's positions were chillingly inhumane, as he soon told his audience. Harry Golden, the Southern Jewish humorist, who came on after Buckley had left, quipped that Buckley wanted to “repeal the twentieth century and also defeat Roosevelt for a second term.” The problem with Buckley, Paar told his audience, was that he did not like people. He certainly did not like Gore Vidal. As with so many of Buckley's appearances in public debate, his appearance on the Paar show was prelude to more. Statements needed verification or amplification. Vidal returned to the Paar show to respond to Buckley. Buckley and Paar exchanged additional clarifications. Vidal bet Buckley, through Paar, that he could not prove his claim that Truman had called Eisenhower anti-Semitic and anti-Catholic. Buckley provided his “proof,” a press report that Truman had referred to Eisenhower not being sensitive enough to Jewish and Catholic political concerns. In context it did not seem proof at all to Vidal or Paar. “
Are you, on top of
everything, a welcher?” Buckley responded. “I had assumed you would apologize for the distortions and untruths you spoke about my family and myself and the
National Review
. Very well, we'll let that go. You are not that kind of man.”

By the time they appeared together in September 1962 on the Susskind
show, the personal pot was boiling, at least from Buckley's point of view. He was especially ill at ease about Vidal's and other people's references to his dogmatically Catholic, ultraconservative family background, with hints of dark views and unattractive prejudices. Rumors had surfaced that his father was anti-Semitic. One family incident apparently pained and worried him. In May 1944 three of his sisters, with two other adolescent girls, had desecrated the Reverend Frances James Cotter's Epsicopalian church in Sharon. Apparently Buckley, Sr., had fulminated in his daughter's presence against the minister's wife, a real-estate agent, for selling a house in Sharon, a city known for its restrictive covenants, to a Jewish lawyer. The girls may have thought they were doing their father's bidding, though, according to William, Jr., his father and mother were in South Carolina at the time of the incident. With sexually suggestive cartoons from
The New Yorker
and centerfold Vargas girls from
Esquire
, they smeared and decorated some of the church pews and prayer books. The outraged Cotters and other parishioners reported the hate incident to the police, who soon, tipped off by a Buckley employee, had incontrovertible proof that the daughters had done the deed. William, Jr., himself was not involved. He was at the time at Fort Jackson, South Carolina. Humiliated, perhaps ashamed, even penitent, the young Buckley girls were lightly punished by the local court. Buckley, Sr., severely admonished his daughters for the shame they had brought on the family. Soon the court record was moved from Sharon to Hartford. Whatever Buckley, Sr.'s, view on Jews and his impact on his children, the family was eager to put the incident behind them. Later, William Buckley denied that the incident had anything to do with anti-Semitism at all. It “
was utterly unrelated
to any real estate transaction in which the rector's wife engaged.” The record suggests otherwise. Also, having lived companionably for years with the nearby Episcopal church and the Cotter family, why would the young ladies suddenly have decided at this time that the church deserved to be desecrated? Devoted to his sisters, William Buckley, Jr., hoped, for their sake as well as his own, that the incident would receive as little publicity as possible in the future.