Nestor to the New Left

...Nestor to the New Left Bread and Roses Too By Jack Newfield Dutton 429 pp $8 95 Reviewed by Stephen J. Whitfield Graduate Student, Brandeis Umveisity Some journalists are valuable as seers, imposing dew lines upon the familiar topography of the present Others can establish hitherto unsuspected connections within an eclectic field of vision or a rich historical context Still others are cherished for the very independence of their minds, for their immunity to cant or custom or fashion Jack Newfield brings special qualifications to the ciaft of journalism As a 33-year-old legatee of Bedford-Stuyvesant, he is among the last Jewish writers to relate to the ghetto as a survivor A founding fathei of sds and a self-proclaimed "alienated radical half-outside the system," he nonetheless became Bobby Kennedy's Boswell—his friend, champion and memorialist Emulating Camus' desire to speak foi the silent, Newfield has further defined himself as an "advocacy journalist" in his new collection, Biead and Roses Too (most of the pieces have appeared in the Village Voice, beginning in 1965) Advocacy journalism exacts a high price, however, and Newfield has bartered away reflection, polish, nuance, and analytical acuity in paying it Lamenting the black and Puerto Rican children dying of lead poisoning contracted from tenement walls, denouncing the brutality and torment facing New Yorkers too poor to laise bail, he has tried to pierce a lethargic buieaucracy with the pam of the innocent Yet these articles, in which the raw nerves of his own humanity lie dangling and exposed, are too narrowly targeted, too bereft of generalization, to sustain the weight of compilation in hard covers All too many ol the pieces are simply not distinguished enough to warrant retrieval Newfield finds the American intervention in Vietnam odious and senseless, but adds little to the national debate except fervor, he offers neither power of insight noi tactical suggestions to the antiwar movement Describing the byzantme woild of New York politics, he tends to get lost in it himself His judgments in the book reviews included here are predictable, except for a rather sympathetic, perceptive critique of Irving Howe's political journalism Biead and Roses Too ends on an upbeat, with finely calibrated portraits of Robert F Kennedy, Ralph Nader and Ramsey Clark The two most interesting sections focus upon other journalists and other radicals Newfield indicts the "objective" press for subservience to authority and bias against radical protest, his examples of governmental collusion and flawed reporting by the New Yoik Times and the newsmagazines are marshaled convincingly enough to be disturbing to admirers of the Fust Amendment And his own impious laddtsh for the New York Post distills the essence of that once promising, invariably exasperating newspaper But Newfield appears to feel that packing bias in others absolves him of the obligation to meet the substance of their arguments Even it the New York Times has been unfair to the Chicago Ten or to the students who stormed Mornmgside Heights, are there situations that do not justify courtroom outbursts or the rifling of files7 Are there behavioral limits which a relatively democratic society may impose upon the beneficiaries of advocacy journalism7 Newsfield does not say Once the jerky, jackhammer persistence of his writing is spent, I miss the ng-oious honesty of confrontation with tough political questions, the arabesque of argumentation, the web of logical challenge and rebuttal commensurate with the complex piob-lems Newfield has chosen to explore His chapter, "Journalism Old, New, and Corporate," reveals another sort of insularity He lacks what Nietzsche called the sixth sense, historical consciousness Not only is Newfield unable to explain what the new journalists have in common, or how they can be distinguished from old journalists, but he seems embarrassingly ignorant of earlier weddings of ego and event, "participation and advocacy " After Lincoln Steffens in our cities, John Reed in Petrograd, H L Mencken in Tennessee, Edward R Murrow in London, and A J Lieblrng just about anywheie, isn't the self-congratulatory spirit of the "new journalism" parochial and unwarranted7 Lacking the sixth sense, Newfield uncritically believes that the unique absurdity of our epoch accounts for radicalism But the absurd, however useful as cultural categorization, is not peculiarly contemporary, New-field's signets of the bizarre and the meaningless could be matched in any other phase of our past Still, for all his present-minded inflation of portent, Newfield almost qualifies as a Nestor to New Leftists tor whom Amite County and Port Huron aie now places without resonance Of course, his exaltation of youth and indifference to intellectual subtlety put him closer to Ponce de Leon than to Daniel De Leon A cultist of experience, he writes as though action and movement were valuable in themselves and as though "existential" politics exclusively circumscribed humane public acts While he evades argument with those positioned several steps to his right, Newfield remains an important and credible critic of other radicals, for his own ideals are decent and appealing He recognizes that parricidal fantasies befoul an honorable tradition of dissent and that antidemocratic tendencies are symptomatic of the sickness rathei than part of the cure Detecting no revolution just over the horizon, he favors protest as a means of making liberals vertebrate He wants politicians to teel the heat, he does not expect them to see the light Although he now regrets withholding his vote from Hubert Humphrey in 1968, Newfield considers himself a socialist and a neo-Popuhst The previously published writings in this collection betray no authentic interest in the redistribution of wealth, but the introductory chapter calls for a blue-collar political alliance to offset both bureaucratic liberalism and Alabama-accented racism "The workers have gone to the right," he argues, "because the old liberalism has made their life worse, worse with inflation, worse by ignoring them and making promises to the blacks, worse with bureaucracy, worse with Vietnam" Yet when he turns to a programmatic solution, he can do no better than quote a quintessential old liberal named Galbraith on the need for "taxing the rich, nationalizing industries, regulating private enterprise, and redeeming power and policy from military and civilian bureaucracy " Should Newfield's sudden concern for the systematic achievement of economic justice adumbrate a new phase of radical energy, then this book may be read as the minutes of the last meeting If not the most trenchant analyst of current radicalism, he is at least its amanuensis Approval of his reports, however, must be conditional Some of the notes arrive bulk-rate (Kenneth Kemston's praise of The Kids' intelligence is cited three times) Some of the phrases are delivered via second-class mailer ("this wounded dinosaur of a country") And some of the problems he discusses are too exigent to be sent surface mail (the manipulative cynicism and sporadic violence of the latter-day prophetic minority"-as Newfield entitled his study of the New Left—are barely understandable) How regrettable that the values which suffuse Biead and Roses Too are not explained, or applied, or refined in intriguing ways The advocacy of just causes is no vice, but ambivalence toward social change probably makes for wiser, more interesting books...