Bless you for tolerating the dyed-in-the-wool conservative on the forum!
Pissed out of his head, Bucky threatens to batter the photographer:
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_HtqT45eUyU4/Sae9A9QV5nI/AAAAAAAAEoc/wrCr2HKK9hY/s400/buckley.jpg
"...Ere, no, stop messin' about..." :
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3262/2296744324_5eb7653f9c_o.jpg
Bucky does his Kenneth Williams impersonation.
http://www.celebshowandtell.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/williamfbuckley.jpg
^ What they used to call a 'Guards Stripe' at Brooks, no matter what the colours were. 'The Jocky Stripe' was the same idea but narrower.
Still my favorite William Buckley moment..just because.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYymnxoQnf8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PEIrZO069Kg&feature=related
Yeah. That's a good one too.
I well remember, at the age of, oh, 19 or thereabouts, trying to read Vidal; and failing miserably. Don't ask me why, because at the same age I was reading Tennessee Williams, William Inge, and plenty of other gay American authors. I soon found myself hating Vidal in much the same way as I hate Norman Mailer (although I wrote an excellent test paper on 'Sexual Power and Economics In American Literature' in my first year, quoting from Mailer and Erica Jong). I still hate the pair of them, even after all these years. I can, however, forgive Chomsky, at least on the grounds that I've never read a word he's written, a gap in my learning I see no definite reason to fill.
Buckley actually looks awful in these clips, and I hope he was man enough to stand Vidal a tomato juice in the green room after the show.
I have my own, deeply unfashionable views on Vietnam.
I loved all this at the time and some comments/images on 'DressedWell' prompted me to seek this out and bump it.
Many of you will be repelled at the very tone of it.
I've just been watching/listening to the verbal tussle between Buckley and Vidal around the 1968 Democratic Convention, Vidal's name has cropped up a good deal in my recent reading.
I rather like the style and tone of both of these gentlemen, perhaps Buckley in his seersucker jacket the more so.
They were a pretty important part of a period in American history that continues to intrigue me, more or less from the presidency of Harry Truman to that of Ronald Reagan. I have little interest in John F.Kennedy (sorry he got bumped off of course), a great deal still in Barry Goldwater and Lyndon Johnson.
Buck Owens and his Buckaroos. ‘Streets of Bakersfield’ and all that.
Great stuff.