The celebrated fight between the American writer Gore Vidal and the conservative author and intellectual William Buckley began in a television debate in 1968 and degenerated into an inconclusive legal dispute that cost Vidal $1 million he did not have.
A new biography of Vidal, who died last year, suggests a possible motive for the confrontation: Vidal was seeking to keep secret evidence that he was a paedophile. Vidal had called his adversary a “crypto-Nazi” and Buckley called him a “queer”. Suit and counter-suit followed. According to In Bed With Gore Vidal: Hustlers, Hollywood and the Private World of an American Master, by Tim Teeman, the celebrated man of letters may have feared that Buckley possessed material showing past relations with under-age partners.
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