by Ben Greenman @ the New Yorker
The conservative author, publisher, and commentator William F. Buckley, Jr., has died at the age of eighty-two. This is not primarily a cultural story, and so shouldn’t really be on this blog, but it is in some small way a television story, if only because of Buckley’s decades hosting “Firing Line” and appearing on countless other talk shows. His most notorious appearance, of course, came in 1968, when he tangled with Gore Vidal over America’s policy in Vietnam. If you think today’s news-panel shows can get nasty, take a look at what things were like forty years ago: Vidal calls Buckley a crypto-Nazi and Buckley calls Vidal a queer. The incident led to further acrimony—Buckley and Vidal wrote essays for Esquire attacking each other, and then each man sought damages in court.—Ben Greenman