Openness Was the Upside

...He was on a mission of his own...

...Mike had to depend on the honor of his young colleagues...

...For the pay was poor, the benefits were nonexistent, the hours were brutal, and the working conditions were—to employ the word used by more than one visitor to our offices—"Dickensian...

...I could not have distinguished a Trotskyist from a Unitarian...

...Where does one get such experience today...

...But for many, what makes The New Leader's demise poignant is the knowledge that its persistent devotion to quality and integrity in opposition to a culture that thrives on meretriciousness and superficiality was not enough to save it...

...One might go so far as to say the Public Interest sprang full-blown from between its covers...

...Eternal students, we had remained in the universities and pursued our educations without any genuine commitment to teaching...

...But from my perch, as an associate editor and then as a longtime contributor, I think I can offer some educated thoughts...

...The process could be painful...

...Under the influence of Morgenthau and others, I had developed a more Realpolitik perspective...

...And 1 was unable to communicate why I thought Dylan was a serious artist because the issue had never arisen among my contemporaries...

...That, no doubt, is why they were writing for a little magazine in the first place...

...Why didn't it take the path Commentary took...

...Here was a publication that often lacked sympathy for the '60s youth culture or was antagonistic to it...

...You were a Communist or a Trotsky ist or a Socialist or a Shachtmanite or a Lovestoneite or a. well, the list went on, seemingly forever...

...By the time that neoconservatism achieved its full flowering, Mike was steering with his heart as much as his head, and since he did not concern himself with ideological rectitude, he was more open, more flexible than most other editors of little magazines, clearly more flexible than the editors of the various neoconservative publications...

...But I am convinced there was no better place in America to learn the editor's craft...

...He took enormous pride in the craft of editing, and was intent on making an editor out of everyone who passed under his supervision...

...By the mid-'80s, a review of a John Lennon biography produced no discomfort at all...

...Its treatment of economic issues, I would say, reflected The New Leader's approach to culture and foreign policy as well...

...I suspect he was pulled in several directions at once—like his magazine...

...By the time I showed up at The New Leader's offices in the summer of 1972,1 had more or less decided the professorial life was not for me, and Mike Kolatch was looking for an assistant editor...

...Both were the children of public school teachers who had lost their jobs during the McCarthy period, and they stood out from the rest of us only because their political views were more intense— which is to say, they had political views...

...If not, forget it...

...For roughly the first half of the 20th century, I would say, if you grew up in New York in a certain kind of household (often Jewish, often immigrant), you stood a good chance of being immersed in the Left's battles...

...In high school I was friendly with two red-diaper babies, but did not know that's what they were...

...So why didn't it end up as a voice for neoconservatism...

...A strict hierarchy prevailed...

...I was enchanted by his movie reviews for Esquire, followed him to the New Yorker and other, smaller magazines, and devoured his collections like Politics Past, then titled Memoirs of a Revolutionist...

...It was no longer spreading its word to its happy few...

...Mike, however, was never willing to jettison the New Deal or abandon the interests of the economically vulnerable, and he repeatedly called on NL stalwarts like Robert Lekachman and Tyler to remind conservatives, both neo- and paleo-, that an unfettered free market produced not only efficiency but inequity...

...His name was Dwight Macdonald...

...First, one should never discount the importance of The New Leader's Social Democratic heritage...

...From Macdonald University I learned not only what many of the sectarian quarrels were about and why they mattered, but also how to be an anti-Communist of the Left...

...As he did with other assistants, Mike asked me to make a two-year commitment to the magazine, on the theory that it took close to a year for an inexperienced editor to come up to speed, so the second year was payback...

...But in my family a magazine meant Reader's Digest or Life...

...Mike resisted rigidity and ideology in every form, whereas neoconservatism hardened into an ideology faster than you can say Weekly Standard...

...The Rosenbergs...

...he was not sure it belonged in his pages...

...What was the difference between a Social Democrat and a Democratic Socialist...

...But I managed to find a Virgil into this world...

...Not that I came by my understanding naturally...

...Reading Norman Podhoretz or Irving Kristol or Gertrude Himmelfarb, you got the impression that they believed you were either with them or against them...

...By the time I arrived at the NL, I think Mike's personal mission had overtaken the magazine's political mission...

...I did not have editing experience and my typing was unsteady, but I did arrive with a few credentials—not so much my freshly minted PhD (though Mike would occasionally call me "doctor" over the years) as the fact that I had a letter of recommendation from Daniel Bell and had written a couple of reviews for Commentary...

...The downside was that the magazine seemed to have lost a certain focus...

...I took a significant intellectual step forward in high school when I subscribed to Newsweek...

...The New Leader had made a reputation as one of the fiercer anti-Communist journals, but now its friends and contributors were a disparate group...

...Looking back from the pages of this final issue, one can see that The New Leader had a particular role to fill in a particular era...

...Every faction appeared to have its own publication for spreading the word to the happy few...

...So I guess you could say I owed my job at The New Leader to two men, Mike Kolatch and Dwight Macdonald...

...Dominoes did not do it for me...

...Did they have anything to do with the Phillies or girls or rock'n'roll...

...The first piece I wrote for the magazine was a review of Bob Dylan: An Intimate Biography (June 26, 1972...

...This was, I should note, before Commentary took its turn to the Right...

...Most important, I suspect, was that I had some understanding of the world of The New Leader...

...I have the University of Pennsylvania library to thank...

...after all, you were serving a Dickensian apprenticeship...

...I always thought he had been a Trotskyist," I said...

...In fact nobody, I think, was sure who the happy few were...

...You spent hours over relatively short articles, often by writers whose command of English was as unsteady as my typing...

...I can easily imagine the neocon poobahs sitting around and accusing The New Leader of sentimentality and flabbiness, and there is no question that they were more rigorous intellects than Mike was...

...It was not an agreement that could be enforced in any way...

...I wanted to know what national interest was served by sending half a million American troops to fight in a place no one could have even found on a map 10 years before...

...I was once talking to Gus Tyler, a longtime NL contributor, about the historian Joseph Lash...

...By the same token, many regarded the Cold War as an ideological struggle: Communism had to be resisted wherever it turned up...

...This was only natural...

...For my introduction to little magazines, including The New Leader...

...Being antiwar, I was delighted to have the chance one week to edit an article by Hans J. Morgenthau, among the smartest of the war's critics and one of my heroes...

...The New Leader's ambivalence about the protest politics of the '60s extended to the era's culture wars...

...Mike taught you not only to value each word, but to look at apiece inthree dimensions...

...Throughout the 1980s I wrote a monthly book column, and while I understood that there were subjects that would not have been appropriate for the magazine, I can't recall an occasion when I had to trim my opinions to fit some New Leader mold...

...I did not...

...Mike needed associates who understood that they were engaged in an enterprise larger than themselves, or who were at least dedicated to pursuing a career injournalism.(AndFmnot sure how well those seeking careers fared if they did not have the larger vision...

...If only they had waited till the '90s...

...I've been told, admittedly by a disgruntled writer, that the New Yorker has hired editors who do not really know how to edit...

...There is no point in expressing regret or unhappiness over this...

...If true, it is because places like The New Leader, with one generation passing its craft down to the next, scarcely exist anymore...

...Here was a publication that counted Sidney Hook and Lionel Trilling among its spiritual godfathers, and Irving Kristol, Daniel Bell, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and Nathan Glazer among its most prominent contributors...

...they are generally one-man operations, no matter how egalitarian their public beliefs...

...The poor Communists...

...To be honest, I did not know, or cannot remember, where Mike stood on these matters...

...The New Leader may have had a mission, but there was nothing communal about its pursuit...

...I learned a great deal from all of them...

...1 was more comfortable with popular culture than were most of our critics...

...I was less than delighted another week to have to edit an apologia for the overthrow of Chile's Salvador Allende...

...Between classes, I would spend hours in its periodical division pulling magazine after magazine off the racks, some that I had heard of, many that I had not: Esquire, the New Yorker, the New Republic, the Nation, Partisan Review, Dissent, I.F.Stone's Weekly, the Reporter, the Progressive...

...Though I inclined toward the Left, or at least toward an Adlai Stevenson/Arthur Schlesinger Jr...

...You learned to pay attention to every word in a piece...

...It was as if The New Leader reached a turning point, then refused to turn...

...Probably the major influence on my notion of Communism was the television show I Led Three Lives, with undercover FBI agent Herbert Philbrick foiling a different Leftist plot every week...

...The blacklist...

...That openness was the upside of the later years...

...I sensed when Mike was editing it that he was uncomfortable with the subject...

...Figures of intelligence and integrity, they were committed to upholding standards against society's dominant mass-market values, and thus never made the mistake of confusing popularity with quality, or of trying to catch the wave of the latest intellectual fad...

...Mike, however, had another reason for maintaining a hierarchy...

...Distinctions few elsewhere in the country cared a whit about mattered deeply to those raised in New York's Leftist hothouse and, amazingly, continue to matter today...

...The generation gap was alive and well at the NL...

...But too often they went from that reasonable view to the more extreme position that the market was the answer to every problem: It could do no wrong and the government could do no right...

...Many of the disputes in these publications, and much of the vocabulary, were foreign to me...

...One of the great rewards of working at the magazine when I did was the opportunity it afforded to edit the critics who populated "the back of the book"—Pearl K. Bell on literature, John Simon on movies, Marvin Kitman on television, Vivien Raynor on art...

...Location matters...

...For him, the personal connection, common decency, came before politics...

...A product of its time, it had become a victim of cultural, political and technological changes beyond its control...

...A major product—perhaps the major product—of the Left's sectarianism was the "little magazine...

...huac...

...Here was a publication that was vehemently antiCommunist and unswervingly pro-Israel...

...Gus mentioned that Lash had been a fiery Stalinist in his youth...

...For some (not all) of the writers at those magazines, it seemed, no government intervention was worth supporting...

...After that identity took hold, it was an easy step toward appreciating the principled if sometimes difficult politics of The New Leader...

...That is, Mike would not articulate his doubts, and I could not defend my certainties...

...Everything—and everyone— had to be sacrificed on the altar of the free market religion...

...I will be eternally grateful to Pearl Bell, for instance, for introducing me to the poetry of Philip Larkin...

...they took no prisoners...

...Rock music might as well not have existed...

...All of which leads to what may be the single most important question about the magazine in those years...

...Each was a distinctive and finely chiseled personality—precisely what one wants in a critic...

...In one episode, as I recall, Philbrick outwitted subversives who were trying to undermine public faith in the Founding Fathers by spreading malicious stories about them...

...It is just the way things are...

...Several film directors I admired—like Alfred Hitchcock and Howard Hawks—stood little chance of passing through the narrow mesh of John Simon's refined sensibility...

...Alger Hiss...

...1 didn't come from New York...

...But I can also imagine Mike responding that rigor was not everything—and that on really important matters it was not even the main thing...

...I had come upon a kind of intellectual passion that seemed to be missing from my classrooms...

...I came from Philadelphia, and 90 miles in this case was the same as 90 light years...

...This is the way with most little magazines...

...Nonetheless, as a child of the '60s, I came with a different aesthetic outlook...

...It was a mistake...

...This is a question only Mike Kolatch can adequately answer—and maybe even he would not be able to provide an entirely satisfactory explanation...

...He did not like clubs, especially clubs that required you to leave your individuality at the door...

...The neoconservatives around Commentary and the Public Interest had learned to extol the efficiencies of the free market—a valuable lesson for anyone...

...If forced to guess, I would have said "Menshevik" was a character in a Danny Kaye movie...

...Politics were your heritage, your identity...

...That was never Mike's way...

...I am not sure this training was helpful if you were trying to be a writer, since it made you extremely self-conscious about the use of language...

...No, Barry," Gus replied, "all the Trotskyists went into real estate...

...The controversies of the '60s, and the Vietnam War in particular, had exploded the Left's carefully nuanced divisions, and therefore the structured world of the little magazine...

...variety of liberalism, I was fairly promiscuous in my reading and would take a look at what National Review had to say or even, God help me, the American Mercury...

...Many of the NL's writers viewed Communism as a monolith...