A liberal voice, clear and true

In the 1940s and 1950s, when Hendrik Hertzberg was a boy in New York City and its outlying communities, his home was a swirl of postwar passion and political animation. His father was the son of immigrant garment workers, a former teenage street-corner speaker for the Bronx Socialist Party. His mother, a professor of history, was a not-too-distant cousin of Walt Whitman. Both were part of the small, insular world of New York’s non-Communist intellectual left.

Fed from babyhood on the sentiments of Socialist leader Norman Thomas (“who never disappoints,” says Hertzberg), George Orwell, Gandhi and the anti-Fascist novelist Ignazio Silone, he grew up in an atmosphere of reasoned dissent and engaged, self-critical discussion. The polemical essays of Dwight Macdonald -- whose short-lived magazine Politics (after which the current volume is named) was conceived in 1943, the year Hertzberg was born -- “electrified” Hertzberg as a young man and confirmed for him the critical lesson that it was the left itself that had most effectively critiqued and fought Stalinism.

That world -- the “dissenting, marginalized, Eurocentric, anti-Stalinist intellectual left,” as Hertzberg describes his cultural milieu -- seems distant today, in the era of George W. Bush and John Kerry. But for Hertzberg it is not; it is all part of a “continuing intellectual tradition,” a tangle of “cultural roots” that he has carried with him and nurtured through a 40-year career.

He came of age as the ‘50s gave way to the ‘60s, amid the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement, the birth of rock ‘n’ roll. He interviewed 24-year-old Jerry Garcia in 1966 for Newsweek (“He has frizzy hair, like Nancy of Nancy and Sluggo,” Hertzberg reported), back when tickets to the Fillmore West cost $2.50 to $3.50 (“depending on the talent”). He visited John and Yoko for a chat in their West Village studio for the New Yorker. He went to Woodstock (where he slept out in the rain, trekked through the crowd for an hour to reach the Port-O-Sans and described it all as “a Mathew Brady phantasmagoria of tents and mud”).

But from the start, what Hertzberg excelled at was short-form political writing. From his early essays on the New Left through his years as editor of the New Republic to the last piece in the book -- a February 2004 dissection of President Bush’s latest State of the Union address for the New Yorker -- his cultural debt to Orwell and Macdonald is almost always evident. Like them, Hertzberg traffics in the kind of analytical yet, as he says, “indignant” intellectual discussion that can actually change people’s minds, set out in the clear, passionate and clever prose we all wish we could produce ourselves. In the book’s introduction, David Remnick, the New Yorker’s editor, says that Hertzberg “has tone control the way Billie Holiday had tone control.”

A couple of distinguishing characteristics: First, it is striking how consistent Hertzberg has been over a very long period of time, and how little he has to look back on with regret or embarrassment. Though no one’s beliefs go completely unchanged for 40 years, Hertzberg did not veer across the political spectrum the way so many of his contemporaries did. He was not a communist in the 1950s, a Weatherman in the 1960s or a Reaganite in the 1980s. He did not engage in the peregrinations of Irving Kristol or David Horowitz or David Brock. Unlike Kathy Boudin, he did not rebel spectacularly against his parents; unlike Christopher Hitchens, he is not at war with his former comrades. His politics have been all along sober and unhysterical, rooted in the values he learned at home. From the start, he says, “I took my antiwar arguments from Theodore Draper, not Noam Chomsky; from Commentary (yes, Commentary) and The New Republic, not the National Guardian and Monthly Review.”

Second, like his parents, he always understood that honest criticism begins at home. In the early years, he was sympathetic to the New Left yet lambasted its “intellectual flabbiness and dishonesty,” lamenting that terms like “fascism,” “racism,” “genocide,” “police state” and “oppression” had been “stripped of meaning.”

In 1970, when he was 27, he took the Weathermen to task. “Unlike the Stalinists, the Weathermen do not take orders from anyone,” he wrote. “They do their own unthinking.... To be thus freed from the responsibility of thought is an exhilarating experience. It is pleasant to ride the tide of ‘history’ without having to worry about the political (let alone the moral) consequences. It is thrilling to give oneself over wholly to mindless action without having to face the travail of doubt.”

Today, in his mature incarnation as a political columnist for the New Yorker, Hertzberg’s positions have settled into a kind of clearheaded liberalism, minus the heavy-handed wallop or the shrillness characterizing so many on the left. It’s true that his positions rarely surprise -- he’s reliably anti-Iraq War, pro-Democrat, anti-Bush, anti-anti-sodomy, pro-civil liberties even after Sept. 11, outraged by Bush vs. Gore -- but few columnists express them so well.

Gary Hart, Hertzberg wrote in 1987, was “the first American victim of Islamic justice.... The difference is that in Iran, the mullahs do not insult the condemned prisoner by telling him that he is being executed not for adultery but because of ‘concerns about his character.’ ” Robert Kennedy, he wrote, “left no great legislative legacy, founded no great institution, led no great movement. His most extraordinary accomplishment -- and it was extraordinary -- was to embody in himself, and create in others, a kind of transcendent yearning for the possibility of redemptive change.”

Richard Gephardt “puts me in mind, unreasonably to be sure, of an earthling whose body has been taken over by space aliens. I keep expecting him to reach under his chin and peel back that immobile, monochromatic, oddly smooth face to reveal the lizard beneath.”

As an observer, Hertzberg is both droll and unsparing. Here he is, for instance, during the 1992 conventions, when Al Gore was exploiting his son’s near-fatal car accident for political gain and Bill Clinton was regaling the delegates with stories of his father’s death and his stepfather’s drunken violence: “One thing’s for sure: If F.D.R. were running today, his aides would wear little gold wheelchairs on their lapels. And John F. Kennedy’s 1960 acceptance speech written under 1992 conditions would have sounded less like Cicero and more like Geraldo. No doubt it would’ve started out with a vivid description of precisely how his brother Joe was killed in World War II, tying that in with the theme of sacrifice as well as the need to find peaceful solutions. Then a couple of grafs on his mentally retarded sister, Rosemary, and how her plight brought all the members of the family closer together while sensitizing them to the issue of community-based health care. Something about the candidate’s chronic back pain as a metaphor for economic suffering

One of the finer pieces is a 1999 essay on the long-running war in New York City between the Daily News and the New York Post. Hertzberg begins by noting that “aside from certain subatomic particles and unrefrigerated egg-salad sandwiches, few physical objects are more ephemeral than a tabloid newspaper.” Then he sizes up the competitors: “The Daily News has gone a little soft around the middle, and its footwork may have grown sluggish and its speech slurred, but it has stolid, sullen strength, and it still has the weight advantage. The Post has dazzling moves and not an ounce of fat and it knows how to taunt an opponent, but its mouth is bigger than its fists, and there is some question whether it can go the distance.”

In another essay, Hertzberg describes how the words “under God” were added to the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954, at the prodding of anti-communists and the Knights of Columbus. “Thus it was that on a bright June morning in 1954 schoolchildren across the country were told that the Pledge of Allegiance would be different from then on,” he writes. “ ‘One nation indivisible’ was suddenly divisible -- by the Supreme Being, no less. ‘Liberty and justice for all’ was still intact, though it was unclear whether ‘all’ now encompassed towheaded little Master Atheist and pigtailed little Miss Agnostic. For some, the experience left a small residue of disillusionment with the machinations of the grownup world -- not as bad as when the Dodgers moved to Los Angeles, perhaps, but a palpable addition to the stultification that, come the nineteen-sixties, would generate an opposite and more than equal reaction.”

If there’s a flaw in the collection -- and Hertzberg can’t be blamed for this -- it is simply that some journalism, written in the immediacy of the news cycle, doesn’t age well. How much can we read today about Lloyd Bentsen or Dan Quayle or John Tower? Or, for that matter, Bruce Babbitt? Really, who cares? Some names might as well be forgotten.

But that’s not the point. The point is this: that for those of us who are always looking for a clear voice, an engaged, spirited, sometimes irate, yet lucid voice, these essays are pay dirt. For those who have grown sick of the debased ideological squabbles of the Michael Moores on one hand and the Sean Hannitys on the other, it’s exhilarating to read Hertzberg -- just as it was exhilarating a long time ago for Hertzberg to read Dwight Macdonald. *