By: Morgan Neville and Robert Gordon
Runtime: 1 hour, 28 minutes
Best of Enemies is a documentary about the legendary debates between two great public intellectuals, Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley, which came to define a new era of public discourse in the media, demarcating the moment that TV’s political ambition shifted from narrative to spectacle. In the summer of 1968, ABC News hired two of the most exceptional minds and characters of their day to meet for a series of ten nationally televised debates during the presidential conventions. Buckley was a leading light of the nascent neo-conservative movement — he’d founded the National Review in 1955. Vidal was a leftist novelist and polemicist and a Democrat by heritage, a cousin to Jackie Onassis. Vidal and Buckley each thought the other’s political ideologies were dangerous, even catastrophic, for America. Like rounds in a heavyweight battle, they slugged out policy, personal insult, and revisionist histories — staking out the opposing political positions that continue to resonate today, as the talks devolved into heated and shocking name-calling. These discussions beg the question, "What has television done to the way we talk about politics?"
Screening Co-Sponsor: The Mohawk Valley Collective
