Life on the Left
JR, ARTHUR M. SCHLESINGER
Life on the Left A Matter of Opinion By Victors. Navasky Farrar Straus Giroux. 458 pp. $27.00. Reviewed by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. Albert Schweitzer Professor of the Humanities...
...And by the way, ADA liberals, contrary to Navasky, regarded Communism as a threat to, not in, America...
...Now the publisher, he (rightly) applauds his successor, Katrina vanden Heuvel, who-with valuable assistance from President George W Bush-has led the Nation to committing ajournal-of-opinion heresy by showing a profit...
...They were publishing their own thoughts and viewpoints...
...He adds characteristically, "But if business is all you are, you will be out of business too...
...But by the age of Ronald Reagan, Navasky writes, "it seemed evident that National Review more than any other institution had nourished and cultivated the writers and ideas-cuckoo though they seem to me-that gave substance to Right-wing politics in America...
...The Congress for Cultural Freedom was the CIA's wisest expenditure, which is, after all, not saying much...
...But that is another story...
...But that was half a century ago...
...WHAT IS Victor Navasky's worldview...
...the creation of an all too plausible bureaucratic hoax published by Dial Press, Report from Iron Mountain: On the Possibility and Desirability of Peace...
...It has moderated through the long years, but it shows a certain lingering divergence from those of us who believed liberalism and Communism had nothing in common, either as to means or as to ends...
...Navasky deals at considerable length with the practical aspects of producing a serious magazine...
...Navasky began his first day in the editor's chair by leafing through bound volumes of the weekly, starting with Volume I, number one, July 6,1865...
...Navasky uses his own experience and his skills as a raconteur to illuminate generalizations...
...Readers may get bogged down in the detailed recital of the troubles he encountered...
...Led by Eleanor Roosevelt and Reinhold Niebuhr, liberals excluded Communists from Americans for Democratic Action...
...Alas, capitalism is possible without democracy, as Deng Xiaoping, Lee Kuan Yew, Augusto Pinochet, and Francisco Franco, not to mention Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, have amply demonstrated...
...The liberal mainstream did precisely that...
...There is a lot to be said," Navasky declares, "about the role of the CIA in corrupting American (and other) culture through its secret subsidies...
...Albert Schweitzer Professor of the Humanities Emeritus, City University of New York Graduate Center Victor Navasky's new book combines thoughtful ruminations about journals of opinion with a personal memoir...
...Almost all New Dealers supported Harry S. Truman against Henry A. Wallace in the 1948 election...
...Knowing little about Stalin and Stalinism, he opposed the Cold War because of its impact on American liberties...
...Before William F. Buckley Jr...
...Since I called no one a Communist and since I had attacked McCarthy, who was soon to attack me, I felt it was McWilliams who was speaking the language of McCarthyism with a California accent...
...He is highly entertaining in recalling his satiric journal Monocle...
...You need to run one of these magazines like a business," he advises, "or else you will be out of business...
...I emphasize "secret" to underline the fact that the CIA subsidy was unknown to recipients, who therefore could not be corrupted...
...Frances Stonor Saunders is cited to the effect that "the CIA used magazines to get across its message promoting the non-Communist Left," as if this were a wicked thing to do...
...As I have argued elsewhere, democracy is impossible without capitalism-because private property beyond the arbitrary reach of the state is the only secure basis for political opposition and intellectual freedom...
...Over the years," Navasky tells us, "I learned from George Orwell, from Khrushchev's revelations at the Twentieth Party Congress, from Gorbachev's and other memoirs, from the Venona decrypts and selected Soviet archives, some of the many things wrong with [my] particular na??ve internationalist version of 'the new world acomin'.'" A passionate advocate of independent journals of opinion should have known much earlier...
...Godkin, the Nation is the oldest journal of critical opinion in the United States...
...All I can say as an author for the CIA-subsidized Encounter is that Saunders has produced no one who was "corrupted," that is to say, wrote whathe or she didnot believe...
...Democracy requires capitalism...
...The Right as well as the Left has benefited from small-circulation magazines...
...I enjoyed A Matter of Opinion...
...There was no equivalent of the Nation in any Communist country...
...McWilliams had written several incisive books about racism on the West Coast before becoming editor of the Nation in 1950...
...Navasky quotes me as saying about McWilliams and other signatories of an anti-Cold War statement, "None of these gentlemen is a Communist, but none objects very much to Communism," and calling them "Typhoid Marys of the Left...
...Anti-Communist European intellectuals were a lonely crowd in the 1950s, while the Soviet Union doled out big sums and organized large audiences for pro-Communist intellectuals...
...Founded by E.L...
...Well over half of A Matter of Opinion is devoted to Navasky's editorship...
...One man Navasky deeply reveres is his predecessor, Carey McWilliams of California, and here I must declare an interest...
...The object of journals of critical opinion is not to make money...
...Indeed, A Matter of Opinion could serve as a how-to manual for novice publishers...
...Although lighthearted in tone and conversational in style and structure, it is essentially a serious work...
...He identified himself "with those denigrated as antianti-Communists during the late Cold War...
...and his employment at the New York Times before he accepted the editorship of the Nation in 1978...
...it is to have influence, to circulate ideas and to make converts...
...But why not condemn Joe Stalin as well as Joe McCarthy...
...His concern is how society can protect, conserve and encourage independent discourse to foster "a dramatically enlarged, critically engaged public" that is basic for a vital democracy...
...Somewhat awed, he writes, "Imagine the courage it took to launch a magazine with this opening sentence: 'The week was singularly barren of exciting events.'" He gives an effective potted history of the magazine that includes disclosing the on-and-off merger talks between Freda Kirchwey for the Nation and Michael Straight for the New Republic from 1948 to 1953...
...capitalism does not require democracy...
...McWilliams replied that Schlesinger "speaks the language of McCarthyism with a Harvard accent...
...started the National Review in 1955, there were conservative journals without a conservative movement...
...He thinks both sides were to blame in the Cold War, but exhibits sympathy for the revisionist school of William Appleman Williams that blames the United States...
Vol. 88 • May 2005 • No. 3
