An Entertaining Account of One Newsman’s Life, Idealism

SOMEBODY’S GOTTA TELL IT

The Upbeat Memoir

of a Working-Class Journalist

by Jack Newfield

St. Martin’s

352 pp., $25.95

*

It’s easy to become exasperated by “Somebody’s Gotta Tell It,” Jack Newfield’s fond account of his life and times, chiefly as a columnist for the Village Voice, the New York Daily News and the New York Post. Newfield is so full of himself that he inadvertently provides the only memorable humor in his rambling memoir:

“We all need mentors and role models,” he writes. “Stephen Sondheim had Oscar Hammerstein. Jimmy Cannon had Damon Runyon. Martin Luther King had Dr. Benjamin Mays and Gandhi. Harry Belafonte had Paul Robeson. Vin Scully had Red Barber to show him how to broadcast a baseball game. Richard Brooke had John Huston to show him how to be a writer-director. Aretha Franklin had Sam Cooke to show her how to cross over from sacred gospel music to secular soul music. Spike Lee had Martin Scorsese as a role model for how to become an independent filmmaker with a personal vision.

“And I had Mike Herrington.”

Well, Herrington, the democratic socialist, was a fine fellow, but only Newfield would compare himself to Sondheim, King, Belafonte, Scully, Brooke, Franklin and Lee, all in the same paragraph.

Actually, Newfield doesn’t think Herrington was all that fine. In a perceptive comment in a book that has quite a few of them, despite the author’s deep self-absorption, Newfield argues that Herrington, who could have been a fine “native American radical,” was drawn into a European kind of left-wing sectarianism.

Observations like that aside, mostly Newfield stays safely inside his own world, populated by his heroes, who are standing off the enemy. His heroes are, in particular, King and Robert F. Kennedy. They also include--Newfield is a great maker of lists--Jackie Robinson, Murray Kempton, I.F. Stone, Paul Goodman, Norman Mailer, Richard Wright, Pete Hamill, Phil Ochs, Mario Cuomo, Sugar Ray Robinson, the old Brooklyn Dodgers. His enemies are the New York Yankees, Walter O’Malley, Richard Nixon and, after about 1967, the New Left. That last is important because Newfield makes a great point of not leaving patriotism to the right wing. He writes that, when he was in high school in the late 1950s and reading the Village Voice, the paper’s “politics straddled liberalism and radicalism in a confused way, just as mine would for many years.” The Voice “simultaneously,” Newfield continues, “promoted reform, socialism, anarchism, bohemianism, pacifism, populism and participatory democracy.”

After some years of life on the barricades, symbolic and real--he was arrested at a Baltimore sit-in in 1963, went to the 1963 march on Washington, the demonstration at Selma, Ala., in 1967 and the 1968 Democratic National Convention--Newfield was disgusted with the turns the New Left was taking. In particular, he says, he was appalled by such events as the expulsion of whites from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the Students for a Democratic Society “turning into vandals and bomb makers.”

Equally troubling to him was Tom Hayden “glorifying the gangsterism of Huey Newton and the Black Panthers,” Stokeley Carmichael “spouting the poison of ‘Zionism equals racism,’” and Jerry Rubin “calling Sirhan Sirhan a ‘freedom fighter.’” Newfield became firmly centered as a liberal, not a radical. Incidentally, he has warm words for Hayden overall and thinks he should have been a writer, not a politician.

The chapter “A Guilty Pleasure” is devoted to his fascination with boxing, and the end of the book will interest students of New York City politics and tabloid newspaper wars as he thinks about his time at the Daily News and then the Post. He adds the Chicago Tribune Co., now the owner of the Los Angeles Times, to his list of enemies for its role in trying to break the unions at the New York Daily News, and he details the clamorous struggle at the Post between editors and owners before it was rescued by the right-wing mogul Rupert Murdoch. “Somebody’s Gotta Tell It” is, in its boastful way, a mildly entertaining account of one writer’s earnest idealism.