How Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley spawned Jon Stewart, Bill O’Reilly and all the horrors of TV news
Like any cultural phenomenon, Jon Stewart has both a history and a prehistory. I’ll have more to say about the longtime “Daily Show” host and his mixed legacy as liberal avatar and Barack Obama doppelgänger before his final signoff, but our topic today involves a trip in the pop-culture way-back machine. Stewart’s prehistory goes back at least as far as 1968, when I certainly hope his parents were not letting him stay up to watch the late-night talk shows.
That was a history-shaping year for American politics and culture in so many ways I can’t possibly list them. It was the year that both Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated, the year of the “police riot” at the Democratic convention in Chicago, the year Richard Nixon was elected president by peeling white Southerners away from the Democratic Party for the first time since the Civil War. (Nixon’s margin over Hubert Humphrey in the popular vote was tiny – 500,000 votes out of 73 million – but Humphrey only carried 13 states, and the Electoral College was a wipeout.) Each of those events changed the world on its own, and taken together they made America in 1968 feel like a nation poised above the abyss.
