William F. Buckley, Jr., and Gore Vidal in Best of Enemies (ABC Photo Archives/ABC via Getty Images)

The interminable presidential campaign cycle is here again, prompting us all to bemoan the degradation of our national political discourse and wonder just how and why it got so dumb. With this election shaping up to be one of the dumbest yet, the excellent new documentary Best of Enemies could not be more welcome. Loaded with insight into the roots of TV-dominated political news coverage, the film depicts the origins of no-holds-barred televised verbal sparring in the eloquent and vitriolic 1968 debates between William F. Buckley, Jr., and Gore Vidal.

In August of 1968, when the two major political parties held their national presidential conventions, American society really did feel like it was coming apart at the seams. On top of escalating anti-Vietnam protests, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination in April set off riots in cities nationwide, and presidential frontrunner Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination in June threw the Democratic Party into turmoil. At the same time, TV news was coming into its own. The powerhouse networks, CBS and NBC, boasted soup-to-nuts coverage of the conventions, bringing live images and sound of the events into nearly every American living room.

The redheaded stepchild of the networks, ABC, couldn’t compete with their comprehensive coverage, so instead it brought the scalding ideological rupture into American homes by hiring Buckley, the day’s most famous conservative intellectual, and the best-selling progressive author Gore Vidal for a series of 10 debates live on location from the Republican convention in Miami and the Democratic convention in Chicago. It was a stunning masterstroke by the third-place network to sense that the ideological divide was what really mattered, more than the formal pomp and circumstance of the political process.

Best of Enemies is supremely sure of the various stories it wants to tell, and it tells them stylishly and economically, fitting all the smaller narratives together in service of the larger story. The story of plucky underdog ABC is told with fondness and humor as we see their cheaply built debate set collapse hours before airtime and are privy to the hilarious jokes at the broadcaster’s expense circulating at the time.

Buckley is predictably painted as the effete intellectual grandfather of the neoconservative movement and as a key figure in the Reagan Revolution. Yet he is also portrayed as the complex, intelligent figure he was, a far cry from the current batch of troglodytes Fox News trots out to promote the conservative message. In perhaps the most notorious moment of their debates, Buckley calls the famously sexually permissive Vidal a “queer” and threatens to punch him. Buckley, though probably a bigot, later wrote a 12,000-word treatise for Esquire magazine pondering whether it was ever permissible to call a man a queer in front of millions of people, not a gesture generally associated with an extremist.

Whenever it threatens to overpraise Vidal while vilifying Buckley, the film highlights Vidal’s many flaws. We are shown footage and pictures of his halcyon days as a confidant of John F. Kennedy, with whom he was close due to his elite political lineage (Vidal’s father was a key figure in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration) and through his family (he was also related to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis through marriage). Vidal genuinely wanted to be an important liberal politician, in the Kennedy and Roosevelt molds, but the arrogant Vidal lacked the common touch to connect with working-class voters. Of course, his steady history of writing about homosexual themes probably made his aspirations for national political office in the 1960s more than a little quixotic.

Buckley’s own early political aspirations met with failure as well, prompting him to become a commentator rather than a participant, though he later seemed a bit less bitter about how his life shook out than Vidal. Oddly, the ostensibly elitist archconservative oligarch is shown to have a much easier charm and keener sense of connecting with ordinary Americans than Vidal, who spent much of his time isolated in a posh villa in Italy. Still, it’s clear as day how similar they were, despite genuinely loathing each other on personal and philosophical levels.

The late ’60s was a momentous time, bursting with key personalities, and Best of Enemies overflows with compelling appearances from the likes of Paul Newman, Norman Mailer, Hugh Hefner, and even briefly Aretha Franklin, to name a few. The tightly edited film is packed with names, faces, ideas, and incidents, logically and clearly presented. The more biographical sections are interspersed with highlights from the debates, creating a highly watchable structure for what could otherwise have been a bit of a dry exercise in media studies and political history. It’s a somewhat similar to Ron Howard’s Frost/Nixon, which depicted the debates between the disgraced former president and the journalist David Frost like rounds in a boxing match. The debate scenes here are, of course, intellectually stimulating and lively antagonistic, but also frequently hilarious as the two trade bon mots while their impossibly square moderator tries to keep a veneer of civility intact.

It’s easy to lament how we don’t have public intellectuals engaging in genuine debates of political philosophy anymore and that Vidal and Buckley were worlds more articulate and eloquent than anyone who would be allowed on as a primetime pundit today. (This was also before segments were chopped up into three or four minutes and people really had time to develop ideas.) But it’s clear that, though the Buckley-Vidal debates marked a high point of mass consumption of public intellectualism, the seeds of animosity, ironclad agendas, and all the other unfortunate hallmarks of contemporary punditry were right there in 1968. Televised political discourse has gotten worse, yes, but it didn’t start out all that polite, either.