I first met Ramsey Clark, who died on April 9, when I interviewed him for Kennedy Justice—the book I was writing about Robert F. Kennedy’s attorney generalship.

Ramsey had been assistant attorney general in charge of the Lands and Natural Resources Division at Justice. In a department that included, among others, Burke Marshall as head of the Civil Rights Division, Nick Katzenback as Kennedy’s number two, and Archibald Cox as solicitor general, Ramsey was thought by many—including yours truly—to be a nonentity who was given his job as a favor to Lyndon Johnson, then John F. Kennedy’s vice president.

But I quickly learned how wrong I was. The early 1960s was a period when many observers used to refer to “extremists of both sides”—the White Citizens Council on the one hand and the NAACP on the other. But after an hour with Ramsey, it was so clear his heart and mind were with the NAACP that I asked him why he was not a member.

“I guess I’m not a joiner,” he said with a smile. Also, while Ramsey had only good things to say about RFK, unlike the other assistant AGs he didn’t hesitate to say where he disagreed. For example, he disapproved of the so-called “Get Hoffa Squad” targeting Teamsters Union President Jimmy Hoffa, which he felt made for unequal justice, and told me he had opposed wiretapping and bugging organized crime figures. Not only did he believe tapping and bugging to be wrong; he also thought they were inefficient. “It takes 27 men to install one of those things” (which he called “insidious”) and to monitor it, he told me. Later, as attorney general, Ramsey would issue an unprecedented directive banning all such activities by federal agencies. And, among other liberal measures, he oversaw the drafting of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1968, which addressed discrimination in housing.

Typically, I would arrive for an 8 o’clock breakfast meeting at Clark’s unpretentious three-bedroom house in Falls Church, Va., to be greeted at the door by his wife, Georgia, an ebullient blonde in her bare feet. In her late 30s, she would hum to herself when the conversation lapsed and looked more like a folksinger than the wife of a high government official.

Most observers who didn’t know him assumed Ramsey would carry on in the hawkish tradition of his father, Justice Tom C. Clark, who had served as attorney general himself from 1945 to 1949 under Harry Truman. It was Clark who had inaugurated the attorney general’s list of subversive organizations.

But I quickly learned the striking difference between father and son. Here’s one example: In 1949, Attorney General Tom Clark brought the famous case against Judith Coplon, a 29-year-old government employee accused of passing secrets to her Soviet sweetheart. And 17 years later, it was Acting Attorney General Ramsey Clark who dismissed the case against Coplon. “I read the record over a couple of hours and there was nothing else to do. Her conviction had been reversed because of tainted evidence. Besides, the constitution guarantees a speedy trial.”

When my conversations with Ramsey were over, Georgia would wave from the doorway saying, “Adios, Ram,” and then he would drive to work in his battered 1949 Oldsmobile convertible, which he much preferred to the chauffeured limousine that came with the job.

Some years later, in 1974, when he ran for the US Senate against Senator Jacob Javits, Ramsey asked me to be his campaign manager. Unlike others in that job, who were always worried that their candidate would do or say the wrong thing, I always knew I could count on Ramsey to show us the best possible way.

Once, when a lawyer told him, ”Your father doesn’t agree with you,” Ramsey responded, “Then don’t tell him what I said.” A champion of civil rights and civil liberties who opposed capital punishment, Ramsey ended up spending much of his life defending unpopular causes and infamous people, including the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and the despicable Lyndon LaRouche. This is not the place to get into why he took on any particular client, other than to say he always had eloquently expressed libertarian reasons for doing what he did.

I once discovered that he kept in the top drawer of his desk a little list of things he hoped to accomplish. When I thought I saw him check something off, I asked him if he might want to call this a new kind of attorney general’s list. Ramsey smiled and cleared his throat and said, “I don’t exactly approve of that other kind of list.”

Besides being educational, working for Ramsey was fun. As The New York Times pointed out, he seemed to revel in telling others what they did not want to hear. “He advocated gun control in speeches to hunters and told defense industry workers that their plants should be closed.”

There will never be another like him.

Milton Glaser, the world-famous graphic designer and longtime friend of The Nation, died last week at the age of 91. As The New York Times noted in its obituary, he was someone who “changed the vocabulary of American visual culture” over the course of his storied career.1

Luckily for me, when I became editor of The Nation in 1978, I lived on West 67th Street in Manhattan, right down the block from Milton, and we knew and liked each other. And luckily for The Nation, as Milton told an audience in London many years later in a talk titled “Ten Things I Have Learned,” his first rule was “You can only work for people you like.”2

We invited Milton to redesign the magazine so that every issue had some articles beginning on the cover. As he and Walter Bernard, his longtime design partner, recalled in their book Mag Men: Fifty Years of Making Magazines, they “wanted to give The Nation a more distinctive visual identity… Back then, the magazine had little money and no art department. We designed a tight but simple type template that editors could manage without the help of a graphic designer. We restored the period at the end of the logo and created icons for the regular columns.”3

Richard Lingeman, then The Nation’s executive editor, recalls a typical experience working with Milton: “We ran a story on Iran (under the shah) about the secret police torture-murders of a number of dissidents. Somehow we had [obtained] pictures of the corpses of the tortured men. We decided to run those pictures and asked Milton to design a spread. We went to his atelier, and he looked at them without blinking an eye and did his layout, coolly and efficiently, without any comment.”4

Katrina vanden Heuvel, The Nation’s editorial director, called Glaser “a great friend of The Nation, always generous with his time and ideas. He believed in The Nation’s mission and values. Milton and Walter Bernard created compelling covers for many of our important stories and special issues and gave valuable creative input on our 150th anniversary issue. Milton loved political buttons, and after 9/11 and the launch of the Iraq War, he made several for The Nation: ‘He lied, they died’ (sadly reusable today) and ‘Dissent is patriotic.’ His heart always seemed as big as the one he designed for his beloved ‘I NY’ logo. I will miss Milton.”5

As Lingeman says, “Milton was a pro, a brilliant designer, and a master of his profession.” He was also a nice guy, and we miss him more than we can say.6

Perry Rosenstein, a 94-year-old-victim of Covid-19 who passed away on April 3, was one of a kind.

A veteran of World War II, when asked why he joined the Navy (he saw action in Okinawa and Guam), he would say it was to fight fascism. As his son, Neal, explains, had he been of age, he would have gone to Spain with the Lincoln Brigade.

When, after the war, he was blacklisted from teaching because of his radical work against racism, he went into business for himself, where he made a fortune manufacturing and distributing metal fasteners (don’t ask). Among other philanthropic causes, he has used that fortune to support the work of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives.

In 1983, he founded the Puffin Foundation, whose mission is to nourish activism, human rights, social justice, and cultural life. Among its projects is the establishment of the Puffin Gallery for Social Activism at the Museum of the City of New York, the only gallery of its sort.

Over the years, Puffin has joined forces with many other progressive institutions (including Democracy Now!, In These Times, Mother Jones, Dissent, Jacobin, The Nation Institute (now Type Media Center), and, not least, The Nation.

Puffin/Nation/Nation Institute collaborations include the $100,000 annual Puffin/Nation Award for Creative Citizenship. (Recipients include Reverend William Barber, Ben Jealous, Colin Kaepernick, Tony Kushner, the Parkland students, Cecile Richards, Bill McKibben, and the Sunrise Movement.) Under Perry’s leadership, Puffin has made possible scores of student journalist fellowships and Student Nation, among other efforts designed to encourage creative and progressive work and thinking among a new generation.

It has been The Nation’s honor and privilege over the years to work with not only with Perry but also his wife, Gladys, Puffin’s executive director, and his son, Neal, both of whom share and have helped expand and amplify Perry’s commitment and dedication to progressive causes and values.

We miss him more than we can say.

Robert Grossman, the cartoonist, caricaturist, illustrator, sculptor, animator, and commentator, who died on March 15, will be much missed, but his unforgettable images will live on. I had the honor of publishing Bob, then fresh from Yale, in Monocle, the political-satire magazine I had founded—with the help of Richard Lingeman, among others—while at Yale Law School. Way back in the early 1960s, Bob gave us one of the first black superheroes, Captain Melanin, along with Roger Ruthless of the CIA; with the latter, he did as much to question the agency’s work at that time as any print journalist. As art director Steven Heller wrote some years ago, “These strips acerbically address issues of the day, most often before they are on the popular culture radar screen.” Grossman also gave us Richard M. Nightcrawler—almost as wormy as the real Nixon, with two henchmen named Haldebug and Ehrlichbug. Grossman’s cover art, spot illustrations, and comic strips (such as the Stone Age–themed “The Klintstones,” a running gag during the Clinton presidency) have delighted readers of The Nation for many years. Once, when asked where he drew the line—pardon the pun—between satire and insult, not to mention outright slander, Bob observed: “If satire isn’t at least a little insulting, what’s the point of it? Slander is a legal term, but I believe the courts have generally held that parody is a form of protected expression.” When asked about people who argue that caricature is undignified when it comes to depicting presidents or presidential candidates, Bob replied, “Undignified? Virtually anything has more dignity than lying and blundering before the whole stupefied world, which seems to be the politician’s eternal role.”
He was one of a kind.

Check out all installments in the OppArt series.

Robert Grossman, the cartoonist, caricaturist, illustrator, sculptor, animator, and commentator, who died on March 15, will be much missed, but his unforgettable images will live on.

I had the honor of publishing Bob, then fresh from Yale, in Monocle, the political-satire magazine I had founded—with the help of Richard Lingeman, among others—while at Yale Law School. Way back in the early 1960s, Bob gave us one of the first black superheroes, Captain Melanin, along with Roger Ruthless of the CIA; with the latter, he did as much to question the agency’s work at that time as any print journalist.

As art director Steven Heller wrote some years ago, “These strips acerbically address issues of the day, most often before they are on the popular culture radar screen.” Grossman also gave us Richard M. Nightcrawler—almost as wormy as the real Nixon, with two henchmen named Haldebug and Ehrlichbug.

Grossman’s cover art, spot illustrations, and comic strips (such as the Stone Age–themed 
”The Klintstones,” a running gag during the Clinton presidency) have delighted readers of The Nation for many years.

Once, when asked where he drew the line—pardon the pun—between satire and insult, not to mention outright slander, Bob observed: “If satire isn’t at least a little insulting, what’s the point of it? Slander is a legal term, but I believe the courts have generally held that parody is a form of protected expression.”

When asked about people who argue that caricature is undignified when it comes to depicting presidents or presidential candidates, Bob replied, “Undignified? Virtually anything has more dignity than lying and blundering before the whole stupefied world, which seems to be the politician’s eternal role.”

He was one of a kind.

If New Jersey Governor Brendan Byrne hadn’t won reelection unexpectedly in 1978, Alan Sagner—who died a couple of weeks ago at the age of 97—might have ended up as publisher of The Nation. But New Jersey’s gain was The Nation’s loss, as Byrne, in consultation with New York Governor Hugh Carey, named Alan, a former state transportation commissioner, to head the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. And instead of buying The Nation himself, Alan supported the effort of Hamilton Fish and myself to acquire America’s oldest continuously published weekly.

But it wasn’t really the magazine’s loss: From that time forward, Alan was a loyal and active supporter. When The Nation’s owner, James Storrow, balked at giving the Fish-Navasky team a binding option while we raised money to buy the magazine, Alan joined the political activist and reformer Ralph Nader, the novelist E.L. Doctorow, and the progressive philanthropists W.H. and Carol Bernstein Ferry at a critical meeting where he helped persuade Storrow to do the right thing. And that was just the beginning: Over the years, Alan gave The Nation not only financial and moral support but the benefit of his wise counsel as well.

Alan, who served as chair of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in the 1990s, was an exemplary citizen. He was a founder of the short-lived but important Fair Play for Cuba Committee in the early 1960s; a board member of Business Executives for National Security, which worked to reduce tensions between the United States and the former Soviet Union; and an early supporter of J Street and a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict.

A modest person and a stalwart friend, Alan also had a fine sense of humor to accompany his keenly honed sense of justice. He would often send letters to the editor of The New York Times—as well as copies to friends, predicting (correctly) that the Times wouldn’t run them. So here, Alan, is one of those letters. You sent it in response to an essay by Elie Wiesel, which ran in the Times as a paid advertisement, that invoked the story of Abraham and Isaac to accuse the Palestinian group Hamas of “child sacrifice” during Israel’s 2014 attack on Gaza:

To the Editor:

In his acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1987, Elie Wiesel said, “I swore never to be silent whenever human beings endure suffering and humiliation.” Today in Israel and Gaza, there are many who fit that description.

One would expect a true advocate for peace to break the silence with a full and rational assessment of the struggle between Hamas and Israel and possible proposals to end the continued military conflict, rather than relying on a biblical myth to characterize and condemn Israel’s enemy.

You wrote that letter in August 2014, Alan, but your progressive, caring, and humanitarian spirit lives on. We will do our best to live up to the tradition that you exemplified.

Correction: This article has been updated to note that Ralph Nader, not Paul Newman, was at the meeting with James Storrow that led to the transfer of the magazine’s ownership. Newman supported The Nation in later years.

McCarthyism, Past and Present


In Victor Navasky’s piece “McCarthyism & Trump” [April 24/May 1], the author quotes from a New York Post column by my father, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., on July 7, 1950, in which he sympathizes with the proposal that the US government name the Communist Party a “criminal conspiracy,” with its members subject to prosecution as “co-conspirators.” According to Navasky’s own authoritative book, Naming Names, my father was, in fact, musing, as columnists sometimes do, about somebody else’s idea, in this case the notion put forward in a judicial opinion written by an associate justice of the Supreme Court, Robert Jackson.

In his own book The Vital Center, however, my father writes that “the traditions of free society…[restrain it] from outlawing the Communist Party,” and “it is hard to argue that the [Communist Party] in peacetime presents much of a threat to American society.” Further in the same book, he praises the fact that, as regards racial segregation in the United States, “in countless small ways across the country Communists performed commendable individual acts against discrimination.” My father also took other actions at the time, for example openly denouncing the practice by students at Harvard University of barring Communist speakers from the campus. Of course, all this does not change the fact that his views of Communism in general, shared with other members of Americans for Democratic Action like Eleanor Roosevelt, were strongly distrustful. But for all of this, Senator Joseph McCarthy himself in 1952 twice publicly denounced my father as being a Communist because, as he claimed, Schlesinger “would ridicule religion and advise that Communists be allowed to teach in our schools, just as he has.”
Stephen Schlesinger
new york city

Victor Navasky Replies


I’m pleased to accept Stephen Schlesinger’s view that his father was “musing” rather than advocating. However, my larger point was that during the anti-Communist hysteria of the Cold War years, too many liberals, including Arthur Schlesinger Jr., forgot their liberal humanism when it came to Communists and their so-called “fellow travelers.” For example, in the early 1950s, when The Nation’s Carey McWilliams and other left-liberals signed the call for a civil-liberties conference, Schlesinger wrote that “none of these gentlemen is a Communist, but none object very much to communism,” and further called them “typhoid Marys of the left”—leading McWilliams to say in the New Statesman that “Schlesinger speaks the language of McCarthyism with a Harvard accent.”
Victor Navasky
new york city

Subject to Internal Debate


I take Katha Pollitt’s good point [“It’s Not McCarthyism,” May 8/15], but remind her of my main concern: As I wrote, “If Trump and his associates were indeed guilty of collaborating with the Russians by interfering in the American election, then they broke the law and should be held accountable. But in a world threatened by nuclear weapons, ISIS, and climate change, it seems to me more important than ever that we talk to our adversaries (especially Putin) and work toward détente.”
Victor Navasky
new york city

Katha Pollitt’s most recent column takes issue with certain terms: “McCarthyism,” “Cold War,” “Kremlin-baiting,” “hysteria,” “distraction.” None of these is as problematic as she makes out, and all but the last share a virtue: They are historical signifiers giving access to a usable past. Pollitt’s column is striking in its resistance to the history behind “Russiagate.” No grasp of the past, none of the present.

This may be why Pollitt doesn’t register Russiagate’s genealogy and the realities of power one finds in it. Have we so soon forgotten that the Pentagon and the spooks piled on Trump as soon as he questioned NATO’s purpose and proposed to renovate relations with Russia? It wasn’t obvious that Clintonians saw a twofer when Robby Mook, instantly after the first e-mail leaks, referenced “experts” fingering Russia and purporting to know Russia’s motive?

Pollitt’s piece poses many questions but misses the most important: What do we think of a renewed détente with Russia? James Carden, whom I take to be among those Pollitt writes against, said in a note the other day: “The position we’re taking is at its heart an antiwar position.” What do we think now that this prospect is dead?

“What worthy projects,” Pollitt asks, “does ‘Kremlin-baiting’ attempt to derail?” Parity between West and non-West is the century’s most pressing imperative, and—no flinching—Russia’s on the right side. How about countering our liberal interventionists? Or standing against US-supported Salafist jihadis in the name of secular government? Or simply for international law, which the United States breaches daily? These are what Pollitt’s parents, surely, would know as primary contradictions. The rest is secondary in the order of things.

No, it’s neither hysterical nor irrational to “want…to get to the bottom of…a lot of strange things.” With history at our disposal, irrationality lies in accepting “the intelligence community’s” ever-couched assertions without evidence. Bernays-inspired manipulations will follow, and it’s then we must talk of hysteria.

Pollitt takes me to task for writing that the liberals’ response to Trump’s election is worse than Trump’s election. I see no other conclusion: Too much of what has occurred (or not) since November 8 justifies the sentiments of those who plumped for Trump. Moreover, standing with those who cultivate fever-pitch hostility toward Russia is unacceptable.
Patrick Lawrence
norfolk, conn.

Sure, investigate. Of course. But the problem with the way the mainstream of the Democratic Party and its allies on MSNBC are framing the issue is not that it is a distraction. It’s a trap. Short of finding a smoking gun in the form of kompromat or hard evidence that Trump himself—not his son-in-law or other hangers-on—asked Russia to intervene to hand him the election, Trump’s presidency will survive, as Ronald Reagan’s survived the Iran-contra scandal. As the investigations drag on, and on, and on, Trump will shed more of his fringe advisers, just as Reagan shed his Iran-contra consorts. He’ll replace them with “serious” people, and his presidency will become normalized. Worse, those betting the farm on proving that Trump is treasonous are doing so by embracing a catastrophic national-security state and international-warfare regime. At this point, Rachel Maddow should just be appointed supreme allied commander of NATO, given how much air time she spends lauding that institution. Paul Manafort and Michael Flynn are gone, and Katha Pollitt calls that “fighting to win.” Really?

It’s easy enough to see how Trump slips out of this. Already, his bombing of a near-deserted Syrian airstrip earned him acclaim by the leading lights of the liberal resistance. Imagine what will happen when he goes after Iran and/or North Korea. I’m all for anything that handicaps Trump, but those who believe they can bring him down over Putin—and by saber rattling over Russia—are laying the groundwork for Trump 2.0. I hope I’m wrong.
Greg Grandin
new york city

Katha Pollitt Replies


Victor Navasky, Greg Gran­din, and Patrick Lawrence want peace. Well, who doesn’t? I don’t see why that means minimizing the likelihood that Russia put its thumb on the scale for Trump or why it is not important if these efforts were known to, and possibly worked out with, the Trump campaign. To me, that sounds like “Let sleeping dogs lie” (in both senses of the verb). It should be possible to get to the bottom of Russiagate without setting off World War III. The alternative is to ignore whether our election was compromised, even though we are now in the hands of a racist, misogynist bully who lost the popular election and wants to destroy the progressive gains of the last 50 years. The above writers say an investigation is fine with them, but they spend all their energies attacking those who are calling for one and pooh-poohing any smoke that suggests fire.

For some reason, some Nation writers have been in the grip of a belief that Trump, although awful in every other way, was some kind of “peace candidate” (unlike evil Hillary). This was always a highly selective and wishful reading of Trump’s public remarks—“I will have a military that’s so strong and powerful, and so respected, we’re not gonna have to nuke anybody” is not what our magazine usually describes as a call for détente—and showed a strange willingness to trust an ignorant and impulsive con artist.

Still, I can understand the disappointment that those hopes were unfounded. I understand less well the apparent conviction that Trump’s supposed pacific proclivities have been thwarted by Democratic dwelling on Russia­gate. Because he has to prove he’s not in Putin’s pocket? This is a pretty speculative and feeble basis upon which to castigate the many people who are disturbed by Russiagate and do not automatically wave away all the claims because they come from intelligence sources and indict a nation that is a familiar folk bogeyman.

If Putin is indeed the smart, sensible grown-up portrayed in much of The Nation’s Russia coverage—­waging only defensive war in Ukraine out of justifiable fears of NATO, for example—he should be able to live with whatever slap on the wrist Rachel Maddow metes out.

As for Patrick Lawrence’s conclusion that postelection events justify his confidence in Trump, I can only say it is good to have him on the record in a forthright way. A Nation columnist who supports the most reactionary president in living memory! Now that is definitely something that would have amazed my parents.
Katha Pollitt
new york city

So Peter Beinart in The Atlantic writes an article on “The New McCarthyism of Donald Trump.” Simon Jenkins in The Guardian informs us that “Donald Trump on terror is just McCarthyism for a new age.” Jonathan Chait in New York magazine argues forcefully that “Donald Trump Is the Perpetrator of McCarthyism, Not the Victim of It,” and Trump himself famously tweets, “Terrible! I just found out that Obama had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower just before the victory. Nothing found. This is McCarthyism!” Even the Russians chime in, with Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov observing that the uproar over Jeff Sessions “strongly resembles a witch hunt or the times of McCarthyism, which we thought were long over in the United States as a civilized country.”

The charges of McCarthyism are important because (a) McCarthyism indeed had such a profound impact on our country, our culture, and beyond; and (b) because some of its consequences may still be with us.

So what is/was McCarthyism? Joseph McCarthy came to national attention with his Lincoln Day speech to the Republican Women’s Club of Wheeling, West Virginia, on February 9, 1950, when he famously said, “I have here in my hand a list of 205—a list of names that were made known to the secretary of state as being members of the Communist Party and who nevertheless are still working and shaping policy in the State Department.” But, of course, McCarthyism (and the Red Scare) was in force before McCarthy himself came on the scene to lend it his name; during its heyday, it encompassed J. Edgar Hoover’s omnipresent FBI (which seemed to see, as the saying went, a Red under every bed); the House Committee on Un-American Activities, or HUAC (whose infamous hearings led to the Hollywood blacklist, among other antidemocratic practices); the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee; the attorney general’s list of subversive organizations; the Subversive Activities Control Board; and the mini-HUACs and police Red squads in states and cities across the country, not to mention private-sector blacklisters like “Red Channels” and much more. Methodologically, McCarthyism involved irresponsible and careless charges of communist affiliation; substantively, it imported the assumption that to be a Red was to be a subversive (and, of course, to be a liberal was to be a socialist was to be a Red), all of which helped create and escalate the anticommunist hysteria.

How does McCarthyism apply to the present situation in general and to Trump and Trumpism in particular? Exhibit A of irresponsible and careless charges (though obviously, in this case, not of being a communist): Trump’s allegation that Obama wiretapped him. The larger question of how McCarthyism applies to the present situation is complicated by the charges that Russia hacked the Democratic National Committee and perhaps the entire American electoral process. My own view is that we won’t know what the Russians did or didn’t do until a special prosecutor (or some other impartial mechanism) is put in place to investigate the matter, but that the readiness of much of the American press and establishment to assume that the worst charges against Russia (including collaboration with and by Trump) are true is, given the lack of specific evidence, at least in part a legacy of Cold War attitudes toward the Soviet Union.

One lesson to be learned about McCarthyism has to do with the role that much of the liberal community played in it. I include here some of our staunchest liberal humanists and organizations, like the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., New York Post editor James Wechsler, Senator Hubert Humphrey, Americans for Democratic Action, and even the American Civil Liberties Union, all of which were infected, I would argue, by the hysteria over the Red Menace. (There were, of course, noble exceptions: a small band of left-liberals like Yale Law School’s Tom Emerson, Princeton’s H.H. Wilson, the law firm of Rabinowitz and Boudin, and, not least, The Nation’s former editor Carey McWilliams, among others.)

To cite one example, Schlesinger advocated that the government should name the Communist Party “as a criminal conspiracy” and that all who were associated with it be subjected to prosecution as co-conspirators. As for those he considered “fellow travelers,” like Emerson, he conceded that they were not communists but said, “They are the Typhoid Marys of the Left, bearing the germs of infection even if not suffering obviously from the disease.”

One of the legacies of the McCarthy era is the cloud of suspicion that still hangs over anything and anyone connected with the former Soviet Union. Former KGB agent Vladimir Putin is undoubtedly guilty of ruthlessness, repression, and much else, but he is not Stalin; and especially given the paucity of specific direct evidence, I would suggest that those (including liberals, in and beyond the media) who too easily assume that Trumpites who talked to the Russians (even those who then falsely denied it) are guilty of colluding or collaborating with them may be victims of the same sort of irrational forces that tainted too many Cold War liberals.

If Trump or his associates were indeed guilty of collaborating with the Russians by interfering in the American election, then they broke the law and should be held accountable. But in a world threatened by nuclear weapons, ISIS, and climate change, it seems to me more important than ever that we talk to our adversaries (especially Putin) and work toward détente.

Question: What do persuading the Greek military junta to release former prime minister Andreas Papandreou; defending (and raising funds to protect) Daniel Ellsberg after he was accused of leaking the Pentagon Papers to various newspaper outlets; persuading Yassir Arafat, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, to recognize Israel and disavow terrorism; exposing the CIA’s use of an American university as a front to help prop up a corrupt regime in South Vietnam; helping Norman Lear organize People for the American Way; and assisting and helping to make possible countless other liberal and free speech organizations (not to mention The Nation magazine itself!) have in common?

Answer: At the heart of each of these courageous actions was Stanley Sheinbaum, who died last week at age 96. Stanley mumbled, but his voice on behalf of peace, liberty, economic and social justice, human and civil rights and liberties, was loud and clear.

In 1978 when Hamilton Fish and I arrived at The Nation as publisher and editor, we had a problem: a sizeable annual deficit and insufficient cash to cover it while we did our best to grow the magazine towards self-sufficiency. Our solution: to find a small group of 100 shareholders, each of whom would commit to investing $5,000 per year for three years, despite the fact that as limited partners they would have no say in the day-to-day editorial and business operations of the magazine.

Stanley, along with the full support of his wife, Betty Warner Sheinbaum, was among the first to join the partnership. Beyond that, as he and Betty were to do for so many others, they assembled scores of potential investors from among their well-heeled Los Angeles friends and neighbors in their Westwood home, to hear and enthusiastically endorse our pitch.

I had met Stanley in 1959 when I was a speechwriter for Michigan’s Governor G. Mennen (“Soapy)” Williams; Stanley was on the economics faculty at Michigan State, but I knew him as my secretary’s (and his first wife, Lynne’s) chauffeur, who would drive her to work and pick up at the end of each day. He always had the smartest observation on the political events of the previous day.

His next stop was the Robert Hutchins Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions in Santa Barbara, California, where along with his assistant, Richard Parker, now of The Nation’s editorial board, and one of The Nation’s other loyalists—W.H. (“Ping”) Ferry—Stanley helped demonstrate that a daily dialogue could be the ideal preparation for his life as a citizen-activist. The rest is history and/or the behind-the scenes making of history.

But it wasn’t until Bob Scheer contacted him on behalf of Ramparts magazine that Stanley took a small pamphlet he had written at the center, and went public on how he discovered that the CIA was behind the Michigan State program he directed in Vietnam. His foresight, care, and courage in breaking that story and the precision and accompanying message about how it undermined our democracy, was to change Stanley’s life as well as the country he cared so much about.

In the course of his unique role as an often invisible agent of change, Stanley accumulated more than his share of friends, not least of whom was his old buddy Al Ruben, the award-winning television writer who in Stanley’s early years also served at the far left of his conscience; later, he was at the heart, along with Lear, Harold Willens, and others of what became known as “the Malibu mafia,” a relatively radical funding and fundraising caucus on behalf of all good things, which met as often as not, in the Sheinbaum living room.

The Nation was lucky to count Stanley among its friends, but so was humankind itself.

E.L. Doctorow, who died on July 21 at the age of 84, was not only a personal pal; he was a supporter of, investor in, and contributor to this magazine and, as the world knows, a gifted, original, and über-relevant novelist.

I first met Edgar in the late 1960s, when he was editor in chief of Dial Press, where his authors included James Baldwin and Norman Mailer. At the time, I was editing and publishing Monocle, a small journal of political satire.

We had an idea for a book that became Report From Iron Mountain: On the Possibility and Desirability of Peace. Its premise was that the US government had commissioned a special study group to plan the transition from a war economy to a peace economy—but the group, which met in secret, found that without war or the threat of it, the economy would collapse, so it quashed the report. The book was written by Leonard Lewin, with input from economist John Kenneth Galbraith, Monocle editors Marvin Kitman and Richard Lingeman (later executive editor of The Nation), and yours truly.

Although all of its footnotes were to real sources, the report itself was, of course, a hoax. But we wanted a publisher who would list it as nonfiction and not let the sales force know otherwise. In Edgar Doctorow, along with Dial Press publisher Richard Baron, we found the perfect coconspirators. When a reporter from The New York Times called to ask whether it was a real, government-commissioned study, Doctorow advised him: If you don’t believe it, check out the footnotes. And when the reporter called the Johnson White House, the officials—not knowing whether or not the Kennedy administration had commissioned it—simply responded, “No comment.” The Times ran a front-page story saying this was possibly a hoax and possibly a secret government document, and the book ended up on the Times bestseller list!

Little did we know that this episode, exploiting the complicated line between fact and fiction, was to prefigure Doctorow’s remarkable career as he went on to write, among other works raising critical historical, political, and cultural questions, The Book of Daniel (inspired by the case of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg), Ragtime, Billy Bathgate, and The March.

All of this is a matter of public record. What is not generally known, however, is Edgar’s unique contribution to this magazine. I am not only talking about the 22 extraordinary articles, essays, meditations, and speeches by him that we were privileged to publish, commencing in 1978, but we can start there. They ranged from his thoughts on “The Rise of Ronald Reagan,” and why it was wrong for the writers group PEN (on whose board he sat) to invite Secretary of State George Shultz to address its annual gathering, to his meditations “The State of Mind of the Union” (1986) and “A Citizen Reads the Constitution” (1987), not to mention his subversive reflections on “Why We Are Infidels” (2003).

Were it not for Edgar, I might never have had the opportunity to edit The Nation in the first place. Long story short: When it became known in 1977 that James Storrow, the publisher and owner of the magazine, was ready to pass the baton to the next generation, young Hamilton Fish and I were one of 20-odd parties that expressed interest. I was a candidate to become editor, while Ham (whom I had gotten to know during Ramsey Clark’s 1974 campaign to succeed Jacob Javits as New York senator) set out to raise funds to buy the money-losing magazine and sustain it while we did our best to raise it to a position of self-sustainability. It was Edgar who, fresh from his Ragtime triumph and without being asked, wrote a check for $10,000 so that Ham would have some “walking-around money” (as Edgar called it) while he did his best to raise the $1 million that would make the deal possible.

And when Storrow balked at signing the needed option agreement, it was Edgar, along with Ralph Nader and a couple of other longtime Nation enthusiasts, who attended a key meeting that helped persuade Storrow—who, it turned out, was not quite psychologically ready to yield control—to sign the deal that enabled fundraising to go forward. Some years later, Doctorow, who had been at Kenyon College with Paul Newman (Edgar liked to joke that it wasn’t until the actor graduated that he started to get the good parts), set up a dinner date for me with Paul and his wife, Joanne Woodward. The result: Newman became the magazine’s single largest outside annual financial supporter until his death.

Edgar was always modest when responding to questions about where he got the ideas for his books, almost as if he had nothing to do with it. As Edgar tells it, he was sitting at his desk, having written 150 pages about a couple much like the Rosenbergs from the vantage of an omniscient narrator, when suddenly a voice (which turned out to be that of their son) emerged from his typewriter, and out came The Book of Daniel. Or he was on his porch in New Rochelle, when what should come riding down the road but the idea for Ragtime, with Coalhouse Walker at the wheel.

Where did Edgar get the idea for Loon Lake? He was driving in the Adirondacks, saw a sign that said Loon Lake, and that was it. “You’ve got to let things happen to you to write,” he said. A friend once said that Edgar—a student of John Crowe Ransom, the Kenyon College professor considered to be the founder of the New Criticism—was “a walking refutation of the intentional fallacy.” When I asked him what would have happened if he’d passed a sign for Lake Placid instead, Edgar replied, “I did pass the sign, but I didn’t notice it.” Then again, he once told an interviewer: “The fact of the matter is that for the fiction writer, once the book is composed, the fictive machinery keeps going—it doesn’t turn off. Whatever you used to write the book, you’re now using your memory to create a fiction about it.”

We will miss you, Edgar, with your arched right eyebrow that let us know your unique appreciation for the interaction of fiction and nonfiction, the comic and the serious, and how you transcended the simplistic distinctions between high and low culture.

The first time Edgar invited Annie (the woman who was to become Mrs. Navasky) and me to the Doctorow home in New Rochelle, he and his brother Donald gave a recital on banjo and guitar. On another occasion, before a Nation Town Hall event in support of Poland’s Solidarity movement, Edgar invited Pete Seeger over to learn the Solidarity protest songs in Polish from a visiting member of the movement, so that he might introduce them at Town Hall. If words could sing, this note would end with Pete singing Woody Guthrie’s “So Long, It’s Been Good to Know Yuh.”

As a former board member of PEN and a believer in its mission—to defend writers’ freedom of expression in the United States and around the world—I was pleased to accept the organization’s invitation to be a table host this year.

And then, as the world knows, six writers, eventually supported by more than 100 other PEN worthies (not including, among others, Salman Rushdie, Art Spiegelman, and our own Katha Pollitt; see page 8), announced that they would boycott the dinner to protest PEN’s decision to give the first PEN/Toni and James C. Goodale Freedom of Expression Courage Award to Charlie Hebdo, the Paris-based satirical journal whose editors had been murdered only months before for doing what they did, which was deploying satire (mostly visual) to attack the powers that be. The protesters objected that Charlie’s “cartoons of the Prophet must be seen as being intended to cause further humiliation and suffering” for a “population that is already marginalized, embattled, and victimized.”

Here let me state my interest: As author of The Art of Controversy: Political Cartoons and Their Enduring Power, I was and am a believer in the power of visual language, but I also know how often cartoons are misinterpreted. When The New Yorker ran cover art during then-senator Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign that showed him and his wife, Michelle, in terrorist garb, a number of readers canceled their subscriptions in protest. In fact, as New Yorker editor David Remnick explained at the time, the cover was not intended to attack the Obamas as terrorists, but to satirize “the distortions and prejudice about Obama.”

Also, although I cherish PEN’s mission and share its values, I have seen its custodians go astray in the past. For example, back in the pretty good old days when I was on PEN’s board, none other than PEN president Norman Mailer took it upon himself to invite Ronald Reagan’s secretary of state, George Shultz, to address PEN’s annual celebration. As E.L. Doctorow pointed out at the time in The Nation, by inviting Shultz, “PEN has put itself in the position of a bunch of obedient hacks in a writers union of an Eastern European country gathering to be patted on the head by the Minister of Culture.” Noting that Shultz’s State Department had applied the ideological exclusion provisions of the McCarran-Walter Act, “which keeps out such dangers to the republic as the Nobel Prize winner Gabriel García Márquez,” Doctorow asked, “Why has American PEN betrayed itself?”

Was PEN betraying its mission once again by bestowing the award on Charlie Hebdo? Was short-story writer Deborah Eisenberg right when she wrote to PEN’s executive director: “To me…the decision to confer [the award] on Charlie Hebdo almost looks less like an endorsement of free expression than like an opportunistic exploitation of the horrible murders in Paris to justify and glorify offensive material expressing anti-Islamic and nationalistic sentiments already widely shared in the Western world.” She suggests that, instead, PEN might have given its courage award to someone like Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, or Laura Poitras. I wish that PEN (like the Fertel Foundation and the Nation Institute, which have awarded Ridenhour Prizes for Truth-Telling to both Snowden and Poitras) had done exactly that, but I don’t think the decision to honor Charlie partook of anti-Muslim prejudice, and here’s why:

First, the widespread claim that Charlie is not an equal-opportunity religion-basher turns out to be wrong. Le Monde conducted a study of Charlie covers from 2005 to 2015 and found that only 13 percent of them “poked fun mainly at Muslims…in fact, Charlie Hebdo was not ‘obsessed’ with Islam. If there was an obsession, it was rather directed at Nicolas Sarkozy and, to a lesser extent, Le Pen and François Hollande.”

Second, and more important, I agree with those who have noted that the Goodale award is for courage, not content. When I called Jim Goodale to ask what he thought of PEN’s decision to bestow the award on Charlie, he said that he and his wife were all for it—and after making clear that they both understood that the donors should have no say in the selection of awardees, he added that “the award is not for what is said. It’s for the right to say it. In this case, journalists got killed for what they said. They should be honored, and my wife and I are extremely proud to do that.”

And finally, a word about satire as a form. As the long-ago founder, editor, and publisher of Monocle, whose editorial policy was that “the views of our contributors, no matter how conflicting and contradictory, are the views of the editors,” I plead guilty to having a sentimental attachment to journals of political satire as unique and effective instruments of criticism, constructive and otherwise.

I’ll end on a personal note. In 1999, a number of people who had been blacklisted in Hollywood during the McCarthy era (along with others who identified with them) objected when Elia Kazan—who had “named names” before HUAC—was honored for “lifetime achievement” at the Academy Awards. The protesters didn’t boycott the ceremony, but chose rather to sit silently while others stood and cheered. I wish the PEN boycotters had done the same.

This article is part of The Nation’s 150th Anniversary Special Issue. Download a free PDF of the issue, with articles by James Baldwin, Barbara Ehrenreich, Toni Morrison, Howard Zinn and many more, here.

More than once, when i’ve been introduced to someone as the former longtime editor of The Nation, that person has asked me: “Did you found the magazine?”

And more than once, I have resisted the temptation to denounce the questioner.

I am old (82 last July), but not that old. However, the truth is that when, in the late 1970s, I had the chance to become The Nation’s editor, I said yes largely because of The Nation’s long and noble history.

Even though I grew up in a home where The Nation (along with The New Republic) arrived weekly, my parents found it hard to understand why I would give up what looked like a promising career at The New York Times (where I worked as an editor on the Sunday magazine).

I had taken a leave from the Times in the early 1970s to write Naming Names, the story of the Hollywood blacklist, which focused on the role of the informer during the so-called phenomenon of McCarthyism. I say “so-called” because the anticommunist hysteria that was its signature began before Senator Joseph McCarthy arrived on the scene and persisted long after he drowned in alcohol. (The historian Ellen Schrecker tells us that knowing what we know now, we should probably call it “Hooverism,” after J. Edgar, who did so much behind and in front of the scenes to promote the anticommunist hysteria.)

In the course of my research, I read through all the magazines and journals of the period, and I came to admire The Nation’s coverage more than any other’s. I also got to read, interview and know The Nation’s editor during those years, the late, great and wise Carey McWilliams, who gave a parade of informed and eloquent writers capacious space to document the paranoia of the period, not least among them the lawyer-historian Frank Donner, who so accurately and definitively reported in 1961:

The obsession with anti-Communism….became a routine feature of our lives. Witness the sedition prosecutions under the Smith Act, the intimidations of the FBI, the rash of loyalty oaths, the security-screening apparatus which blankets American industry, the emergence of the informer as hero, the wave of deportation and denaturalization proceedings against the foreign-born, the restrictions on the right to travel, the manifold attacks on organizations and on the freedom of association, and the congressional witch hunts.

* * *

But since, as any reader of The Nation will attest, the evils and grotesque excesses of the anticommunist crusade are an old and oft-told story, why bother to bring them up yet again now?

Partly it’s because of a personal experience I recently had involving one of McCarthyism’s lesser-known victims, Jack O’Dell, now in his 90s, which I’ll tell you about in a minute. (We also have an article by O’Dell himself on page 188 of this issue.) But mostly it’s because of the impact of McCarthyism/Hooverism on the rest of us. That impact lives on to this day, despite the end of the Cold War that gave rise to it.

Let me explain. After Robert Kennedy was killed during his presidential campaign in 1968, I asked Burke Marshall, who had served as head of the Civil Rights Division in Kennedy’s Justice Department, if I could go through his files for a book I was writing on RFK’s tenure as attorney general. Marshall said I could but that it wouldn’t be of much value, since the Kennedys put little on paper and did everything by word of mouth—and indeed, that turned out to be mostly the case. But one weekend, while the Marshalls were vacationing in the Caribbean, I got snowed in at their place in Bedford Hills, New York—and somewhere around 2:30 in the morning, while going through the papers stored in their attic, I came across a sealed file.

During the campaign, Kennedy had been asked on more than one occasion whether he had authorized the wiretapping of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and his answer was always the same: he couldn’t discuss individual wiretaps—that information was classified—but he could assure his interrogator that he never authorized any wiretaps except in the area of national security. In the sealed file were a series of memorandums, the first from Hoover asking for permission to tap King’s phone because there were two communists (“planted,” Hoover wrote) in his camp—a New York lawyer named Stanley Levison, and an African-American, Jack O’Dell—and Hoover wanted to see whether they were trying to influence Dr. King and his movement on behalf of the Soviet Union.

Other memorandums made it clear that the president, the attorney general, Burke Marshall and others—all buying into the prevailing anticommunist assumptions of the day—pressured King to get rid of these two alleged communists, lest their presence be used to smear him and his movement, and compromise the possible passage of civil-rights legislation that was working its way through Congress. I eventually found Levison, who denied party membership, but never found O’Dell; then I wrote it up, and The Atlantic Monthly put the story of the wiretapping of Martin Luther King on its cover.

Forty-odd years later, O’Dell, now living in Vancouver, showed up on The Nation’s annual fund-raising cruise, and I got to ask him the $64,000 question: “Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?” His answer: “Of course I was. They were the only people doing anything about Jim Crow, lynching, the poll tax.” Asked whether he had any reservations about Stalin, the purge trials and all the rest, he said that he didn’t join the party because of Stalin and he didn’t leave the party because of Stalin. He quit because he thought that civil rights would come before socialism came, and he wanted to be part of the movement to make that happen.

Back in the 1950s, as the sociologist Matthew Nichter put it, communism and socialism, in the minds of most Americans, “were roughly on a par with cannibalism and satanism.” But listening to O’Dell now, it occurred to me for the first time what we as a country and a culture had lost by disqualifying this energetic, articulate, charismatic and wise man from making his case in his own name and voice.

And I began to consider how stigmatizing people with the red brush had deprived the rest of us of interaction with people whose ideas might have not merely deepened and clarified the national and international conversation, but whose advocacy, intelligence, passion and information might have brought us to an improved understanding of the political and cultural situation, and perhaps even have transformed it.

I began to wonder what we had lost by not permitting O’Dell (and other communists and former communists who were not willing to renounce their past) to publicly participate in our politics.

Historical counterfactuals never “prove” anything, but before I mention other ways the consequences of our anticommunist obsession continue to bedevil us, indulge me while I cite but one example of how things might have been different had Jack O’Dell and his ideas been accorded the respect, attention, and presumption of possibility accorded members of the establishment and mainstream politicos. Consider his argument that what became the Marshall Plan should have been carried out under the auspices of the United Nations—dismissed at the time as a recycling of the party line.

O’Dell favored using the United Nations to supply aid and relief to rebuild Europe after World War II rather than the Marshall Plan, which he saw, rightly or wrongly, as an agency of US imperialism. Henry Wallace had incorporated the idea in his presidential campaign, and it was included in the Progressive Party’s platform. O’Dell believed that Wallace’s call for “the century of the common man” was the best answer to magazine magnate Henry Luce’s claim that this was “the American century.” Many may not agree with O’Dell’s analysis that the Marshall Plan was capitalism’s way of protecting oil and other business interests. But for myself, when I read about how hundreds of men, women and children are being killed in Syria and slaughtered in Libya but we can’t do anything about it for fear of getting involved in “another Iraq” or “another Afghanistan,” I can’t help wondering: Isn’t that what the UN was supposed to be for?

Had O’Dell’s position prevailed, and had we built up the United Nations as part of a general effort to honor the ideal of an international agency, would the UN be in a better place—not to mention the world? We can’t know the answer to that question, but if the UN is indeed our last, best hope for addressing the staggering array of global problems that confront the planet, it’s an important one to ask.

* * *

As it happens, I agree with O’Dell’s analysis, but my point here has nothing to do with whether he was right or wrong, but rather with the fact that during some critical years in our nation’s history, this man—who at age 89 received the only standing ovation in seventeen years of Nation cruises—was not permitted to participate as himself, under his own name, in this country’s political conversation. What we have lost by depriving ourselves of the expanded dialogue that O’Dell and others like him might have made possible is incalculable.

Other ways that the impact of McCarthyism/Hooverism/Cold War anticommunism lives on are so much a part of our country’s woe-work that we fail even to notice them. I’ll mention just a half-dozen examples:

§ Vietnam. Take the Vietnam War itself. Purging the State Department of the China hands (men like John Stewart Service, John Paton Davies, Oliver Edmund Clubb)—essentially because they were right in predicting that communism would come to China—meant that there was no one around to file dissenting cables when the decision was taken to follow the French into Vietnam. In addition to blood and treasure, the costs of that decision in terms of enemies and critics alone are still with us and impossible to measure.

§ Healthcare. We have heard so many denunciations of Obamacare that we tend to forget, as David Blumenthal and James Morone make clear in their definitive book, The Heart of Power: Health and Politics in the Oval Office, that from Harry Truman in 1945 to George W. Bush in 2003, “not a single economic team signed on happily to an extension of health care benefits.” As often as not, “socialized medicine” were the scare words that opponents invoked. My own favorite anti-healthcare campaign was invented by Whitaker and Baxter, the savvy husband-and-wife public-relations team hired by the American Medical Association to undermine Harry Truman’s healthcare plan. They published a fifteen-page pamphlet of questions and answers called “The Voluntary Way Is the American Way,” including a concocted quotation from Lenin: “Q. Would socialized medicine lead to socialization of other phases of American life? A. Lenin thought so. He declared: Socialized medicine is the keystone to the arch of the Socialist State.”

§ The arms race. Even though the Cold War is no more, the arms race to which it gave rise is still with us, which, in this nuclear age, is more problematic than ever. Even Senator Dianne Feinstein—who, despite her heroic push to release the Senate Intelligence Committee report on the CIA’s post-9/11 torture, on many other issues seems to accept the premises of the defense/intelligence establishment—has written about how during the Cold War each side stockpiled something like 30,000 nuclear weapons to prevent the other from gaining an advantage; and how our budget for simply maintaining nuclear materials is insupportable: “our nuclear stockpile is competing for limited defense spending, money that could be used to address more pressing challenges such as the fight against the Islamic State and defending against cyberattacks.”

§ The Central Intelligence Agency. Never mind the congressional report on CIA torture. The agency, founded in 1947, was from the outset more a covert-action arm than the research institute that its name would imply. As Tom Hayden has written recently for The Nation, “It’s relevant today…because of the cancerous growth of Big Brother surveillance and the proliferation of clandestine operations branded in the name of ‘democracy promotion,’ from Cuba to the Ukraine.” The pervasive use of secret-money campaigns makes it impossible to know whether operatives of our intelligence agencies have any role in harassing or steering social movements, or whether such roles have been passed on to private foundations. Democracy is increasingly in the dark.

According to Hayden, differences have “blurred” between the CIA and the US Agency for International Development, which spends an annual $20 million on “democracy promotion” in Cuba. The CIA continues to meddle in Ukraine and even played a role way back when in the arrest of Nelson Mandela. Such practices, Hayden notes, cast a long shadow that is still with us.

§ Pre-empting class analysis. I would further argue that the conflation of Marxism with the former Soviet Union and domestic subversion, so characteristic of the Cold War years, has had the side effect of stigmatizing anything that smacked of class analysis. As a result, for years Americans were deprived of some of the most relevant and probing analysis—and even identification—of our core economic problems. To a great extent, this is still true, although occasionally the mention of class seeps through. Thus a recent New York Times column made the connection between class and the environment, pointing out that even though the benefits of pollution control are more or less evenly spread across the population, environmentalism is a class issue. For example, ownership of stock in coal companies is concentrated in the hands of the wealthy, with all that this implies.

§ Big government. When Bill Clinton informed us that “the era of big government is over,” he neglected to mention the context: that all federal aid—to education and whatever else—was under a cloud. No more New Deal; no New Deal 2.0. The idea of government itself was a victim of what Norman Thomas, the perennial Socialist candidate for President (himself a staunch anticommunist) used to delight in calling, as he raised his arms above his head, fingers aflutter, “creeeeping socialism.”

How to calculate the consequences of the books not written, the scientific discoveries not pursued, a trade-union movement purged of its most energetic, creative and effective leaders (demonized as Communists and fellow travelers)? All that is only part of the legacy of what David Caute has aptly called “the great fear.” In her sophisticated study Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America, historian Ellen Schrecker does a fine job of showing how the Taft-Hartley Act (1947), passed as an anticommunist measure, undermined all of organized labor. The crippled labor movement helps to explain as much as anything the increased inequality that Thomas Piketty has newly brought to our attention.

But the legacy of a labor movement purged of its best and most radical members is not merely economic. As we know from what has gone before, its impact is also political (particularly where civil rights and liberties, not to mention global freedom itself, are concerned). In other words, McCarthyism/Hooverism may be long gone, but its aftermath is alive and as sick as ever.

Robert sherrill, who wrote at least 130 signed articles for this magazine, died on August 19 at age 89. This former college English teacher, amateur painter and poet was a passionate purist in his prose, his populist politics, and his expectations of others and himself. I first got to know Bob by serving as his sometime editor at The New York Times Magazine. (Conflict-of-interest alert: at a critical moment, he sent James Storrow Jr., The Nation’s then-owner/publisher, a billet-doux telling him he’d be a fool not to hire me, so I owe him.) Sherrill’s advice to me when I became editor of this magazine in 1978: “If you ever publish anything in The Nation that could appear in The New York Times Magazine, you are not doing your job.”)

Sherrill, who wrote for everyone from I.F. Stone’s Weekly and The Washington Post to Playboy, was first brought to The Nation in 1964 by editor Carey McWilliams, whom he (with good reason) revered. Because Sherrill had been banned from the White House as a security risk—he had punched out the governor of Florida’s press secretary—I was pleased to bestow the title of White House correspondent on him after I came to the magazine. Bob later became our corporations correspondent and—contrary to the New York Times obit, which reported that he left The Nation in 1982—wrote for the magazine until the early 2000s. (For many years Sherrill lived with his first wife, Mary—whom he repeatedly credited with doing the bulk of his research—in Tallahassee, Florida, on Old Dirt Road. I always wondered whether Bob, who was born in Frogtown, Georgia, moved there because he liked that street address.)

I loved Robert Sherrill, but I should quickly add that it would take the higher math to count the number of “I quit” letters he wrote during my years at the mag. My favorite concluded: “You are an eastern liberal…I’m a western anarchist…. But I think I hate corporations much better than you do…and I know damned well that I hate politicians better than you do, though the hatred is downright gutter…. And don’t make me a contributing editor. That is the dumbest and most meaningless title ever concocted by a profession that spends half its time doing dumb and meaningless things. Just take me off the masthead. You know I wish you well indeed.”

Once, objecting to a Nation editorial he regarded as elitist because, in Bob’s reading, it advocated teaching kids how to think as opposed to demanding that they master their ABCs, he sent me a note based on the (to him, generous) assumption that I hadn’t written it, which included the following: “THE EDITOR OF THE NATION IS THE NATION. I’ve said that a thousand times (that’s an understatement) to you, but because you are too fucking soft for your own good, or the good of the magazine, you prefer to turn policy- making over to a bunch of elitist nitwits. That’s the second time I’ve used the word elitist. If I had the time, I would write it a million times.”

In case you haven’t figured it out, Sherrill had what his buddy and fellow Nation writer Molly Ivins called a “cantankerous” temperament. Decades before he died, Molly proposed that his epitaph read: Here lies a man who never kissed ass. His usual reaction to anything saccharine, she pointed out, was “It makes me puke!”

Bob had a healthy disrespect for both publishers and publishing conventions. His answer to his publishers’ preference for short, snappy titles included such books as Military Justice Is to Justice as Military Music Is to Music and his definitive work on handguns, The Saturday Night Special: And Other Guns With Which Americans Won the West, Protected Bootleg Franchises, Slew Wildlife, Robbed Countless Banks, Shot Husbands Purposely and by Mistake, and Killed Presidents—Together With the Debate Over Continuing Same.

Among his pieces for The Nation were take-no-prisoners profiles of Rupert Murdoch (“Citizen Murdoch: Buying His Way to a Media Empire,” May 29, 1995) and Roy Cohn (“King Cohn,” May 21, 1988), and his hilarious and dispositively documented exposés of Wall Street chicanery, criminal and otherwise (including the November 19, 1990, special issue on “The Looting Decade: S&Ls, Big Banks and Other Triumphs of Capitalism”). But it is folly to try to capture Robert Sherrill in a few hundred words, so let me end by quoting the man himself. These lines are from a review, reprinted in an anthology of The Nation’s best, that Katrina vanden Heuvel put together before she became editor. After inventorying some corporate products that kill, maim or otherwise injure the consumer, he counsels the reader: “Go corner your senators and congressmen and threaten to tie them down and force-feed them coal dust, lint, baby formula, Oraflex and asbestos, if they don’t agree to help us out. Now.”

The following is an excerpt from Victor Navasky's The O'Dell File, a new Amazon Single.

Many of those most intimately involved in the black freedom movement from the late ’50s forward have called Jack O’Dell its “unsung hero.” Yet, most Americans have never heard of the man or his many accomplishments. By disqualifying O’Dell from playing a public role in the national conversation, from being an open and visible contributor to the policy debates that help define and comprise the public sphere—as the FBI, the Kennedys, and Martin Luther King himself did in the early 1960s—we have inflicted an unnecessary and grievous wound upon ourselves, our country, and our culture.

I first came across Jack O’Dell’s name in 1969, in the attic of Burke Marshall, Robert F. Kennedy’s former assistant attorney general for civil rights. Let me explain: Since 1964, when Robert F. Kennedy had resigned from the Justice Department and was elected senator from the state of New York, I had been working on a book about his attorney-generalship. Although many of the alumni of the Kennedy Justice Department were still in the Washington area, many were not. Burke Marshall, for one. He had resigned in 1965 and was living in Bedford Hills, New York, where his papers resided in the attic.

After Robert Kennedy was assassinated, Marshall granted me permission to go through his files. He told me I probably wouldn’t find anything of interest, because the Kennedys did everything by word of mouth, and when one leaves the Justice Department, the FBI purges one’s files of all sensitive materials. Nevertheless, if I wanted to waste my time…

So every weekend, I would install myself in the Marshalls’ attic. Burke would come up from time to time and, laughing nervously, would ask what I was doing up there since there could be nothing of interest. Then we would have dinner and discuss what I had discovered. The conversations were invaluable because they gave me a chance to get this thoughtful man’s opinions on everything from federalism; to the role of the FBI; the March on Washington; and Robert Kennedy’s evolving commitment to civil rights and how that expressed itself in terms of his relationship to his brother and after JFK’s assassination; President Johnson; and much, much more.

One weekend Burke told me that he and his wife, Violet, were going to be soon taking a vacation, but I was welcome to make my weekly pilgrimage. As it happened, that weekend there was a blizzard so great that I got snowed in and was forced to stay the night. I spent that night in the attic, where I buried myself in Burke’s correspondence and memorandums. At 2:30 in the morning, I came across a sealed file. There was no indication on the outside what the file contained. What to do? I could wait until Marshall returned and ask, but since it was 2:30 in the morning, since I was there and he wasn’t, what else could I do? After weighing the ethical pros and cons (for about 30 seconds), I carefully unsealed the file and found copies of a series of memorandums, the first of which said that J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the FBI, had requested the attorney general’s authorization to tap the phone of Martin Luther King, Jr. The basis of the request was that there were two high-ranking members of the Communist Party in Dr. King’s entourage: one, a New York attorney named Stanley Levison, and the other, Hunter Pitts (Jack) O’Dell, an African-American who, at Levison’s suggestion, had been hired to run the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s (SCLC) new direct-mail fund-raising office in Harlem. The purpose of the wiretap was to monitor Dr. King’s conversations in order to discover whether Levison and O’Dell were attempting to influence Dr. King and the civil rights movement on behalf of the USSR.

O'Dell had a fascinating history, before, during, and after his Communist Party period: As a merchant seaman he was elected by his shipmates to go to NMU’s labor school. As a petition-gatherer, he invoked his college fraternity network to collect a record number of signatures. As a first-time benefit fund-raiser, he raised more than half of SCLC’s budget for the year. Lacking a college degree, he was the most popular professor in Antioch’s Graduate School of Education. As aide to Rev. Jackson in the 1988 presidential campaign, he was put in charge of the “foreign desk.” An insider reports, “he was instrumental in Jackson’s positions on Latin America, Cuba, South Africa, Palestine—essentially all of those that mattered most to the constituencies the campaign was trying to put together.” All of the above, he operated coast to coast (on Long Island, he received the Lifetime Achievement Award and in the state of Washington, he has the Jack O’Dell Center for Reflection and Education named after him).

Whatever he was, Jack O’Dell was as far from the Hoover-McCarthy-inspired caricature/stereotyped image of a Red—an unthinking, party-line Stalinist—as it was possible to be. In fact, if anything, he was the citizen (albeit with a Marxist orientation) all thoughtful theorists of democracy hope for when they make the case for government of, by, and for the people.

O’Dell’s is a cautionary tale. Although he himself never turned bitter, never despaired, never gave up, we—our state, our democracy, our country—disqualified him from full participation in our national conversation, our policy-making process. Might such high-visibility participation have resulted in the rest of us seeing things in a new, worldwide perspective? We will never know. The larger question his life story poses is, How many other potential enrichers of our democratic dialogue did we miss out on because of the domestic cold war and attendant anti-communist hysteria? And if there are no others like him, more’s the shame and more’s the pity.

Jack O’Dell has a special feeling for the role of music in politics. So perhaps it’s appropriate to end with the words from Pete Seeger’s song: “When will we ever learn, when will they ever learn?”

When Joe Aidlin, an old pal of former Nation editor Carey McWilliams, came to me many years ago with the idea that since the so-called experts were wrong so much of the time, someone ought to do a book called The Experts Speak, I called André Schiffrin, then the director of Pantheon Books. André immediately suggested that I enlist the witty writer and editor Christopher Cerf.

Thus we joined a distinguished club—Authors Published By André—that included Studs Terkel, Eric Hobsbawm, E.P. Thompson, Michel Foucault, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Edward Said, Noam Chomsky, Roy Medvedev, Gunnar Myrdal, Günter Grass, Ivan Illich, George Kennan and Sissela Bok.

Satire and humor are probably the last things most people in publishing think of when they think of André Schiffrin, who died on December 1. But he was, after all, the editor who agreed to publish Art Spiegelman’s book Maus after every major publisher in town had turned it down. Maus, which portrayed the main actors in the Holocaust as animals, went on to become the first graphic novel (also part memoir, part history) to win a Pulitzer Prize. André himself was the author of a book about graphic satire, Dr. Seuss & Co. Go to War.

The first time I encountered André was in the late 1950s, when he was a Yale undergrad who belonged to a group called The Pundits. It consisted of ten students who would have a lobster and champagne banquet on the steps of the Yale library on the first day of exams. The Pundits (who that year included Calvin Trillin, now The Nation’s Deadline Poet) stood on the steps of the library dressed in togas and said what were supposed to be funny things. The only line I remember was André’s: “The peasants may be penniless, but the czar is Nicholas.”

André famously took over Pantheon Books while still in his 20s. After twenty-eight years of successfully publishing books (left, liberal, democratic socialist and simply high quality) of social, cultural and political distinction, André was dramatically forced to resign after refusing his conglomerate bosses’ order to cut his list by two-thirds (and trim his staff) for what they told him were bottom-line reasons. His staff (including Tom Engelhardt, who would later become a Nation Institute blogger) quit with him, and—perhaps for the only time in publishing history—more than 200 authors and supporters picketed a major American publisher, Random House (then owned by S.I. Newhouse Jr.). I know because I was there, marching next to my Nation colleague Richard Lingeman, just behind Kurt Vonnegut (who was not one of André’s authors but was there, along with many other writers—including our own Barbara Ehrenreich—to show solidarity).

Not long thereafter, André founded the New Press, a bold experiment in nonprofit, relatively radical book publishing, joined by an amazing number of his former Pantheon authors. Its list gets stronger by the year. At last count, it numbered some fifty books a year, virtually all of them of social consequence.

Over the years, starting in 1968, when he wrote about student demonstrations at the Frankfurt Book Fair, André contributed articles and reviews to The Nation on subjects ranging from “The New China—No Turning Back” (1988), “Remembering Studs” and “Socialism Is No Longer a Dirty Word” to, yes, more than once, the conglomeratization of publishing—all of them ahead of the curve, and all of them informed by his nuanced and passionate politics.

André was a good friend of mine, of The Nation (where one of his daughters served as an intern), of literature, of letters, of democracy and socialism, of his authors and colleagues (including Nation alumni such as Phil Pochoda and Don Guttenplan, who now runs the magazine’s London bureau with his wife, Maria Margaronis). André was also an enemy of hypocrisy, cant, fascism, racism, pomposity and conglomerates. Especially publishing conglomerates.

We miss you, André, but your message continues to resonate in our hearts and in our pages.

Alice Kessler-Harris, a prominent feminist historian and author of the pioneering study Out to Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States (1982), has written a difficult book about a difficult subject. A Difficult Woman is difficult because, rather than being a conventional biography of Lillian Hellman, the celebrated and despised playwright and screenwriter, it explains her life by attempting to answer a question: How was it that Hellman, whom Kessler-Harris and others admired for her three autobiographical works (An Unfinished Woman, Pentimento and Scoundrel Time) and her “blunt and plainspoken style,” had become, by the time she died in 1984, the “archetype of hypocrisy,” the “embodiment of ugliness,” and the public image of “the quintessential liar” (as well as the “angry woman,” the “rigid Stalinist” and the “greedy, self-aggrandizing individual”)—even in a “world where so many others had committed many of the same sins?” Kessler-Harris has tried to answer this question not by reassessing Hellman’s character but “by thinking through her relationship to the twentieth century.” That is no easy task.

Lillian Hellman was difficult in part because of her many apparent contradictions. Born in 1905 in New Orleans, she was a white Southerner who worked for civil rights. She was perhaps the most famous woman playwright in the world, yet one who thought it demeaning to be known as “a woman playwright”; a Jew who was accused of denying her Jewishness (“self-hating” was the term her Jewish neoconservative critics preferred); a truth-seeker who was said to be a congenital liar; a “tough broad” who had no particular use for feminists; a civil libertarian who was repeatedly denounced as a Stalinist; a woman whose face once led William F. Buckley’s conservative National Review to run a cover story showing her looking in the mirror and asking, “Who is the ugliest of them all?” Yet she had an allure, as evidenced by her numerous attractive male bedmates, whose names Kessler-Harris has no compunction about naming.

Hellman was also a difficult woman because she liked being—not to put too fine a point on it—difficult. Sometimes she was difficult on principle: for example, she would not allow her plays to be performed in apartheid South Africa. Sometimes she was difficult professionally: she once struck a deal with Ladies’ Home Journal for three lucrative articles but specified that not a word of hers could be changed. Sometimes she was difficult temperamentally: as Kessler-Harris reports, “She expected accountants and agents alike not only to understand and respect her principles but to honor all her unspoken as well as spoken wishes.” And sometimes she was difficult, period. Stephen Gillers, who worked with Hellman as co-chair of the Committee for Public Justice, an activist organization that she helped found in the 1970s to protect constitutional rights and liberties, told me that a better title for Kessler-Harris’s book would have been An Impossible Woman.

Although Kessler-Harris does a brave and fair-minded job of traversing the thicket of -isms surrounding Hellman (Stalinism and Trotskyism, Zionism and anti-Semitism, communism, McCarthyism, cold war liberalism), a principal value of her book is the way it shows how labels like “Stalinist” obfuscate rather than capture the character of this complicated woman, not to mention the century through which she passed. Consider the striking contrast between her interactions with the two McCarthys, Joseph and Mary. Kessler-Harris makes clear why Hellman’s reaction to the McCarthyite charges that she was a subversive and a possible communist propagandist won her kudos and glory, whereas her lawsuit for defamation against Mary McCarthy (who said of Hellman on the Dick Cavett Show that “every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the’”) earned her obloquy and ridicule.

* * *

In 1952, Hellman was subpoenaed to appear before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC). It was the height (or should I say “nadir”?) of the red hunt. Senator Joseph McCarthy, with the intimidating attorney Roy Cohn at his side, seemed to be making daily headlines with his irresponsible charges that however many communists were undermining virtually every aspect of American life. Senator Pat McCarran’s Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, meanwhile, was blaming security risks in the State Department for the “loss” of China. (Many state legislatures had their own mini–investigating committees.) The Smith Act prohibited the teaching and advocacy of subversive ideas. Harry Truman’s Loyalty Program required all federal employees to sign an oath of fealty to the United States. The Hiss and Rosenberg cases dominated the news. Over President Truman’s veto, the restrictive McCarran-Walter immigration act was passed, along with the Taft-Hartley Act, which required all trade union officials to take a similar oath. The US attorney general had compiled and disseminated a list of subversive organizations. Police departments in every major city had their own red squads, and behind the scenes J. Edgar Hoover presided over an FBI that saw reds under every bed.

In Hollywood the blacklist became the principal drama, with investigators (Congressional and freelance) using guilt by association to destroy the careers of hundreds of people in the industry. After the so-called Hollywood Ten had been sent to prison for refusing to answer HUAC’s most notorious question (“Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?”), attorneys advised their subpoenaed clients that their choice was either to cooperate with the investigators (which meant naming names) or risk imprisonment for contempt of Congress (by refusing to do so); alternatively, they could invoke the Fifth Amendment with its protection against self-incrimination, but they would still end up on the blacklist. Naming names became the order of the day. The actor Sterling Hayden named his mistress; the director Richard Collins named one of his creditors. The left-wing playwright Clifford Odets, who had given the eulogy at Group Theater actor J. Edward Bromberg’s funeral, named J. Edward Bromberg. And Elia Kazan, Hollywood’s most prestigious and successful director, not only named names but took out full-page ads in Variety and the New York Times urging others in the industry to follow his example. Although there were some notable exceptions, most who took the Fifth kept their silence.

Such was the poisonous political climate surrounding Hellman when she appeared before HUAC. Yet, as Kessler-Harris observes, by the end of her testimony “she had given no names and would serve no jail time.” Indeed, in her letter to the committee, she asked that it respect the “simple rules of human decency and Christian honor” by not forcing her “to betray people who had never done any harm.” She famously and eloquently insisted that “To hurt innocent people whom I knew many years ago in order to save myself is, to me, inhuman and indecent and dishonorable,” adding: “I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions, even though I long ago came to the conclusion that I was not a political person and could have no comfortable place in any political group.”

Writing in The New York Review of Books, the columnist Murray Kempton said of Hellman: “The most important thing is never to forget that here is someone who knew how to act when there was nothing harder on earth than knowing how to act.” This is precisely what all those others who would dismiss this difficult woman as “Stalinist” forgot. In my view, Hellman’s stance before HUAC was consistent with the best of her proclaimed democratic and humanistic values. In addition to what it says about her character (which was Kempton’s point), it served the larger political purpose of resisting unjust authority and also had an educational function for the citizenry at large. It took courage and literary elegance to pull off, yes, but more important, it was inspirational to a mostly cowed generation.

* * *

If Hellman’s response to McCarthyism was the high point of her existence as a public figure, Kessler-Harris makes it clear that decades later, toward the end of her life, when Hellman was losing her eyesight and was frail, angry and embittered (not least at the attacks on her for proclaiming her moral superiority at the expense of the truth), her response to what I will call Mary McCarthyism was less than admirable. Kessler-Harris explains that for more than forty years, Hellman and McCarthy “had shared a climate of hostility, their trajectories running along parallel paths, their opinions conflicting and confronting.” McCarthy, seven years younger than Hellman, had been gunning for a fight with her nemesis for years. As a drama critic, she had attacked Hellman’s plays—when she deigned to review them at all—as offering more melodrama than drama; as a film critic, she had viperously denounced Hellman’s film The North Star (1943), a prize-winning feature about the brutal German invasion of a peaceful Ukrainian village, as “political indoctrination” for showing the Soviet Union as “an idyllic hamlet.” (McCarthy was presumably unaware that Hellman herself hated what Hollywood had done to her script, turning the film into what she called “an extended opera bouffe,” though she kept her name on it because it “said some true things about fascism.”)

But underlying their antagonism was the fact that they were on opposite sides of a political and cultural divide. McCarthy was a Trotskyist and thereby inclined to loathe Stalinists. Hellman was vulnerable to the charge of Stalinism because in 1938, shortly after she’d joined the Communist Party in full awareness of the show trials (she’d been in Moscow while they were going on), she had signed a letter—along with 350 other writers, artists and scientists—declaring her belief in the guilt of the defendants and accepting the trials as necessary to preserve progressive democracy in the USSR. Nor did she ever repudiate the act. Kessler-Harris’s judicious observation seems apropos: “In the sharp glare of history, neither the act of signing that letter nor her failure to repudiate the document thereafter is defensible. But by the dim light of the 1930s, both acts are understandable.” Kessler-Harris reports that years later, Hellman confessed to her goddaughter that she simply had not seen or understood the full spectrum of Stalin’s sins.

Nevertheless, given their respective conflicting worldviews, McCarthy and Hellman were on a collision course. McCarthy wrote for Encounter, which was sponsored by the CIA-funded Committee for Cultural Freedom. Its regular contributors included people like Irving Kristol (later to be dubbed the “godfather of neoconservatism”), Sidney Hook (the Marxist who veered further and further to the right) and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. (who in those years, as Nation editor Carey McWilliams put it, “spoke the language of McCarthyism with a Harvard accent”). As a group, the contributors to Encounter focused on Soviet espionage and subversion, which Hellman considered a “red herring.” Her worldview on these matters may be gathered from a statement that Hellman wrote but never released, in which she asserts that “In all the organizations in which I have participated over the past 15 years,” she had never “heard one word concerning espionage, sabotage, force, or violence, or the overthrow of our government.” Like The Nation’s editor-publisher Freda Kirchwey (McWilliams’s predecessor), she thought the idea of the angelic United States versus the demonic USSR was simplistic and “too easy an out…for it excuses policies and behavior which bear no true relationship to the danger.” For Hellman, those anticommunists who saw communism as a monolithic worldwide conspiracy thereby fostered unwarranted repression at home and inhibited the capacity of ordinary people to dissent.

Hellman’s belief that our constitutional rights and liberties deserved protection from abuses by the US intelligence agencies was central to her involvement in the Committee for Public Justice. Its board consisted of staunch civil rights and civil liberties activists and supporters like Burke Marshall and Roger Wilkins, who had been assistant attorneys general for civil rights under Robert Kennedy and Ramsey Clark, respectively, as well as Norman Dorsen, later president of the American Civil Liberties Union. It ran a much publicized conference at Princeton University on investigating the FBI (for which I was the co-author of a paper on FBI wiretapping).

So was this difficult woman truly a “Stalinist”? Or, as Kessler-Harris argues, does that term obscure more than it clarifies? I would agree that it does—especially when applied to someone like Hellman, whose brief involvement with the party came at a time when the CPUSA was the most vociferous defender of racial equality, the most consistent supporter of her union, the Screen Writers Guild, and, for better or worse, her lover Dashiell Hammett’s home base. And she subsequently spent much of her life fighting fascism and racism and upholding civil liberties. At best, the term “Stalinist” would appear to ignore her First Amendment enthusiasms (albeit mixed with possible political naïveté), and at worst it constitutes a McCarthyite smear.

For myself, I believe that while Mary McCarthy was right about what was happening inside the USSR, Hellman was right about the invidious role that organizations like the Congress for Cultural Freedom played in the cold war. McCarthy’s attorney Floyd Abrams was correct that no free-speech absolutist (as Hellman thought herself to be) should pursue the kind of bullying defamation suit she brought against McCarthy—for, had she won, her victory could only have been used by others to repress public discourse. The suit was unwise, and I suspect that had she lived, she would have lost. The otherwise estimable lawyer Ephraim London did her no favors in agreeing to take the case. But for the reasons made clear in this valuable book, when the dust settles, this difficult woman’s reputation will fare better than it did when Kessler-Harris began her Hellman journey.

One of Alexander Cockburn’s specialties was attacking people just after they had died (presumably to keep obituary writers honest, but also to thumb his nose at a sentimental convention of the establishment press). So as a tribute on hearing of his death, I thought I’d inventory his problematic qualities. But I confess I’m really not up for it.

Granted, Alex was at his peak in attack mode, especially when you agreed with him on the target. His style was witty, coruscating, deadly, in the highest polemical traditions of Ambrose Bierce and H.L. Mencken. Yet his most slashing sallies were always fact-based, right up to his final Nation column, last issue, on the Libor scandal. Commenting on Labour Party leader (and former Nation intern) Ed Miliband’s proposal that the Big Five banks sell off up to 1,000 of their branches, Alex wrote: “In the current culture of rabid criminality in the banking system, that would surely be unwise, unleashing 1,000 small-time banksters.”

Like every other journalist in town, I was a regular reader of Alex’s irresistible, hilarious, brilliant, biased “Press Clips” column in the Village Voice when, in 1984, it was announced that he had been suspended for accepting a $10,000 grant from an outfit called the Institute for Arab Studies to write a book about Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, without informing his editor.

It seemed to me at the time that if Alex had been awarded a Guggenheim and not mentioned it, nobody would have objected, so he was being punished for what was an ideological crime. After consulting with The Nation’s Andrew Kopkind (an old buddy of Alex’s), I decided to convert Alex’s suspension into a departure and offered him a column in The Nation. And so “Beat the Devil”—named after the novel by his father, Claud Cockburn, that was the basis for the cult 1953 movie—was born.

I loved the idea that Alex’s column would appear in The Nation because (a) nobody wrote better than he did, (b) he usually had something original to say and (c) it served as a standing rebuke to those who condemned The Nation for having some sort of party line. That last virtue became even more painfully obvious as the years went by and he increasingly chose as his targets Nation writers and editors, including yours truly, Christopher Hitchens, Eric Alterman, Katha Pollitt and Aryeh Neier (who wrote a human rights column); left-liberal heroes like Bernie Sanders; worthies like neo-Nazi-watcher Chip Berlet, human rights activist Michael Massing and my Columbia Journalism School colleague Todd Gitlin; and so many public intellectuals, journalists and activists on the liberal left and in the neo-center that, as I wrote in my book A Matter of Opinion, “it would be more manageable to make a list of the exempt (starting with his late father and the rest of his talented family),” to whom he was unfailingly, and touchingly, loyal.

Alex served, among other things, as a corrective to the magazine’s liberal pieties. Once, when we co-sponsored a conference with the University of Southern California on the role of the journal of opinion, we made a point of inviting the editors of magazines with whom we were in varying degrees of disagreement, like The American Spectator, The New Republic, The New Criterion and National Review. Here is what Alex had to say in his column on the eve of the conference:

“I’m glad the rights of these horrible journals are guaranteed under the First Amendment, but I don’t think they ‘keep the mainstream honest.’ To the contrary, these are exactly the magazines that have helped corrupt the mass media and instruct them in the art of telling lies. These magazines have not widened debate, they have narrowed it to leather-lunged condoning of reaction, both in politics and culture.”

Despite his occasional assaults on what seems to me the inarguable (see his columns on global warming), and despite views that seemed cranky or worse to many Nation readers (see his columns on the Middle East and on the number of Stalin’s victims), on balance—a term that would have infuriated him—I’m proud and glad that The Nation gave Alex his final forum as our longest-running columnist. And by the way, it should be noted that he was generous in crediting (and mentoring) those Nation interns lucky enough to work with him.

Alex, you’ve left a big hole in this magazine—and yes, to be sentimental, in our hearts. As Elizabeth Pochoda, our former literary editor, put it, “Who will ever insult us as well as he?”

Read our favorite columns by Alexander Cockburn.

I first met Nora Ephron in the early 1960s through our mutual friend Milton Gwirtzman, adviser to various Kennedys. Nora had been working as a White House intern—the only one, she later wrote, that JFK never tried to hit on. At the time I was trying to convert Monocle—a “leisurely quarterly” (it came out twice a year) of political satire that some friends and I had started as students at Yale Law School—from a hobby to a business.

Came the New York newspaper strike of 1962–63, and we decided to put out parody issues of the striking papers. We persuaded Nora, by then working at a lowly job at the Newsweek clip desk (she gave her job description as “coolie”), to write a parody of Leonard Lyons’s New York Post column. She hilariously captured his style, which in Nora’s rendition consisted of serial name-dropping attached to pointless stories. When the Pest (get it?), a perfect visual replica of the paper, appeared, the editors at the Post wanted to sue, but Dorothy Schiff, the owner, said if they can parody us they can write for us, and one week into a two-week tryout, they hired Nora.

Nora’s mother, Phoebe, famously advised her to remember that all of life is copy. Speaking of copy, what is left to write about this talented, witty, warm person after the hundreds of thousands of words celebrating her books, movies, articles, words and spirit when she died a few weeks ago, other than that they are all going to be with us for some time to come?

Although Ephron once called her work “froth,” Katha Pollitt demonstrates in her obit on our website that beneath the urbane, witty, casual surface, Nora’s feminist and other humanist values always asserted themselves. And those of us lucky enough to count her as a friend have our stories. Here are three you may not have heard:

§ When she was still a fledgling reporter at the Post, she wrote a quickie paperback taking on America’s No. 1 talk-show host, Johnny Carson. One day Nora phoned my wife, Annie Navasky, complaining that “they are all so afraid of Johnny Carson that nobody is willing to be acknowledged as having anything to do with this book.” Annie—who had had nothing to do with the book—being Annie, said, “I’d love to be acknowledged” and then forgot about it. Until the day a copy of the book arrived with its dedication: “To Annie Navasky, because she wants to be acknowledged.”

§ Appearing on a talk-show, Nora listened to the other guests telling of the dangers of insider trading and interjected, “Oh, please. It’s not so easy to be an inside trader. I’ve been trying to be one all my life.” Now it can be told: when in 1995, after many years as The Nation’s editor, I became publisher, one of the ways we raised new capital was to set up a Circle of 100—$5,000-per-unit investors. I promised them that when they lost their money, they would get a pro rata tax write-off for their investment. Nora heard about our plan from Nation insiders and sent a check for $5,000, becoming one of the first members of the Circle. That was as close to insider trading as she ever got.

§ If you haven’t already figured it out, Nora was a loyal friend. So it was no surprise that she cast some of her more presentable friends, like The Nation’s deadline poet, Calvin Trillin, as extras in her movies. I never had that distinction, but one day I got a call from her asking if it would be OK if she gave one of the characters in a movie she was making my surname attached to a different first name. No problem, I said, and shortly thereafter You’ve Got Mail opened at our neighborhood theater, with Greg Kinnear playing a character named Frank Navasky.

I never told Nora this, but later that week we made a reservation in the name of Navasky at a restaurant we had been patronizing anonymously for years, where they had never so much as given us a drink on the house. This time when we arrived, the maître d’ grandly announced that he was picking up the tab in our honor. Thank you, Nora.

And thank you for casting us in your life.

Read Katha Pollitt’s remembrance of Nora Ephron, Writer, Filmmaker, Feminist, Wit.

Earl Shorris, our friend and Nation contributor, who died on May 27, was one of a kind.  In the 1970s, when he was an advertising executive (his accounts included AT&T and General Motors), he dreamed up and helped found the Leadership Network, a mini-advertising consortium that enabled mega-corporations to advertise in small-circulation journals of opinion and thought-leader magazines across the board.

Earl was also a stalwart advocate of providing a voice to the growing hispanic population in the US and was the editor, with Miguel León-Portilla, of In the Language of Kings: An Anthology of Mesoamerican Literature–Pre-Columbian to the Present (Norton).

And after he quit advertising to become a full-time essayist, and novelist, he dreamed up the Roberto Clemente course, which introduced poor people to the classics, his theory being that one of the reasons poor people were poor was that they never had the opportunity to read the great books, the way he did at Robert Hutchins’ University of Chicago. He taught the first such course to a small group of women prisoners.  Before he was done, more than forty universities and other institutions around the world were offering Clemente courses to the underprivileged, a terrific testament to Earl’s vision.

Although we obviously had our differences, I was pleased to see that the vast majority of the well-deserved establishment kudos that our friend Christopher Hitchens received after he died were not inconsistent with Christopher Buckley’s assessment that Hitchens was “the greatest living essayist in the English language.”

That being the case, and discounting the fact that some of the appreciations were reflexive obituary superlatives, I couldn’t help remembering that during the two decades Christopher was writing his “Minority Report” column for The Nation, his literary gifts went remarkably unremarked by the mainstream (I do not include in this indictment Buckley, a longtime admirer of Hitchens’s prose). Despite Christopher’s graduation (or dropout, depending on how you see it) from The Nation, I suspect he would have appreciated the irony and seen it as a comment on the establishment press as much as on himself.

In the shadow of the above, and lest I be accused of obituary sentimentality, forgive me for quoting what I wrote about Christopher and The Nation some years ago in my book A Matter of Opinion:

I came to The Nation in 1978, and in those years we couldn’t afford to import overseas talent, but we could try something else. So on July 23, 1980, I wrote to Bruce Page, then editor of Britain’s New Statesman, with a modest proposal: the first international editors’ exchange in history. But the background to this began soon after I got to The Nation.

I had first met Christopher Hitchens through his elegant New Statesman pieces on the Middle East, but also, it seemed, everywhere else. If he was traveling the world anyway, why not write an occasional article for us, I asked via old-fashioned snail mail. And he did, to everyone’s satisfaction. And then one day around 5 pm a dimpled, five-o’clock-shadowed face peered through my half-open door surrounded by a haze of smoke. “Drink?” asked the deep, richly accented baritone voice that accompanied all of the above. If it is possible in one word to convey an upper-class sensibility attached to a heart ostentatiously identified with the toiling masses, Christopher Hitchens, whom I had been looking forward to meeting, succeeded.

We repaired with some comrades, as he liked to call all who partook of his charismatic company, to the Lion’s Head, our local pub, where we indeed had a drink or three, and this was the beginning of a twenty-five-year adventure that I hope was as rewarding for him as it was for the magazine, despite (and sometimes because of) the occasional political collision.

By the time I wrote to Page, Christopher had contributed four timely articles in which only his English spelling had to be changed, and Kai Bird, his editor, who had been working eighteen-hour days while commuting from Princeton, where his wife was studying international economics, was ripe for a new assignment. So my idea was that we exchange one Nation editor (Kai) for one New Statesman editor (Christopher) for a period of three to six months, commencing January 1981; that Hitchens stay on the New Statesman payroll and Bird stay on our payroll for the duration of the exchange, thus obviating the need to deal with guilds, unions, border patrols, green cards, immigration authorities and bureaucracies; and that during this period Hitchens and Bird take on, to the best of their abilities, each other’s obligations, rights and duties for their respective journals.

In my letter to Page, I took the precaution of listing the potential perils of such an undertaking: “What happens if one or the other of the exchangees defaults, defects, alienates or otherwise finds the new environment unorganized, the new responsibilities overwhelming, boring or whatever. What happens if in your/my judgment X can’t do Y’s job? “My feelings about that,” I wrote, “are that if they are willing to take the risk, we ought to be.”

I proposed that we envision the exchange as a three-month experiment, with the mutual option to renew for a second three months, contingent on the agreement of all four parties. I was sure there were 1,001 obstacles (insurance, carfare, living space, the fact that Kai was then primarily an editor whereas Christopher seemed primarily a writer, not to mention unfamiliarity with the other country’s writers, culture, etc.), but it seemed to me that the accident of two relatively footloose transatlantic peers with their extraordinary talent and apparent adaptability made it possible. What did Page think? If it is a wild, crazy or otherwise impractical idea, “have no hesitation in telling me to go away,” I wrote. Finally, because I had the advantage of having met, liked and published Hitchens, whereas to Page, Kai was an unknown quantity, I added by way of assurance that “Kai is well-read, well-informed, something of an expert on the Middle East, a gifted editor, and a pleasure to work with (come to think of it, probably much more of a pleasure than Hitchens, who strikes me as a trouble-maker). He also is frugal, cheerful, thrifty, brave and loyal.” Bruce said yes.

Christopher demonstrated that it was possible to down his share of lunchtime martinis, supplemented by however many glasses of red wine, return to the office and, in fifteen to twenty minutes, write an elegant 250-word unsigned editorial to space, not one word of which had to be altered.

In March 1981 we renewed the three-month experiment for a second three months, by the end of which it was apparent that Christopher was ready to defect to The Nation. Our first idea was to have him do a “Marxist covers Wall Street” series of articles. Christopher was not averse (in fact, he liked the idea, especially if the apprenticeship came with a Wall Street salary); but he kept telling us that economics was not his forte, and so eventually he ended up writing a biweekly “Minority Report” column from Washington.

Although he wrote some of his best (i.e., my favorite) pieces for other publications (I include among these his essay on discovering that his mother, and therefore he, was Jewish, for Grand Street, where he memorably wrote, “On hearing the tidings, I was pleased to find I was pleased”; and his essay in defense of smoking and drinking for the London Review of Books, called “On Fags and Booze”), and although we had our later differences over what I regarded as his obsession with President Bill Clinton’s alleged public and private derelictions and the nexus between them; over his willingness to testify before the House Judiciary Committee as to private conversations with his friend the then–White House aide Sidney Blumenthal, concerning what Sidney had or hadn’t said about Monica Lewinsky being a stalker (I wrote an editorial about that); and over President George W. Bush’s “war on terror” and invasion of Iraq, which Christopher supported before, during and after, I much regretted his resignation in the fall of 2002 over The Nation’s position on what he regarded as one of the great moral issues of the day, the Iraq War.

His “Minority Report” had been well named, and The Nation benefited from having literate, informed and original second-, third- and fourth-guessings of Christopher’s sort in its pages. In the early days, it seemed to me, Christopher would have welcomed the argument. In the end, he chose to walk out on it.

When I was a kid, growing up in the 1930s on West 74th Street between Broadway and West End, the highlight of my day was ten in the morning, when Babe Ruth would emerge from his daily shave at the barbershop in the Ansonia Hotel, on my corner. Every day, if I could be there, I would stand on the street, and when the Babe appeared, I’d wave and say, “Hi, Babe.” He’d wave back and say, “Hi, kid,” and then get into his car. One day I got up the courage to ask him for his autograph, and he signed my book, date and all.

If, like me, you think that Big Money exerts ever more influence on the way politics gets covered in this country; and if, like me, you think that Citizens United, the recent Supreme Court decision that lifts the lid on corporate campaign spending, will speed up, reinforce and otherwise extend this unfortunate trend; and if, like me, you believe that for the past fifty years the main way corporate money has worked its electoral will is by manipulating news images via television commercials (watch Mad Men if you don’t believe me), then you will want to read Barbie Zelizer’s new book, About to Die.

Zelizer is the Raymond Williams Chair of Communication and the director of the Scholars Program in Culture and Communication at the Annenberg School at the University of Pennsylvania. (Personal disclosure: I’m a longtime admirer of Zelizer from the days, many years ago, when we were Freedom Forum fellows together.) In the frontispiece of About to Die, she quotes the eighteenth-century German critic and dramatist Gotthold Lessing’s observation that an image can capture “but a single moment of an action,” and that therefore the image chosen must be “the most pregnant one, the one most suggestive of what has gone before and what is to follow.” Building on Lessing’s observation, Zelizer writes that in print journalism the “frozen moment of impending death forces attention even though people know more than what it shows.”

The frozen moment Zelizer analyzes in her book is the “about to die” moment, which she uses as a prism for making visible a range of political, psychological, aesthetic and moral issues having to do mainly with photographic news images and with the practice of print journalism. (She does take a few byroads into television journalism.) Images of “about to die” moments fall into three categories: images of “presumed” death, images of “possible” death and images of “certain” death. Zelizer discusses images of assassinations (Jack and Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, but also more distant cases, such as Presidents Garfield and McKinley); executions (Daniel Pearl, Saddam Hussein, among others); wars (Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, World War II, the Civil War and too many more); historical episodes (the Holocaust); metaphorical wars (the so-called “war on terror”); natural disasters; suicides and what have you.

She rightly emphasizes that most journalists and academics have generally assumed that words are more important than pictures or images; that the main function of news pictures is to document or illustrate words; and that most editors regard pictures as “softer” than words. Of the bureau chief who remarked, “Words can go deeper than pictures,” she writes, “This disregard for the image has buttressed a default understanding of news as primarily rational information relay that uses words as its main vehicle and implicitly frames images as contaminating, blurring, or at the very least offsetting journalism’s reliance on straight reason.” Of academics like Jürgen Habermas and Karl Popper, who have acknowledged the power of images, she argues that they seem “irritated” because they believe that “affect, the emotions, and passion,” which may be aroused by images, “undermine the development of the reasoned public that journalism is expected to bolster.” About to Die is a refutation of this “words matter and images don’t” perspective. As Zelizer sees it, words may be rightfully valued for reasons related to logic and evidence, but rationality, facts and information offer an incomplete picture, so to speak, of an event. Images can “bypass the intellect to engage the emotions,” offering instead what she calls “implicative relays, suggestive slices of action that people need to complete by interpreting and imagining.”

Zelizer argues that four interrelated interpretive communities are invested in the way we think and talk about news images: journalists, news executives (whom I would classify as journalists, though Zelizer doesn’t), politicians and officials (by which she means the subjects of news coverage), and viewers. Her critical categories for the analysis of news images of people who are about to die are what she calls “As is” and “As if” images. What class is to Marx, and what the id, the ego and the superego are to Freud, “As is” and “As if” are to Zelizer. Let me explain. “As is” is what it sounds like: what you see is what you get. Example: photos of four dead US contractors in Falluja whose bodies have been defiled by an Iraqi mob. With “As if,” on the other hand, what is seen is contingent, imaginative, subjunctive or what might be. Example: a photo of a young boy herded from the Warsaw ghetto by a Nazi wielding a machine gun. Will he be killed? Will he be wounded? Will he escape?

* * *

Recalling “Aristotle’s injunction to dramatists to place death offstage,” Zelizer notes that one of the reasons “As if” photos seem to edge out “As is” photos in journalism is that, although there are exceptions, for the most part photographers don’t like to take pictures of dead people. Editors don’t like to run shots of dead people. Readers (not to mention relatives of the deceased) don’t like to look at dead people. And then there are the political reasons. Zelizer asserts that the “war on terror” “offers an illustrative set of examples about how the incomplete and suggestive nature of about-to-die images has been used to modify or hide the fact that people died.” She reminds us that from the very beginning, “the Bush administration called for media restraint, and most news executives fell in line. CNN chief Walter Isaacson was said to have instructed his international correspondents to avoid displaying an excess of gruesome images of the war, because ‘it seems perverse to focus too much on the casualties or hardship in Afghanistan.’” (Is this, then, a case where aesthetics trumps politics, or the reverse?)

Here’s another example, in a book packed with them, and one Bush had nothing to do with: the way about-to-die photos of people jumping or falling from the Twin Towers on the morning of 9/11 were quickly replaced by photos of the towers themselves. This was significant, first because the response to the images signaled the diverse, contradictory and illogical responses of viewers, officials, journalists and news executives who in earlier times might have welcomed The Scoop. Also, the photos of the towers, Zelizer argues,

make it possible to engage with an event’s visualization without being repulsed by graphic imagery of the dying…. And they allow viewers to feel as if they are responsibly acting as witnesses to horror, even though they do not attend to its structural conditions, its causality, its purposive nature or its impact.

“As is” photos pose an altogether different set of issues. In March 2004 the New York Post ran a page-one story about the fourth fatal plunge by an NYU student since the beginning of the school year. Zelizer reports that the paper’s copy editor said of the photo splashed on the front page, “We had a damn good story…and a damn good photo to go with it. Of course we were going to use it!” But she also quotes our own Katha Pollitt, who called the photo’s publication “a new low” and wrote that “it is so grotesque, so cruel, so voyeuristic and so irresponsible to cover suicide in this way…. It is chilling to think of the photographer waiting for just the right moment to click the button so he could make his however many dollars the Post paid him.” But wait: would such a photo be “irresponsible” in all cases? What about the photo of the Buddhist monk who immolated himself to protest the Vietnam War? And if the occasion presents itself, should the ethical journalist interfere with another person’s suicide attempt or mind his own business?

Here’s one last example, this one pertaining to the depiction of genocide. On May 9, 1996, the Philadelphia Inquirer ran a front-page photo of a soldier looming over an unarmed man lying face up in a ditch, either about to die or already fatally shot. The headline was unambiguous: “A Liberian Prisoner Faces Death.” The Inquirer was immediately swamped with letters of complaint. The image was “too violent,” “disgusting,” “revolting,” “irresponsible.” Subscriptions were canceled. Only a handful of other papers ran the Reuters-distributed photo, and those that did published it in their inside pages under vague (where death is concerned) headlines like “Battle Rages in Liberian Capital” (Boston Globe). Oddly, once the news gathering stopped and award time came, the photo won almost every top award in the field.

Here’s Zelizer’s take on the controversy:

Given that the acts depicted here gave rise to a Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Liberia only seven years later, which laid out the horrendous scope of the crimes committed, the implications of failing to engage around the unsettled and difficult events of intentional death brings pause. As the Washington Post wrote at the time, “This is news we can’t use, these foreigners killing each other for incomprehensible reasons.”

Unlike Susie Linfield, whose book, The Cruel Radiance, published last year, made the ethical and human rights case for showing photographs of atrocity or abject misery [see Frances Richard, “The Thin Artifact,” December 13, 2010], Zelizer does not take a position on the moral implications of “As if” images. When I read her explanation of how Sydney Schanberg, in a 2005 issue of News Photographer, argued that a lack of graphic images of the Iraq War was “undermining journalism’s obligation to full reportage,” and among the responses to his piece was a letter calling him an “idiot” who was “heartless toward the families of those who have loved ones” in Iraq, I was grateful that she defined the issue but disappointed that she didn’t tell us whether she or we should second Schanberg’s motion. This is too bad, since, having immersed herself in the world—the vocabulary—of images, Zelizer surely has some moral wisdom to share.

But Zelizer does do something else. She wants to inspire new thinking about “how news images might work differently, particularly in unsettled events where the public need for information is thought to be critical.” In that respect it is fitting that early in her book the Raymond Williams Chair invokes the man himself when she describes how “collective existence cannot take on meaning without some recognition of the structures of feeling that drive it.” This densely packed, closely reasoned book shows that Zelizer has absorbed and applied Williams’s insight: words, emotions and values frame the information we call news, and therefore the images that give rise to these intangibles deserve to be analyzed with the same precision and rigor as the words with which they exist in tandem.

A Chinese man walks into a bar. The man on the next stool introduces himself as Goldberg. They exchange small talk. Suddenly Goldberg punches the Chinese man in the nose. "Why did you do that?" asks the Chinese man. "That’s for Pearl Harbor!" says Goldberg. "But I’m Chinese, not Japanese," says the Chinese man. "Chinese, Japanese… What’s the difference?" says Goldberg. A few minutes later, the Chinese man punches Goldberg in the nose. "Why did you do that?" asks Goldberg. "That’s for the Titanic!" says the Chinese man. "But I had nothing to do with the Titanic," says Goldberg. "Iceberg, Goldberg… What’s the difference?" says the Chinese man.

I thought of that old joke when I first heard about Walter Schneir’s book Final Verdict: What Really Happened in the Rosenberg Case, published posthumously with an introduction and afterword by his widow and collaborator, Miriam. Schneir was a lifetime student of the case, which for him ranked right up there with the Dreyfus case, Sacco and Vanzetti and the Scottsboro Boys as an example of historic injustice. In the Schneirs’ 1965 book, Invitation to an Inquest, they had argued that the Rosenbergs were framed, "punished for a crime that never occurred." Thirty years later, after the National Security Agency released the Venona transcripts (declassified intercepts of Soviet intelligence cables during World War II), the Schneirs published an article in this magazine concluding that although the government’s case against Julius had relied on fabricated evidence, "the Venona messages reveal that during World War II Julius ran a spy ring," albeit one that played only a relatively minor role in atomic espionage [see "Cryptic Answers," August 14/21, 1995].

With Final Verdict, Walter Schneir came to a new, "final" and startling conclusion: that it was really the Rosenbergs’ in-laws, David (Ethel’s brother) and Ruth Greenglass, not Ethel and Julius, who illegally passed classified information on the atomic bomb to the Russians via middleman Harry Gold.

Assuming Walter Schneir is right, pardon me if I ask, "The Rosenbergs, the Rosenbergs’ in-laws… From the perspective of history, what’s the difference?" After all, aside from the not unimportant matter of rectifying a monstrous injustice to the Rosenberg family, both were poor, first-generation Americans whose immigrant parents had come from Russia. Both had joined the Communist movement. Both were Jewish in a post-Holocaust moment when fears of anti-Semitism were matched by fears of being charged with anti-Semitism (it was no accident that the sentencing judge, Irving Kaufman, was Jewish; that the prosecutor, Irving Saypol, was Jewish; and that his assistant, Roy Cohn, was Jewish). Since Julius had recruited his brother-in-law as a spy, both were members of the alleged "conspiracy to commit espionage," and both had thus broken the US espionage law by spying for the Soviet Union. But like Klaus Fuchs, who had illegally passed secret atomic information to the Russians and was sentenced to fourteen years, neither deserved the death penalty.

On the cultural front, both couples exchanged jailhouse letters that revealed a Marxist mindset. Cold war intellectuals put down Ethel’s death-house letters as party-line pamphleteering. Imagine the field day they might have had with the Greenglasses’ letters, made available for the first time by Schneir. In one, for example, David wrote, "I love you with all the love of Marx and humanity of Lenin."

In Final Verdict Schneir’s narrative is dramatic. He invites the reader to accompany him on his journey as he uncovers the various archival finds that inexorably led him to his conclusion. By comparing the Rosenberg trial record with documents now available under the Freedom of Information Act, or released through Venona or by the Russians and available in such books as The Haunted Wood by Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev (as well as Vassiliev’s notebooks) and Bombshell by Joseph Albright and Marcia Kunstel, Schneir makes his main points about the case. Remember that the Rosenbergs were accused of passing on crude lens-mold sketches of the bomb drawn by Greenglass, who said he delivered the sketch to Julius in 1945 (with Ethel allegedly typing up notes of the meeting). But FOIA documents show that in their initial FBI interviews, all under oath, the Greenglasses never mentioned such a meeting with the Rosenbergs. And other documents show that the Russians didn’t get the sketches until three months later. Schneir’s conclusion, as Miriam says in her afterword: the meeting "was made up out of whole cloth." Hence his four key points: first, that Ethel never typed up any notes and was not a spy; second, that Julius did not receive lens-mold sketches from David Greenglass; third, that Ruth Greenglass, rather than Julius, cut the famous Jell-O box that was to serve as a recognition signal; and finally, that if anyone was guilty of stealing the atomic bomb secret, it was the Greenglasses, not the Rosenbergs.

The New York Times‘s review of Final Verdict was written by Sam Roberts, David Greenglass’s biographer (The Brother: The Untold Story of the Rosenberg Case). Roberts concluded that "it’s hard to find any good guys in this entire affair." With all due respect to Roberts, a careful reporter, this is not a question of good guys and bad guys. Schneir’s book makes a difference for the following reasons: first, the truth always matters, and if Schneir (whose thesis Roberts calls "not completely implausible") is right, history will have been served. Second, whether or not Schneir is right, we live in a state of opinion trusteeship. None of us have the time and few of us the ability to do our own research on all the complex, problematic issues of our day. On the Rosenberg case, the Schneirs have earned the public’s trust—they scrupulously followed the facts wherever they led, revising their views when new evidence required it. The onus is now on those who disagree with Schneir to prove him wrong. And because he has used documents uncovered by those who (like Weinstein and Vassiliev) in the past have taken exception to his conclusions, Schneir’s book is yet another argument for opening long-closed files on both sides of what used to be the Iron Curtain. Finally, the book reminds us that although the cold war is over, when it comes to transparency the Iron Curtain has come back down. The Russians have reclassified files they briefly opened, and, to quote the Los Angeles Times, "The Democratic administration of Barack Obama, who denounced his predecessor, George W. Bush, as the most secretive in history, is now denying more Freedom of Information Act requests than the Republicans did."

Reuters Photos

As I listened to Obama’s inaugural address, although I harbored no illusions about the difficult task ahead, I felt that I was swimming in a sea of happiness, as I heard him gently but firmly declare the country’s liberation from the past (rejecting as “false” the Bush administration’s notion that national security is incompatible with constitutional liberty) and simultaneously reject the Clinton administration notion that the era of big government is over (“The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small but whether it works”).

Therefore, there was something off-putting when I turned on my TV the next morning to see pundit after pundit praising him as a “centrist.” I had three problems with that.

First, as Paul Newman used to remind us, The Nation is valuable because it helps define where the center is. The center can shift. When Obama added to his ritual description of us as “a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus” a new category–“nonbelievers”–it was almost unbelievable, as he quickly helped redefine where the center is. Second, based on what we know about Obama–his books, his initial intuitive stand against the Iraq War, his Senate voting record, his campaign, his inaugural speech–I don’t believe he’s a centrist. At most, he seems a liberal wolf in centrist sheep’s clothing. And finally, faced with the dire economic crisis, his commitment to Keynesian economic stimulus and renewed regulatory rigor (see his inaugural reference to not letting the market “spin out of control”) suggests that at minimum, he flunked Centrism 101.

Rather, I prefer to believe that Obama’s reach across the aisle, his cabinet appointments and his openings to the renegade Joe Lieberman and erstwhile opponent John McCain are part of his work-in-progress plan to advance an agenda that goes beyond anything the so-called center might contain. Whether or not it will work–that is the question.

Reuters Photos

Whatever one’s feelings about our new president, there was something thrilling about being at the the Huffington Post/Atlantic Philanthropies pre-inauguration bash at the Newseum in Washington with 1,500 journalists and pols, all of whom seemed to be celebrating and exulting in Obama’s coming to power.

One had the same feeling earlier in the evening at the home of Myra MacPherson, Izzy Stone’s biographer, where left-liberal journalists predominated.

And the next day, as I listened to his inaugural address, although I think I harbored no illusions about the difficult task ahead, I still felt that I was swimming in the same sea of happiness, as I heard him gently but firmly declare the country’s liberation from the past (and reject “as false” the Bush administration’s notion that national security was incompatible with constitutional liberty, that it is not a question of choosing “between our safety and our ideals”); and then simultaneously rejecting the Clinton administration’s notion that the era of big government was over (“The question we ask today is not whether government is too big or too small but whether it works”).

Therefore, there was something off-putting the next morning when I turned on my TV only to see pundit after pundit–be it Pat Buchanan on the right, “Morning Joe” Scarborough on the center-right or Mike Barnicle in the center–all praising him as a “centrist.”

I had three problems with that:

First, as our friend and backer Paul Newman used to remind us, The Nation was valuable because it helps define where the center is. The center can shift. When Obama added to his ritualistic description of America as “a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus” a new category–“nonbelievers”–it was almost unbelievable, as he quickly helped redefine where the center was.

Second, based on what we know about Obama–his books, his initial intuitive stand against the war in Iraq, his Senate voting record, his campaign, his inaugural speech–I don’t believe it. At most, he seems to me a liberal wolf in centrist sheep’s clothing.

And finally, faced with the ever-more-dire economic crisis, his commitment to a Keynes-based economic stimulus and renewed regulatory rigor (see his inaugural reference to not letting the market “spin out of control”) suggests that, at a minimum, he flunked Centrism 101.

Rather, I prefer to believe that his reach across the aisle, his cabinet appointments and his opening to the renegade Joe Lieberman and his erstwhile opponent John McCain himself are part of his pragmatic plan to advance an agenda that goes beyond anything the so-called center might contain. Whether or not it will work, that is the question.

No sooner was I seated on the Amtrak train to Washington than I was joined by Joanna Lawrence, whose mother in the 1930’s famously put Esquire on the map with her article, “Latins Are Lousy Lovers,” and had been Abbie Hoffman’s companion during the last years of his life (including his years on the lam.)

Her itinerary was much more interesting than mine. It included a “shoe-in” at DuPont Circle, where those so inclined would throw their shoes at the Bush administration, and thereby “shoe them out” of office.” It also included a rally organized by Medea Benjamin, who was joined by witches from CodePink and Kate Clinton, the comedienne, whose object would be to “cleanse the White House.” Don’t Ask. And an event at the bookstore Busboys and Poets, where Joan Baez was singing and Alice Waters and others were doing their stuff.

Across the aisle were Linda Gottlieb and her husband, Rob, who told an Obama story I had never heard before. Bob is one of Obama’s bigger funders and “bundlers” (he has tickets in the coveted “yellow section” on Inaugural Day.) He told a lovely story. In 2004, after Obama’s main opponent withdrew from the Senate race in Illinois because this wife had charged he forced her to go to sex clubs and Obama handily won the election, Bob received a check from the Obama campaign, with a note from Obama, explaining that there was leftover money.

Amtrak arrived in Washington on time, and inaugural festivities were well underway, although traffic around the Union Station was at a standstill and what seemed like a half-mile line of would-be taxi passengers was instructed to move to First and G streets, if they hoped to move anywhere else. Meanwhile, as Obama was rolling Laguna Blue paint on the walls over at Sasha Bruce House, a way of participatory symbolism in his call for service, all of that part of Washington not stuck in a traffic jam, seemed to be marveling at the logistical efficiency of the Obama operation.

I’m with them. A few days before I left for DC, I received a call from Sarah Kovner, our 67th Street neighbor on Manhattan’s West Side. She had received one of the Obama e-mails calling for service and asking her to be a block captain in the cause. Sarah’s idea was that since Upper West Side food kitchens were low on food, due to increased demand, would we (the code word for Annie, my spouse) take responsibility for our building? It turned out within minutes of Sarah K.’s e-mailing back, at her willingness to take on the responsibility, she received five e-mails from people in the neighborhood (also on Obama’s list), offering their services.

So while many in the progressive community carry on the conversation about whether Obama’s surface move to the center (by way of his appointments) is a tactic (aimed at converting liberal humanist values into national policy) or a sign (that at heart he is more a political traditionalist than they had expected?) and while protesters continue to protest (hoping to push O in the right (i.e., the left) direction, the view from here–on a cool Inauguration Day in Washington, DC–is that the work has begun.

The year was 1953. I was a junior at Swarthmore College, and my friend Anne Mott and I decided to hitchhike down to Washington in time for Dwight D. Eisenhower’s inauguration.

It was not that we liked Ike, or his campaign slogan (“It’s time for a change”!). Hardly. We had a theory and a plan. Our theory was that some of our favorite Democratic senators might be skipping the inaugural ceremonies, and our plan was while Ike was giving his boring inaugural address, we would visit the Senate office building and see what Democratic senators we could see. We were particularly interested in Senator Paul Douglas, the Illinois crusader for civil rights, because his daughter Jean was a Swarthmore sophomore, and we thought that might give us a leg up when we descended on his office without an appointment.

And, believe it or not, that is exactly what happened. The Senate office building seemed quiet and mostly empty (there was no security at the street entrance in those those innocent days); and when we presented ourselves to the receptionist in Douglas’s outer office, shamelessly dropping his daughter Jean’s name, in a matter of minutes we were ushered into the inner sanctum.

There, big and tall, was the white-haired Senator. Although we knew he was a Quaker (who had joined the Marines in World War II), an economist, a stickler about not accepting any gifts worth more than something like $10, and dedicated to getting civil rights legislation through a reluctant Congress at a time when schools in Washington, DC, were still segregated and blacks were not allowed to ride in the same railroad cars as whites, we really had not prepared any questions, because deep down, we really hadn’t expected our plan to work.

So by way of small talk we asked him about the photographs on his wall. Lincoln we recognized, Clarence Darrow we knew all about, and Robert (“Fighting Bob”) LaFollette of Wisconsin we had heard of. But the man he wanted to talk about was John Peter Altgeld, the Democratic Illinois governor, whom he explained had committed career suicide by pardoning the three surviving Haymarket “rioters,” who were serving prison terms. I had read Howard Fast’s novel, The American, based on Altgeld’s life, but never knew where the facts stopped and fiction started, so Douglas’s eloquence about how Altgeld was an activist who placed conscience and the public welfare above personal gain, was memorable.

He asked us about Swarthmore, and we must have talked about other things, but the main thing was that Anne and I had succeeded in our mission and we returned to the open road as happy campers.

Now flash forward fifty-five years. When his primary opponent Hillary Clinton charged that Barack Obama was a good talker who hadn’t accomplished much, his backers cited his years as a community organizer when, inspired by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., he organized a public housing project called Altgeld Gardens. And indeed Obama devotes more than 100 pages of his his memoir, Dreams from My Father, to his experiences organizing the Altgeld Gardens, named of course after the governor on Senator Douglas’s wall. This, claimed his supporters, followed King’s model of organizing via the churches.

On Saturday Obama arrived in Washington from his “whistle stop” tour, by desegregated train. The last president-to-be who travelled to his inauguration by train was–who else?–Dwight D. Eisenhower. The papers featured stories about how Obama’s nominee for attorney general might be in trouble over his role in Clinton’s pardon of campaign contributor Marc Rich, but my mind was on Altgeld and how he had pardoned the remaining Haymarket rioters after Darrow, also on Douglas’s wall, had pleaded with him to do so.

And for what it’s worth, coincidentally or otherwise, on all the Sunday talk shows, African-Americans were well-represented among the punditocracy; among them Tavis Smiley on Meet the Press, who reminded us that when Carl Stokes was elected mayor of Cleveland, he spoke of “the importance of black faces in high places.” Obama, Smiley said, is not the fulfillment of Martin Luther King’s dream, “but he is the down-payment.”

Well, here we are, celebrating Doctor King’s birthday, and I’m on my way–this time via Amtrak–to see what Inauguration Day brings. But If it gets too cold out there, I have no plans to warm myself by going into one of the Senate office buildings. Been there, done that, and I’m too curious about what the new man in the White House has to say.

Studs Terkel, who died October 31 at 96, has been universally celebrated as a world-class listener. This is ironic, since for the past few years, anyway, Studs couldn’t hear worth a damn. But that didn’t stop him.

Of course, with his publisher, André Schiffrin, egging him on, Studs invented a new form of history, winning a Pulitzer Prize for his oral history of World War II, The Good War (1984), although it could just as easily have been for Working or Hard Times or any of his other amazing books, including Talking to Myself, his self-interview.

But as any writer who had the luck to pass through his studio at WFMT radio in Chicago could tell you, listening was the least of it. Studs was, of course, also a reader and a nonstop talker who delighted in nothing so much as enthusiastically sharing his pleasure with his audience, reading passage after passage from his interviewee’s book, which he had highlighted in advance with his yellow crayon (“Get this!” he would exclaim. “And this!”).

Bud Trillin once observed that if the Guggenheim Foundation knew what it was doing, instead of giving writers monetary grants it would arrange to get its grantees on Studs’s radio show. An hour on the air with Studs would leave them walking on air, a high that would last at least a year.

He could be funny, too. In the late 1970s Studs, who had a long history with The Nation–as reader, writer, cruiser, promoter–was serving as master of ceremonies at a Nation dinner honoring its recently retired great editor, Carey McWilliams. When the time came to introduce The Nation‘s new young publisher, Hamilton Fish, Studs couldn’t let the occasion pass without a comment on Ham’s reactionary grandfather (of FDR and “Martin, Barton and Fish” fame). It just goes to show, he said, “the more things stay the same, the more they change.”

Studs was a man of taste–and tastes. After Ham persuaded him to join The Nation‘s group of modest shareholders, in those pre-fax days Ham sent his assistant, Shirley Sulat, all the way to Chicago to pick up his signature in time for the end-of-year deadline. Ham asked Studs if he needed anything from New York. Shirley showed up with the requested New York pastrami sandwich, and that sealed the deal.

The late Lee Hayes, of the Weavers folksingers, used to say that if it weren’t for the honor of the thing, he’d just as soon not have been blacklisted. Studs appreciated the various honors bestowed on him over the years, but of none was he prouder than having been blacklisted. So he undoubtedly would have gotten a kick out of a story the New York Times ran a few days after his death. James Houtrides, who used to produce CBS News Sunday Morning, which often featured Studs along with John Leonard and others, wrote, “On Monday, November 3, Edward Rothstein, the New York Times critic, wrote ‘An Appraisal’ of Mr. Terkel and his work. You would have thought that he was a secret terrorist or communist and that the Cold War was still on.” Look more closely, Rothstein wrote, “and it becomes less clear where his liberalism slips into radicalism.”

Rothstein even noted that Terkel “wore something red every day to affirm his attachment to the working class.” Think of that, we can imagine Studs riffing, “to be blacklisted when alive and redbaited after death–too good to be true.” The ultimate comment, not so much on Studs as on the culture he so valiantly resisted.

On more than one occasion Studs would compare a journalist to I.F. Stone, George Seldes and/or Lincoln Steffens to indicate his highest accolade. Studs was more than a journalist, but his name now joins the ranks of those he so admired, with an add-on: he was our national griot, the bearer of the stories of people, ordinary and extraordinary.

Paul Newman was a foul-weather friend.

He helped this magazine when we needed it most.

He was also a fair-weather friend. When we came back to him and asked for more so that we might build on the base he had helped make possible, he had only one question, Where do I sign?

Although he was confident that he would lose every cent, on more than one occasion he told us, “The Nation is my favorite investment.”

It all started in 1994, when Arthur Carter, who for eight years had subsidized and published The Nation, which was losing about $500,000 a year, turned the magazine over to me.

Since I didn’t have $500,000 to lose–that year or any other year–I came up with a four-year plan. My idea was to find three shareholders who would put up $1 million each. That way we would have enough money to cover our losses, pay Carter off and invest in our future until the magic moment of self-sufficiency arrived (or so we hoped).

I called my friend E.L. Doctorow, who was also a friend of The Nation and, perhaps most important, a friend, or at least an acquaintance, of Paul Newman, who had returned from World War II to Kenyon College as a senior when Doctorow was a freshman. Could he arrange a meeting?

Two and a half months later, I found myself at dinner at a small Italian restaurant in the East Eighties with Doctorow, Newman and Joanne Woodward. Normally, I would have been thrilled to have dinner with Newman and Woodward, but my fundraising experience told me that when a “mark” (in the spirit of The Sting, let’s think of Newman as a mark here) brings his wife along, all too often no funds get raised. So, much as I admired Woodward, I worried about her presence.

Dinner began with Newman and Doctorow reminiscing about Kenyon. Doctorow reminded Newman that he had been a patron of the small laundry business Newman had started in competition with the college. He had made a deal with a local laundry that he’d collect student laundry and get paid. So he opened a store in opposition to the campus laundry. Then he got the bright idea of putting a keg of beer in the store window; any student who came in with laundry got a free beer. College authorities began to wonder why their laundry business was going down. When they found out, that was the end of Newman’s promising career in laundry–but not, as his all-natural food company, Newman’s Own, was later to make clear, his entrepreneurial instincts.

Then Newman turned to me and said, “So, Professor, what’s the damage? What can I do for you?”

When I told him what I had in mind, he said, “That’s very rich.”

At which point Woodward piped up and observed, “You’re very rich.”

“So are you,” said Newman.

“Not as rich as you, dear.”

I shouldn’t have worried.

Before our dinner was over, Newman had agreed to become a partner. And to make a very complicated and long story short, as a result of his participation we were able to attract the rest of the investment capital we thought we needed.

Over the years, Newman not only invested money; he also agreed to sponsor, chair and attend various fundraising events, although given who he was and what he did for a living, he was at times a remarkably reluctant showboat. Once, he traveled across the country to California, where he co-chaired a Nation event. When it was his time to speak, he announced that he was taking the Fifth Amendment.

On another occasion he had some investor prospects over to his New York City apartment. As bait, he let the word go forth that Robert Redford was going to be there. When the guests were assembled, Newman said he had some good news and some bad news. The bad news was that Redford couldn’t make it. The good news was that Redford’s six-figure check was on the way. And then there was the time he explained to potential members of The Nation‘s Circle of 100, a shareholder’s group that he helped us start, “I think The Nation is important not because I agree with everything it says but because it helps define where the center is.”

He flattered us by asking our advice on candidates before he endorsed them, and how to deal with a New York Times editorial that, he thought, took an unwarranted and unfair swipe at Newman’s Own (it did).

When Starr’s Last Tape, a one-act play on Clinton’s tormentor, Kenneth Starr, by Nation senior editor Richard Lingeman and myself, was produced at the Berkshire Theatre Festival, Paul and Joanne journeyed up to the Stockbridge opening.

He was funny, he was thoughtful, he was considerate, he was supportive, he was committed and, in the end, he was a friend, period.

Denver

Think of the Democratic convention as a series of circles. At the center is the bull’s-eye: the convention itself, the delegates assembled at the Pepsi Center, where the public action takes place.

Among the circles, there are the funders (one of whom complained to me that “there is plenty of money at this convention–enough to make the difference in, say, twenty close Congressional races. The problem is, there are more than seventy-five close Congressional races, and there’s no real forum here to work out a strategy on who gets what”).

There are the protesters in the streets (some of whom were pepper-sprayed on the opening day, outside the Sheraton Hotel, where several delegations stayed, although it’s unclear who was protesting what).

There are the lobbyists (not all of them evil), with their receptions and free-flowing booze (like Planned Parenthood’s “Sex, Politics, Cocktails Late-Night Dance Party”).

There are the journalists (to be found, of course, at the nearest bar–like the Ship Tavern in the Brown Palace Hotel, opposite the Comfort Inn, where The Nation has put some of us up).

And then there are the policy wonks, who seem to appear at round-the-clock symposiums on issues ranging from “Health Care, Not Warfare” to “Ideas on Election 2008,” in this case co-sponsored by Air America and the Progressive Book Club, at a venue called The Big Tent.

“It’s not left versus right,” said Thom Hartmann, who hosts a show on Air America and was moderating a panel called “The Contest: Progressives vs. Conservatives.” “The left is dead. I interviewed the head of the Communist Party and it only has 312 members. It’s all-of-America versus right-wing cranks.” Arianna Huffington put it slightly differently: “It’s not left versus right because left positions [like universal healthcare, global warming] are now mainstream positions. The problem is with the media, which presents ‘all sides’ when often there is only one side.” David Sirota, author of The Uprising: An Unauthorized Tour of the Populist Revolt Scaring Wall Street and Washington, argued that the key to electoral victory is realizing that “to harness all the energy out there, you have to deal with what pisses people off. Deregulation and NAFTA–which both parties are responsible for–have made ordinary people angry. You have to force the party to take progressive positions.”

I agree with all of the above. But I also believe that Barack Obama, who ran a brilliant, bottom-up primary campaign, is so far making a big post-primary mistake. And it doesn’t have to do with flip-flops (like not fulfilling his promise to filibuster the FISA bill, which gave legal immunity to telecommunications companies that facilitated illegal government eavesdropping; “refining” his position on Iraq, etc.). Although the list is too long, he can justify each of these decisions case by case.

His big mistake is the same one that the last two Democratic candidates for President–Al Gore and John Kerry–made: the assumption (shared by too many campaign consultants) that the way to woo those in the center is to move toward the center. Huffington has a point when she advises, “Instead of targeting the swing voters, he should target the unlikely voters.” I would argue there’s nothing wrong with targeting the swing voters. What’s wrong is pandering to them by moving to the center.

They are undecided precisely because they are not Democrats or Republicans, and they don’t care about left versus right. They care about finding someone they can connect with, a candidate they can trust. And as soon as they see a candidate who appears to be listening to the consultants and pollsters rather than being true to himself, they see a candidate who has betrayed what they care about most: authenticity.

Because this is so clearly a Democratic year, Obama may well win even if he persists in traveling down the illusory middle road. But if that’s the way he wins, it will be too bad, because he will be a President without a mandate–or with at best a diluted one.

AP Images

Yesterday, last night and this morning it was all about Hillary, and she didn’t let her supporters or her party down. Go (or, depending on where you stand, Welcome Back) Hillary!

But while all eyes are on the podium, the election and the direction (of the country) may be determined by events and ideas under consideration outside the formal arena.

At the notorious 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, I remember sitting in the office of Larry O’Brien, who by that time, was running the Hubert Humphrey campaign. He had three television sets, tuned to the three big TV networks. On two of them, cops were beating up and otherwise abusing demonstrators in the streets, and on the third set, a political insider, Richard Goodwin (who had moved, after Robert Kennedy’s assassination, to the McCarthy camp), was giving his analysis of the delegates. O’Brien turned off the sound on the two street-violence pictures, and turned up the sound on the Goodwin interview. It all seemed to me emblematic of the way in which the party establishment missed the historical moment, the real story of what was happening at their own convention.

Here in Denver, the main action outside of the arena is not in the streets but indoors. Most of it has to do with progressive possibility. Yesterday, for example, I attended a half-day series of panels organized by Bob Borosage, where people like Arianna H., Senator Sherrod Brown, Rep. Donna Edwards, Bob Kuttner, Rep. Keith Ellis and Alan Charney held forth. The talk was about a “new” New Deal. (The old one, designed to overcome the Great Depression, gave birth to Social Security, public works and such; the new one, designed to overcome “the great devaluation,” requires social investment in human capital– healthcare and a college education for all, and other elements of “a new dream” ). The talk was about:

• Conyers’ single-payer bill, HR 676

• A minimum wage indexed to inflation

• The right to organize (but also the need for unions to invest more of their assets into organizing)

• Retirement (don’t move the age up, said US Action President Bill McNair, “snap the cap” on Social Security)

The point here is not whether one agrees with David Sirota that “The progressive wing of the Democratic Party has finally defeated the corporate wing of the Democratic Party” but that the conversations outside the arena should remind those inside that the debates between Clinton, Obama, Edwards et al. in the primaries were in large part over who was more antiwar, who was greener, who cared more about labor. They assumed, in other words, that the old Democratic Leadership Council’s push towards so-called moderation was yesterday’s news.

There is much talk here about this being an “historic convention.” And of course what most people are referring to is the first nomination by a major party of a black candidate for President. But the talk in the penumbra of the Pepsi Center embodies the content of what could really make the aftermath of these proceedings historic, i.e., what Borosage and others have called “a transformational moment.” Let’s hope that the new leadership has not turned the sound off.

AP Images

Think of the convention as a series of circles. At the center is the bull’s-eye–the convention itself, the delegates assembled at the Pepsi Center, where the public action takes place.

Among the circles, there are the funders (one of whom complained to me that “there is plenty of money at this convention–enough to make the difference in, say, twenty close Congressional races. The problem is, there are more than seventy-five close Congressional races, and there’s no real forum here to work out a strategy on who gets what”).

There are the protesters in the streets (some of whom were pepper-sprayed yesterday, outside the Sheraton Hotel where the New York delegation is staying, although it’s still unclear who was protesting what).

There are the lobbyists (not all of them evil) with their receptions and free-flowing booze (like Planned Parenthood’s “Sex, Politics, Cocktails Late-Night Dance Party”).

There are the journalists (to be found, of course, at the nearest bar–the Ship Tavern in the Brown Palace hotel, opposite the Comfort Inn, where The Nation has put some of us up, isn’t bad).

And then there are the policy wonks, who seem to appear at round-the-clock symposia on issues ranging from “Health Care, Not Warfare” to an afternoon of “Ideas on election 2008,” in this case co-sponsored by Air America and Progressive Book Club, at a venue called The Big Tent.

“It’s not left versus right,” said Thom Hartmann, who hosts a show on Air America and was moderating a panel called “The Contest: Progressives vs. Conservatives.” “The left is dead. I interviewed the head of the Communist Party and it only has 312 members. It’s all-of-America vs. right-wing cranks.” Arianna Huffington put it slightly differently: “It’s not left versus right because left positions [like universal healthcare, global warming] are now mainstream positions. The problem is with the media, which presents ‘all sides’ when often there is only one side.” David Sirota, author of The Uprising, argued that the key to electoral victory is realizing that “to harness all the energy out there, you have to deal with what pisses people off. Deregulation and NAFTA–which both parties are responsible for–have made ordinary people angry. You have to force the party to take progressive positions.”

I agree with all of the above. But I also believe that Barack Obama, who ran a brilliant, bottom-up primary campaign, is so far making a big post-primary mistake. And it doesn’t have to do with ideological flip-flops (like not fulfilling his promise to filibuster the FISA bill that gave legal immunity to telecommunications companies who facilitated illegal government eavesdropping, “refining” his position on Iraq, and such). Although the list is too long, he can justify each of these decisions case by case.

His mistake is the same one that the last two Democratic candidates for President–Gore and Kerry–made. The assumption (shared by too many campaign consultants) that the way to woo those in the center is to move towards the center. Arianna Huffington, I believe, has a point when she advises, “Instead of targeting the swing voters he should target the unlikely voters.” But I would argue there’s nothing wrong with targeting the swing voters. What’s wrong is to pander to them on the assumption that the way to win them over is to move towards the center.

The reason they are undecided is precisely because they are not Democrats or Republicans, and they don’t care about left vs. right. They care about finding someone they can connect with, a candidate they can trust. And as soon as they see a candidate who appears to be listening to his consultants and pollsters rather than being true to himself, they see a candidate who has betrayed what they care about most: authenticity.

Because this is so clearly a Democratic year, Obama may well win even if he persists in traveling down the illusory middle. But if that’s the way he wins, it will be too bad, because he will be a President without a mandate–or with, at best, a diluted one.

This article originally appeared on TomDispatch.

The Iraq war was a disaster for Iraq, a disaster for the United States, a disaster for the Middle East, a disaster for the world community, but most of all, it was a disaster for the experts.

They were wrong about its difficulty. (It was to be either “a cakewalk” or “a walk in the park”–take your pick). They were wrong about how our troops would be greeted (“as liberators” said Vice President Dick Cheney on September, 14, 2003; “with kites and boom boxes,” wrote Professor Fouad Ajami on October 7, 2002). They were wrong about weapons of mass destruction. (“Iraq not only hasn’t accounted for its weapons of mass destruction but without a doubt still retains them. Only a fool–or possibly a Frenchman–could conclude otherwise,” wrote Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen on February 6, 2003.) They were wrong about how many troops would be needed. (“It’s hard to conceive that it would take more forces to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq than it would take to conduct a war itself,” said Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz on February 27, 2003.)

They were wrong about the number of casualties (“we’re not going to have any casualties,” said President George W. Bush in March, 2003). They were wrong about how much it would cost. (“The costs of any intervention would be very small,” according to White House economic advisor Glenn Hubbard on October 4, 2002.) They were wrong about how long it would last. (“It isn’t going to be over in 24 hours, but it isn’t going to be months either,” claimed Richard Perle on July 11, 2002.) They were wrong about the “sinister nexus between Iraq and the Al Qaeda terrorist network,” as Secretary of State Colin Powell put it in addressing the UN Security Council on February 5, 2003. They were wrong about the likelihood of Iraq descending into civil war. (“[There is] a broad Iraqi consensus favoring the idea of pluralism,” insisted William Kristol and Robert Kagan on March 22, 2004.) There was, in fact, very little they were not wrong about.

Who are we to make such charges? Not to be boastful, we are, respectfully, the CEO and president–the founders, as it were–of the Institute of Expertology, which has been surveying expert opinion for almost twenty-five years. It is true that our initial study, The Experts Speak: The Definitive Guide to Authoritative Misinformation, came under attack back in 1990 because, at the time, we failed to find a single expert who was right, although we readily conceded that, in statistical theory, it was possible that the experts were right as much as half the time. It just proved exceedingly difficult to find evidence of that other 50 percent

In Mission Accomplished!, our new study of the experts–people who, by virtue of their official status, formal title, academic degree, professional license, public office, journalistic beat, quantity of publications, experience and/or use of highly technical jargon, are presumed to know what they are talking about–we once again came under attack from critics who claimed that our failure to include any misstatements by Senator Barack Obama betrayed a political bias. These allegations were quickly refuted. Everybody knows that Obama has no experience and therefore does not qualify as an expert. Senator Hillary Clinton, who voted to authorize the Iraq war, did make the cut, but the presidential candidate-cum-expert of genuine interest is Senator John McCain.

At first, we were impressed by the senator’s statements in Republican primary debates about how he had actually opposed the Bush Administration’s conduct of the war from the start. As he told CNN’s Kiran Chetry, in August of 2007, “I was the greatest critic of the initial four years, three-and-a half years.”

Well, having dug into those missing years a bit, here, for the record, is what we found to be Senator McCain’s typical responses to some of the key questions posed above:

How would American troops be greeted?

“I believe…that the Iraqi people will greet us as liberators.” (March 20, 2003)

Did Saddam Hussein have a nuclear program that posed an imminent threat to the United States?

“Saddam Hussein is on a crash course to construct a nuclear weapon.” ( October 10, 2002)

Will a war with Iraq be long or short?

“This conflict is… going to be relatively short.” (March 23, 2003)

How is the war going?

“I would argue that the next three to six months will be critical.” (September 10, 2003)

How is it going (almost two months later, from the war’s “greatest critic”)?

“I think the initial phases of [the war] were so spectacularly successful that it took us all by surprise.” (October 31, 2003)

Is this war really necessary?

“Only the most deluded of us could doubt the necessity of this war.” (August 30, 2004)

How is it going? (Recurring question for the war’s “greatest critic”)

“We will probably see significant progress in the next six months to a year.” (December 4, 2005)

Will the President’s “surge” of troops into Baghdad and surrounding areas that the senator had been calling for finally make the difference?

“We can know fairly well [whether the surge is working] in a few months.” (February 4, 2007)

In April 2007, accompanied by several members of Congress, Senator McCain made a surprise visit to Baghdad to assess the surge, had a “stroll” through a market in the Iraqi capital and then held a news conference where he discussed what he found: “Things are better and there are encouraging signs. I’ve been here many times over the years. Never have I been able to drive from the airport. Never have I been able to go out into the city as I was today. The American people are not getting the full picture of what’s happening here today.”

The next evening, NBC’s Nightly News provided further details on that “stroll.” The Senator and Congressmen were accompanied by “100 American soldiers, with three Blackhawk helicopters and two Apache gunships overhead.” (In addition, the network said, still photographs provided by the military revealed that McCain and his colleagues had been wearing body armor during their entire stroll.)

Reality check:

Five months later, on September 12, 2007, McCain again observed that “the next six months are going to be critical.”

Six months later, McCain claimed that the US had finally reached a genuine turning point in Iraq and that his faith in the surge was (once again) vindicated. On March 17, 2008, he reported: “We are succeeding. And we can succeed and American casualties overall are way down. That is in direct contradiction to predictions made by the Democrats and particularly Senator Obama and Senator Clinton. I will be glad to stake my campaign on the fact that this has succeeded and the American people appreciate it.”

Well, we at the Institute of Expertology appreciate it, too, and we are, of course, pleased to record the Senator’s ever-renewable faith in this latest turning point. As scrupulous scholars, however, we do feel compelled to add that the Senator is not the first to detect such a turning point. Indeed on July 7, 2003, Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith said: “This month will be a political turning point for Iraq.”

On November 6, 2003, President Bush observed: “We’ve reached another great turning point…” On June 16, 2004, President Bush claimed: “A turning point will come two weeks from today.”

That same day the Montreal Gazette headlined an editorial by neoconservative columnist Max Boot: “Despite the Negative Reaction by Much of the Media, US Marines Did a Good Job in Fallujah, a Battle That Might Prove a Turning Point.” On February 2, 2005, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld stated: “On January 30th in Iraq, the world witnessed an important moment in the global struggle against tyranny, a moment that historians might one day call a major turning point.” On March 7, 2005, William Kristol wrote: “[T]he Iraqi election of January 30, 2005… will turn out to have been a genuine turning point.”

On December 18, as that year ended, Vice President Cheney, while conceding that “the level of violence has continued,” assured ABC News: “I do believe that when we look back on this period of time, 2005 will have been the turning point.”

The Institute continued to record turning points in remarkable numbers in 2006, and 2007, but perhaps in 2008 the surge will, indeed, turn out to be the turning point to end all turning points. After all, Senator McCain has staked his campaign on it.

Who said the Iraq War would pay for itself? Why, the experts did.

To mark the fifth anniversary of America’s Iraq debacle, The Nation offers words of wisdom from those who led us there, courtesy of a new book by Christopher Cerf and Victor Navasky, Mission Accomplished! Or, How We Won the War in Iraq: The Experts Speak (Simon & Schuster).

Here are highlights:

And a year from now, I’ll be very surprised if there is not some grand square in Baghdad that is named after President Bush. There is no doubt that, with the exception of a very small number of people close to a vicious regime, the people of Iraq have been liberated and they understand that they’ve been liberated.

Richard Perle
Chairman of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board
September 22, 2003

More pearls of wisdom from Navasky and Cerf:

Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business.

Michael Ledeen
Freedom Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute
ca. 1992, as paraphrased by Jonah Goldberg in National Review Online, April 23, 2002

Blackwater employees and other civilian contractors cannot be tried in military courts and it is unclear what American criminal laws might cover criminal acts committed in a war zone.

The New York Times
October 29, 2007

Things are better and there are encouraging signs. I have been here many years–many times over the years. Never have I been able to drive from the airport, never have I been able to go out into the city as I was today. The American people are not getting the full picture of what’s happening here.

Senator John McCain
at a news conference in the Green Zone
after completing a “walking tour” of the Shorja market
April 1, 2007.

More people get killed in New York every night than get killed in Baghdad. The fact of life is that there will never besuch a thing as one hundred percent security–it doesn’t exist.

L. Paul Bremer III
Director of the Coalition Provisional Authority
August 2003.

“Iraq is a very wealthy country. Enormous oil reserves. They can finance, largely finance the reconstruction of their own country. And I have no doubt that they will.”

Richard Perle, chair
The Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board
July 11, 2002

“The likely economic effects [of a war in Iraq] would be relatively small…. Under every plausible scenario, the negative effect will be quite small relative to the economic benefits.”

Lawrence Lindsey
White House economic adviser
September 16, 2002

“It is unimaginable that the United States would have to contribute hundreds of billions of dollars and highly unlikely that we would have to contribute even tens of billions of dollars.”

Kenneth Pollack
former director for Persian Gulf affairs
National Security Council
September 2002

“The costs of any intervention would be very small.”

Glenn Hubbard
White House economic adviser
October 4, 2002

“Iraq has tremendous resources that belong to the Iraqi people. And so there are a variety of means that Iraq has to be able to shoulder much of the burden for their own reconstruction.”

Ari Fleischer
White House press secretary
February 18, 2003

“When it comes to reconstruction, before we turn to the American taxpayer, we will turn first to the resources of the Iraqi government and the international community.”

Donald Rumsfeld
Secretary of Defense
March 27, 2003

“There is a lot of money to pay for this that doesn’t have to be US taxpayer money, and it starts with the assets of the Iraqi people. We are talking about a country that can really finance its own reconstruction and relatively soon.”

Paul Wolfowitz
Deputy Secretary of Defense
testifying before the defense subcommittee
of the House Appropriations Committee
March 27, 2003

“The United States is very committed to helping Iraq recover from the conflict, but Iraq will not require sustained aid.”

Mitchell Daniels, director
White House Office of Management and Budget
April 21, 2003

“The allies [have contributed] $14 billion in direct aid.”

Dick Cheney
vice presidential debate with
Democratic candidate John Edwards
October 5, 2004

Actually, only $13 billion was pledged, and on the date Cheney spoke only $1 billion had arrived. As of October 28, 2007, the National Priorities Project estimated that the share of Iraq War costs that had been borne by American taxpayers exceeded $463 billion.    –C.C.&V.N.

The following quotes were compiled by Christopher Cerf and Victor Navasky in their capacity as CEO and president of the Institute of Expertology, which has just issued a report on the experts who were wrong about Iraq–before, during and after the invasion–under the title Mission Accomplished! Or, How We Won the War in Iraq; The Experts Speak (Simon & Schuster). Here, the “experts” speak about the costs of war.

“Iraq is a very wealthy country. Enormous oil reserves. They can finance, largely finance the reconstruction of their own country. And I have no doubt that they will.”

Richard Perle, chair
The Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board
July 11, 2002

“The likely economic effects [of a war in Iraq] would be relatively small…. Under every plausible scenario, the negative effect will be quite small relative to the economic benefits.”

Lawrence Lindsey
White House economic adviser
September 16, 2002

“It is unimaginable that the United States would have to contribute hundreds of billions of dollars and highly unlikely that we would have to contribute even tens of billions of dollars.”

Kenneth Pollack
former director for Persian Gulf affairs
National Security Council
September 2002

“The costs of any intervention would be very small.”

Glenn Hubbard
White House economic adviser
October 4, 2002

“Iraq has tremendous resources that belong to the Iraqi people. And so there are a variety of means that Iraq has to be able to shoulder much of the burden for their own reconstruction.”

Ari Fleischer
White House press secretary
February 18, 2003

“When it comes to reconstruction, before we turn to the American taxpayer, we will turn first to the resources of the Iraqi government and the international community.”

Donald Rumsfeld
Secretary of Defense
March 27, 2003

“There is a lot of money to pay for this that doesn’t have to be US taxpayer money, and it starts with the assets of the Iraqi people. We are talking about a country that can really finance its own reconstruction and relatively soon.”

Paul Wolfowitz
Deputy Secretary of Defense
testifying before the defense subcommittee
of the House Appropriations Committee
March 27, 2003

“The United States is very committed to helping Iraq recover from the conflict, but Iraq will not require sustained aid.”

Mitchell Daniels, director
White House Office of Management and Budget
April 21, 2003

“The allies [have contributed] $14 billion in direct aid.”

Dick Cheney
vice presidential debate with
Democratic candidate John Edwards
October 5, 2004

Actually, only $13 billion was pledged, and on the date Cheney spoke only $1 billion had arrived. As of October 28, 2007, the National Priorities Project estimated that the share of Iraq War costs that had been borne by American taxpayers exceeded $463 billion.    –C.C.&V.N.

When I was a first-year student at the Yale Law School in 1956, I was deeply impressed when my torts professor, Fleming James Jr., to underline his point that in the old days one could be imprisoned for seditious libel (even if what one wrote was the truth), quoted I-don’t-know-who, saying:

Then up rose Lord Mansfield.
He spake like the Bible.
“The greater the truth, sir
The greater the libel!”

As Anthony Lewis makes clear in his elegant new book, Freedom for the Thought That We Hate: A Biography of the First Amendment, those days are gone forever. Although his approach is not legalistic, he thoroughly discusses the great libel cases, like Near v. Minnesota, which in 1925 established the principle that the First Amendment protects the press from prior governmental restraints on publication, and New York Times v. Sullivan, which in 1964 extended the principle of First Amendment protection to include subsequent-to-publication punishment (even if what one wrote was false–unless there was reckless disregard for the truth).

Lewis, who formerly from his perch on the op-ed page of the New York Times and currently as a contributor to The New York Review of Books has proved himself to be one of the most vigilant members of the commentariat on behalf of First Amendment values, is the bearer of glad tidings. Less a sounding of the alarm than a chiming of the liberty bell, his message is eloquent and clear. Despite the Bush Administration’s much-publicized assault on First Amendment values, “I am convinced, that the fundamental American commitment to free speech, is no longer in doubt.”

Although Lewis is unsparing in his inventory of this country’s various significant pre- and post-9/11 wounds to constitutional liberty, his argument is, in effect, that almost every time the government (or would-be private censors, for that matter) has crossed the free-speech line, history has pushed back. And why, he implicitly asks, should this time be any different? His faith is not undocumented. Even though his book is less a systematic “case for” than a compelling and lucid celebration of those fourteen little words (“Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press”), his point is taken: “Again and again in American history,” he writes, “the public has been told that civil liberties must be sacrificed to protect the country from foreign threats”; yet again and again liberty denied has been followed by liberty restored.

By way of example, he tells us:

§ In 1798 Congress passed a bill making seditious libel a federal crime, punishable by fines of up to $2,000 and imprisonment for up to two years. (The law was said to be needed to protect the country from terrorism–French terrorism, no less, the fear being that the Jacobins would export guillotine justice!) On March 3, 1801, Congress allowed the law to expire.

§ In 1917 Congress passed the Espionage Act, and in 1918 the Sedition Act. They were followed by the infamous Palmer Raids and other instances of radicals getting rounded up in blatant violation of due process. Sauerkraut was rechristened “liberty cabbage,” and Eugene Debs, leader of the Socialist Party and five-time candidate for President, was convicted for a speech he made opposing conscription and World War I and sentenced to ten years in prison (from where he again ran for President). Three years later President Harding pardoned Debs, and by that time Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, who had voted with the majority for Debs’s conviction, had restated his “clear and present danger” test (adding the crucial adjective “imminent”) and written a powerful dissent in Abrams v. United States. The defendants in that case were charged under the Espionage Act with printing leaflets intended to hurt the war against Germany. (“I believe the defendants had as much right to publish,” Holmes wrote, “as the Government has to publish the Constitution of the United States now vainly invoked by them.”) Eventually his “imminent danger” test would become the law.

§ In 1944 President Franklin Delano Roosevelt ordered the internment of all Japanese-Americans in relocation camps solely because of their ethnicity. In 1976 President Ford called the relocation of the Japanese “a sad day in American history,” and twelve years later, President Reagan signed into law an act of Congress providing compensation for the survivors of the relocation program.

§ In the late 1940s and early ’50s the House Committee on Un-American Activities and the Senate Internal Security Committee, along with Joe McCarthy and various other investigators intent on purging the Red Menace from our movies, our schools, our churches, our government and our military, were riding high and riding roughshod over the First Amendment rights of reluctant witnesses. By the mid ’50s Senator McCarthy had been censured by his colleagues, and by the late ’70s HUAC and SISC were no longer in business. In a series of rulings the Warren Court (with Justices Hugo Black, William Douglas and William Brennan being its most articulate First Amendment elaborators) had reminded the country of what Lewis calls the Madisonian Premise–the right to dissent–which later informed the Court’s opinion in the Pentagon Papers case (and which most recently the New York Times invoked as the basis for disclosing secret and illegal Bush Administration wiretapping without warrants).

Nor is Lewis content to describe and predict. Like many prophets he also seems to feel the need to exhort, either in his own words or in those of others. Thus: “The highest duty of the press [is] to inform the public about its governors,” he writes, because, as James Madison himself put it, the people are sovereign; and as Justice Louis Brandeis wrote in 1927 in his dissent to Whitney v. California, in which the Court upheld the conviction of Anita Whitney for her role in establishing the Communist Party in California: “Discussion affords ordinarily adequate protection against the dissemination of noxious doctrine…. The fitting remedy for evil counsels is good ones.”

Moreover, Lewis urges the press to follow the injunction of the British columnist Bernard Levin of The Times of London, who in the 1980s dismissed the idea that the press’s obligation was to be “responsible” (in the English sense of commitment to the ideas and assumptions of the ruling class). “The press,” he wrote, “has no duty to be responsible at all, and it will be an ill day for freedom if it should ever acquire one…. We are and must remain vagabonds and outlaws”–we must continue “the pursuit of knowledge that others would like unpursued and the making of comments that others would prefer unmade.”

As it happens, for me Lewis’s credibility as an observer is enhanced by the fact that he does not number himself among the so-called First Amendment absolutists, like Justice Douglas. Rather, Lewis is a self-described balancer who finds that freedom of expression is often in tension with other values–the right to a fair trial, campaign finance reform, the right to privacy, the need to deal with hate speech and hard-core pornography and such. Whereas Justice Douglas, with whose view, I confess, I perhaps naïvely identify, considered the idea “that First Amendment rights are to be balanced against other needs or conveniences of government” to be “amazing,” Lewis believes with the late Justice Potter Stewart (and most sophisticated contemporary Court watchers) that freedom of the press is not an absolute; it “must give way under the Constitution to a paramount public interest in the fair administration of justice.”

Here I might add that along the way Lewis does not shy away from issuing opinions of his own: Thus, “The Minnesota decision [Republican Party of Minnesota v. White, which overturned a law forbidding candidates for judgeships to announce their views on legal or political issues] seems to me an egregious misapplication of the First Amendment.” On speech codes he seems to agree with The Economist that “the big danger is that, in the name of stopping bigots, one may end up by stopping all criticism.” He adds that “one of the arguments for allowing hateful speech is that it makes the rest of us aware of terrible beliefs [like Holocaust denial] and strengthens our resolve to combat them.” Lewis concedes, however, that “in an age when words inspired acts of mass murder and terrorism, it is not as easy for me as it once was to believe that the only remedy for evil counsels, in Brandeis’s phrase, should be good ones.” He adds, “I think we should be able to punish speech that urges terrorist violence to an audience some of whose members are ready to act on the urging.”

As a former newspaper man, Lewis tackles the knotty conflict between freedom of the press and protection of confidential sources. Are shield laws, which are meant to provide a journalist with the right to refuse to testify about who provided information gathered during the course of writing an article, the answer for journalists who would protect their sources? Mr. Justice Lewis believes that “the chance that [the Supreme Court] will read the First Amendment to give journalists a testimonial privilege is zero.” Nevertheless, he does not believe that shield laws are the answer. The Lewis solution when journalists refuse to reveal their sources: Don’t put them in jail (as was done to the Times‘s Judith Miller), just have judges tell jurors to assume no source.

Given the press’s abysmal performance in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, is Lewis’s confidence that in the long run free speech will prevail justified? And what about the middle run? Lewis seems to see the press’s submissive stance post-9/11 as an atavistic rally-round-the-flag-in-times-of-trouble response, this time reinforced by right-wing intimidation and a natural desire not to appear unpatriotic. It will, he presumably believes, ebb with time, if not with a change of administration.

Well, Lewis has history–or a part of history–on his side. But in trying to project the longer-term prospects for the health of the First Amendment and free-speech values that animate it, I worry that he gives short shrift to the long-term consequences of the Bush Administration’s successful action. For example, its packing the Supreme Court (and lower federal courts) with a cadre of younger conservatives who are putting in place precedents that could undermine the First Amendment, not to mention other parts of the Bill of Rights, for decades to come.

In the 1920s, the constitutional scholar Zachariah Chafee Jr. identified the two free-speech interests the First Amendment is meant to protect: a personal interest in self-expression (the right of individuals to set forth their opinions on matters of vital interest, if life is to be worth living) and a social interest in the attainment of truth (which Holmes famously described as “the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market”).

Lewis is fairly persuasive when he argues that, by and large, the courts have reflected the deeply embedded Madisonian view on the importance of safeguarding the right of citizens to express themselves. But on the second interest–the need for a competition of ideas, a diversity of opinions–I wish he had given more space and attention to those like Ben Bagdikian, Robert McChesney and Bill Moyers, who argue that media concentration has put in place a structure that functions to exclude alternative, diverse and radical opinions, ideas and assumptions. There is a vast literature here–ranging from radical analysts like Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman to moderate liberal humanists like Lee Bollinger (who argues that for ideological diversity to flourish in electronic media there must be federal regulation, a position at odds with recent rulings of the FCC and long-term friends of deregulation and the Murdochization of the media).

Lewis gives no shrift at all to the concerns of those like the lawyer-scholar Lawrence Lessig, who has reminded us how corporate interests have impinged on the free flow of ideas–how as a result of changing law, new technology and concentrated markets, “never in our history have fewer had a legal right to control more of the development of our culture than now.” The Copyright Act of 1790 took a restrictive view of intellectual property and emphasized the importance of free expression and the public domain. For the first 120 years of this Republic, the copyright term was extended once, to twenty-eight years from fourteen, the effect being the continued enforcement of copyright as a limited monopoly. In the past four decades, powerful media conglomerates seeking to monopolize lucrative properties have extended it eleven times, with the term of protection now being the life of the author plus seventy years, which is effectively a lifetime monopoly!

At a moment when too many Americans are either ignorant of or choose to underestimate the critical importance of constitutionally protected freedom of speech to our country and our culture, Anthony Lewis’s book makes an invaluable contribution to our incomplete national conversation. But that should be the beginning rather than the end of the story. A.J. Liebling famously said that freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one. In the world of Big Media, owners are corporations; the courts to the contrary notwithstanding, these (mega) corporations are not people, and their ability not merely to survive in the marketplace but to dominate it has less to do with having better ideas than with a better-looking bottom line. The threat this poses to our No. 1 Amendment should not be ignored.

We have indeed come a long way from the days when it could be said, “The greater the truth, sir/The greater the libel!” Freedom for the thought that we hate may be, as Lewis suggests, here to stay; but freedom of thought per se will be compromised if First Amendment values are diminished or replaced by corporate ones.

This is an abridged version of remarks Victor Navasky delivered at the “Alger Hiss and History” conference at New York University on April 5, 2007. We have also published the full text of the speech.

In 1951 literary critic Leslie Fiedler wrote, “It is time, many of us feel, to forget the whole business: the prison doors have closed [on Alger Hiss]; let us consider the question also closed.”

For the next fifty-five years commentators, critics, journalists and historians proclaimed the case closed–most recently (i.e., ten years ago) with the release of the Venona decrypts, including one said to be “the final nail in Hiss’s coffin”: Venona cable 1822, which contained a twenty-five-years-after-the-fact footnote saying that a Soviet agent code-named ALES was “probably Alger Hiss.”

This is the gazillionth “final” nail in Hiss’s coffin, but no matter. Over the years the pendulum of the Hiss case has swung this way and that with only one certainty: This is a case that will not die. It will not go away. The cold war is over, but the symbolic cold war lives on. In early April New York University’s Center for the United States and the Cold War sponsored a daylong conference on “Alger Hiss and History,” and events before, during and, presumably, after the conference help explain why.

Even before the conference got under way it was attacked (in the New York Sun and on The New Republic‘s website) for having more pro- than anti-Hiss participants (conflict-of-interest alert: I gave the keynote address) and for not having Allen Weinstein and Sam Tanenhaus, who have written the most important anti-Hiss books on the case. (Weinstein and Tanenhaus, as it happens, were both invited but couldn’t–or wouldn’t–attend.)

Three things seemed to me newsworthy about the NYU conference:

§ For the first time ever, Alger Hiss’s stepson, Timothy Hobson, who lived in the Hiss household until he was 14, including the period when Chambers claimed to be a regular visitor, told his story publicly. Now 80, Hobson said, “I know Chambers was lying, because I was there and he wasn’t.” (He also blamed Hiss’s defense counsel for not calling him as a witness. He had been less than honorably discharged from the Navy as a homosexual, and Hiss’s attorneys thought the stigma would cast a negative shadow over the defense. Also, Hiss had told his stepson he would rather go to prison himself than see him attacked and publicly humiliated.)

§ Kai Bird, the Pulitzer Prize-winning co-author of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, and Svetlana Chervonnaya, a Russian researcher, in a précis of a 17,000-word paper, “Who is ALES?” (soon to be published online in The American Scholar), argued that going by Venona, Hiss could not have been ALES because, among other reasons, Hiss was publicly and visibly in Washington when his US-based control had ALES in Mexico. The paper also argues that another person, Wilder Foote, an assistant to the Secretary of State, who, like Hiss, traveled from Yalta to Moscow and was in Mexico during the period in question, better fits the ALES profile.

§ Jeff Kisseloff, drawing on new research courtesy of FOIA, documented that Hede Massing, the only witness besides Chambers who testified that Hiss had been a member of the underground, at first omitted Hiss from her story, introducing him into her account only after Chambers produced the pumpkin film and publicly accused him of espionage. Her husband was under threat of deportation at the time, and she had lied in several previous interviews. Kisseloff makes the case that her testimony against Hiss was the result of FBI prompting.

If Bird and Chervonnaya are right, their finding complicates but does not resolve the case. If Hobson and Kisseloff are right, their new information goes to the heart of the case. Either way, to paraphrase the late Alistair Cooke (who wrote A Generation on Trial), not just Alger Hiss but all those historians who share what they like to call the consensus are on trial, for we live under a system of opinion trusteeship, and the rest of us rely on contemporary historians to get our news about the past.

The consensus historians have tended to focus on information that on its face is incriminatory (like Venona cable 1822) but have seemed to look the other way when it comes to evidence that on its face is exculpatory (like another Venona cable, which mentions Hiss by name, when in the world of Venona, spies are mentioned only by code name). Will the consensus historians study this new information and attempt to integrate it into their understanding of the case, or will they reflexively ignore and dismiss it? Check National Review and The Weekly Standard for early ­warning signals.

By the end of the day it seemed obvious that anyone who would understand the New Deal, McCarthyism and/or the postwar international order would do well to come to terms with the case that refuses to die. Victor Navasky

Victor Navasky delivered these remarks at the “Alger Hiss and History” conference at New York University on April 5, 2007.

In 1951 Leslie Fiedler, the literary critic, wrote “It is time, many of us feel, to forget the whole business…[t]he prison doors have closed [on Alger Hiss]; let us consider the question also closed.”

Twenty-seven years later another literary critic, the distinguished and thoughtful cultural and political observer, Alfred Kazin wrote, on the occasion of the publication of Allen Weinstein’s book, Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case, “it is impossible to imagine anything new in the case except an admission by Alger Hiss.”

Fourteen years after that in 1992, the Russian historian general Dmitry A. Volkogonov, after ordering a search of a full range of official Russian government repositories with information about Soviet intelligence operations, including KGB files and military intelligence – or GRU files – told Hiss attorney John Lowenthal and the world, in a videotaped interview that Hiss had not been a spy (“If he was a spy then I believe positively I would have found a reflection in various files…Alger Hiss was apparently a victim of the Cold War…”) he said. Volkogonov subsequently conceded under questioning by Herb Romerstein, formerly a staff consultant to the House Committee on Unamerican Activites, that he could not say with absolute certainty that some files had not been destroyed or that his search had been 100% exhaustive.

Ten years ago, in 1996 the CIA and NSA released 3,000 World War II intelligence cables decrypted under the secret Venona project. They included a cryptic reference to Hiss by name but also a 1945 report about an agent code-named “Ales” and it contained a footnote, dated 20 years later saying that Ales was “probably Alger Hiss.” At the time, Time Magazine wrote “…the Venona message [document no. 1822] seems to remove reasonable doubt about Alger Hiss’s guilt.”

This morning, Kai Bird and Sventlana Chervonnaya release a paper whose full text will appear in the American Scholar online, which purports to document that Alger Hiss could not have been Ales.

I mention all of the above not to argue that Alger Hiss was or wasn’t a spy, but rather to underline the obvious. This is a case that will not die. It will not go away. The Cold War is over but this, among other Cold War ghosts, lingers on. The question is why? It is perhaps the wrong question to put to this audience, since you wouldn’t be here if you didn’t think the case still mattered. In 1999 Jacob Weisberg, writing in The New York Times magazine put forth one possible explanation not about the Hiss case alone but about Cold War political cases as a class: “These are not primarily arguments about historical fact at all. Espionage charges, initiated by subterranean and frequently unreliable sources, are a way of arguing about the past as if it were present. A continuation of ideological politics by other means among people who are, charitably put, obsessive. Listening in you get a sense that these arguments are less a posthumous sorting out of the Cold War than a sublimated continuation of it. The prevailing perspective remains that of the battlefield, occupied by shell-shocked soldiers who can’t process the news that the war is over. It is, in a way, a metaphysical problem, that afflicts the ex-, pro-, anti-, and anti-anti-Communists: What happens when the political struggle that defined your existence ceases to exist?”

Well, that may explain the pull of this case for some of the characters who have thought, obsessed and written about Alger Hiss and Whitaker Chambers, but this morning, by way of putting this conference in perspective, I put to you that there are at least ten other possible reasons to be here. Pace, David Letterman. And I share them with you in full expectation that in the course of today’s deliberations, the scholars, journalists, commentators and participants, on panels and in the audience, will dismiss some of them as frivolous, explore others in depth, and of course add alternatives of their own.

First, to borrow a familiar phrase from Richard Nixon, let me make one thing perfectly clear, I am well aware that there are those who believe that at least as far as the Alger Hiss case goes, there really is nothing more to discuss — that the small band of true-believers in Hiss’s innocence are in denial. There is even a book out called In Denial: Historians, Communism and Espionage by John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr which argues that people like me, who think the case against Alger Hiss has never really been proved, are, simply, in denial. Well, I deny that I am in denial and here’s why. Unlike Allen Weinstein, Sam Tanenhaus, the late Bill Reuben and others, I do not pretend to be a scholar of the Hiss case. But when I sat down in 1978 to review Allen Weinstein’s book, Perjury, partly because I started with the impression — and that is all that it was — that Whittaker Chambers was not to be trusted, and not always capable of distinguishing fact from fiction; and partly because I believed that the major political trials of the period were carried on in the over-heated atmosphere of the Cold War. I started with the impression that Hiss was indeed still entitled to the presumption of innocence. But presumptions are there to be rebutted and after reading Perjury I found that a number of those he had interviewed seemed to strengthen Chambers’ story, and it seemed to me if he had them right, I would have to abandon my presumption. So I sent advance galleys of his book to seven of his most startling new sources, to ask if he had reported what they had to say correctly and in context. Six of them got back to me and they each independently said the same thing: yes he had, except for the espionage part. I will not burden you this morning with the details, but the bottom line was that they all denied that anything they knew or said or believed confirmed the espionage part of the Chambers-Weinstein’s narrative. Weinstein’s response was that they had recanted only because they disapproved of his conclusion that Hiss was indeed guilty of perjury. Perhaps Weinstein was right (although one of them sued and won a settlement from him, his publisher and the new republic, where he had repeated his misinformation.)

My point this morning is not who was right or wrong between Weinstein and me. It is not even that when he republished and updated Perjury, he omitted the fact that six of his original sources denied that he got them right. Nor is it that when Sam Tanenhaus wrote his interesting biography of Whittaker Chambers, which relied heavily on Weinstein for many of his facts and assumptions, he too omitted the fact that Weinstein’s key sources had recanted or whatever you may want to call it.

Rather, my point is that the omission of inconveniently exculpatory material seems to be something of a pattern among those who have no such inhibitions when it comes to sharing what appears to be on the surface, incriminating material. Those who share what they like to call the “consensus” will cite the famous footnote in Venona cable 1822 saying that the agent code-named Ales was “probably Alger Hiss.” on its face, incriminating. But they omit that in another cable, this one a fragment that is otherwise incoherent, Hiss is mentioned by name. Yet in the world of Venona spies are supposed to be referred to only by their code-names. On its face, exculpatory. They will quote from the memoir of former KGB officer Oleg Gordievsky, who said that Hiss was a spy, but they fail to quote another KGB officer, General Vladimir Pavlov, who says in his memoir, that Hiss was not a spy. And so forth. If I am right — and of course perhaps I am not, but if I am, who then is in denial?

Second, Whittaker Chambers himself may have provided the best explanation for the enduring interest in this case when he called it an epitomizing one. As he wrote, “It epitomized a basic conflict and Alger Hiss and I were the archetypes. This is of course what gave the peculiar intensity to the struggle.” Here he was not talking about innocence or guilt. He was, I believe, talking about belief in God vs. Belief in man. As Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who accepted Chambers’ basic account, nevertheless put it, Chambers’ writings divided the world into “messianic Christian anti-Communists” and “atheistic Communists”. A more extreme version of this perspective was provided by John Strachey writing in 1962, when he put the case in its most cosmic context. Chambers, he wrote, was part of the literature of reaction “not only against communism but against five hundred years of rationalism and empiricism; against, in short, the enlightenment.”

One among many of the paradoxes that persists in this case has to do with Chambers, and I regret that Sam Tanenhaus is not with us today to perhaps shed some light on it. Irving Howe, who believed that Hiss was probably guilty, reviewed Witness for The Nation in 1952. And like Schlesinger and Strachey, he wrote that “The world, as Chambers sees it, is split between those who acknowledge the primacy of god and those who assert the primacy of man; from this fundamental division follows a struggle between morality and murder, with communism merely the final version of the rationalist heresy; and the one hope for the world is a return to Christian virtue, the ethic of mercy.” how does one reconcile this world-view with Sam Tanenhaus’s explanation of one of the mysteries of the case — why Chambers, after telling the FBI on numerous occasions and under oath that Hiss had been a Communist but not involved in espionage changed his story (after he produced the pumpkin papers, allegedly given to him by Hiss.) Hiss supporters say Chambers lied. Tanenhaus provides a clue when he reports that although Chambers said that as a quaker he did not want to hurt anyone’s life, “Chambers did not mention his longstanding fear that he himself would be prosecuted for espionage.” (Under the statute of limitations, which placed a three-year limit on espionage, by 1948 he could not be prosecuted as a spy.) Would the messianic Christian anti-Communist Chambers, the man who saw what he termed “the tragedy of history” as a test of faith, who invoked the moral authority of a true counter-revolutionary, the prophet who exposed the hell of Stalinism, whose self-proclaimed heroes were Dante, Dostoevsky and Kafka, really have put the statute of limitations and his mundane self-interest ahead of his deeper interest in salvation – his own and mankind’s? Perhaps the panel on “Hiss in History” will deal with this.

A third reason that the case retains interest for the survivors of the period, but also for those who would understand it whatever they may believe about Hiss’s innocence or guilt, is that as Alistair Cooke noted at the time, not just Hiss, but a generation was on trial. Chambers himself wrote in witness “Alger Hiss is only one case that stands for the whole Communist penetration in government.” And from the Democrats’ point of view consider that the case was used at the time to smear FDR and the New Deal : If Hiss was guilty then the New Deal was corrupt, the state department had been subverted, Yalta was a sellout, the UN was a Communist plot, the possibilities of peaceful coexistence with the Soviet union were shattered, incipient Cold War repression became defensible. Anyone who would understand the history of the New Deal , the so-called McCarthy era, and the post war international order must come to terms with the Hiss case.

Fourth, as Kai Bird and Svetlana Chernovonnaya point out in their fascinating paper, the case had historic consequences: “as the distinguished historian Walter Lafeber observed,’ it was the Hiss trial, among other [events] that triggered the McCarthy era.’ it also catapulted an obscure California congressman, Richard M. Nixon, onto the national scene.” I do not want to scoop Bird and Chernovonnaya here but if they are right, their paper is a comment not merely on “who was Ales?,” an important question in its own right, because ultimately truth is what history is and ought to be about. But also for what it says about the history profession, and how well or ill the system of opinion trusteeship under whose auspices the rest of us get our information, is functioning. If they are right, these two superb, indefatigable investigators have put the consensus historians to shame.

Fifth, of course, there is the irrisistably dramatic structure not to mention the larger than life protagonists who inhabit this case. It’s hard to believe that aside from a teleplay or two more has not been made in Hollywood of this spy story of how the lean, handsome golden boy from Harvard Law School, the New Deal hot dog with all the right connections — clerked for Oliver Wendell Holmes, protégé of Felix Frankfurter, colleague, friend and valued associate of Dean Acheson, advisor to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, mentioned as possible secretary of state — was brought down by short, overweight, rumpled and deeply closeted Columbia drop-out, self-confessed spy-turncoat with the rotting teeth and gift for self-dramatization. At one point a Hollywood studio was rumored to have commissioned Gore Vidal to write a screenplay about the case. The project was abandoned at about the time the latest so-called consensus emerged. On the other hand, the right has long maintained that Hiss charmed and deceived the elite liberal media by demonizing and even gay-baiting Chambers. Either way, it seems to me that Hiss vs. Chambers is, if nothing else, the ultimate case study in the relationship of popular culture to history, the ways in which our belief systems are subject to manipulation even as they inform and are formed by our politics.

Sixth, is the mystery which has hovered over the case ever since Hiss emerged from prison. And spent the rest of his life trying to prove his innocence. For his supporters there was no mystery. He must have been telling the truth because as Philip Nobile reported in Harper’s in 1975, “Nothing else makes any sense.” But if he was telling a lie, why did he persist in telling that lie, compromising his friends, family and allies in the process? It is an issue worth airing because by avoiding it, each side to the dispute, as it were, thinks (and writes and talks as if) it occupies the moral high ground, making it that much more difficult to get at the underlying reality. Ron Rosenbaum, writing in 2001 in The New York Observer, put forth one theoretical answer: if he was a mole (which Rosenbaum persuaded himself Hiss was), the same convictions that led him to deceive the people who were close to him when he was active “might just as well have led him to deceive those defending his innocence in ‘retirement.'” but Rosenbaum went further. He thinks Hiss’s supporters do him a disservice by believing him. He points out quoting Graham Greene, that when Kim Philby moved to Moscow he could say “I did it and I’m glad!” Hiss deprived himself of that recognition, but his supporters needn’t. It’s a sentiment akin to that of Gary Wills, who also believes Hiss to be guilty, and wrote “I would not pay him the insult of believing him. It is only as a secret foe that he regains the integrity people have always sensed in him.” Perhaps the most ambitious attempt to plumb Hiss’s psyche on the issue may be found in G. Edward White’s book, Alger Hiss’s Looking-Glass Wars.

Mr. White’s thesis, if I understand him correctly, is that by appearing to pursue proof of his innocence, Hiss believed he would persuade his supporters that he was not the kind of person who could have been a traitor to his country. That way he could be “an inspiration to his supporters, and a reminder of the excesses of the Cold War.” And he could be a Soviet agent too, since once an agent always an agent. “Those achievements taken together gave him a sense that his life had a completeness and a fundamental meaning, writes white. It is a complex theory, which I hope Mr. White will elaborate when his turn comes because of all the issues buried in this case, none is more difficult and critical to disentangle than the relationship between personal psychology, morality and politics. If Hiss was telling a lie, was it an important or a trivial one (like Clinton’s denial that he had sex with an intern)?

Number seven: with the meltdown of the former Soviet union one would have thought that the need for carrying on the symbolic politics of the Cold War had expired. Not so. As new Cold War archives came on the market, they have been exploited not merely to revisit old Cold War battles, but with an eye on contemporary politics. Thus George Will said of the new Yale “annals of communism” series that the material shows that “the left was on the wrong side of history and deserves to be.” Nick von Hoffman, the left-libertarian maverick columnist wrote, in the aftermath of Venona, and the publication of a new, sympathetic biography of Joe McCarthy that “point by point McCarthy got it all wrong and yet he was closer to the truth than those who reidiculed him. McCarthy may have exaggerated the scope of the problem, but not by much.” all of which led Josh Micah Marshall in 1999, in The American Prospect, to detect “a generalized red scare revisionism in which liberals, the Democratic Party, the left, the New Deal are all retroactively besmirched by an association with – or at least gullibility about – the Communist menace.”

If Marshal who happens to believe that Hiss was guilty, was right, what we have here is more than a rehashing of Cold War battles. It is what he called the new McCarthyism that “seems to discredit Cold War liberalism by revising history, but also to attack liberal internationalism in foreign policy today by using the tactics pioneered by the red baiters of half a century ago.”

The continuing power of the case, fifty years after the fact, was on display when Clinton’s nominee for the CIA, Anthony Lake, had to withdraw from contention not least because he said on “meet the press” that he found the evidence against Alger Hiss “inconclusive.”

Eighth and not unrelated, at a time when there is a tendency to demonize a new enemy other, the Muslim-as-terrorist, study of the Hiss case has the potential to help demythologize and demystify the enemy other of those years when to be liberal was to be a pinko was to be a Communist was to be a spy. If the Communist party was involved in both reform (see Mark Naison, Communists in Harlem During the Depression), and espionage, as ellen schrecker’s writings make clear, it’s important to know in what proportions. Where did belonging to a marxist study group stop and belonging to a Communist cell begin, and did belonging to a Communist cell and/or “doing underground work” inevitably mean being to be part the secret Soviet underground? We know what we mean by espionage, but reading some of the Venona cables (so and so definitely understands that he is working for us) one wonders whether there is such a thing as unwitting espionage? I tried without success to get the late Victor Perlo and the late Harry Magdoff, both of whose names found their way onto various Venona lists of suspected spies, to tell their stories. Magdoff claimed innocence but they both claimed disinclination to disrupt their end-of-the-last-century lives by once again getting in the papers. But the social history of life at the intersection of radical politics, democratic politics and Communist party politics in those years, is still for me, remains a missing piece of history, and such murkiness perpetuates misunderstanding.

A ninth reason that the case has not died is the possibility, the conference notwithstanding, that what we have here is a monumental miscarriage of justice. I don’t wish to get sentimental, but the other day I was talking with – of all people – Tony Hiss, Alger’s son. He reminded me that “when we stop to think about it and stop to feel about it we can sometimes acknowledge and sense the pain and shame that a miscarriage of justice is an unhealed wound, an injury that continues to hurt the victim and the victim’s family and friends in a way that does not diminish throughout any of their lifetimes.

“But it’s perhaps harder to see that the circle of the injured also takes in all the of the rest of us too. A miscarriage of justice is just that – a miscarriage. A stillbirth, a piece of the truth that never made it into the light of day. It’s absence from the world encourages dangerous and harmful illusions to lodge invisibly in our minds – one of them being that our system of justice is more reliable than it actually is; this can fool us into thinking that our courts have the strength and resilience to withstand sudden episodes of fear, panic, and prejudice. A miscarriage of justice also weakens all of us in another, subtler way. If a wrongful conviction is the result of lies or trickery of some kind, until we learn to recognize the patterns of dissembling being used, we remain vulnerable to repeating our original mistake and to being tricked time and again by the same deception.”

And tenth and finally, I want to mention the blogosphere. Not as a reason that the case has survived, so much as by way of a cautionary note that a conference such as today’s is important not least because real people talking and arguing with other real people in real time at a real place like the New York University Law School auditorium, can serve as a valuable corrective to the distortions that so quickly overwhelm cyber-space. Even before we got underway, this conference was been attacked in the blogosphere so we are already a success — but since we were attacked, among other reasons, for having me as the keynote speaker, allow me to apologize for being me. However, although I was not among the inviters, I might say that although I deeply regret that Weinstein and Tanenhaus were unable or unwilling to attend, I want to praise the center for holding the conference that we have. My own suspicion is that before the day is done, a variety of views on the matters I have inventoried will have been heard, but should it prove to be the case that those questioning the consensus outnumber those reflecting it, I think the political culture will survive this latest swing of the pendulum. Either way, I trust that today’s proceedings will benefit from the civility our hosts have already displayed in making it possible. And I ask that you join me in thanking them for doing so.

In the early 1980s The Nation invited the eminent historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who died February 28, to join a panel. Professor Schlesinger declined the invitation, saying he would have to be “a monumental masochist” to lend himself to a proceeding sponsored by The Nation, a magazine that had been attacking him in its pages for the past thirty years.

In his 1949 book The Vital Center, Schlesinger had described The Nation (along with The New Republic) as “a fellow traveler of the fellow traveler.” As America’s premier self-proclaimed liberal anti-Communist, although he continued to write book reviews for the magazine through 1950, he wanted nothing to do with the front half of The Nation, which he saw as an anti-anti-Communist magazine.

And for many years, although both the magazine and the professor were on the liberal side of the divide in American politics, the ill will was mutual.

In 1951 in a weekly column he wrote for the New York Post, Schlesinger attacked The Nation‘s Carey McWilliams, along with two other non-Communist left-liberals (Tom Emerson and Stringfellow Barr) who had signed a letter proposing a national conference on civil liberties, as follows: “None of these gentlemen is a Communist, but none objects very much to Communism. They are the Typhoid Marys of the left, bearing the germs of infection even if not suffering obviously from the disease.”

Which prompted McWilliams to respond in The New Statesman that Schlesinger “spoke the language of McCarthyism with a Harvard accent.”

A year or two later, when Nation editor and publisher Freda Kirchwey declined to publish an article by the magazine’s former art critic Clement Greenberg accusing its foreign editor, Álvarez del Vayo, of being a Stalinist, she also declined to publish a letter from Schlesinger, in support of Greenberg, that castigated The Nation for “betraying its finest traditions…when it prints week after week these wretched apologies for Soviet despotism.” In other words, no love was lost.

Then in 1990, Professor Archie Singham, a member of the Nation editorial board, longtime Caribbeanist and activist-scholar, called. Cheddi Jagan, three-time popularly elected Prime Minister of British Guiana and by then leader of Guyana’s largest party, was in town, and would we like to invite him for a luncheon seminar in our offices?

In the late 1950s and early ’60s, Jagan, the first elected Marxist leader in the Western Hemisphere, had declined to take sides in the cold war. For that reason, among others, after the Bay of Pigs fiasco the CIA, encouraged by the Kennedy White House, covertly worked to destabilize the Jagan administration, with the result that in 1963 he was voted out of office. Now he was thinking of making a comeback, and Singham had an idea: Why not invite Schlesinger? In A Thousand Days, his memoir of the Kennedy years, Schlesinger seemed to have had second thoughts about Jagan and his own role at the time.

Once again, we invited Professor Schlesinger, but this time he said that although he had a class later in the afternoon and might have to leave early, he would be pleased to join us. Lunch began promptly at 1, Jagan held forth on his plans for a possible new presidential run and soon it was approaching 2:30. Professor Schlesinger interrupted: He had to leave, but before he did he had something he wanted to say. And he proceeded to apologize to Jagan for what he called “a great injustice” he and his Kennedy colleagues had helped to perpetrate.

Then in February 2002 The Nation Institute was putting together a panel at the Society for Ethical Culture on “Civil Liberties After September 11.” Phil Donahue had agreed to moderate, Molly Ivins was coming up from Texas, and it seemed a natural to invite Schlesinger, whose thoughtful op-ed pieces on why it was a mistake to sacrifice civil liberties in the name of national security more and more seemed to overlap with Nation values. He agreed to come, appeared on the panel and was at his most elegant and eloquent.

In the years since, we continued to have our differences–especially over matters multicultural, not to mention his reviews of books covering the cold war years by Nation contributors. These past differences were over nontrivial matters, but more and more our thoughts about the present and future seemed to converge. It is probably presumptuous to say that we learned from each other, but the public sphere will be the poorer without Schlesinger’s voice and activist historian’s perspective informing the debate.

On December 29 Hugo Chávez, President of Venezuela, recently re-elected with a whopping 61 percent of the vote, announced his intention not to renew the broadcast license of Radio Caracas Televisión (RCTV), whose concession will expire in May. “They better go packing,” he said, adding lest he be misunderstood, “Start turning your equipment off.”

The announcement was not out of the blue, since a few days earlier Venezuela’s Minister of Communication and Information, William Lara, had said that licenses of privately owned media would be subject to revision, and the fate of RCTV would be decided by popular survey. Chávez now put it more colorfully. His Venezuela, he said, would not tolerate media “at the service of coup-plotting, against the people, against the nation, against the national independence and against the dignity of the Republic.” And when José Miguel Insulza, Secretary General of the OAS, denounced the move as censorship, Chávez called him a pendejo (“asshole”–translated by US media as “idiot”) who had no business intervening in Venezuela’s internal affairs.

In the weeks that followed, Chávez persuaded the legislature to give him the power to rule by decree for eighteen months, made known his plan to consolidate the parties of the left into one and announced his intention to nationalize various industries. Along the way he described Jesus Christ as “the greatest socialist in history,” ended a speech to the National Assembly by shouting “Socialism or death!” and, after US officials expressed concern about recent developments, advised, “Go to hell, gringos! Go home!”

* * *

When Joel Simon, executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, proposed last summer that I join a mission to Caracas, I had my qualms. First, I didn’t speak Spanish (an interpreter can fix that, said Joel); second, I knew Chávez was overwhelmingly popular with the poor and I wasn’t interested in participating in an anti-Chávez hit job, even in the worthy cause of human rights. I quickly learned that under Chávez the National Assembly had passed the potentially repressive Law of Social Responsibility, which for example bars stations from broadcasting messages that “promote, defend or invite breaches of public order” or are “contrary to the security of the nation.” I also knew that in 2005 the National Assembly had increased criminal penalties for defamation and slander. But I shared Naomi Klein’s view (published here March 3, 2003) that it was “absurd to treat Chávez as the principal threat to a free press in Venezuela. That honor clearly goes to the media owners themselves.” (In the days leading up to the brief 2002 coup against Chávez, RCTV, as well as the three other major private stations, blanketed the airwaves with anti-Chávez speeches, interrupted only by oil company “public service” commercials, run free of charge, calling on viewers to take to the streets. When the coup began to collapse, RCTV blacked out the news, ran cartoons and instructed its staff to keep Chavistas off the air.)

Joel persuaded me that the mission, to be put together by CPJ’s Carlos Lauria, in whose bona fides I had confidence, had no hidden agenda. Moreover, Joel argued, perhaps my Nation connection, emeritus though I may be, would facilitate an audience with the man. (As it turned out, that was not to be; Chávez chose to attend Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega’s inauguration during our visit. I guess a head of state is entitled to his own priorities.)

We arrived in Caracas January 7, the day before Chávez announced his intention to reverse the privatizations carried out by previous governments in the telecommunications and utilities industries–which won him editorial denunciations in the New York Times and the Washington Post. (If past practices are any precedent, nationalization under Chávez will be preceded by elaborate negotiations, and the owners will end up with a fair price–sort of the Venezuelan equivalent of a hostile takeover.) And we did get to see Lara and José Vicente Rangel, one of Chávez’s closest confidants, still loyal despite being replaced as Vice President just before we arrived. We also saw the heads of most of the leading media companies, as well as various human rights and media monitoring types.

What did we conclude? Speaking for my non-Spanish-speaking self, I concluded I was right to have had qualms. No matter how much preparation I’d done or how much access we had, I found it impossible to assess the status of freedom of expression in six days, especially in the polarized environment we found. Example: On the one hand, the man from RCTV assured us the legal case is open and shut: Under the law they had a two-year window within which to apply for renewal of their concession; they filed a timely application, the government never got back to them, and therefore their concession was automatically renewed. On the government side, Lara cited RCTV’s regular showing of what he called “pornographic” soap operas during children’s viewing hours as one among many violations of the law of social responsibility.

Elides Rojas, editor in chief of El Universal, which has been called the Wall Street Journal of Venezuela, argues that the RCTV episode is phase four of a carefully planned “take-over”: In phase one, Chávez attacked the credibility of opposition media and their owners; in phase two he attacked the media as agents of foreign powers; in phase three he attacked journalists by name; and in phase four he wants to take ownership–“RCTV is a clear case.” Opposition journalists repeatedly mentioned lack of access, withholding of public advertising, content restrictions and countless defamation suits.

But talk to Eleazar Díaz Rangel, editor of Ultimas Noticias, generally regarded as a progovernment paper (although, he told me, a majority of its staff supported Chávez’s opponent in the last election), and he’ll tell you the nonrenewal of RCTV’s concession is exactly what it appears to be: nonrenewal of a concession and nothing more. Or talk to Rangel, former Vice President, and he’ll assure you, “We have more freedom of expression than ever before. Not a single journalist has been put in jail. Not a single journalist has been exiled or deported. No media have been expropriated or confiscated. RCTV politicized this. They use political arguments, because they don’t really have legal ones.” Or, as Teodoro Petkoff, editor of the satirical tabloid Tal Cual, a curmudgeonly anti-Chávez (but anti-coup) independent, put it, “The tycoons thought

they owned the country, but Chávez outwitted them.”

Our delegation decided that since everybody we talked to was focusing on RCTV that’s where we, too, would put our focus. At the same time, we knew we didn’t have enough facts to pass on the case. Were they involved in the coup against Chávez? Probably. However, was that grounds for revocation of a license or grounds for prosecuting them as coupsters when it happened? Did they break the law of social responsibility? Probably. And so, probably, did others, whose concessions were not revoked–at least not yet.

But we also decided that we did have enough facts to sound the alarm on the lack of transparency surrounding the decision not to renew RCTV’s concession. Rangel told us that although Chávez had announced the decision in his own inimitable way, in fact it was the result of a long process. Where is the file that describes that process, and why has it not been made public? In our presence, Rangel called the man in charge of such matters and asked him to make it available to us, but somehow–if it exists–it never made its way into our hands. And so we drafted a press release and held a press conference where we revealed our preliminary finding and reported our consensus: that in the absence of a transparent, public process with clear criteria, the decision not to renew RCTV’s license (or any other license) would have a chilling effect on free expression. Our “findings” appeared in all the local papers–pro and con the regime–and were carried live on TV.

But for me, the most intriguing part of our mission was less what we found when we got there than the questions I left with. Was the decision not to renew RCTV’s license merely the latest power grab of Caudillo Chávez, who will turn out, like Castro, to be tone-deaf to the requirements of free expression, or is it a sign that he is serious about his plan to empower the poor and will use his missions, decrees and revised laws to guarantee bottom-up, democratic access to and ownership of the various modes of communication? Should the socialist ideal of imbuing the people with democratic values be trumped by the civil liberties premise of no prior restraint? How does one reconcile “socialism in the twenty-first century” (surely a more noble aspiration than carrying forward the media concentration of the twentieth century) with the requirements of democracy?

If the Venezuelan telecommunications authority and Chávez accept the spirit of our delegation’s recommendation, and the next time a concession comes up for renewal they announce open bidding with the goal of achieving true media diversity–stations owned by cooperatives, stations owned by communities, stations owned by public-private partnerships, stations like Telesur (already owned partly by Argentina and Uruguay along with Venezuela)–what will the bidding process look like? What will be the social criteria? And if they could really pull it off, wouldn’t it be a better system than the one the United States itself has, which, for all our talk of free expression and granting licenses in “the public interest,” seems almost always to result in the FCC granting automatic renewal of television licenses?

Opponents of the Chávez regime mock his talk of “socialism in the twenty-first century” as empty rhetoric. Perhaps at this stage it would be better to call it magical realism–still a fiction, but one to be nourished as an ideal to pursue rather than a policy to be mocked.

The consensus seems to be that Gerald Ford, who died December 26, at 93, was a healer. And his pardon of Richard Nixon, although controversial at the time, is now cited as perhaps his most significant achievement. History, it has been said, has been kinder to him than the voters who turned him out of office. Not so fast.

Ford was indeed a nice guy, although he did–before he was named to replace the disgraced Spiro Agnew as Vice President–call for the impeachment of liberal Justice William O. Douglas, ostensibly because Douglas had contributed an article to The Evergreen Review, an avant-garde publication too racy for the Congressman’s taste. But missing from the otherwise near-universal encomiums for his helping to put what he called “our long national nightmare” behind us is any serious questioning of his own version of the story behind that pardon, which in the long run may have more to do with his historical reputation than the fact of the pardon itself.

We should know, if for no other reason than that in 1979 Ford’s publisher, Harper & Row, sued The Nation over a story we published concerning that pardon. Technically, the suit had to do with the fair-use doctrine: Had The Nation, which had been leaked an advance copy of the manuscript of Ford’s memoir, quoted more of Ford’s words than the fair-use doctrine permits? The Supreme Court, overturning an appeals court decision, said we had. In fact, we had only quoted a few hundred words from Ford’s 110,000-word book. But the Court, voting 6 to 3 against us‚ didn’t buy our position that public figures, who have every right to profit from their memoirs, have no right to copyright the news. So be it.

According to Ford, on August 1, 1974, a week before Nixon resigned, White House Chief of Staff Al Haig took Ford for a walk in the Rose Garden and told him that the “smoking gun” tapes establishing Nixon’s complicity in the Watergate cover-up had been found and that they had to get the President out of there. If Ford promised to pardon Nixon, Haig thought, he would agree to resign. Ford said he then asked Haig if it was possible to pardon a person before he had been indicted. Haig said yes, adding that White House counsel had checked out this detail.

The way Ford wrote it, the conversation was all very innocent. He didn’t even tell his wife, Betty, about it. But the next morning when he mentioned the conversation to an aide and the aide asked, And then what did you say? and Ford said, Nothing, the aide said that in that context, mention of a pardon could be “a time bomb.” And when Ford told a second aide, the aide said, “Silence implies assent.” Ford says he then called Haig and read him a statement (which he reproduced in the book and which we reproduced in our article), the point of which was that nothing that was or wasn’t said in the previous day’s conversation would have any bearing on whatever Ford would or wouldn’t decide.

Writing for the Court, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor assumed that because The Nation “attempted no independent…research” the news we hoped to make with our story was the same news that Ford hoped to make with his book, and that being the case we should have bid for publication rights, along with Time magazine (which won them and then canceled its plans after the news came out). Of course, from The Nation‘s perspective, the point we hoped to make was the opposite of Ford’s. By removing his gloss of innocence but presenting the facts as he had presented them, we raised the possibility that his call to Haig was strictly for cover.

Forget about fair use (subsequent legislation and litigation brought the law of fair use back to where it had been before the Nation case): If The Nation was right in its interpretation of what Ford and Haig had cooked up, healing or no healing, the behind-the-scenes deal that took place was nothing less than obstruction of justice.

Ford, who also presided over the withdrawal of our troops from Vietnam, may now be justly celebrated as a healer. Let future historians decide whether he was also a justice obstructor.

Congratulations, fellow doctors. This is your last required lecture, and I promise to keep it brief.

I want you to know that like Senator John McCain, I intend to give the same commencement speech here that I would give at Reverend Falwell’s Liberty University–should they ever get around to asking me.

I speak to you today in five capacities. As the recipient of your honorary degree; as the former editor and publisher of The Nation; as a writer; as one of, and here I quote, the 101 most dangerous academics in America, unquote; and last but far from least, in my capacity as a taxpayer.

First, as a recipient of your honorary doctorate, I am, of course, honored to be honored–especially in the company of two of my heroes, E.L. Doctorow and Roscoe Lee Brown. But I am also humbled because when I think of proffering advice–which is, after all, the deal: You give me a degree and in return I give you advice–I am reminded that you did all the work to get here. All I had to do is show up.

Here, then, is my first piece of advice:

As a newly minted PhD, you are now officially an expert. Don’t let it go to your head. As it happens, some years ago a colleague, Christopher Cerf, and I did a study of the experts and we compiled what we modestly called “the definitive compendium of authoritative misinformation.”

Here are two of our findings:

§ In October 1929, the day before the great stock market crash, one of the leading economists in the country, Irving Fischer, professor of economics at Yale University, wrote “stocks have reached a permanently high plateau.”

§ In 1895 Lord Kelvin, the mathematician, physicist and president of the Royal Society, assured his audience that “heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible.”

So while I am pleased to offer you all honorary membership in what we like to call the Institute of Expertology–one honorary bestowal deserves another–I must warn you that in and of itself expertise is not enough.

Second, I want to speak to you as former proprietor of The Nation, America’s oldest weekly magazine. You know in the magazine business, survival is the ultimate test of success. And The Nation, founded in 1865, the year the Civil War ended, has survived where magazines with circulations in the millions–Life, Look, The Saturday Evening Post, Colliers–have gone under. By that standard, despite the fact that it has lost money for most of its 140 years, The Nation is America’s most successful magazine. For myself, I attribute its success partly to the fact that it is a cause more than a business–its owners have regarded it as a public trust–and partly to the fact that it has always been suspicious of the official line, that it has challenged the mainstream press’s claim to objectivity.

These days the president of ABC News goes around making speeches claiming that opinion, which is supposed to be bad, is driving out objectivity, which is supposed to be good. In my opinion it’s not quite as simple as that.

Molly Ivins, a frequent Nation contributor, put the case against objectivity well some years ago when she said:

“The fact is that I am a 49-year-old white female, a college-educated Texan. All of that affects the way I see the world. There’s no way in hell that I’m going to see anything that a 15-year-old black high school dropout does. We all see the world from where we stand. Anybody who’s ever interviewed five eyewitnesses to an automobile accident knows there’s no such thing as objectivity.”

At the New York Times, so-called objectivity helped perpetuate the false belief that the Iraqis were developing weapons of mass destruction. But speaking in my capacity as an opinion journalist, I urge you in your scholarship to honor accuracy, yes. But don’t be afraid to form your own opinions. Sharing your opinions, not to mention analyses and interpretations, is a way of testing your expertise, putting it to work on behalf of the public interest.

Third, and here I speak with some trepidation, as a writer. I know all about deconstruction and poststructuralism, but if I were you, having mastered my specialty, I would leave the jargon behind.

In law school I had a maverick professor named Fred Rodell, who way back in 1936 wrote a famous article called “Farewell to Law Reviews.” It began: “There are two things wrong with all legal writing: one its content and two, its style.” He vowed never to write another footnote, and didn’t. Let him be a source of inspiration to you.

Fourth, I come before you in my capacity as an officially certified danger. I am pleased to report that when one David Horowitz, one-time lefty but now a hardcore neoconservative, recently published his book, The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America, I made the cut. I really don’t feel that I earned it, and I regret that he is not more of a scholar–he got most of his facts wrong, not just about me but about his 100 other subjects as well–but I will say that I was flattered to be included. I feel about it the way Lee Hayes, a member of that wonderful folk-singing group from the 1950s, The Weavers, felt about what happened during the McCarthy era. He said, “If it wasn’t for the honor of the thing, I’d just as soon not have been blacklisted.”

Getting blacklisted is not always something that is within your control, so I can’t advise you on how to get on a blacklist. But I can remind you that there are two themes in American history: the theme of freedom, of liberty, of free speech, of Thomas Paine and Jefferson and the First Amendment, the Bill of Rights and all the other good things we were taught in civics and social studies classes. The other is the theme of repression and intolerance, and it goes all the way back to the Alien and Sedition Acts, to the raids on radicals during and after World War I, the internment of the Japanese in World War II, the so-called McCarthy era (I say so-called because it began before the senator from Wisconsin appeared on the scene and its legacy lasted long after he drowned in alcohol) and most recently to the suspension of the rights and liberties of Muslims and other suspected terrorists in the post-9/11 period; and the broad-brush attempt on the part of the Administration and its supporters to portray dissent as disloyalty, dissenters as traitors.

This latter development, part of the misnamed “war on terrorism,” places an extra burden on you but an opportunity as well.

In my view, the “war on terrorism” is misnamed because real wars are won and lost. The so-called “war on terrorism”–which is held forth as the reason for the suspension of our rights and liberties–almost by definition can’t be won. If Saddam Hussein is sentenced to death and executed and Osama bin Laden is picked up tomorrow, there will still be a car bombing the day after. What it means is that if the powers that be have their way, the suspension of our rights and liberties will be perpetual.

Yes, terrorists pose a serious problem, but it is important also to recognize that in the long history of counter-subversion, the counter-subversives invariably do more damage than the subversives they set out to disable. My advice: Use your prestige and where relevant your scholarship, your powers of analysis and persuasion to stand up to unjust authority.

And finally, I want to speak to you in my capacity as a taxpayer.

As a taxpayer, I want my money’s worth. The Graduate Center of the City University of New York is a public institution. It is a beneficiary in increasingly modest amounts to be sure, but a beneficiary nevertheless of public largesse and involvement. As a member of the public, as a citizen and taxpayer, I am a strong supporter of the Graduate Center. But as I see it, I and my fellow taxpayers have an investment in you. And at a moment when both of our major political parties tell us that the time of big government is over, that the market, the private sector, free enterprise is the answer, when the Administration tells us that we should privatize Social Security and further privatize healthcare, at a time when vouchers and other schemes threaten to undermine our national commitment to public education, I say to you, I implore you, I advise you, graduates of this great public institution:

As the product of the Graduate Center of CUNY, you are in a prime position to enrich the public sphere. Not all of you are going to play the role of our most visible public intellectual in the great tradition of men and women such as W.E.B. Du Bois, John Dewey, Hannah Arendt, Reinhold Niebuhr, your own Arthur Schlesinger Jr., but you have something to learn from them. You have all demonstrated the capacity to dig deeply in your specialty. A recent study by Richard Posner has argued the modern university–and many of you will be joining such institutions of higher learning–has encouraged the professionalization and specialization of knowledge in a way that has shrunk the ranks of the independent intellectual. Resist that trend. Give the public the benefit of your opinions, your beliefs.

Opinions are to ideas as facts are to knowledge and as knowledge is to wisdom. So launch your ideas, let others study, assimilate, criticize and modify them as they are projected out into the culture. The challenge is to persuade the public to come back to politics and to cease to sit passively before a discussion conducted by experts and translated by journalists. Some of you will do it in the classroom, others through the media or the Internet or letters to the editor. But all of you can make your contribution by joining and thereby elevating and improving the national conversation.

There is in the penumbra of the USA Patriots Act the rendition of prisoners, the detention of however many anonymous suspects without even the pretense of due process, not to mention legal representation, the perpetual suspension of civil liberty, a new blatancy.

John Kenneth Galbraith, another public intellectual, used to talk about countervailing power. As a new cohort of PhDs, don’t underestimate your potential to constitute a countervailing power of your own. You have the power of your ideas, of your learning, of your achievements. My advice: Use it.

In my favorite Marx brothers movie, if I remember it right, there is a scene where Groucho emerges from a pile-up on the football field shouting, “Is there a doctor in the house? Is there a doctor in the house?”

Way up in the grandstands, a man leaps out of his seat carrying his medical bag, fights his way through the crowd; at last, out of breath, he arrives on the field saying, “I’m a doctor, I’m a doctor.”

Groucho flicks an ash off his cigar, wiggles his eyebrows and asks, “How do you like the game, doc?”

By my count there are 331 doctors in this house. I say it is not enough to be a spectator at the game. Leap into the fray and give it all you’ve got.

Thank you.

In the magazine business, survival is the ultimate test of success. Carey McWilliams, who edited The Nation from 1955 through 1975, once observed, “It is precisely because The Nation‘s backers cared more about what it stood for than what it earned that the magazine survived where countless other publications with circulations in the millions have gone under.”

There is, in my judgment, another reason for the survival of this cultural treasure, founded by the great Anglo-Irish journalist E.L. Godkin the year the Civil War ended. Over the years its stewards have shared the vision of its founders. The Nation‘s original prospectus in 1865 promised that the new weekly “will not be the organ of any party, sect, or body.” It was going to be a conscience, a gadfly “to wage war upon the vices of…exaggeration, and misrepresentation.”

In studying Nation transitions past, I have come to believe that, important as what one does when one is on the job is, more important is what happens after one moves on.

It is therefore with a sense of accomplishment and institutional reassurance I report that this week Katrina vanden Heuvel will replace me as The Nation‘s publisher and general partner. Katrina is the latest in a long line of Nation publisher-owners who include yours truly and extend back to Freda Kirchwey in the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s and Oswald Garrison Villard, who took over from his father in 1918. Katrina is the only woman editing (and now publishing) a political weekly in this country.

Katrina vanden Heuvel has an invaluable understanding of the role of the opinion magazine in general and the mission of The Nation in particular. I believe she is the ideal steward to carry forward The Nation‘s extraordinary tradition. She has the trust and confidence of the Nation community.

As editor of the magazine for the past ten years, Katrina has defined The Nation‘s voice in the aftermath of the cold war and in the traumatic post-9/11 years. The magazine under her leadership has clearly staked out the intellectual and political alternative to the Bush Administration’s extremist agenda and has done much to mobilize our readers and the country against the misbegotten war in Iraq.

Carey McWilliams once said that the editor (and by extension the publisher) of The Nation is a captive of its tradition. I didn’t quite understand the full meaning of that remark until I was privileged to live it. It has been an honor to be a part of that tradition. I look forward to continued contributions as publisher emeritus and a member of the Nation editorial board.

“I have the impression,” magazine consultant Jim Kobak wrote in his classic How to Start a Magazine, “that every man, woman and child in the United States has an idea for a magazine that is ‘needed’ (which is stronger than ‘wanted’) by the American people.”

I thought of this observation when I was in London recently visiting with David Goodheart, who was celebrating the tenth anniversary of Prospect, which he describes as “a post-grand narrative magazine” (in contrast to its two predecessors, the CIA-funded Encounter and the underfunded Marxism Today, which went out of business in 1991).

Simultaneously, Katrina vanden Heuvel had set off for Cambridge, Massachusetts, to serve on a Kennedy School panel celebrating what would have been the tenth anniversary of George, the monthly magazine conceived, founded and edited by the late John F. Kennedy Jr., who liked to refer to it as a political publication “for ‘postpartisan’ America.” (Alas, Katrina’s plane was canceled, but the panel went on.)

George lasted about a year after Kennedy died–when its backer, the publishing conglomerate Hachette Filipacchi, pulled the plug. At the time, many culture-watchers observed that without the Kennedy glitz, the post-Kennedy magazine was doomed. Such speculation seemed poetically justified; as culture-watcher Neal Gabler has argued, in our entertainment-driven, celebrity-oriented society, the new standard of value has less to do with content than with “whether or not something can grab and then hold the public’s attention.” As Gabler put it, politics is “show business for ugly people.” (JFK Jr. himself once told the New York Times that politics was merely another aspect of cultural life, “not all that different from sports, music and art.”)

The problem with the glib post-Kennedy put-downs is twofold. First, his successor-editor Frank Lalli’s George seemed to be turning some sort of economic corner–its circulation was up–when the magazine went under, or so he told a luncheon audience at the time. Even if Hachette Filipacchi was right–that George could not succeed without Kennedy–I’d argue that it was not so much because the JFK Jr. glitz was missing; it was because JFK Jr. himself was missing. Even “postpartisan” magazines require the energy, commitment and, yes, fanatical dedication that founders in particular, and obsessed editors in general, bring to their jobs.

While in London I had lunch with the staff of the ninety-two-year-old democratic socialist journal The New Statesman, hosted by its new editor, John Kempfner; and its publisher, Geoffrey Robinson, MP. Unlike Prospect, there is no post-anything in The New Statesman‘s old-fashioned commitment to social democracy. Whether its antiwar, pro-Labour politics will be sufficient to improve the Statesman‘s problematic numbers is difficult to say. Under Kingsley Martin, who served as editor from the 1930s until 1960, its circulation approached 100,000. Nowadays, in competition with the Sunday agenda pages and the blogosphere, it hovers in the low twenties. Nevertheless, the week I was there Kempfner’s claim that the head of the BBC was about to lose his job seemed to be on the front pages of all the London dailies. If that is a harbinger of things to come–the Statesman monitoring and, where necessary, hectoring the major media–let’s hope it’s the ticket to success in the tradition of independence. As Martin once said, when the majority of the press agree on the orthodoxy of the day–be it the war, the BBC or whatever–the time has come to say, “Oh yeah?”

George, on the other hand, was at the mercy of a conglomerate, and conglomerates think like, well, conglomerates.

Prospect’s prospects are, in my view, enhanced by its status as an independent journal. I say this despite the fact that it celebrates its tenth anniversary by playing into the celebrity culture, featuring the world’s “Top 100 Public Intellectuals.” My objection to such games is only slightly mitigated by the fact that our own Naomi Klein is high on the list (which, by the way, also includes Noam Chomsky as the top vote getter, Jürgen Habermas and Christopher Hitchens.)

The late Neil Postman, who was on the editorial board of this magazine, anticipated this Las Vegas-ization of our culture when he wrote in his 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death that the ideas of Aldous Huxley were prevailing over those of George Orwell: While Orwell feared those who would ban books, Huxley feared that “there would be no reason to ban a book for there would be no one who would want to read one.”

Having said that, I remain a cultural optimist, at least where journals of opinion are concerned, and here’s why. I hold in my hands the thirtieth-anniversary issue of The Boston Review, which has done more than its share to help set the standard for public discourse. If you don’t believe me, send $20 to Boston Review, 30 Wadsworth Street, Ste. 407, Cambridge, MA 02139, ask to begin your sub with the anniversary issue and you’ll see what I mean. Seamus Heaney, for example, tells how as a Catholic school boy he received in a food parcel from home a dark blue linen-bound edition of T.S. Eliot’s poems. It had about it an air of “contraband,” for reasons he explains in his essay on his literary awakening.

The other day the mails brought the latest issue of Jewish Currents (circulation ca 16,000), on the brink of its sixtieth birthday. The late Morris Schappes, who died almost two years ago at age 97, was to Jewish Currents what Goodheart hopes to be to Prospect and JFK Jr. had in mind being for George. So in this age of mergers and entertainment conglomerates, instead of being swallowed by one of the big boys, the post-Schappes Jewish Currents joined forces with The Workmen’s Circle, whose members now receive the magazine as a membership benefit. The Workmen’s Circle, entering its 105th year, is, like Jewish Currents, committed to progressive political and cultural activities, radical secular Jewishness and opposition to anti-Semitism and prejudice.

I suspect both magazines will be around for a long time, not least because they pay attention to the little things. A recent issue reported that because of an error at the bindery, some copies of the July/August issue were mailed with pages missing and other pages appearing in duplicate. “If your copy was ongepatshket (messed up) please contact our offices.”

What’s with these special prosecutors anyway? Kenneth Starr is hired to investigate an obscure land deal and ends up impeaching the President for not coming clean about his sex life. And now Patrick Fitzgerald, the US Attorney from Chicago appointed to find out who violated the Intelligence Identities Protection Act by leaking to conservative columnist Robert Novak the identity of a covert CIA employee, ends up sending to prison a New York Times reporter who never wrote about the case.

Actually, for a while it looked as if Fitzgerald was going to use the government’s contempt power to force not one, but two journalists “not charged with any wrongdoing,” to quote William Safire, of all people, to betray their confidential sources. But at the last minute Time‘s Matt Cooper, who, like Judith Miller of the Times, seemed ready to go to jail rather than betray a source, got a message from his source, Karl Rove, releasing him from his promise of confidentiality and agreed to appear before the grand jury. Cooper, incidentally, seems to have become a target largely because of an article he (and two other Time reporters) wrote for Time‘s online edition three days after Novak’s scoop, saying that Time had received a leak similar to Novak’s. Subsequently Time Inc. editor in chief Norman Pearlstine, over Cooper’s objections, agreed to turn over Cooper’s notes, which included an e-mail showing that Rove had mentioned Plame, though not by name, and the prosecutor insisted Cooper testify in person.

Since much of the case is still shrouded in secrecy, determining the motives of the prosecutor is a mug’s game. But understanding the forces in play and the issues at stake would seem to be critical to anyone who cares about the ability of the press to gather and publish the information a democracy requires.

It all started on July 6, 2003, when Ambassador Joseph Wilson, based on a trip he took to Niger at the CIA’s behest, wrote an op-ed piece in the Times claiming that George W. Bush had relied on discredited information when he said in his 2003 State of the Union address that Saddam had tried to buy yellow-cake uranium in Niger.

Enter Robert Novak, who reported in his July 14 syndicated column that, according to “two senior administration officials,” Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, whom Novak described as “an Agency operative on weapons of mass destruction,” had “suggested” Wilson for the mission. Three days later David Corn wrote on the Nation website that if Novak’s reporting was accurate, the leakers may have violated the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, which makes it a crime to deliberately and knowingly divulge the identity of a covert intelligence agent, which Valerie Plame indeed was.

Several months later–after the CIA asked the Justice Department to investigate the leak–Attorney General John Ashcroft, who recused himself from playing any role in the case (what did he know and when did he know it?), appointed Fitzgerald special prosecutor to look into it. Subpoenas were duly issued to, among others, Walter Pincus of the Washington Post, who had written in October 2003 that White House officials had talked to a Post reporter about Plame, and also to NBC’s Tim Russert, Miller, Cooper and probably Novak.

We still don’t know whether Novak was actually called and what he did. He has said that on advice of counsel he will not talk about his role until the case is over, at which point he will tell all. In any event, the statute criminalizes leakers rather than leakees unless the leakees are engaged in “a pattern of activities intended to identify and expose covert agents.”

We cannot know who told the grand jury what, but we do know that after the lower courts backed up Fitzgerald and the Supreme Court declined to hear the case, Time‘s Pearlstine, who serves on the board of the Committee to Protect Journalists (as do I), decided that in this instance the notes of his journalist Matt Cooper needed no protection. Pearlstine told the Times that his “knee jerk” reaction was that nothing was more important than a journalist’s keeping his word. But then “the journalist and the lawyer were fighting in my head” and “if presidents are not above the law, how is it that journalists are?” Pearlstine chose to rely on his head rather than his knee.

Thus far, the actions of both the special prosecutor and those he has summoned to testify have raised almost as many questions as they have answered. Yes, it seems brutally excessive, and dangerous social policy, to put Miller behind bars for refusing to give up a source. But since she never published a story on the matter, among the mysteries of this case are how and why Fitzgerald came to subpoena her in the first place. (The answer may lie in Judge David Tatel’s concurring opinion in the appellate court where he seemed to want to create a protection of journalists’ sources but decided that, based on secret evidence, Fitzgerald had good reasons to go after Cooper and Miller. Alas, the part of his decision referring to Fitzgerald’s basis for going after them is blacked out.) Was she herself, as some of her detractors hint, a secondhand source out to discredit Wilson, whose op-ed was a rebuke to many of her stories on Iraq? As Frank Rich has written, she “was one of two reporters responsible for a notoriously credulous front-page Times story about aluminum tubes that enabled the Administration’s propaganda campaign to trump up Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction arsenal.”

David Halberstam, criticizing Pearlstine’s decision to turn Cooper’s notes over to the special prosecutor, asked, “Is this a journalistic company or an entertainment company?” But if the answer is that it’s both, and the entertainment portion of a $5.6 billion company requires approval by the Feds for mergers, acquisitions and takeovers, where does one’s fiduciary duty lie? And if it is to protect your corporation’s assets, do they, as media lawyer Jim Goodale has maintained, include the First Amendment? In his book The Politics of Truth, Wilson states categorically that “the assertion that Valerie had played any substantive role in the decision to ask me to go to Niger was false on the face of it.” If, as Wilson claims, his wife did not suggest him for the job, what obligation did Novak, or anyone else, have to protect the identity of a source who misled them?

And what of the Times itself? On the surface, Miller is a First Amendment martyr and the Times, as it did in the Pentagon Papers case, has done itself proud. Second guessers, however, like the Post‘s David Ignatius, see Miller and the Times as having allowed the press “to be dragged into a no-win case that will weaken our ability to protect true whistle-blowers and thereby serve the public.” That, presumably, is why reporters like the Post‘s Pincus and Glenn Kessler and NBC’s Russert let their lawyers work out arrangements that provide Fitzgerald with the information he wanted without compromising the reporters’ sources.

Whether or not he ends up indicting the leakers, the question remains: Were his threats and calls for imprisonment vindictive overreaching? At the time the Intelligence Identities Protection Act was under consideration, in 1982, the civil liberties community was split. And although a less draconian version of the bill was ultimately passed, the more radical civil libertarians agreed with Representative Don Edwards, a former FBI agent particularly sensitive to First Amendment issues, who said during the floor debate that “no amount of tinkering can rehabilitate a law which criminalizes constitutionally protected freedoms of speech, press and political expression.” Jack Shafer, a columnist for Slate, has argued that Fitzgerald is using a law that “was meant to protect journalists…to create the procedural equivalent of an Official Secrets Act. This is bullying, pure and simple.” On the other hand, what should a prosecutor do when confronted with a statute in which the crime is leaking by a high government official and the (journalist) leakees are the only witnesses to this abuse of power? And where does the public’s right to know come into it?

None of these are simple issues, but here is where I come out.First and foremost, it is wrong to put reporters in prison for keeping faith with their sources. Our ideal of an open society, and the free flow of information it presupposes, depends on protecting and encouraging such whistle-blowers. Also, as Justice William O. Douglas has written, when juridical values conflict, “the press has a preferred position in our constitutional scheme, not to enable it to make money, not to set newsmen apart as a favored class but to bring to fulfillment the public’s right to know.” Last and far from least, under the Bush Administration the free press has suffered a series of setbacks. Eric Alterman has documented in these pages how the White House has waged war on the critical press by curtailing its access to routine information, suborning friendly journalists and using other underhanded tactics [see “Bush’s War on the Press,” May 9]. Enough is enough. Undermining journalism at its sources is too much.

Speaking of sources, I understand the argument against a journalist ever blowing a source. Nevertheless, I believe that at the heart of a reporter’s promise to protect the identify of his source is a contract: You tell me the truth as you know it, and I will protect your anonymity. If the source breaks that agreement, there is no agreement. As Bill Kovach, chairman of the Committee of Concerned Journalists, and Tom Rosenstiel, director of The Project for Excellence in Journalism, have written, “A growing number of journalists believe that if a source who has been granted anonymity is found to have misled the reporter the source’s identity should be revealed. Part of the bargain for anonymity is truthfulness.” Los Angeles Times columnist Robert Scheer has suggested as much in the Wen Ho Lee case, in which the Los Alamos scientist falsely accused of leaking classified information is suing the government for violating his privacy. The judge has directed the journalists who published mis- and perhaps disinformation about him to reveal their sources.

As for the Times‘s legal strategy in defending Judith Miller’s refusal to cooperate rather than trying to strike a deal, I find Stephen Gillers of New York University Law School persuasive when he recalls that in 1975, when Congress for the first time put the federal rules of evidence in statutory form, they explicitly delegated to the courts the authority to elaborate a reporter’s privilege in the common law. In his concurring opinion in the 1972 case Branzburg v. Hayes, in which the Court said the First Amendment provides no automatic shield, Justice Powell seemed to invite future courts to develop a modest journalists’ privilege protecting them from unnecessary harassment by law enforcement. Who can say that the New York Times and its counsel Floyd Abrams were wrong to invite the courts down that road?

In the absence of a federal shield law, these controversies can be decided only case by case and conscience by conscience. But that is different from leaving it up to the corporate conscience. Time Warner’s conduct is a good example of why. When Pearlstine decided to turn the documents over to the grand jury, he told the Times that money wasn’t the issue. But in another story Lorne Manly and David Kirkpatrick reported that three executives involved in the internal deliberations, “speaking on the condition of anonymity because the company did not want them talking publicly about the matter” (I had to read that sentence twice), said that Pearlstine was convinced the judge might jack up the $1,000-a-day fine. Anyway, this is not about Pearlstine but whether promises–even by employees of mega corporations–should be protected.

Where does all this leave us? There is always the possibility that technically nobody is “guilty” because under the terms of the statute the person(s) disclosing Plame’s identity had to have known that she was truly “covert,” and maybe the leaker(s) didn’t know that; nevertheless, Fitzgerald may well pursue perjury and obstruction of justice cases against him (or them).

Be that as it may, if I am right, the matter of a reporter’s relationship to his/her sources won’t be resolved until we break up the media behemoths; transform the judiciary into one that shares the views of Justices Hugo Black, William O. Douglas and William Brennan about the primacy of the First Amendment; repeal the Intelligence Identities Protection Act; and recognize that criminalizing journalists’ conversations has only contributed to the confusions of the present situation.

But in case not all (or none) of the above happens, there are a few slender threads of hope on the legislative front: Republicans and Democrats have introduced several different bills for a federal shield law in both houses, claiming to offer journalists absolute protection but allowing the government to determine who is and is not a journalist, putting at risk independent journalists, not to mention bloggers. Conceivably the plight of Judith Miller will invite constructive legislation.

Whatever happens or doesn’t happen to Karl Rove, the whole episode is another black mark against an Administration that used the specter of WMDs to justify our invasion of a sovereign nation; and then, for political purposes, blew the cover of an agent who for twenty years has had WMD as her portfolio, doubtless setting back the antiproliferation cause in ways we cannot imagine.

Whatever their motives, Mark (Deep Throat) Felt; Woodstein (Bob and Carl); Judge John Sirica, who refused to accept the notion that the Watergate break-in began and ended with the men arrested inside the Watergate complex (and the two White House aides who recruited them); Senator Sam Ervin, with the battered copy of the US Constitution in his pocket; Senator Howard Baker, who asked what did the President know and when did he know it; John Dean, who did much to answer that question–all of these, and a constitutional process involving a cast of thousands, deserve history’s thanks for helping to reveal that something was rotten in President Nixon’s Beltway.

Having said that, it behooves us to remember, in the course of today’s debate over whether Felt was a hero or a complicated villain, that he had a pre-Watergate history, emblematic of the intelligence agency in which he served as FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s number two: Namely, he helped preside over an agency that systematically engaged in such practices as warrantless wiretaps, breaking and entering, mail intercepts and the photographing of letters, documents, correspondence and minutes of meetings, which targeted not only members of such suspect organizations as the Socialist Workers Party, the Communist Party and the Weather Underground but also their friends and relatives! It was only when these illegal and unconstitutional techniques were brought to bear against the Democratic National Committee that the establishment was bestirred to take the actions that ultimately led to Nixon’s downfall.

So while there is much room for congratulation on the self (or family) outing of Deep Throat and all he represented, and for appropriate ruminating on the benefits and problematics of journalists’ using anonymous sources, there are even more urgent/ample grounds for cogitation on the underlying lessons for the democratic process of this bizarre episode in our history.

Some years ago, in his magisterial study The Age of Surveillance, the late Frank Donner, a frequent contributor to this magazine, documented how in the pre-Watergate years the FBI “twisted history’s arm” and won itself a permanent grant of authority to engage in subversive-activities intelligence, a franchise it regularly abused. Nor was the bureau alone in pursuing this pattern of systemic intrusion on liberty in the name of national safety and the use of “intelligence”–in theory, the gathering of information–as an instrument of control. Those same years saw the CIA exploit countersubversion to discredit the peace movement for political purposes, even as it institutionalized its own illegal domestic surveillance system.

At a moment when Congress is asked to sign a new blank check to the intelligence community in the name of combating the latest threat to national safety (a k a the renewal of the USA Patriot Act), it is imperative to acknowledge these radical departures from the democratic process if we are to avoid their recurrence. Speculation on whether Deep Throat is a good guy or a bad guy is fun and games, but ultimately a distraction from this more critical focus.

On February 1, 2003, just weeks before the invasion of Iraq, I opened my New York Times to an article by Todd Purdum of the Washington bureau titled “The Brains Behind Bush’s War Policy.” From the Times‘s Washington bureau I expect the scuttlebutt, the inside word from the denizens of the war party. But what Purdum gives us is less inside dope from the inner circle of hawks than outside analysis from The National Interest, The Weekly Standard, from various (neocon) journals of opinion. He reports their common theme (in articles starting in 1997): “Saddam must go.” And the essence of all their arguments in favor of war with Iraq? That the doctrine of containment no longer applies in a post-Soviet, post-cold war world. (Containment, of course, was first set forth as policy in another journal of opinion, Foreign Affairs, which published George Kennan’s history-making essay “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” under the pseudonym “X,” in July 1947.)

So take it from me (or better yet, take it from the Times), the journal of critical opinion is here to stay.

Fifteen years after we came in for our share (more than our share) of contumely for inviting retrograde and/or politically incompatible journals of opinion to our conference at the University of California at Los Angeles, I asked National Review editor Rich Lowry to lecture at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism (see how ecumenical, fair and balanced I can be?). But he outfoxed me. Instead of spewing right-wing propaganda, he talked about what our two magazines had in common. He said that like The Nation, National Review exists to make a point, not a profit; and that opinion journals are at their best when they are fighting for ideas that are out of favor, like the idea that the case for keeping drugs illegal is intellectually bankrupt, an idea on which both magazines concur. (Although I’m glad The Nation has given space to the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s contention that decriminalization will amount to suicide for the boyz ‘n the hood.) When and if the retrograde drug laws are changed, I guess it’s true that it will be at least partly because these journals have been chipping away at them all these years.

Christopher Hitchens once traced what he called “a thin reddish thread” connecting J.B. Priestley’s article on the nuclear threat to E.P. Thompson’s history-making Committee for Nuclear Disarmament. I don’t know whether Thompson would have agreed with Hitch on the role of Priestley’s article. I do know that as the British social historian and leader of the European nuclear disarmament movement saw it, by the early 1980s America and Europe appeared to have drifted beyond the range of communication, and the drift seemed to be endangering both continents.

The Nation invited him to send his warning to his American friends–and devoted an entire issue to his message: “We must protest if we are to survive. Protest is the only realistic form of civil defense.” This slogan of the British antinuclear movement may have sounded idealistic at the time, but Thompson’s confidence that rhetoric could be turned into action proved prophetic. A decade before the disappearance of the Soviet Union and the self-transformation of its satellite East European regimes, he wrote that even though only courageous dissidents will, in the first place, be able to take an open part, protesting “will provide those conditions of relaxation of tension which will weaken the rationale and legitimacy of repressive state measures, and will allow the pressures for democracy and détente to assert themselves in more active and open ways.”

I cite these prescient sentiments not just because I agreed with them, and not just because I believe them to be as compelling an explanation for the meltdown of the USSR as the claim that the arms race bankrupted it (although I do), but because “protest and survive” is more than a stratagem. It is a philosophy, and as such describes more than the British antinuclear movement. Indeed, it is as fair an account as we have of the animating force behind the journal of dissent itself. When Thompson wrote about generating an alternative logic, an opposition that must, at every level of society, win the support of multitudes and bring its influence to bear on the rulers of the world, his argument exemplified the case for a truly independent journalism.

Now consider the injunction of The Nation‘s first editor, E.L. Godkin, not to be the organ of any party, movement or sect. A magazine like The Nation can inspire, it can mobilize, it can organize, but in the end it is not a movement, since it is also the job of our journal to deal with–not omit or ignore–inconvenient facts; to persuade, in philosopher Jürgen Habermas’s phrase, through the power of the better argument. There is a time to protest and a time to consider, to analyze. To me, this double life, this mixed mandate, the William Lloyd Garrison-E.P. Thompson tradition of protest and the E.L. Godkin-Jürgen Habermas tradition of intellectual debate are not either-or. It is the job of the journal of opinion–postmodernism to the contrary notwithstanding–to tell the truth, and when there is no truth to tell, tell that, too. At least in the case of The Nation, although it doesn’t always seem that way, the two traditions keep company.

I suspect that The Nation has survived all these years partly because it serves no party, movement or sect but also because of its independence, financial as well as political. I believe there is another reason why The Nation survives as America’s oldest weekly in a business sector where survival may be the ultimate test of success. And it has to do partly with the raison d’être of all journals of opinion, and partly with The Nation‘s values and ideals.

Protest against injustice, protest against the despoliation of the world’s resources, protest against the arbitrary exercise of power, protest against prejudice and discrimination, protest on behalf of the dispossessed and the disenfranchised, protest on behalf of those who don’t read us are only one part of The Nation‘s mission, but a critical part.

At first I thought it was an anomaly when Rupert Murdoch and his News Corporation agreed to fund The Weekly Standard. Because by definition a journal of opinion, if it is to be politically and culturally free, must also be financially independent. The conventional wisdom tells us that in the world of mass magazines, so-called stand-alones are a thing of the past. Not so in the world of opinion journals, where stand-aloneness seems to be something of a necessary condition.

But then I thought, Well, in the UK the Spectator, currently owned by the London Telegraph‘s communications conglomerate, has survived a series of megacorporate owners. And though like the Standard, only more so, it often values style over substance and is too quirky to be circumscribed by a party line, it is nevertheless an opinion journal of the right. These magazines are in the position of defending the powers that be, and so conglomerate ownership, which is anathema to the left, may be organically appropriate to their mission as magazines dedicated to free-market capitalism.

Either way, as The American Prospect‘s Bob Kuttner has observed, one fundamental difference between left and right is that “the right is always floating downstream relative to economic power. And the left is always heading upstream. That helps explain why the right is always so well-funded. Because it is validating the world view of people who have a ton of money.”

Nevertheless, I guess I still subscribe to the idea that those of us in the opinion industry have a stake in protecting one another’s space. And if you’re not already, you should become a subscriber, too.

We are told that because the new media quicken the news cycle–that the twenty-four-hour news cycle is now a twenty-four-minute one–the weekly will soon be, if it is not already, outmoded if not outmodemed. To the contrary, what the speeded-up new media mean is that the news is too often replaced by un-fact-checked hyperbole; and thoughtful debate, argument and opinion by shouting matches.

What effect will the new communications technologies have on current cultural formats, artifacts and institutions? Talkies put silent movies out of business. But the paperback extended the audience for the hardcover novel, and neither television nor videotapes put talkies out of business. Will the advent of journals like Slate and Salon and the arrival of bloggers–not to mention the availability of online versions of thousands, hundreds of thousands, of print opinion pieces in electronic form–negate the need for the classic, stapled journal of opinion?

I don’t think so. But then I’m told by my mostly younger colleagues that I don’t get it. I don’t. It seems to me that despite the benefits, low costs, speed and interactivity of the blogosphere, the depositing of prose in an electronic database cannot compete with the canonization conferred by those old-fashioned print journals, at least not in contemporary cultural terms. That an essay has survived the vetting process of a board of editors on whose political/cultural judgment the reader has come to rely (though not necessarily to concur in) tells the reader not only how to read a particular piece but that it may be worth the effort. Moreover, one’s reading of, say, an Arthur Danto essay in The Nation on the end of beauty may be influenced by its being sandwiched between Gore Vidal’s requiem for an empire and Katha Pollitt on “Are Women Morally Superior?” (I forget where Katha came out, but of course that is not the point. The unhurried superior quality of her prose, her argument, her moral sensibility is the point. And the rhythm of magazine reading and mulling is the point.) Over the long haul, these magazines provide their own narratives, a long-running moral/political/cultural paradigm complete with its own heroes and villains. Which is not to say there is not room for an electronic republic of letters to supplement its print predecessor.

Perhaps I am a victim of my own mail (not the hate mail, of which I receive more than my share but the other kind). Only today I found this message on my voice mail from a woman who identified herself as a 68-year-old widow: “I need to ask a favor of you. I’m stuck in Abbeville, Louisiana, and I want to move, but I want to move somewhere where I can see a Democrat before I die. It occurs to me that you might be able to rummage up a place where people are actually subscribers to The Nation, where I would have somebody to talk to. I don’t want their names or anything. I just want a town where there are a few kindred souls.” And she added: “If you could call around noon I’d be grateful, I’m about to cut the grass.” I have always believed that if Gallup or Roper or the latest public-opinion surveyor asked a representative sample of our readers, “Who are you?” any number of them might answer (never mind their vocation and religion, marital status, gender and/or sexual orientation), “I am a Nation subscriber.” Just the other weekend in the Sunday Styles section of the New York Times, the featured wedding described how one Nina Rowe, the bride, met her groom-to-be. She found him on an Internet dating service under his handle, “nationreader.” The readers of journals of opinion constitute nongeographical communities, whose self-identification and links with people they have never met are no less real for that. They are indeed kindred souls. Maybe it’s no accident that the social anthropologist Benedict Anderson, who invented and elaborated the idea of the imaginary community, has a brother, Perry Anderson, who edits a journal of opinion, New Left Review.

Although last year The Nation took in more money than it spent, we’re still subsidized by anonymous well-wishers, and what with rising postal rates, rising paper costs, rising healthcare premiums and our inimitable capacity to offend our most generous donors, next year we will undoubtedly be back in the red. More important, short-run profit can contribute to survival, but it is no measure of mission. Every publisher of The Nation, and I am no exception, has understood that it is a public trust.

So I end where I began. You need to run one of these magazines like a business or else you will be out of business. But if a business is all you are, you will be out of business, too. As The Texas Observer‘s founding editor, Ronnie Dugger, wrote in Volume I, Number 1 back in 1952: “We have to survive as a business before we can survive as a morality; but we would rather perish as a business than survive as an immorality.” The tension between market and mission is unresolved, although the choice is clear. When in 2002 anonymous Disney executives were talking about shutting down ABC’s Nightline because it had “lost its relevance,” a part of me thought that if relevance is measured by the bottom line, they are right. I was glad to be in the un-mass media.

How conveniently they forget.

When it comes to presidential politics there seem to be a half-dozen narratives favored by big (and small-minded) media: Who’s ahead?, “Gotcha!”, the (cynical) assumption that all policy pronouncements are explainable as political maneuvering, the idea that a campaign is being run by either skilled pros or incompetent losers, and here’s what [name your candidate] ought to do, etc.

Last week the dominant narrative was Here’s what Kerry ought to do. The week before it was Who’s ahead? And this week it was “Gotcha!” The only problem was, they “got” the wrong guy–and missed the main issue.

Yes, Dan Rather and his 60 Minutes II colleagues ought to feel embarrassed, but so should his 60 Minutes I colleagues who seemed more eager to exonerate 60 Minutes from having anything to do with those tainted documents than to support their colleague, who has anchored CBS News with passion and professionalism for twenty-three years.

In retrospect, as many bloggers and Monday- and Tuesday- and Wednesday-morning quarterbacks will tell you, instead of going with documents of dubious provenance they should have gone with Marian Carr Knox, who, as Lieut. Col. Jerry Killian’s secretary, would have typed them but says she didn’t, yet adds that the information in them accurately reflects the views of her boss.

If, as seems to be the case, the underlying point of the 60 Minutes II episode was accurate, then it’s a sad comment on the rest of the press that they have relentlessly and repeatedly focused on what Dan got wrong and relatively ignored what Dan got right (namely, that pressure was put on Killian to “sugar coat” Bush’s National Guard record, that Bush got into the Guard via favoritism, that he got paid for meetings he didn’t attend, that he missed the physical he signed up for, and all the rest).

What Rather got right relates to yet another presidential narrative–the one having to do with the President’s character. If indeed Bush skipped out on his National Guard obligations at the time, that does not speak well for his character then. And if he arranged to have this dereliction expunged from his file after he became President, that does not speak well for his character now. (It may also be a violation of the law.)

Of course, if the media do their job between now and Election Day, there is one other narrative they ought to bring into focus–on the front page, the editorial page, the nightly news, in questions for the candidates during debates and everywhere else–and that is the issue that should have been front and center from the outset: the narrative about Iraq. Is the US war on Iraq an extension of what we did in Afghanistan, a real “war on terrorism” that’s making the world a safer place? Or, especially in the absence of weapons of mass destruction, is it a disastrous diversion that has made our country less secure, resulted in the deaths of more than a thousand Americans and tens of thousands of Iraqis, and earned the United States unnecessary enemies around the world?

That, rather than Rather, is the issue.

Everyone agrees. The story is that there is no story. The candidates have already been chosen. The platform has been written to avoid controversy. That’s why the early focus has been on the sideshows (since everyone knows that politicians get booed at baseball games, was it wise of Kerry to throw that first ball? What will Teresa Heinz Kerry say next?).

So here’s the story behind the story.

There are, first of all, the delegates, who this year are virtually all voting the way they are told to vote (and for the most part want to vote, because they want to beat Bush). Then there are the 15,000 mainstream journalists who outnumber the delegates three to one, who are, as the phrase goes, stenographers to power. Both these groups are partakers of the conventional convention wisdom: that because polls show Kerry does better among those who know him, the goal of this convention is to tell his story. (And, his group of a dozen political strategists who meet daily would add, in the words of consultant John Martilla, “to make sure that prominent in the narrative is his ability to handle issues of national security.”)

Next are the sponsors–Union Pacific, MassMutual, Edison International, BellSouth and all the rest, including the liquor and food companies–who pay for the countless receptions, at which delegates and the press consume gallons of booze and tons of sumptuous hors d’oeuvres as they talk to one another about the evil influence of big money on politics. I myself consumed more than my share of such complimentaries at the moving reception honoring Senator George McGovern (attended by former candidates Mondale and Dukakis), courtesy of Ocean Spray Products.

And finally there are the dissenters, and they are where they are–at the center of what should be the debate but on the fringes of the convention.

In the absence of any official joining of such issues as the war on Iraq, globalization, the death penalty and media concentration, all these player-constituencies carry on doing what they do best.

My sense, for example, is that in almost every state delegation a mini drama is being played out over the transfer of power to the next generation. In New York, if Attorney General Eliot Spitzer runs for governor, Mark Green, Andrew Cuomo and perhaps Robert Kennedy Jr., among others, are in line to run for attorney general. When I asked Mark about this and what sort of politicking one could do at the convention, all he said was, “Look and you will see any number of us taking down names of people to talk to later. We’re keeping lists like a prosecutor at a Mafia wedding.”

On Monday I went to an ADA lunch, where one of the speakers was Representative Barney Frank, as outrageously witty as ever (“If my Hebrew was better, I’d say Kaddish for moderate Republicanism”) and as on-message as everyone else: There were, he said, two models for transforming the Democratic Party in a progressive direction–the Nader-outsider model (many boos) and the Jesse-Jackson-enter-the-Democratic-primary model. He explained that “our role is to carry on that fight, and the way to get there is to follow the Jesse model.” But the backstory to Frank’s convention was that if Kerry wins the presidency, Barney (along with Edward Markey and a half-dozen others) will be running for the Senate. Go Barney!

The big-shot journos, having not that much to say about the politicos, did have some interesting things to say about each other. At this year’s Shorenstein Center brunch, anchors Tom Brokaw, Peter Jennings and Dan Rather, along with PBS’s Jim Lehrer and CNN’s Judy Woodruff, got in a set-to about whether it was a good or a bad thing that the Big Three networks were limiting coverage of this year’s convention to an hour a night. To me, the most interesting moment came when Nolan Bowie, a Shorenstein fellow, asked why they thought so many young people say they get their news from Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show rather than network nightly news. The panel mistakenly used the question as a jumping-off point to speculate on whether the kids knew the difference between satire and the real thing and how the nightly news could be adjusted to appeal to the younger viewers.

I thought the panel missed the point. Kids watch Stewart because he is very funny but also because he openly frames the news and shows his contempt for hypocrisy, sham and cant, whereas the anchors, in thrall to the convention of narrative neutrality (which confuses moderation of tone with objectivity), pretend to have no views of their own. There was much talk about bias and the “L” (for liberal) word but no talk about the “A” (for authenticity) word.

And finally, there was the convention outside the convention–in the streets and in various venues around town. At one of these events, I ran into the Reverend Jackson, and since I had just seen his picture on various front pages smiling alongside George W. Bush, I asked him what that was all about. He told me, “I asked the President one question: Did he intend to enforce the law so that every vote counted? And he said he’d get back to me.” Jesse said he’d heard nothing and that he’d get me a copy of his follow-up letter–which he did when I ran into him the next afternoon at a forum (“The Case for a Right-to-Vote Constitutional Amendment”) co-sponsored by The Nation and moderated by John Nichols. The letter requested a meeting with the President to discuss guaranteeing the “integrity and protection” of the voting process. At the forum, Jesse’s son, Congressman Jesse Jackson Jr., spoke eloquently: “If I had a big piece of yellow ribbon, I would wrap it around the state of Florida and declare it a crime scene.”

So maybe the story behind the story of this convention has to do with the next generation after all. And I haven’t even mentioned Barack Obama, the US Senate candidate from Illinois who electrified the convention Tuesday night (and whom Studs Terkel thinks may one day be President).

LITTLE RED SCHOOLHOUSE RED?

Washington, DC

Re Victor Navasky’s “Seeing Red at the Post” [Oct. 13], about my coverage in the Washington Post of Kathy Boudin’s parole. Navasky takes me to task for describing Elisabeth Irwin High School, which Boudin attended in the late 1950s, as “Communist-influenced.” Citing my recent (private) e-mail correspondence with Andrew McLaren, the school’s current director, he says that I declined McLaren’s request for a correction, and that I offered “selectively” quoted information from the school’s seventy-fifth anniversary commemorative publication to buttress my point.

But it’s Navasky who’s doing the selecting. The entire quotation from the school’s publication, which Navasky elides in your pages, reads as follows: “In January, 1945, we voted to finish History with Russian History instead of the last two years of American History. We were all pretty much left-leaning ‘progressives,’ and thought Russia was great and Communism a noble experiment. Many flirted with Communism as an alternative.” The upper-case Cs are in the original, by the way.

I cited this to McLaren in response to his claim that Elisabeth Irwin “has never been pro-communist or communist-influenced.” McLaren wrote back cordially that he “appreciated” my comments, then offered to rewrite his letter and submit the revised version for publication, minus the request for a correction, as it turned out. That was that.

Navasky called the Post‘s Christine Haughney in New York to inquire about the story, but for some reason he didn’t call me. I would have gladly explained all of the above to him if he had done so.

CHARLES LANE

NAVASKY REPLIES

New York City

First, Charles Lane takes me to task for quoting a paragraph from what he calls “private” correspondence with EI’s director. Since Lane sent it in response to the director’s letter to the Post, I assumed it was not meant to be unpublic.

Second, Lane takes me to task for not quoting more of his “private” letter. I’m glad he has filled us in on the rest of it, but again, it’s a non sequitur. The letter he is quoting is merely one alum’s account; others had opposite experiences and conflicting memories. The real question is, Why include such an irrelevant (and incendiary) opinion as if it were fact in a news article ostensibly about something else?

Finally, we can all agree that Andrew McLaren is more of a gentleman than I am, but my suspicion (perhaps based on the Post‘s decision not to publish my own letter to the editor) is that had he not agreed to cut the offending passage, his letter would have not been published.

We are pleased to publish Lane’s letter–in full.

VICTOR NAVASKY

IF IT BLEEDS, IT LEADS

As we expect from our loyal but fractious readers (who tend to write in when they’re peeved), our new cover design, inaugurated on the September 29 issue featuring John Nichols’s “Blood in the Water” cover story, was met with a mixture of excitement and pique. It took us back to the days of our design overhaul, January 1, 1996, which caused an explosion of protest–and excitement. (Readers grew to love the redesign.) –The Editors

Crawfordsville, Ind.

I note with some trepidation that you have hired a new design team, and I am appalled at the savageness of the imagery of their first cover. The knowledge that George Bush’s policies have wreaked death and devastation across the globe should be a deterrent, not an impetus, for this kind of visual.

JESSICA ROSENBERG

Palo Alto, Calif.

Is it any coincidence that your new cover design, with the head “Blood in the Water,” has what’s known as a “full bleed” image (running off all four sides)? It’s a dubious visual pun. Previous Nation covers by the design firm Open are sadly missed.

MARK EASTMAN

Evanston, Ill.

I was impressed by the look of the first cover by the Avenging Angels. Alas, I was a little disappointed by the physics. The picture has the larger bubbles (rising through the water on the lower right) lagging below the smaller ones, when in fact the opposite happens in nature. The arrangement is appropriate for raindrops falling down, not bubbles going up.

DAVID FERSTER

Brooklyn, NY

I don’t really like the new covers. Your content, as always, is great. Lead us out of the ignorant darkness that is American politics right now.

AMELIA HENNIGHAUSEN

Brooklyn, NY

Nooooo! Mere months after The American Prospect stopped using Bell Gothic for its headlines, you start using it on your covers. I can’t escape. Bell Gothic was designed for small font sizes, as used in telephone books, but it’s a terrible large font. I may have to start ripping the covers off your wonderful magazine. I’m not a crank. Really.

DANIEL T. MAINZ

New York City

The revised logo is quite handsome. I’m particularly fond of the drop shadow, a sophisticated design tool. I look forward to the introduction of bolding and underlining you have craftily held back while we adjust to this groundbreaking evolution.

NICHOLAS MUSOLINO

Las Vegas

I recently renewed for two more years. Keep up the good work. I like the new cover format, too.

WILLIAM HUGGINS

Brooklyn, NY

Thank you for the past few years of smart, exciting covers. Their sophistication and clarity matched the writing and, damn it, looked good on the subway. The visual transformation a few years ago from stodgy to wide-awake and vital was a bold move–no wonder your circulation climbed. The new look is crude, the typography clumsy, the imagery obvious, the layout lifeless. Please reconsider.

ROBERT KIMMEL

Medford, Mass.

I just received the September 29 issue and I am impressed with the new look. Stay with it.

CARL MARTIN

THE PRICE OF LIBERTY

Batavia, NY

“It can’t happen here,” the Chilean people said on September 11, 1973 (Ariel Dorfman, “Lessons of a Catastrophe”; Peter Kornbluh, “Chile, 9/11/73”; Marc Cooper, “Remembering Allende”) [Sept. 29]. Except it did happen. It can happen. Anywhere. Anytime. The price of liberty is eternal vigilance. Our current leaders would have us disregard this. “Go shopping,” they urge, “and leave the governing to us.” To argue is unpatriotic. Undoubtedly, the only Chileans who disappeared were those who disloyally refused to go along with Pinochet’s plan. Or got in the way. Or were killed by accident.

It can happen here. As Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1781, “Every government degenerates when trusted to the rulers of the people alone. The people themselves therefore are its only safe repositories.”

WILLIAM P. TROLINGER

Garden City, NY

In addition to 9/11/01 and “Chile, 9/11/73” there was another, earlier 9/11. On September 11, 1914, the French colonial rulers of Morocco issued an edict placing Morocco’s Middle Atlas Berbers under French legal jurisdiction as part of a larger policy intended to de-Islamify the Berbers and assimilate them into Western culture. A second, more famous “Berber Edict” was issued in 1930, extending this policy. The second edict was interpreted as an attack on Islam, and protests against it became the rallying point of Moroccan nationalism. The date of the second edict was May 16, a date commemorated by the Casablanca bombings on May 16, 2003. It seems unlikely that this is mere coincidence. The silence of our leaders and the US intelligence community on this subject suggests either ignorance or an unwillingness to admit the links between colonialism and jihadist terrorism.

SPENCER SEGALLA

THE COMPASSION OF W

Silver Spring, Md.

George W. Bush’s “compassionate conservatism” [Joe Conason, “Where’s the Compassion?” Sept. 15] reminds me of Richard Nixon’s “law and order,” Herbert Hoover’s “prosperity is just around the corner” and George H.W. Bush’s “read my lips–no new taxes!” A revealing measure of the President’s “compassion” is his record on tobacco. In February a twenty-eight-member advisory commission on smoking and health unanimously recommended a $2-a-pack boost in the federal cigarette tax, saying it would prevent 3 million premature deaths and help 5 million smokers quit within a year. No way, said the compassionate one, who has received large infusions of campaign money from tobacco interests.

The White House tried for years to eviscerate the global tobacco-control treaty adopted this year by the World Health Organization. It also sought to use anti-terrorism legislation to shield US tobacco companies from foreign lawsuits. This from the world’s best-known exponent of compassion.

MORT PAULSON

Santa Rosa, Calif.

Bush’s “compassionate conservatism” is in keeping with his abuse of the English language. In the same vein, when his vaunted reason for a pre-emptive strike against Iraq turned out to be bushwah, he transformed his motivation into his deep desire to liberate Iraqis from their murderous leader. So, like the Americans in Vietnam who destroyed a village in order to save it, Bush unleashed his war machine to slaughter thousands. In Bush’s lexicon this would be “compassionate carnage.”

LIESELOTTE HOFMANN

Littleton, Colo.

Whenever I hear George W. Bush talk about bringing democracy to the long-suffering people of Iraq, I think back to his very undemocratic “election” in 2000. When he travels around Africa espousing the virtues of democracy, I feel the disconnect between those words and Karl Rove’s attempts to gerrymander the 2004 Congressional elections in states like Colorado and Texas. And when I hear W talk about the need to topple regimes in Iran and Syria to bring democracy to the good folks in those places, I am reminded of the 200 million corporate dollars he will have to spend for his “re-election” on a media machine made GOP-friendly by Michael Powell and his FCC buddies.

As I contemplate this lunacy, I am left with the unsettling thought that George W. Bush is to democracy as Idi Amin is to vegetarianism.

DONALD R. KNIGHT