WHO'S ON FIRST!
Hentoff, Nat
Who's on First FREE SPEECH AND DOUBLETALK BYNATHENTOFF In 1960, when there were still political blacklists at the networks, though they were not as rigidly enforced as before, I was helping Bob...
...The management feared, not without reason, that if Redgrave were not canceled, the Orchestra would wind up missing a good percentage of its anticipated contributions...
...Blacklisting, to be sure, is hardly peculiar to television...
...Many, but not all, of the protesters were Jews...
...Golden, a classic believer in the power of "good speech" to rout "bad speech," would have the Government outlaw "bad speech...
...After all, any professional police force has a responsibility to protect law-abiding citizens from anyone who would do them violence—including anti-PLO demonstrators intent on going beyond speech to the use of fists, clubs, and other instruments not protected by the First Amendment...
...Said the Kimberly Clark letter: "Thank you for writing to us about your objection to Ed Asner's recent statement on El Salvador...
...and instruct the membership to refuse all offers of work in Israel...
...Has history not proven," Golden continued, "that genocidal 'bad speech' kills, and that the demon of anti-Semitism, or racism, even when driven from the light of day by 'good speech,' lies like a quiescent vampire in the darkness of the human psyche, waiting for a genocidal ghoul to call it from its subconscious crypt...
...Actually, a close reader of The Wall Street Journal could have figured out exactly what was happening...
...Some of them said they would not appear with her...
...Alan Dershowitz, a law professor at Harvard, has long been a passionate, obdurate protector of all manner of speech, even of speech he finds extremely distasteful...
...Much of the Boston press also comforted Redgrave as a victim of blacklisting while championing everyone's right to free expression without risk of economic sanctions...
...cancel all tours to Israel...
...Yet, in her luminous statements about her own victimization in Boston, Redgrave did not mention that she herself had ever let politics interfere with an artist's right to work free of political pressure that has economic consequences...
...High CBS sales officials were acutely concerned about the possibility that other nervous sponsors might leave not only "Lou Grant" but other CBS shows because of that loudmouth actor...
...They wanted me to kick Cisco off the show," said Herridge...
...If the police are intimidated by threats of violence, the heckler's veto prevails and any band of hooligans, however sincerely motivated, will determine what citizens will see and what they will not see in a concert hall or theater...
...One, a Russian emigre, had refused, back home, to play for an anti-Semitic conductor...
...Be warned, said Golden: The First Amendment can go too far in saying that even "bad speech" must be protected...
...And how odd that other CBS programs pulling less of an audience share than "Lou Grant" were not also terminated with extreme prejudice...
...As soon as Redgrave's name had been listed for Oedipus Rex, a barrage of furious phone calls and letters were directed at the Symphony management from citizens who regard the PLO as a gang of murderous thugs...
...It was as if an advance forecast had indicated that a hurricane would hit Boston in mid-April and then move on to New York on April 21 and 22...
...This is the first of a series of articles he will submit from time to time on First Amendment issues...
...As reported by The New York Times on June 16 of that year, the Redgrave resolution said, among other things: "The annual general meeting demands that the equity council ban the sale of all taped and filmed material to Israel...
...But in my view, Redgrave was also a hypocrite...
...When the smoke cleared, Asner had been defenestrated...
...There were to have been three mid-April concerts in Boston, followed by two in Carnegie Hall on April 21 and 22...
...Later, I asked Herridge what the note was about...
...And so it came to pass that Vanessa Redgrave was fired...
...Because of "causes and circumstances beyond our reasonable control...
...And she was a victim...
...As the controversy continued, another combatant was heard from...
...that the council instruct all members working in Israel to terminate their contracts...
...Furthermore, as New York Daily News television reporter George Maksian has asked, if the decision to end "Lou Grant" was based solely on ratings, "Why were thirteen new scripts ordered for the series...
...The Boston Symphony's management should know this, and probably does...
...Yes, it can, said Dershowitz...
...The genteel officials at the Boston Symphony, dismayed at this unaccustomed show of irreverence by the press, tried to go on the offensive—rather sneakily...
...The kid took the note to Herridge who looked at it, tore it up, and went about his business...
...A frightened employer, CBS, let it be known that any performer using its air time had damn well better watch what he or she said as a private citizen or else...
...After all, it wasn't Joe McCarthy who had made all those other people unemployable...
...Furthermore, at least twenty-five members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra signed a petition to management in which they criticized the "insensitive, provocative" hiring of Redgrave...
...And Vanessa Redgrave...
...But not all victims are heroines...
...A reporter for the Boston Globe called the police commissioner to confirm this chilling warning...
...When the story of Redgrave's firing first broke, Dershowitz attacked the Boston Symphony—on television and in press interviews...
...Cisco and Woody Guthrie apparently gave some concerts for the wrong folks years ago...
...Furthermore, as Dershowitz pointed out, when the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution some years ago equating Zionism with racism, a national student group in England called for the banning of all Zionist speakers—including artists who go on speaking engagements— from universities...
...During a rehearsal, I noticed a CBS official, sitting in the control room, hand a note to a page...
...Then," he told me, "she came to town and I saw her being treated by the press as a heroine, as a wonderful person, because she was a victim...
...Cisco stayed on the program...
...Asner speaks with some authority, having just been blacklisted by CBS for being too controversial, on his own time, at the wrong end of the political spectrum—agitating for medical supplies for El Salvador, and for First Amendment citizen defense of the Freedom of Information Act...
...But that's the commercial music world...
...As Redgrave came increasingly to embody the very spirit of the First Amendment, bloodied but unsilenced, in the Boston press—and gradually, elsewhere in the country—another First Amendment paladin moved on stage...
...It was a prime-time special, fully sponsored...
...I'm running this show...
...And she, in essence, is a soul sister of Louis Golden, not of Alan Dershowitz...
...Worse yet, the scheduled series of Oedipus Rex performances was to have taken place around the same time as the Orchestra's annual fund-raising marathon...
...Again, no Senator got rid of "Lou Grant...
...Dershowitz is a Zionist, and if Redgrave had the power, she would prevent him from speaking at those British universities where student groups equate Zionists with racists...
...Essentially, it is the same weapon that some of those Boston musicians who objected to Redgrave's hiring had threatened to use against her...
...Among the performers was Cisco Houston, who had the look of an honest riverboat gambler and a voice that, with no trouble at all, came through as both strong and tender...
...Or so it seemed in the protected enclaves of classical music until the Boston Symphony Orchestra recently canceled a series of Vanessa Redgrave performances—not because she showed up drunk at rehearsals or because she couldn't master the part, but because she is a fervent supporter of the Palestine Liberation Organization...
...Surely, in the land of the free, he had the right to decline to accompany a woman he considered an enemy of his people...
...Redgrave, as has been noted, was emphasizing how awful it is to deprive an artist of work for political reasons...
...She also filed a lawsuit for damages, and in the following weeks, argued vigorously for the principle that "no one should have the right to take away the work of an artist because of political views...
...The resolution was not approved, but outside the British Actors Union, Redgrave continued to urge artists not to perform with any official Israeli theater, dance, or musical group...
...So Dershowitz, a man of prodigious energy and anger, went on the attack...
...but at this point, it needed some way to justify what it had done to Vanessa Redgrave...
...They were told by their severest critics that expression of ideas was one thing, collaborationism quite another...
...Yes, she still supports an artists' boycott of Israel...
...As the furor intensified, there was also division on the Symphony's board, with at least one of its more influential members also condemning the invitation to Redgrave as insensitive and provocative...
...Thank you for your interest...
...they want to get rid of Cisco, first they'll have to get rid of me...
...Suddenly on April 1, the Orchestra announced that all performances of Oedipus Rex had been canceled...
...On May 6, around the time CBS had begun to prepare the official obituary, a small item, deep inside The Journal, noted that Kimberly Clark, a large manufacturer of paper products, was dropping its commercials from the "Lou Grant" show...
...And as for the ban on speakers with allegedly racist views at universities, "that is entirely correct, in my view...
...The commissioner retorted he had never said any such thing to anybody...
...Well, you saw what I did with the note...
...After all, there are British universities boycotting anything South African...
...The intent of this kind of boycott is, of course, to inflict economic as well as political injury...
...He kept trying to point out that if anyone's right of expression is denied, everyone else's stake in the First Amendment has been undermined...
...Who could perform in a hurricane...
...Surely, in the special microcosm of unfailing good taste in which symphony orchestras are nourished, no one would be so crude as to censor a performer because of his or her political views...
...nothing more was heard from CBS or the sponsor...
...He continued to insist that the Orchestra had been entirely wrong to punish Redgrave for her political opinions, but he was determined to show that this victim was quite capable of urging economic sanctions against performers whose political views she found offensive...
...Vanessa Redgrave refused to debate Alan Dershowitz, but— through the Boston Herald American—she did respond to some of his points...
...But that was long ago, right...
...The commissioner, Joseph Jordan, had reportedly warned he could not guarantee the safety of either the audiences or Redgrave if the performances were to go on...
...And she had also said of her cancellation, "Everybody can see that if it can happen to me, it can happen to anyone...
...And it could happen to certain performers if Redgrave herself had the power to hire and fire...
...A measure of Cisco's warmth and resiliency had been his close friendships with Woody Guthrie and Lead-belly...
...Who's on First FREE SPEECH AND DOUBLETALK BYNATHENTOFF In 1960, when there were still political blacklists at the networks, though they were not as rigidly enforced as before, I was helping Bob Herridge, a CBS television producer, put together a folk music hour...
...He pointed out that in 1978, she had offered a resolution asking the British Actors Union to boycott Israel...
...The Boston Symphony Orchestra, to cap the celebration of its own centennial season as well as the 100th anniversary of Igor Stravinsky's birth, planned a set of performances of Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex...
...The narrator for Oedipus Rex, which the Boston Symphony had first introduced to the United States in 1928, was to have been Vanessa Redgrave...
...How odd, then, that it was replaced by a show, "Cagney & Lacey," much lower in the ratings...
...Dershowitz, a classic champion of the First Amendment, believes in answering "bad speech" with more "good speech...
...A covert spokesman for the Orchestra—no one in management will speak for the record in this matter—let it be known that Boston's police commissioner had figured in the decision to cancel...
...Not according to Ed Asner, who's been saying that we may be in for a rerun of blacklisting...
...One man, Herridge, had shown how blacklisting could have been broken long before...
...According to my sources, there was a battle at the CBS summit over whether Asner was worth the risk of the network disaffecting more sponsors...
...He's on some kind of list they have of Reds or Red sympathizers...
...During the flowering of Joe McCarthy, the Weavers, the hottest record act of their time, couldn't even get work as a backup group...
...So, if Ed Asner were a heldentenor, he probably could say anything he liked, as a private citizen, without endangering his livelihood...
...CBS, of course, says through its round-heeled spokesmen that Asner's "Lou Grant" show expired of natural causes— Nat Hentoff writes regularly for The Progressive on indigenous music...
...Said Dershowitz, "Although the BSO was wrong to cancel Redgrave's performances—by Redgrave's principles, the BSO was absolutely correct...
...Redgrave was in favor of that ban...
...Still, if a performer does not want to work with another performer as a matter of conscience, there is a right to withhold one's labor...
...Not since the time, anyway, of certain Nazi-approved German musicians who tried to work here after World War II...
...The Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts agreed with Redgrave and issued a public reprimand to the Boston Symphony...
...Not even Ed Meese was involved...
...And it was simultaneously sending out letters to those viewers who had complained to the company that Asner had one hell of a lot of nerve subverting American policy in El Salvador...
...declining ratings...
...She noted that others opposed to her politics had tried on occasion to get her cashiered from a job, but this was "the first time they have been successful...
...Why, she's still a victim of the Boston Symphony...
...Apparently, members of the union who refused to join the boycott would be expelled or otherwise punished...
...Louis Golden, a playwright and lyricist, went after Dershowitz in the Boston Herald American, asking, Why must we listen to free speech of hatemongers...
...Even so, in most of those cases, art eventually diverted memory, and the accused collaborationists made their American tours...
...Dershowitz identifies himself vigorously and proudly as a Jew, for example, but in the ferocious aftermath of the American Civil Liberties Union's defense of Nazis' right to demonstrate in Skokie, Illinois, Dershowitz made a point of speaking in some fifty Jewish communities...
...Think about it...
...Vanessa Redgrave's name wasn't even mentioned in the press release...
...Or, let us suppose that Dershowitz were an actor with the skill to handle Oedipus Rex...
...And why was a new cast member signed up for the new season...
...We appreciate the opportunity to tell you that we have discontinued all advertising on the 'Lou Grant' television program...
...It was their employers...
...It did not require much digging, though, for Boston journalists to find out what the real "causes and circumstances" were...
...Here are the facts of the blacklisting of Vanessa Redgrave...
...If Redgrave were the general manager of the Boston Symphony, what do you suppose the odds are that she would have hired Dershowitz...
Vol. 46 • August 1982 • No. 8
