Always felt Buckley depended on arrogance cowing his opposition. Public intellectuals get used to asserts of their rightness, less used to being publicly rebutted.
James Baldwin was super smart. Also not the humblest man, but certainly not cowed by Buckley, whose main output was critique not creation. Baldwin did both. I think it gave him an advantage.
Tangentially I was reading various retrospective accounts of Buckley V. Vidal, back in 2015 Gordon of Politico had this to say of Buckley (and Vidal):
Despite political differences, the two men seemed cut from the same cloth:
Their mid-Atlantic speaking accents were haughty, their demeanors were aloof, they exuded breeding and education.
However, for each, these airs had been cultured; they were not born into the Eastern establishment, and didn’t have the usual New England prep school backgrounds (though each did attend elite academies, Buckley at Andover and Vidal at Exeter).
Vidal came from Oklahoma and Tennessee stock and was raised in the U.S. Senate where his blind grandfather served, developing a political education by reading aloud to him the Congressional Record and other necessary documents.
Buckley’s family was wealthy, but nouveau, their Catholicism keeping them outside the WASPish circle of their Connecticut bluebloods neighbors.
Tutored from an early age, Bill went on to Yale while Vidal opted not to pursue college—each angling for his own route of attack on the culture’s dominant forces.
Vidal published his first book in 1946 but became an enfant terrible with The City and the Pillar in 1948, a novel that dealt unapologetically and sympathetically with a homosexual protagonist.
Buckley published his first book three years later, God and Man at Yale, a controversial attack on an institution that he proclaimed was leaning too far left, promulgating communism, and attacking religion.
Their positions staked, we can look back and see these polar opposites being slowly drawn toward each other.
The Fight That Changed Political TV Forever
Half a century ago, William Buckley and Gore Vidal brilliantly castigated each other on air.
It’s been downhill ever since.
James Baldwin was super smart. Also not the humblest man, but certainly not cowed by Buckley, whose main output was critique not creation. Baldwin did both. I think it gave him an advantage.