Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes

by David Horowitz

  But, of course, such a perspective is politically incorrect at places like Bates, so dangerous that the faculty commissars are constantly on guard to prevent students from too much contact with such dangerous thoughts. The relatively good behavior of my audience at Bates is not always in evidence. The campus norm when conservative ideas are expressed is a kind of intellectual fascism which makes such dissenting discourse improbable, and often impossible. On the same trip, I spoke at the University of St. Thomas in Houston. When I got to the line "Nobody is oppressed in America," a very large African-American student stood up and began ranting in my direction, "You're a fascist! I can't listen to this anymore." Then he thrust his hand into the air in a Nazi salute, shouted "Sieg Heil," and walked out.

  17

  Calibrating the Culture Wars

  A NEGATIVE ARTICLE in the Los Angeles Times Sunday Book Review on recent publications by two neo-conservative authors, Norman Podhoretz and Hilton Kramer, reveals how the culture war has become a dialogue of the deaf. In the article, the left-wing critic Russell Jacoby concludes that the "problem" with these neo-conservative writers "is less their positions than their delusions about them; they seem to think they represent lonely and beleaguered outposts of anti-Communism."

  How could conservatives be beleaguered in an American culture that was itself conservative? Jacoby wanted to know. Referring to Kramer's Twilight of the Intellectuals, the more theoretical of the two books, Jacoby asserts: "Kramer refashions reality. . . . [He] writes as if he were a denizen of the former Soviet Union, where the party controls intellectual life and only a few brave souls like himself risk their lives and careers to tell the truth." The critic focuses on Kramer's lament that "it was not the Western defenders of Communist tyranny who suffered so conspicuously from censure and opprobrium in the Cold War period but those who took up the anti-Communist cause." Incredulous, Jacoby asks, "What could 184 he mean?" as though there were no plausible answer to the question.

  But it is obvious to any reader of Kramer's book that he had in mind the emblematic figure of Whittaker Chambers, the subject of the first two essays in his powerful volume. Jacoby seems to have given the book an attention as cursory as his evident contempt for its author's conservative politics. In Kramer's view, Chambers was an "archetypal" ex-communist and his treatment in "the court of liberal opinion," which is coterminous with the literary culture, reflected its own attitude towards the anti-communist cause. Chambers did risk his life and career to expose one of the top Soviet spies in the American government, yet his status in America's literary culture ever after has been that of a renegade and a snitch. As a direct consequence of his patriotic deed, Chambers — one of the towering figures of the early Cold War and, in Witness, the author of an American classic — was fired from his job as a top editor at Time and brought to the brink of personal ruin. Despised in life, for forty years after his death in 1957 Chambers was a forgotten man. Indeed, when I had the occasion to ask some senior honors students at the University of California in the early 1990s if they had ever heard of Whittaker Chambers, they said they had not. But they knew the name "Alger Hiss" and that he was a "victim of McCarthyism."

  Alger Hiss was, of course, the Soviet spy whom Chambers exposed. In contrast to Chambers, Hiss emerged through his ordeal as a political martyr to the liberal culture, a hero and a cause célébre among Nation leftists, who continued to champion his "innocence" long after his guilt was obvious. The convicted Hiss even had an academic chair named in his honor at a distinguished liberal arts college. Upon his death in 1996, he was eulogized in progressive magazines and by liberal television anchors as an "idealist," and (inevitably) as a long-suffering victim of the anti-communist "witchhunt." As Kramer sums up this parable, "Hiss — convicted of crimes that showed him to be a liar, a thief, and a traitor — was judged to be innocent even if guilty, and Chambers-the self-confessed renegade who recanted his treachery-was judged to be guilty even if he was telling the truth. For what mattered to liberal opinion was that Hiss was seen to have remained true to his ideals — never mind what the content of these 'ideals' proved to be — whereas Chambers was seen to have betrayed them."

  In this passage, Kramer identifies the central cultural paradox of the Cold War epoch in the West: the survival among American intellectuals of the very ideals — socialist and progressive — -that led to the catastrophe of Soviet Communism. As Kramer puts it, "Liberalism, as it turned out, was not to be so easily dislodged from the whole morass of illiberal doctrines and beliefs in which, under the influence of marxism, it had become so deeply embedded, and every attempt to effect such a separation raised the question of whether . . . there was still something that could legitimately be called liberalism." Yet, Jacoby's only response to these seminal chapters and the questions they pose is that they make Kramer's book seem "musty." This despite Chambers's final vindication in the release three years ago of the Venona transcripts of Soviet intelligence communications, which definitively established Hiss's guilt.

  For anti-communist conservatives, Whittaker Chambers is a political hero. But it took forty years from the time of his death for the publishing world to produce a biographical tribute in Sam Tannenhaus's worthy volume. And Chambers stands almost alone among anti-Communist heroes of the Cold War in finally receiving his biographical due. Elizabeth Bentley, Louis Budenz, Bella Dodd, Frank Meyer, Walter Krivitsky, Victor Kravchenko, Jan Valtin, once large figures of the anti-communist cause, along with countless less well-known others, are more typical in having virtually disappeared from cultural memory.

  By contrast, to cite only one of many counterexamples, Abbie Hoffman, a political clown of the next radical generation but a hero to the left, has been the subject of three biographies within a decade of his death, not to mention a book-length exposition of his political "philosophy." There can be no question that the nostalgic glow around Hoffman's memory and the interest in his life are integrally connected to the fact that he was a stalwart defender of communist tyrannies in Cuba and Vietnam, and thus in the shared ideals of progressives who now dominate the literary culture and shape its historical judgments.

  Russell Jacoby acquired his own credentials by writing a book called The Last Intellectuals, which bemoaned the vanishing "public intellectual." This was a label he gave to intellectuals who worked outside the academy, wrote lucid (instead of postmodernist) prose, and influenced the public debate. The very title of Jacoby's book, however, is an expression of progressive arrogance and the unwillingness of leftists like Jacoby to acknowledge their cultural success. What Jacoby really mourned was the disappearance of the left-wing public intellectual, a direct result of the conquest of American liberal arts faculties by the political left and its distribution of academic privilege to comrades among the politically correct. Jacoby is well aware that an important consequence of this takeover is that almost all contemporary conservative intellectuals are (of necessity) public intellectuals. Indeed, this fact is regularly used by leftists in their ad hominem attacks on conservative intellectuals as "bought" by their institutional sponsors. Jacoby himself cannot even mention Kramer's magazine the New Criterion, without adding that it is "funded by a conservative foundation." Of course, the Nation for which Jacoby himself writes regularly is funded by rich leftists and leftist foundations. So what?

  The reason conservative intellectuals gravitate to think-tanks like Heritage, American Enterprise, and Hoover, and to magazines like Commentary and the New Criterion is because of their de facto blacklisting by the leftist academy. It is, in fact, the public influence of these conservative intellectuals that is the focus of Jacoby's lament in The Last Intellectuals. Academic intellectuals, he complains, write for a professional coterie instead of a broad public. Yet the pull of institutional security is so great that Jacoby himself has since succumbed to its lure. Since writing his assault on the "obscurantist" university, Jacoby has given up his own independent existence and accepted an appointment from his political comrades in the history depa
rtment at UCLA.

  While lack of self-reflection and self-irony are indispensable characteristics of the left in general, Jacoby's attack on Podhoretz and Kramer is an extraordinary specimen. Not only is his attack directed at two intellectuals who, for political reasons, were denied a platform in the Times, but they were also denied the very academic patronage that Jacoby himself now enjoys. "What can he mean?" Indeed.

  Jacoby's attack was actually one of four nonfiction reviews the Times chose to feature on its cover. Three were of conservative books-all of which were attacked from the left. The fourth was a review of two books on Clinton, both written by leftists, both praised by reviewers from the left.

  The issue of the Times in question happened to be May.9, 1999, but it could have been any date. In December 1997, the Book Review ran a year-end wrap-up, the "Times' ioo Best Books," compiled from previous Times reviews. Because some reviewers had written more than one notice, there were eighty-seven contributors in all. They were a familiar sampling of the literary left, and even of the true believing left (Saul Landau, Martin Duberman, Robert Scheer, and Ellen Willis, for example). Among them all, however, the only reviewer I could detect with the slightest claim to a conservative profile was an academic, Walter Lacquer, who has no obvious association with conservative politics comparable to the connection of the aforementioned leftists to radical politics.

  I learned how the "100 Best Books" were picked shortly after the issue appeared, when I had lunch with Steve Wasserman, the newly appointed editor of the Review. I knew Wasserman as a former Berkeley radical and protege, in the 1960s, of a Times contributing editor, Bob Scheer, when Scheer was promoting the party line of Kim Il Sung and plotting to overthrow the American empire as a member of the Red Family. Scheer's present politics were still to the left of "Senator Bullworth," in whose film he had made a cameo appearance courtesy of his friend Warren Beatty. After the 1960s, Scheer had ingratiated himself with Hollywood's bolsheviks, married a top editor at the Los Angeles Times, and become a figure of influence in the paper's hierarchy, which enabled him to secure Wasserman his job.

  I had defended Wasserman's appointment in print, at his own request, when journalist Catherine Seipp attacked him in the now defunct Buzz magazine. In my letter to Buzz, I praised what I thought were Wasserman's good intentions of fairness, despite our political differences. The lunch we had arranged was an attempt to rekindle the flame of a relationship that had survived the 1960s. The mere fact that he would have civil contact with me, a political "renegade," seemed an auspicious sign-rare as such gestures of civility had been over the years from my former comrades-in-arms. It led me to assume (falsely) that Wasserman had some respect for my own odyssey and quest for the truth. Indeed, he had praised my autobiography, Radical Son, which some reviewers had flatteringly compared to Witness, and even thought the critical portrait I drew of Scheer "charming" and "accurate."

  In fact, given the proper circumstances, Wasserman could himself be an artful critic of the left, within the stringent boundaries it normally set for itself. I say this because I have sometimes been accused of "lumping" leftists together and missing the spectrum of "progressive" opinions. The reverse would almost be more accurate. I have often given too much benefit of the doubt to people like Wasserman, in recognition of mild deviations they have been willing to risk and have failed to see the hard line coming before it smacked me in the face.

  When I raised the issue of conservatives' exclusion from the pages of his magazine, Wasserman dismissed my concern out of hand as "bean counting." He compared it to feminist complaints of underrepresentation, even though there were plenty of feminists and feminist sympathizers on the Review's list. I found myself wondering whether a leftist writer of reputation comparable to mine would have been invited to lunch by Wasserman and not asked to write a review for his magazine.

  I should have known at the time that this was not going to be a long-lived reunion. It came to an end almost a year later when Wasserman finally did ask me to write for the Review. He wanted me to join a "symposium" on the sesquicentennial of the publication of the Communist Manifesto. My contribution was to be 250 words (which he promptly cut to 5). I made the mistake of assuming others's would be equally brief. When the issue came out, however, I saw that the symposium opened with a three-thousand word illustrated spread celebrating Marx's genius and continuing relevance. This mash note was written by Eric Hobsbawm, a member of the Communist Party until 1990 (!) and a recidivist marxist. Hobsbawm's most recent book had been a five hundred-page defense of the pro-Soviet left in the Cold War, which I had taken on in a lengthy review in the Weekly Standard. Hobsbawm's apologia for Marxism was an insult to the historical record and to everything that people like Chambers and I had stood for. In featuring this travesty, Wasserman had revealed the standard by which he lived (and his real opinion of me). Why not ask David Duke to write a paean to Mein Kampf on its anniversary, I asked, in an acidic note I sent him.

  But I could not let the matter rest there, and decided to take it up with the top editors at the Times. Both of them were men of the left as well, who listened politely and ignored my concern. I also wrote a letter to the Time's newly appointed publisher and CEO, Mark Willes, previously an executive at General Mills. I had met Willes at a Times Christmas Party which was held at the Hancock Park mansion of its editorial page editor, Janet Clayton, an African-American woman whose living room was tellingly adorned with an iconic portrait of Jesse Jackson. Except for the passage of thirty years, the Times party could have been organized by Ramparts, the radical magazine Scheer and I edited in the 1960s. Clayton's living room was soon filled with the glitterati of the Los Angeles left. Scheer was there, gnashing his teeth at me because of what I had written about him in Radical Son. Tom Hayden came too, along with the ACLU's Ramona Ripston and black extremist (and Times contributor) Earl Ofari Hutchinson. In fact, the only person not of the left I encountered that whole evening, was Paula Jones's spokeswoman Susan Carpenter McMillan.

  It occurred to me to make an appeal to Willes because he had already made a few gestures that seemed to indicate his intention to introduce some balance at the Times. He had even demoted several left-wing editors who had climbed the affirmative action ladder to the top of the paper, among them Scheer's wife. In my letter, I challenged the rationale behind pitching the book section of a major metropolitan newspaper to what was essentially a Nation audience. I made it clear that I had no problem with the representation of left-wing authors in the paper. It was the exclusion of conservatives that concerned me.

  But I had misjudged Willes, whose reason for demoting the editors was related more to the Times's poor economic performance than its sometimes extreme political postures. Like many businessmen, Willes showed little political sense when it came to the issues of left and right. Shortly after my appeal, for example, Willes was publicly embarrassed by a leaked internal memo in which he demanded that Times reporters include ethnically diverse sources in all articles, regardless of subject matter or context. This was too much even for the quota-oppressed Times staff and its politically correct editors. Instead of answering my letter, Willes handed it over to its target, Wasserman, whose reply was understandably terse and revealed that our relationship was effectively over.

  In my discussions with Wasserman and the Times's editors, I had raised another issue: the exclusion of conservative writers from the annual L.A. Times Festival of Books. This was an event normally attended by a hundred thousand readers and five hundred authors flown in from all over the country, eager to show up because of the opportunities for publicity and validation that an appearance entailed. At the previous festival, the only conservative authors I had been able to identify were celebrities Charlton Heston and Arianna Huffington.

  I was made aware of the festival as a result of my own exclusion when my autobiography Radical Son was published. Like any author with a new book, I had been looking for venues in which to promote it. Given the liberal bias in the general media,
securing an audience was already problematic for a conservative author. Although I had co-authored best-sellers with Peter Collier, and in Radical Son had a dramatic story of murder and intrigue to tell, I found my book blacked out in the review sections of most of the major metropolitan papers. A chance to have 60 Minutes do a segment on the book's untold story of Black Panther murders was blocked by its chief investigative producer, Lowell Bergman, a veteran Berkeley radical. I had enough experiences like this to know I needed the book festival venue. As a well-known author based in Los Angeles, it seemed odd to me that I should not be invited. When I brought this up to Wasserman, however, he just brushed me off. "There are lots of authors," he said. To his credit, he did then try to get me invited but was unsuccessful because my request for inclusion had come too late.

  That was last year, before the Marx fracas. This spring I answered my phone and to my surprise Wasserman was on the other end inviting me to the festival. We had not spoken for nearly a year, and his voice sounded strained and not particularly friendly as he made the offer. "I want to thank you, Steve," I said, accepting. "I know how hard this must be for you." The conversation was so short I never found out exactly how I had earned the invitation, or exactly who had decided I should get it.