Where the News Ends:

...The other was Reuben Markham, Kansas-born, for many years a journalist in the Balkans, a passionate anti-Nazi and, as soon as he learned what Communism had meant to his liberal and democratic friends in Bulgaria, Yugoslavia and Romania, a passionate anti-Communist...

...This aureole was a compound of warm humanistic culture, of selflessness, of absorption in causes and interests that had nothing to do with personal self-seeking, of contempt, perhaps rather indifference, for everything mean and petty, for such considerations as fame and wealth and "status seeking...

...His death 11 years ago was probably hastened by his unsparing dedication to the struggle against Communist tyranny and the false images which Communist propaganda tries to create...

...Besides possessing those rare qualities of the old Russian intellectual that made him a personal friend of inestimable value, Sol Levitas had in him the gifts of a great editor...

...Financially, The New Leader, under the indomitable direction of Levitas, was somewhat in the position of Austria, according to a Vienna wisecrack of the inter-war period: "Always hopeless, but never serious...

...At any rate it has always been associated in my mind with my years in Russia, with the warm, outgoing, witty wife of an agricultural professor who was one of our best friends during 12 years of life in Moscow, with the old liberal writer, V. V. Veresaev, who turned to publishing studies of Pushkin and making translations of classical Greek poems when the conformist screw of Soviet censorship turned too tightly, with the son of a former Russian judge, a Bolshevik in his student days, who fought on the Moscow barricades in the 1905 Revolution and whose last words to me before I left Russia were: "I can never forgive myself for devoting the best years of my life to a utopia that has turned into such a nightmare...

...Here, I felt, is a man who might have come out of the pages of a prewar Russian novel or whom I might have met in Moscow in the '20s or '30s...

...perhaps it was a product of Russia's relatively retarded technological background, which made Russian social relations more simple, direct and human...

...Operating always on a shoe string that was often painfully frayed, Levitas, during his 30 years as executive editor of The New Leader, made the publication much bigger and broader than when he took over...

...When a historically famous monthly, as part of a general policy of going soft on Communism, presented a flagrantly distorted picture of conditions in Poland and refused to publish an article presenting the other side of the case, which it had ordered from a recognized American expert on Poland, the full story appeared in The New Leader...

...Two men who are known to New Leader readers, at least by their contributions, shared this aureole of the old Russian radical and liberal intelligentsia...

...When columnists and radio commentators with nation-wide audiences were gushing over Yalta as a great feat of democratic statesmanship, The New Leader took the critical position that subsequently became that of most of the American people...

...WHERE the NEWS ENDS By William Henry Chamberlin Sol Levitas and The Russian Aureole THE STRONGEST IMPRESSION of my first meeting with Sol Levitas, when he invited me to become a regular contributor to The New Leader almost 20 years ago, is also the most lasting...

...Sol Levitas has passed from our midst, a true Russian "intelligent," a marvellous human being, an editor who achieved amazingly much with pathetically little in the way of material resources...

...His finest bequest to those who knew him was his spirit of unswerving devotion to the eternal values of truth, justice and freedom...

...There is an aureole, subtle, hard to define but unmistakable, that surrounds the personality of the typical dedicated pre-Bolshevik Russian "intelligent" (intellectual) that seems peculiarly Russian, that helps to account for the fascination which Russia, before it became a totalitarian dictatorship, had for many foreigners...

...Why this type of personality should have been more common in Russia than in America or Western Europe I will leave to specialists in national psychology...

...It called the shots unerringly on the crushing of the liberties of the peoples of Eastern Europe...

...Uncompromising in its realism and integrity, convinced, unlike many Americans who should have known better, that Stalin's ruthless tyranny was not transformed into a benign democracy when another tyrant attacked it, The New Leader, during the years when appeasement of the Soviet dictatorship prevailed in Washington, became a source of news that was not found fit to print in many publications of larger circulation...

...One was Professor Michael Karpovich, one of Harvard's most loved and respected teachers, voluntary participant in a score of Russian cultural enterprises in this country, a man who took quiet satisfaction in the fact that he was on personally good terms with all the divergent groups in the Russian Diaspora...