If you were an alert reader of the November 6, 2000 issue of National Review, the conservative journal founded by William F. Buckley Jr., you might have turned the final page, refreshed from another serving of cogent thought and elegant prose, to find, on the back cover, a truly shocking sight: a full-page ad for Absolut vodka featuring a color portrait, taken by Annie Leibovitz, of the far-left novelist and provocateur Gore Vidal.
How could this be? I wondered at the time. Wasn’t Vidal, in the superhero terminology of my youth, WFB’s arch-nemesis? Hadn’t the two men clashed spectacularly on television, in print, and in the federal courts, keeping up, over three decades’ time, the century’s longest-running and most acrimonious literary feud? How could Bill Buckley possibly allow his magazine to be given over to a flattering image of that man — now gray and paunchy, gaze averted, right index finger pressed eruditely to temple — as though Gore Vidal, within the precincts of National Review, were any innocuous figure from the world of advertising, like Juan Valdez or Cap’n Crunch?
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