The Archivist

The Shame of the Vanderbilts

By Jeff Kisseloff

Back in the 1970s and 1980s, I had occasion to enjoy a lunch and a few subsequent interviews with Frederick Vanderbilt Field. Fred, who was raised in a mansion on Fifth Avenue and 52nd Street, spent his life fighting for peace and justice and against racism and economic oppression, so of course he was considered the black sheep of the Vanderbilt family.

Fred was also forced to flee the US during the McCarthy period. It figures doesn't it, that he was a pariah in this country, while his robber-baron great-grandfather was some kind of national hero?

That's one reason why I was so intrigued by Steve Fraser's review in this week's magazine of "The First Tycoon," T.J. Styles's new biography of Cornelius "Commodore" Vanderbilt. Through Fred, one of the country's most notorious tycoons and I were are only three-degrees of separation apart (And my friendship with Alger Hiss, leaves me only two degrees of separation from Richard Nixon. Enough of that game).

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November 17, 2009

Calling Mariano

By Jeff Kisseloff

Last week marked the first anniversary of President Obama's historic victory over John McCain. But as I looked over the progressive agenda laid out by Katrina vanden Heuvel last November, it occurred to me that it is littered with too many disappointments. Then I realized why -- the president doesn't have a good closer.

He needs Mariano Rivera!

When legislation is in trouble, the president should be able to pick up the phone and call his bullpen. The gate would open, and out would come Mariano, the greatest closer of all time. With a blazer draped over his shoulder, a briefcase full of arguments in his hand, Mariano, with that confident smile on his face, would stroll up to Capitol Hill to strains of Metallica's "Enter Sandman." All it would take would be a few pitches to close the deal. Why am I always the first one to think of these things?

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November 9, 2009

Afghanistan, Yesterday and Today

By Jeff Kisseloff

After reading this week's special issue on Afghanistan, and in particular the story about Great Britain bombing the country back in the 1920s, I wondered if I could find any references to it from that period. I did, in a fascinating piece by T. H. K. Rezmie from 1929. Not only does Rezmie mention the bombing, but he also essentially foretells many of the issues confronting Afghanistan today. It was also a fascinating surprise to see who was partially responsible for implementing Great Britain's policy -- Lawrence of Arabia. Now the United States is repeating so many of Britain's sorry actions. Will we ever learn? Here's the piece.

Have a question about any aspect of The Nation's archives or its history? Drop me a line at jeff.kisseloff@gmail.com To be notified of new posts to this blog, follow me on twitter @jeffisme.

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October 26, 2009

These Literary Hoaxers Were Also Full Of Hot Air

By Jeff Kisseloff

Granted, they probably wouldn't garner the cable ratings of the balloon boy shenanigans, but a good literary hoax often comes with its own special intrigue. The Nation has covered a few of them in its arts pages. I've got two here. The first was the story of Thomas Chatterton, an eighteenth-century writer who claimed to have discovered the literary works of a fifteenth-century poet priest named Thomas Rowley. The problem was there was no Thomas Rowley (or there may have been in England, but he wasn't a poet). Chatterton was Rowley, although not for very long. Chatterton killed himself with an arsenic cocktail a few months before he turned 18 -- more than two hundred years before he could have confessed his sins on Larry King.

Like the balloon boy story, Clifford Irving turned out to be full of hot air. His fake autobiography of Howard Hughes was set to be published by McGraw-Hill, until Hughes himself briefly stepped out of seclusion to denounce the book as a fraud. This was a huge story in 1972, featuring as it did a reclusive zillionaire, a secret Swiss bank account, even your basic bikini-clad blonde, Nina Van Pallandt. Irving ended up in jail, but at least he got a book deal out of it, and he didn't even have to cry his eyes out on Oprah.

Have a question about any aspect of The Nation's archives or its history? Drop me a line at jeff.kisseloff@gmail.com To be notified of new posts to this blog, follow me on twitter @jeffisme.

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October 23, 2009

The Nation and Israel

By Jeff Kisseloff

After reading this week's cover story about American Jews and Israel, I was curious about how The Nation covered Israel's story, especially in its formative years. Not surprisingly, it has been consistently thoughtful and thorough. Here are just three examples. The first is a report and analysis of the 1917 proclamation by the Right Honorable Arthur James Balfour, the First Earl of Balfour and Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs (the Brits may be clueless when it comes to fine food and dentistry, but they sure know how to come up with titles), which put a semi-official imprimatur on Zionism and set the stage for what has been nearly a century of conflict. When Israel was born in 1948, The Nation's editor, Freda Kirchwey, was a sympathetic witness. Kirchwey was a marvelous reporter, and she traveled to Israel in the midst of the war to see what was going on for herself. She ended up filing a remarkable five-part series on the nascent country's struggle to survive against incredible odds. Part two was Kirchwey's report on why the Arabs fled Jaffa in 1948, a question that remains highly contentious today. Since so many of Israel's current troubles have arisen from its treatment of the Palestinians, I also took a sampling of the magazine's coverage of the Six-Day War, when Israel's territorial gains soon became a millstone. Stanley Wolpert was in Tel Aviv after the war, and he filed this prescient report, predicting many of the political and military challenges that still haunt Israel, and really the entire region.

Have a question about any aspect of The Nation's archives or its history? Drop me a line at jeff.kisseloff@gmail.com To be notified of new posts to this blog, follow me on twitter @jeffisme.

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October 20, 2009

Death and Taxes — Minus the Taxes

By Jeff Kisseloff

When my daughter was four, the subject of Ted Williams' alleged decision (it has strongly been disputed by family members) to have his head frozen somehow came up in conversation. I explained to her that before they died, many people would express their wishes about what they would like to have done to their bodies. Some chose cremation, others chose burial, or in the case of Williams, it was (according to his son anyway) to be frozen. She was fascinated by this and for weeks afterward upon being introduced to an adult she would ask, "What's your choice?"

Fortunately, in our society even if someone chooses to freeze his head so that one day it will thawed out and attached to a body that will hit .410 in a season, they can. As ridiculous as that is, however, relatively few can choose how to end their own lives, even when all hope of any kind of a quality existence is gone.

How did this happen? A big reason is that whenever anyone puts forward a serious proposal about end-of-life counseling or the right-to-die, someone like Sarah Palin starts screeching about Nazi-like death panels, (as if she even knew anything about World War II history; she probably thinks the Final Solution is a way to break a tie at the top of the final college football rankings).

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October 13, 2009

Irving Kristol and Prostitution

By Jeff Kisseloff

I bet that grabbed your attention.

I've always wanted to write a headline like that even though the reality is in this case one had nothing to do with the other (at least nothing that I'm aware of). Let me start by saying when Irving Kristol died this weekend, I went digging into the archives to see what the magazine had to say about him. I found quite a few stories and selected two. Both are reviews of his books. The first is Philip Green's 1978 review of Two Cheers for Capitalism. Five years later, Robert Lekachman reviewed Kristol's memoir Reflections of a Neoconservative. What I found so fascinating about it was Lekachman's admission that he Kristol came across as rather likable: "Buried beneath his vulpine neoconservative intellectual garments," Lekachman writes, "beats - perhaps faintly and certainly irregularly - a startlingly enlightened heart."

Who knew?

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September 22, 2009

(Genetically Modified) Food For Thought

By Jeff Kisseloff

Remember the opening scene in "Oliver" when the poor, starving kids sang "Food, glorious food", sarcastically, of course, about the awful gruel they were being served ("and such small portions," Woody Allen would add)?

As our special food issue demonstrates, today's consumers aren't that much better off than those poor orphans. True, most people don't eat gruel (although if you know a good recipe, feel free to share it here), but kids in Dickens' day didn't eat genetically modified (GM) corn and milk with bovine growth hormone or fast foods that have led to appalling obesity and diabetes rates among the working poor.

If our food issue leaves you hungry for more, check out the documentary Food, Inc. Much of the film focuses on Monsanto, with its private detectives stalking farmers accused of illegally saving seed (yes, thanks in part to Monsanto's former attorney, Clarence Thomas, seeds can be patented, and the company enforces its rights by sending out teams of investigators in the dark of night to intimidate growers -- even those who don't purchase the company's GM products but whose fields are found to have been contaminated by Monsanto seeds).

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September 10, 2009

The "What if" and Ted Kennedy Question

By Jeff Kisseloff

"What if…?" is a game I occasionally play in my head when writing about crucial moments in our history. "What would have happened if the South had won the Civil War or if the stock market hadn't crashed? What if FDR had decided to send troops to support the Spanish Republic? What if Mr. and Mrs. Lenin (or, for that matter, Mr. and Mrs. Lennon) had decided not to have children?

And what if Ted Kennedy didn't make that unexplained turn as he drove toward the bridge on Chappaquiddick Island with Mary Jo Kopechne sitting in the car (here's The Nation's take on it from 1969)? How would subsequent history have been different? Would he have won the presidency in 1972 or 1976? Would we as a nation be better off today had he done so?

What do you think?

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September 2, 2009

A Selective History of Zionism (the Sidney kind)

By Jeff Kisseloff

Sidney Zion was someone who my grandmother would have called "a character." He was a Yale Law School graduate and a former prosecutor, the co-founder of Scanlan's, a short-lived muckraking monthly that published Hunter Thompson and famously reproduced a memo by Spiro Agnew about a secret plan to cancel the 1972 election (prompting John Dean to refer to it as a "shit-ass magazine"). Over the course of his journalism career, he was also a New York Times reporter and a columnist for several other newspapers and magazines. To hear the sound of his voice, you would have mistaken him for a New Jersey mobster. In fact, Sid's Jersey tone was much more authentic than Paulie Walnuts's (probably due to the fact that the actor Tony Sirico came out of the Brooklyn mob, not Newark's.)

But Sidney, who died on August 2 at the age of 75, wasn't just a character, he was a force of nature who collected characters as friends. It didn't matter where they were on the political or moral spectrum. There were mobsters, politicians, right-wing zealots and Communists in what must have been the most diverse personal address books of anyone in New York City. Really, he was like a one-man General Assembly. To give you an example, at his daughter Libby's shiva (she died in 1984 at the hands of exhausted and inexperienced interns at New York Hospital, leading Sidney to campaign successfully for changes in the work rules for interns), in one room was Judge Irving Kaufman, who sent the Rosenbergs to the electric chair, and in another was Bill Reuben, the bellowy journalist who formed the group that desperately tried to save their lives. Needless to say, it was a tense scene in Sidney's apartment, and I think that despite his enormous grief, Sidney got a kick out of it (and Kaufman nearly did).

Sidney defended Israel with a passion and he loved Frank Sinatra as much as he hated rock 'n roll, and I don't think there was anyone alive who he couldn't drink under the table. He once invited me to the Yale Club for drinks. I went home after two hours to go throw up, but as I wobbled out of there it was clear he was just getting started.

There was a charm to Sidney's catholic taste in friends -- but not always. If there was a Hall of Fame for sleazeballs, Roy Cohn would have been its Babe Ruth. Yet Sidney was a buddy of his, and in 1988, he wrote "Citizen Cohn," an autobiography/biography that -- shockingly so -- leaned toward hagiography (shocking in part because Sidney generally had no use for self-hating Jews, and Cohn was a big practitioner of that cowardly art). The book received a well-deserved pasting from Robert Sherrill in The Nation. I'm a big fan of Sherrill's work. When John Judis's bio of William F. Buckley was published in 1988, Sherrill wrote a marvelous review in The Nation, that should have been required reading when all that sentimental tripe was being up-chucked following Buckley's death in 2008. He is similarly brilliant in this joint review of two biographies of Cohn, one by Nicholas von Hoffman and the other by Sidney.

As Sherrill points out in his review, a lot of moralists in the media and on New York's political scene called Cohn a friend, but he was such a loathsome man that my guess is even they were relived by his death. After all, this was a person with the loyalty of a hungry alley cat. He would have turned on any of them in a second had he a self-serving reason to do so.

I don't know if Sidney had any regrets in the end about his association with Cohn, but it's safe to say that it wasn't his finest moment, nor was "Citizen Cohn." His autobiographical collection of essays Read All About It! makes for much better reading, as do these two obits that he wrote for The Nation, perfectly capturing William O'Douglas and Fred Rodell, two mavericks in the finest sense of the word. The only thing that Roy Cohn ever rebelled against was human decency.

Have a question about any aspect of The Nation's archives or its history? Drop me a line at jeff.kisseloff@gmail.com To be notified of new posts to this blog, follow me on twitter @jeffisme.

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August 12, 2009