Picking Up the Ax

...The Nation trafficked in conspiracy theories that as a born member of the wasp patriciate and close friend of the fractious Rockefellers I knew to be preposterous...

...Then Mike would call back a few days later, overflowing with praise for the great man's words, but asking if he could add a few sentences on the Bay of Pigs or the subway strike or the Kennedy assassination—whatever was foremost in the news at the time...

...It was an easy if sometimes perilous walk to The New Leader on Union Square in the morning, or to Slug's, the jazz menagerie near Tompkins Square, at night...

...Kolatch Center," however, turned out to be short on express elevators opening to Hudson River School scenes, among other amenities I had imagined...

...I began deleting words and phrases all the way through...

...Marines...

...But every one of the writers mentioned, and scores more, were contributing to The New Leader at the time...

...In all likelihood, no such single issue existed...

...As they say in the new journalism, it is a "composite character...

...an indignantly pedantic film critique by John Simon on the opus and corpus of Elizabeth Taylor...

...Handing Mike the article, I stood in front of his desk awaiting grateful praise...

...Commentary, now my favorite publication, was then mushy and parochial and apparently cherished a strange fantasy that my wasp relatives who fought in the War against Hitler were anti-Semitic at heart...

...As Irving Kristol wrote in his NL "Thinking Aloud" column: "Whenever a man leaves a subject believing the very same things as when he entered it—and most especially when he believes them as strongly—he has earned our incredulity...

...But the NL did not disappoint me in its ambience of history and intellect...

...As I worked, I was shocked to discover that there was nowhere stop...

...Mike Kolatch apparently saw that after putting out Advance for several years, I was capable of performing all the tasks of his staff members...

...He also edited and published Draper's exhaustive research on the counterproductive U.S...

...The New Leader had it all—an Olympian assurance, a polemical verve, an academic erudition, an anti-Communist panache based on well-earned exCommunist and unionist experience that rang true and trenchant...

...To this freshman, the NL was where it was at...

...It was the kind of rhetorical celebration of global engagement and statesmanship thatlmighthave happily published in Advance or heard delivered to the assembled members at the Council...

...The New Leader's ultimate gift to me was its demanding an independent mind...

...I pruned down the article, proudly cutting it by as much as 10 per cent, surprised to discover that the process was easier than I expected...

...and dispatches from Paris by Ray Alan, from London by Denis Healey MP, and from a jail in Tito's Yugoslavia by Milovan Djilas...

...Would he...

...With my uptown input and connections, I thought, The New Leader could soon enter a new era as a prestigious vessel for the geopolitical ideas of deep thinkers like Lindsay...

...He looked at me balefully and said, "Cut it...

...Mike knew that the world offered an editor far more pigs' ears than silken prose...

...As my father told me in his last letter to me—written when I was 3 and he was preparing to leave for the European front as commander of a squadron of B-17s that proved defective—I could become President later...

...a rambunctious jazz review by Ralph Ellison...

...I had moved into an apartment on 94th Street and Park Avenue just vacated by Joan Didion, where I discovered the financial facts of life for the shabby gentility, and ended up at 512 Avenue ? on the Lower East Side...

...In the end, the many victims of kolatching often paid him the highest tribute by believing they had achieved the transformation themselves...

...Against this seductive world Harvard's classes could not compete at all...

...From then on, I wielded a mighty ax at the magazine...

...involvement in the Dominican Republic, then offered up Dominican leader Juan Bosch's writings from the front...

...New Leaderism was not a matter of belief but a mode of skepticism that allowed discovery...

...Also included were a discourse on the nits and nuances of modern verse by Howard Nemerov...

...Mike had taught me the most important lesson of my career as a writer and editor, and I never again read any political discourse in the same way...

...and had a reflective review of William S. White's Citadel by the promising young Senator John E Kennedy...

...If it is predictable, it contains no information or journalistic value...

...In 1964 and '65, as a contributor, I got to know Joseph Epstein, Hilton Kramer, Diane Ravitch, and Michael Janeway...

...There would be more calls further implanting the hook...

...Duringmy time, The New Leader published such memorable pieces as Mihajlo Mihajlov's "The Unspoken Defense" (May 8,1967), and such ravishing special issues as "Harlem's America" (September 26, 1966), comprising Congressional testimony by Claude Brown, Arthur Dunmeyer and Ralph Ellison...

...I vented some verbiage about "the challenge of the crisis of the historic tides of...

...Monthly Review attracted me with its academic rigor and Marxist éclat, but I was not quite ready to become a full-boring Socialist...

...I could go on and on...

...Then he asked me to explain the second paragraph...

...But my heart remained downtown at The New Leader, where I began submitting articles and reviews...

...segued through amazingly learned articles by Daniel Bell, Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan...

...Was there something wrong with this picture...

...Leaving Advance behind, I came to New York and claimed my inheritance as a junior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations...

...I began hemming and hawing...

...My job entailed editing books by such NL contributors as Zbigniew Brzezinski and Samuel P. Huntington, and serving as rapporteur for Council seminars...

...insights on German politics and economics by Ludwig Erhard...

...I was a callow and impressionable 17year-old freshman, but I was hugely ambitious...

...For me, the commanding heights of journalism were represented by the magazines looming amid the slush and swirl of Cambridge traffic...

...Could the Senator or Chairman honor him by possibly allowing him to reprint it and "give it a larger audience" in The New Leader...

...Perhaps there was a little bombast here and there...

...Eclipsed were John Kenneth Galbraith droning away vainly from his own books to bored students, and the venerable Cecilia Payne Gaposhkin, statuesque in a crimson velvet dress passionately describing the physics of the stars while my classmates cackled around me and read the comics...

...Later I did an essay on the divisions among the Republicans that prompted Knopf editor Ashbel Green, a devout reader of The New Leader, to suggest that I write a book on the GOP...

...he wanted to know...

...After the Marines, I managed to gain readmission to Harvard, where I met a similarly ambitious student named Bruce Chapman...

...They would show up at Elaine's or the Century Club posturing as pundits and literateurs...

...My first successful submission was a critique of The Winning Side: The Case for Barry Goldwater by Ralph de Toledano (November 25, 1963...

...The above is a matter of memory, though, and I am now 66 years old...

...With coauthor Chapman, I wrote The Party ThatLostltsHead (Knopf, 1966...

...Amid many anguished protests, thousands of additional words would be reeled in...

...As editor, I modeled it discreetly on The New Leader...

...He merely handed it back and told me to edit it down a bit, "Just remove the words that don't add to the theme...

...For original works, Mike was willing to suspend the usual limits on length and editorial commitment...

...Setting out to show Mike I could make up for my comparative limitations in belles-lettres by bringing in big names, I remember proudly presenting him with an article by Congressman John Lindsay of the "Silk Stocking District," who at the time was my political hero...

...Mike would shimmy and shape, prune and polish every line and every paragraph...

...After all, the piece had probably begun as a speech...

...Wherever I poked my editorial butter knife, I hit pure roomtemperature golden margarine...

...Finally, 1 returned sheepishly to his desk, confessing that the article had no content whatsoever and that we should not print it...

...Perusing the edited copy, Mike asked me to explain the meaning of the first paragraph...

...I got his point...

...Entering the pages of The New Leader one had always to be open to surprise and thus to the lively and redemptive experience of learning unexpected truths...

...As I recall it, the issue that initially seized my imagination began with a fierce debate on peace and war between Bertrand Russell and Sidney Hook...

...Being the great-grandson of a famous editor and son of a formidable Harvard Crimson editorial chairman lost in World War II, I naturally focused on journalism...

...Almost always the eminence would accept the hook...

...What ideas...

...proffered a Galbraithian economics survey by Robert Lekachman...

...To boot, I could deliver late copy to a midnight bus leaving from the Port Authority terminal by running the distance from Union Square to Eighth Avenue and 42nd Street at a miler's pace...

...I mumbled something about transitional prose that "kind of knit the ideas together...

...National Review then seemed sophomoric, Harper's was a soporific easy chair, the New Yorker was gaseous and prolix...

...My education came chiefly from magazines, and it was clear to me at the time that The New Leader was the best...

...presented a sage appraisal of The American Dream by the eminent critic Stanley Edgar Hyman entitled "Norman Mailer's Yummy Rump...

...I was named after the executive director, George Franklin, my godfather was David Rockefeller, who ruled as chairman, and the library was named after my father...

...Surely Mike would not turn down a chance to publish John Lindsay...

...I returned to his desk awaiting further laurels...

...Returning angrily to contemplate the precious pages, I suddenly recognized that Mike was right...

...Reaching out to me from stacks and stashes of papers and magazines, it lured me away from the ivied walls across the avenue into a more real and raffish form of higher learning...

...I remember thinking that to work for such a publication—entering what I imagined must be The New Leader Pavilion in downtown Manhattan, via the Levitas Tower in Kolatch Center, and zooming up in an elevator to the editorial penthouse where serried ranks of godlike men of the mind ruled America's intellectual life while pensively viewing panoramas of Central Park and the Statue of Liberty—would be the summit of my career...

...He mercifully interrupted and told me to cut it more...

...He also found out I would work for $7,500 a year, provided I was occasionally permitted to filch a book from the trove of review copies the magazine received...

...I stood there nervously while he thumbed grimly through the pages...

...This so distracted me from my Council assignments that I soon left to seek a job at the NL...

...I was omnivorous, consuming Harper s, the New Yorker, the Reporter, the Atlantic, Dissent, Monthly Review, Time, Hudson Review, the Nation, the New Republic, Commentary, National Review, Partisan Review, you name it...

...Mike would call some potentate, whether "Pat" Moynihan or Henry Jackson or Walter Reuther or whomever, to praise him for some inspiring speech at some campus or other oratorical podium on possible reforms of the state's agricultural labor law or the children's cultural programs of the UN...

...When their other works attracted less interest and praise in other publications, they would be perplexed and blame the editors for minor alterations in their prose...

...In any case, shortly after I was hired, all the other editors departed and I was left as the personal apprentice of Professor Kolatch...

...Following graduation, we moved Advance to Washington and published it there until the Kennedy assassination in 1963 found us with an issue devoted to the kind of frenzied attacks on JFK ("The Unprepared Meets the Unforeseen") that liberal Republicans like us offered up to disguise our oppositi on to the direction of our party during the Goldwater era...

...All of it was heavily kolatched...

...I learned, too, Mike's editorial alchemy for making silk purses by purring in the pigs' ears of prominent NL devotees...

...By the end of the process, the turgid speech on children's farm policy would have been kolatched into a topical article responding pithily and even elegantly to the hot topic of the day...

...a comment on the passing Soviet cultural scene by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn...

...Mike understood that the NL could accomplish nearly anything in journalism if he did not insist on claiming any credit...

...I named the process "kolatching...

...To my relief, he did not reject the piece...

...This was my lesson as well...

...Although I much enjoyed long distance running for Coach Bill McCurdy, I soon flunked out of Harvard's "core curriculum" and went into the better organized corps and more respectfully attended classes run at Parris Island, South Carolina, by the U.S...

...Together we started Advance magazine: "A Journal of [Progressive] Republican Thought...

...He edited and published definitive long essays on Cuba by Theodore Draper that deftly showed how Fidel Castro—heralded at Harvard Stadium and across the global media as a heroic revolutionary—was in fact dependent on the Cuban Communist Party that had been a bastion of Fulgencio Batista's dictatorship...

...But Mike," I stammered, "it's already down to less than 1,500 words...

...Most often they would accede...