---
title: Best of Enemies
type: Movie
date: 2026-08-01
rating: 8
year: 2015
director: Robert Gordon
status: Finished
image: best-of-enemies.jpg
tags:
  - movie
colorSortKey: [0, 39, 0]
---

Last year, I watched [[the-war-room]], the documentary following Bill Clinton's first campaign — a film I am remiss for having never written about, because it was captivating, satisfying, and illuminating. And whether for good reasons or bad, it punctured most of my belief that the political moment we currently find ourselves in is novel in any grand sense. (See also [[days-of-rage]], which covered the seventies; if you're ever worried about civil unrest, it's the one to reach for.)

*Best of Enemies*, compared to _The War Room_, has less immediacy and access but much more of a clear agenda and through line. It's about the William F. Buckley–Gore Vidal debates during the 1968 conventions, built out of lots of archival footage with very little fat. We, the viewer, spend more time *at* the debates than *examining* them; as someone who confesses to knowing of the *National Review*, and to owning a half-read copy of *Burr*, but not really knowing who either of these two individuals were in any meaningful sense — I appreciated how the film is equal parts explanation and analysis. 

I hesitate to succumb to instinct and laud both them *and* the middle-brow public that appreciated and rewarded the idea of intellectualism. The histrionic fondness with which we might remember their patrician accents could very well be said, thirty or forty years from now, of people discovering blogs and pining for the days when public intellectuals would so candidly and openly write on Wordpress or whatever. Additionally, I don't buy at face value the film's thesis that these debates were the birth of American punditry. In no small part because I think *television itself* was the birth of American punditry — an organism that simply required some time to incubate.

But these two guys are fascinating, and the debates are riveting, and this documentary gets to carry that respective sunlight.  The film takes an unflinching look at who these people were and what drove them. How clearly you can see that these two men led twinned lives, to a certain extent: both ultimately failed ambitions, both incredibly intelligent, and — in what seems so deeply interesting, perhaps more so than the denoument of their careers after the debates — both horribly, horribly despondent toward the end of their lives.

---

As for the debates themselves: it's fascinating to me that it's taken at face value that Vidal *won* by the TKO of successfully baiting Buckley into an outburst. Vidal succeeded in his goal and Buckley did not, but Buckley knew — as the film references multiple times — that the goal wasn't to be awarded the highest score by the judge, so to speak, but to be known at all.

What is beyond debate (ha) is that the experience destroyed at least some part of both men, or at least revealed to millions a part of them which was rotten.

The final scene in the film is a clip of Jon Stewart appearing on Crossfire, declaring that the format of the show is theatrical rather than analytical: Stewart's appearance was so caustic that the network cancelled the show and the two hosts (Carlson and Begala) considered irrevocably stained by the association: after a decade in the hinterlands (PBS and MSNBC), Carlson was a few years into a Fox & Friends gig as a sort of Barbour-clad ronin; Begala left the television sphere entirely and returned to consultancy.

That was in 2015; in the decade since this film's release, whatever spectre haunting Carlson appears to have vanished, having risen to lead the most popular show on television before his ouster and now in the process of doing the same in the realm of podcasts. Just like sixty years ago, it appears that no transgression can outweigh the power of a sufficiently fervent audience.