Feuds: Wasted Talent

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Low Blows. Nothing of the sort, says Vidal. "I do not prefer homosexuality to heterosexuality," he writes, "or, for that matter, heterosexuality to homosexuality . . . But regardless of tribal taboos, homosexuality is a constant fact of the human condition and it is not a sickness, not a sin, not a crime." Vidal insists that "I am not an evangelist of anything in sexual matters except a decent withdrawal of the state from the bedroom." He calls Buckley one of those "morbid, twisted men" who are always "sniggering and giggling and speculating on the sexual lives of others."

Vidal says he did not mean to link Buckley to "Hitler's foreign and domestic ventures." But he insists that Buckley's views "are very much those of the founders of the Third Reich who regarded blacks as inferiors, undeclared war as legitimate foreign policy and the Jews as sympathetic to international Communism."

For low blows, distortion and invective, Vidal is the clear-cut winner in the Esquire phase of the Buckley-Vidal vendetta. In fact, Buckley last week widened his sights and filed a new $1,000,000 libel suit, this one against Esquire.