One of the semester’s chief joys, whenever I teach journalism, is the first of eight classes on “political commentary”—the day when I introduce unsuspecting youngsters to the K-hole known as “YouTubing Gore Vidal vs. William F. Buckley.” We watch selections from the 1968 debates in Chicago and Miami, and undergraduate jaws tend to dislocate within the first three minutes. The classroom’s stated task is to compare 1960s and ’70s notions of public intellectualism and political gamesmanship with our own age’s debased versions of these things, and to have a gut-bustingly good time doing so.

Once in a while a student will take a shine to Buckley (“debonair” and “like James Bond”), but if we let the tape roll long enough, Vidal’s deeper composure and keener knowledge of history will often seduce even the most conservative students. Whereas Buckley produces one of Evelyn Waugh’s anti-socialist epigrams idly, like removing a kerchief from the pocket of his blazer, Vidal’s points of reference in these televised sparring matches are precise, sedulously selected from his self-compiled encyclopedia of a brain. His glibness is not, as with Buckley, the premise of argument, his wit less a tool of deflection than a source of argumentative propulsion. Few pieces of 20th-century political theater can match the intellectual bloodsport of these tapes.

My only Korean War veteran client loves Gore Vidal and tells me I need to read everything he has written.