The Archivist

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