Best of Enemies -- a review

image from blu-ray.com

Best of Enemies, a 2015 documentary available streaming from Netflix, chronicles the 1968 televised debates between conservative William F. Buckley, Jr., and liberal Gore Vidal.

In 1968, three television networks vied for American audiences. CBS was first among equals, closely followed by NBC. ABC was a distant third. Those were your choices. No FOX. No CNN. No cable at all. Not even PBS.

CBS and NBC planned to cover the 1968 political conventions gavel to gavel. ABC couldn't afford to. They had to come up with something to draw ratings away from their two rivals. And as someone in Best of Enemies says "nothing draws an audience like the sugar of a fight."

Do I hear the names Jerry Springer and Donald Trump?

In 1968, ABC gave birth to modern political punditry and point/counter point political commentary with these end of the convention day debates between America's most television savvy intellectuals, both from Eastener aristocracy stock. Pompous, but well-spoken and mostly restrained, each was absolutely confident he was right and the rest of the world could acknowledge that or be damned.

1968's national political conventions found the United States mired in the Vietnam War. The Civil Rights Movement continued unabated. Women's Liberation and the youth movement further fractured the nation.

Everything happened on TV.

January 30, the North Vietnamese launched the Tet Offensive.

March 31, sitting president Lyndon Johnson announced "I shall not seek and I will not accept the nomination of my party for another term" as President of the United States.

April 4, Dr. Martin Luther King was murdered in Memphis, Tennessee.

May 4, four students were shot dead by National Guardsmen on the campus of Kent State University in Ohio.

June 6, Robert F. Kennedy, a leading contender for the Democrat nomination for President, was murdered in Los Angeles, California.

And every evening on the national news no matter which network we watched the TV news anchors gave the numbers. How many Americans were killed in Vietnam. And how many North Vietnamese.

August 5, the Republican Party opened their four-day convention in Miami, Florida, to nominate their candidate for President of the United States. The leading contenders were former Vice President Richard Nixon and then Governor of California Ronald Reagan.

August 26, a demoralized Democrat Party opened their four-day convention in Chicago, Illinois, a city run by iron-fisted Mayor Richard J. Daly.

Best of Enemies mixes extensive footage of the actual debates between Buckley and Vidal with comments and clips from the conventions and the real world then swirling around the conventions. There are illuminating comments from people close to the political actors of the time and to Buckley and Vidal.

In Best of Enemies, we get to hear again the dulcet tones of Senator Everett Dirksen speaking at the Republican Convention. We see snippets of the luminaries of the times -- Walter Cronkite, Huntley and Brinkley, Dick Cavett, the Kennedys, Norman Mailer. There's a clip from Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In, the iconoclastic TV show that gave a comedic raspberry to the foibles of American society and introduced the American public to fringe, go-go boots, and psychedelic humor.

Best of Enemies reminds us that passionate political views can be expressed at reduced decibels, intelligently.