This Boy's Politics
KELMAN, STEVEN
Navigating the Sixties This Boy's Politics By Steven Kelman This may sound strange—in retrospect, it does even to me—but in 1964, as a high school sophomore, I underwent a political...
...Castro, I learned, did not embrace Communism and the Soviet Union because the United States pushed him to do so with its hostile behavior, as the received wisdom in my liberal world had it...
...My mother was a child of Jewish immigrant garment workers, my father a refugee from Hitler's Germany...
...Suddenly I was some kind ofboy wonder, thanks to The New Leader...
...Nor did Gus influence my political evolution, although it was wonderful to discover that a political soul mate—to use an expression not yet current—lived next door...
...They did get I.F...
...It was possible to be on the Left and not apologize for Castro...
...I was gripped, too, by a voracious appetite for magazines, but The New Leader was not one of them...
...His values were clear—democratic, humane and antitotalitarian—and he really did eschew dogmatism and sectarianism...
...The result—titled "The Feud Among the Radicals"—examined the different approaches to political change in the U.S...
...policy in Vietnam had unleashed a chain of events that gradually transformed SDS into an advocate of Maoist totalitarianism...
...made my article the subject of one of his syndicated columns...
...We too became deeply exercised over a comma or an adjective...
...I also remember a meeting in New York where Josh Muravchik, then the YPSL national chairman, dismissed a criticism of the organization as being "politically incorrect...
...New America was filled with jargon, secret-password-like expressions that could distinguish friend from foe, and a real party line...
...Mostly Jewish, very intellectual, and home to a significant number of—no longer Party members but still sympathizing—Communists, the town itself was politically bizarre...
...He explained that he was not interested in pursuing a "party line," preferring to have an openness to diverse viewpoints define the NL...
...I did not want to believe what I was reading in National Review, but it was raising questions in my 15-year-old mind...
...It voiced concern that young people of my generation were setting themselves up for a repeat of the disillusionment of the 1930s, and for cynicism or reactionary politics...
...In those days, as now, there was a newspaper and magazine kiosk near the corner of Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street in Manhattan, right outside the subway station...
...That fall Myron Kolatch, then relatively early in his tenure as editor, wrote back saying the magazine wanted to run my article...
...It will be missed...
...One day I got to meet Mike Kolatch at his office off Union Square...
...The New Leader was written in— good!—English...
...We too had secret passwords...
...On my next visit to the city, I bought a copy of the magazine and then sent in for a subscription...
...My parents were not members of any of the New York political sects of the era, though my mother, who grew up in the Depression, worshiped Franklin D. Roosevelt...
...policy in Vietnam...
...policy in Vietnam...
...I wrote a second article for the NL about the Students for a Democratic Society—"SDS: Troubled Voice of the New Left" (September 27,1965...
...When I arrived as a freshman at Harvard in the fall of 1966, I must have come off as a mixture of weird and annoying...
...The New Leader was part of the support system that I and fellow students in the small band of dissenters from New Left Maoism and liberal mushiness relied on...
...My parents' politics were more or less mine until the middle of my sophomore year, when I began to feel I had my own political ideas...
...Perhaps rebelliously, for the next few months I searched out and read books written from the point of view of the anti-Communist Left of the 1930s and '40s, ranging from Arthur Koestler's collection The God That Failed to Isaac Deutschere biography of Stalin...
...Oddly, I had started to read National Review sporadically...
...I was 16, going on 17, and could not believe The New Leader was actually willing to publish something written by a kid...
...I wrote a piece called "The Contented Revolutionists" for the magazine's special issue (April 28, 1969) on the Harvard strike, and my roommate Elliott Abrams (since of Iran-contra fame) contributed to it as well...
...withdrawal would simply hand victory to the Stalinists...
...The New Left's sectarianism encouraged ours...
...He used the phrase without irony, even though it was typically associated with our New Left opponents...
...Unfortunately, as the decade wore on, Leftist campus politics skidded further toward '30s-style sectarian battles...
...I was now the notorious "Red baiter," especially after William F. Buckley Jr...
...My parents' political views could broadly be termed Left-liberal—closer to the Nation than to The New Leader, though they subscribed to neither...
...At the time, I did not fully appreciate what he was saying...
...I was troubled by this, yet I thought it was making valid points about liberal naïveté, hypocrisy or blindness toward Castro's Cuba and newly independent Africa...
...I remember my father telling me he was not allowed to speak himself because he had a foreign accent...
...I spent a large chunk of my time arguing for the proposition that opponents of United States policies in Vietnam should be allowed freedom of speech, or that America was more democratic than Mao's China...
...All hell broke loose at my school and in the town of Great Neck...
...To the average student this sounded mild, not very radical at all by the day's standards...
...It appeared in the issue of February 1,1965, underthe title "Youth and Politics...
...Still, I follow journalism enough to know that no general magazine takes The New Leader's stance today...
...When a significant minority in the Harvard YPSL chapter endorsed the idea of immediate U.S...
...Before the protest movement began in earnest on college campuses, a majority of the politically aware kids were already opposing U.S...
...Moreover, on the substance, Castro's rule had been bad for Cuba...
...For a young man obsessed with politics at Harvard in the late 1960s, life constantly replayed the bon mot—put by Partisan Review editor William Phillips to drama critic Kenneth Tynan— that the arguments were so old one had forgotten the answers...
...I was amazed...
...Draper's book had an electric impact on me...
...To the average student that meant "far, far, far out radical," but I was constantly saying how much I hated Communism and had mixed feelings about U.S...
...A year later Houghton Mifflin published my book about that spring, Push Comes to Shove...
...Within a broad spectrum of democratic, egalitarian and antitotalitarian values, it did present a fairly wide range of opinion...
...It was possible to argue with a classmate who defended the 1939 NaziSoviet Pact...
...I did not grasp that I was enveloped in a world of fractured New York—mostly Jewish—politics, nor was I fully sensitive to the differences in tone between The New Leader and, say, New America, the Socialist Party newspaper...
...withdrawal from Vietnam—against the official position of the national organization, favoring a negotiated settlement—I was treated by national officials to a Marxist analysis...
...Later, a number of people assumed I was introduced to the magazine by our neighbor, Gus Tyler of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union, but that was not the case...
...Among a strong contingent of Great Neck South students, the dominant posture in 1964 was Leftist anti-Americanism...
...Stone's Weekly, which I probably started reading when I was around 11...
...Growing opposition to U.S...
...Great Neck South Senior High School, on Long Island, was the right place to be for any teenager interested in refighting the battles of the '30s between Stalinists and Mensheviks...
...I sent the piece to The New Leader, in the hope that the magazine would be interested in what a young acolyte had to say...
...Soon I received a letter from Willie Morris, the new editor of Harper i, inviting me to contribute to the magazine...
...I expressed my new philosophy in an article I wrote during summer vacation that year about the political life of my high school...
...I believe I first heard about The New Leader in Draper's Foreword, which noted that it had published the first two sections of the book as special supplements...
...Navigating the Sixties This Boy's Politics By Steven Kelman This may sound strange—in retrospect, it does even to me—but in 1964, as a high school sophomore, I underwent a political conversion...
...advocated by Social Democratic Bayard Rustin and New Leftish Staughton Lynd...
...What changed my views were the Cuban Revolution and developments in early postcolonial Africa...
...At about age six, I sat in the back seat of a car my father was driving while another adult alongside him spoke into a loudspeaker on behalf of a Congressional candidate...
...Thus the magazine and I emerged from the 1960s with those values intact, while the dogmatism and sectarianism of the day has morphed into the messianic neoconservatism that now bedevils the U. S...
...In the middle of this—probably at the local public library—I discovered Theodore Draper's book Castro's Revolution: Myths and Realities...
...I grew up in a New York suburban family very interested in politics...
...I called myself a Socialist, working hard to establish a campus chapter of the Young People's Socialist League (YPSL...
...Thinking back to those years, I realize I came out of them in what I consider to be relatively good political and psychological shape thanks to (finally) understanding Mike Kolatch's objective for The New Leader...
...Some of my earliest memories are of accompanying my parents as they handed out campaign literature for local elections...
...Exhibiting less worry than I indeed felt about SDS' strident "anti-anti-Communist" course, it was a sympathetic portrait of a group formed by the civil rights struggle and consciously trying to keep out of older Leftist sectarian battles...
...After it started arriving in the mail, my father came into my bedroom one night and said he thought subscribing was a bad idea: The magazine was too stridently anti-Communist...
...I also recollect her recounting how she opposed Bella Abzug's political twists and turns over the Nazi-Soviet Pact and Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union when they were both students at Hunter College...
...In deciding to pursue an academic career, I became increasingly separated from the world of journalism, though I have continued to review books for the NL over the years...
...In effect, they said upper-class Harvard kids would of course lack appreciation for their working-class-oriented analysis of the Vietnam War: that immediate U.S...
...Meanwhile, my experience in high school presaged the tumultuous developments on American college campuses...
...I read both religiously and leaned on friends to read and subscribe to them...
Vol. 89 • January 2006 • No. 1
