Posted on 01/08/2009 5:36:18 PM PST by nickcarraway
I've borrowed Woody Guthrie's 1942 song to report that this is my last column for the Voice. I'm not retiring; I've never forgotten my exchange on that decision with Duke Ellington. In those years, he and the band played over 200 one-nighters a year, with jumps from, say, Toronto to Dallas. On one of his rare nights off, Duke looked very beat, and I presumptuously said: "You don't have to keep going through this. With the standards you've written, you could retire on your ASCAP income."
Duke looked at me as if I'd lost all my marbles.
"Retire!" he crescendoed. "Retire to what?!"
I'm still writing. In 2009, the University Press of California will publish my I>At the Jazz Band Ball: 60 Years on the Jazz Scene, and, later in the year, a sequel to The War on the Bill of Rights and the Gathering Resistance will be out on Seven Stories Press with the title Is This America? And I'll be breaking categories elsewhere, including in my weekly syndicated United Media column, which reaches 250 papers, and my jazz and country music pieces in The Wall Street Journal.
I came here in 1958 because I wanted a place where I could write freely on anything I cared about. There was no pay at first, but the Voice turned out to be a hell of a resounding forum. My wife, Margot—later an editor here and a columnist far more controversial than I've been—called what this paper was creating "a community of consciousness." Though a small Village "alternative" newspaper, we were reaching many around the country who were turned off by almost any establishment you could think of.
Being here early on, I felt I'd finally been able to connect with what had first startled and excited me as I was reading my journalism mentor, George Seldes, the first press critic. When I was 15, I saw his four-page newsletter, "In Fact: An Antidote to Falsehoods in the Daily Press." He broke stories I'd never seen in any other paper, including The New York Times, stories that gave scientific data on how cigarette smoking caused cancer.
Seldes was also a labor man. You could find "In Fact" in some union halls, and for years, his name was blacked out of The New York Times because, in 1934, he testified about journalists' wages before the National Labor Relations Board just as the Newspaper Guild was trying to organize the Times.
"In Fact" reached a circulation of 176,000 and included newspaper reporters around the country who fed Seldes news that they couldn't get into their own papers.
Seldes was, to say the least, not an admirer of J. Edgar Hoover, and when "In Fact" died in 1950, one of the reasons was that FBI agents had gone into post offices around the nation and copied down the names of subscribers—and let them know they were known.
Seldes was also my hero when, after Senator Joseph McCarthy called him into a closed-door session to admit to his Bolshevism, the Great Red Hunter eventually came out of the room, looking unprecedentedly subdued as he told the waiting press that Seldes had been "cleared." George had intimidated Tailgunner Joe.
As a foreign correspondent for the Chicago Tribune, Seldes, because of his stories, was kicked out of Hitler's Germany, Mussolini's Italy, and Stalin's Russia. Years later, he and I corresponded for a while, and then I finally met him in 1985 when he was in New York promoting his book, The Great Thoughts, about a gallery of freethinkers through the centuries. Some of his other books include Never Tire of Protesting and Lords of the Press.
At 94, Seldes was no longer in the news business, but as I came into his hotel room around nine one morning, he was doing what I do every morning: tearing pages out of stacks of newspapers. Instead of saying, "Hello," he grabbed a handful of clips, gave them to me, and said, "You ought to look into these stories!" Then, smiling, he said, "I'm getting old, yes, but to hell with being mellow."
In 1995, he died at the age of 104 in Hartland Four Corners, Vermont.
My other main mentor, I.F. "Izzy" Stone, was inspired by "In Fact" to start "I.F. Stone's Weekly," where mainstream newspaper reporters also sent stories that they couldn't get into their own papers.
One of the lessons I learned from Izzy was to avoid press conferences: "You're not going to get the real story there," he'd say. Instead, I learned from him to find mid-level workers in bureaucracies whom reporters seldom thought to interview. That's how, years ago, I reported for the Voice on the accurate drop-out rate in the city's schools.
Because of the "Seldes and Stone Journalism School" (I've never been in one that actually grants degrees), I got to do at the Voice something that led the late Meg Greenfield, The Washington Post's editorial page editor—for whom I wrote a weekly "Sweet Land of Liberty" column for some 15 years—to say on my receiving the 1995 National Press Foundations Award for lifetime distinguished contributions to journalism: "Nat Hentoff is never chic. Never has been, as those of us who have known him over the centuries can attest. Never will be. Count on it. He is not tribal in his views and is terribly stubborn. He challenges icons and ideas that are treasured in the community he lives in. He puts on his skunk suit and heads off to the garden party, week after week, again and again."
It was here that I was able to practice, since 1958, what I learned from my non-chic mentors. And I'll be putting on my skunk suit at other garden parties, now that I've been excessed from the Voice.
I was in my twenties when I learned my most important lesson from Izzy Stone: "If you're in this business because you want to change the world, get another day job. If you are able to make a difference, it will come incrementally, and you might not even know about it. You have to get the story and keep on it because it has to be told."
Still, there was one time when I was stunned at meeting a reader changed by what I'd written. One of my sons, Tom, is a partner at Williams & Connolly, a highly prestigious Washington law firm founded by one of my idols in the law, Edward Bennett Williams. Tom, a specialist in intellectual property and defamation, among other areas of law, once invited me to a large gathering in New York of lawyers from around the country who are also experts in those fields. Several lawyers in their thirties, it seemed to me, came to our table, and one, speaking for the others, said to me: "We're here because of you. We were in high school when we started reading you in the Voice, and you made the law so exciting. That, as I've said, is why we're here."
Other Voice writers have had that effect on readers—the late Jack Newfield, for one—and some are still being skunks at garden parties: Tom Robbins and Wayne Barrett. Their calls get returned quickly.
Around the country, a lot of reporters are being excessed, and print newspapers may soon become collectors' items. But over the years, my advice to new and aspiring reporters is to remember what Tom Wicker, a first-class professional spelunker, then at The New York Times, said in a tribute to Izzy Stone: "He never lost his sense of rage."
Neither have I. See you somewhere else. Finally, I'm grateful for the comments on the phone and the Web. It's like hearing my obituaries while I'm still here.
Folks, I appreciate that this guy may have got something right.
And as a Jazz fan who can tell the diffence in three notes or less between Coleman Hawkins and Ben Webster, I don’t have any issue with his writing about music. I think that is great.
But, as the saying goes, a stopped clock is right twice a day. This guy was an avowed apologist for communism, and again, the fact that someone like I.F. Stone was his mentor and someone who he greatly admired speaks volumes about him.
I’m glad he stuck up for Terry Schavio. I’m heartened that he thought Palin was fine. I think it is great he stuck up for College students who were being oppressed.
The fact is, you cannot have it both ways. If he was doing thinking for himself, then he wasn’t doing a very good job of it if he thinks the rights of oppressed college students are important, but it is okay to overlook the faults of a bloodthirsty ideology responsible for tens of millions of deaths and hundreds of millions more living oppressed lives or imprisioned in Gulags. There is a severe cognitive dissonance in his “own thinking”.
At the risk of invoking Godwin’s Law, they say that Hitler liked his dogs and Stalin was fond of children. I am sure that this man had his redeeming virtues, but his support whether overt in his columns or through his contribution to the profitability of a despicable publication that is a shill for leftists and tyrants has disabled my inclination to overlook those faults.
The fact that for so many years he earned his daily bread from a publication like the Village Voice which is virulently opposed to any value we as conservatives and/or Americans hold high should highlight that fact.
I take umbrage at your implied criticism of someone critical of this person as indicative of a lack of being able to think for myself.
I take the time to think long and hard about these issues. My personal dedication to this cause of understanding the issues as a responsibility as a citizen took a serious hit when I realized all the months and years I have spent staying on top of the issues (so I could make an informed choice when voting) were ill spent along those lines because my vote was negated by a stupid idiot on television who thought that getting Obama into office would take care of her mortgage and gas money. But I am not giving up.
As I get older, I am less inclined to overlook the ideology of entertainers. I used to enjoy Roger Waters until I saw him in concert a while back, and ended up sitting there and steaming in silence because I didn’t want to ruin for anyone else I was with because of his overt politicization of his entertainment. I blame myself for not recognizing it in advance. But I am no longer willing to give people points for their cultural contributions they dole out on one when balanced against their support of political or ideological forces that are dedicated to destroying the fabric of our society.
These people hold a lot of power in our society, and I am not willing to grant that to them any longer. This guy falls in that category. Maybe he has had a change of heart as he gets older, but it doesn’t look that way to me.
So, in an effort to make sure we all get along, I will moderate my criticism of this man and call him a “Useful Idiot” which gives him some benefit of the doubt. Perhaps that is more generous than “POS”.
If you think this is "a license to kill," your real beef is either with the fundamental concept of a living will OR with the institution of marriage.
The Schiavo case is indeed a life issue because it was about when a person gets the right to decide to kill a living person. ... It's a much bigger issue than your personal views of marriage.
Well, there we have it. Apparently, we have differing views of marriage. Referring to Mr. and Mrs. Schiavo as "a person" and "[another] person" implies their marriage is irrelevant to the case.
My "personal views of marriage" come from the Bible. If the Schiavos had a church wedding with God and a Bible and vows and all that, let's just say "words mean things."
When the day comes that a court says a husband needs another piece of paper before he can speak on behalf of his wife in her hour of need, marriage is under attack on yet another front.
For example, from 1999:
A Holocaust We Could Have Stopped
Clinton’s culpability in this holocaust is not an impeachable offense, but it is the single most repellent charge against him and his administration.
In his extraordinarily detailed and probing book, We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories From Rwanda (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998), Philip Gourevitch says plainly that “throughout the entire period” of the genocide, the Clinton administration’s approach was not a failure to intervene but ”a success of a policy not to intervene.” (Emphasis added.)
Carrying out the Clinton policy of letting the killing continue was Madeleine Albright, then our ambassador to the United Nations. Says Gourevitch:
“Her name is rarely associated with Rwanda, but ducking and pressuring others to duck— as the death toll leapt from thousands to tens of thousands— was the absolute low point in her career as a stateswoman.”
So far.
Clinton’s name is also rarely associated with Rwanda. The American press noted the corpses at the time, but largely failed to begin to cover Clinton’s complicity in this crime against humanity, as it essentially failed to cover Franklin Roosevelt’s refusal to rescue Jews from the Nazis...
The Triumph of Evil
On Frontline, Tony Marley, a consultant at the State Department in 1994, says that a Clinton administration official cautioned him that in view of the coming congressional elections, the Democrats could lose votes if Clinton “admitted that genocide was taking place in Rwanda and was seen to do nothing about it. . . . It indicated to me that the calculation was based on whether or not there was popular pressure to take action— rather than taking action because it was the right thing to do.”
William Jefferson Clinton survives because of his close— often daily— attention to polls telling him the popular thing to do.
Frontline’s narrator on “The Triumph of Evil”:
“The objective reality of what was happening in Rwanda couldn’t be kept quiet forever. Rwanda’s dead had begun to float downstream into the outside world. The country was literally overflowing with corpses.”
At one point, Tony Marley recommended that, at least, American military radio equipment could be used to jam Hutu radio transmissions, which were urging that not a single Tutsi be left alive. (“All Tutsis will perish! They will disappear from the earth.”)Marley’s suggestion was turned down. “In fact,” Marley told Frontline, “one lawyer from the Pentagon made the argument that [jamming the Hutu radio] would be contrary to the United States constitutional protection of freedom of the press and freedom of speech.”
The Clinton administration had presented the Hutu assassins with our First Amendment to get the president off the hook...
Your logic is precisely that of the pro-abortionists: Who else should speak for the unborn baby if not the mother?
Once again, you don't know what you're talking about.
Some examples of Nat Hentoff "overlooking the faults of communism":
http://www.villagevoice.com/1999-11-23/news/china-s-brutal-police-state/
"Savage beatings against Christians [the ones not officially approved by the government] were on the rise at the end of last year. . . . On December 24, in Liangzhuang Village, Xushui county . . . a 12-year-old girl, who told interrogators she became a liturgy lector out of religious conviction, was beaten so badly she had to be hospitalized. In November, a Protestant woman in Henan suffered brain damage in beatings by security agents. "On May 9, 1998, Chinese police, in collaboration with the United Front Work Department of the Chinese Communist Party, raided and bulldozed a Catholic Church in Luoyuan county of Fujian province while some of the congregation were assembled for worship. During the raid, the police, armed with guns and electric batons, kicked and beat anyone who resisted arrest. Three female parishioners were seriously injured. Within two hours, the 600-square-foot church was bulldozed." The parishioners will now have to go underground.
http://www.villagevoice.com/2000-05-02/news/eli-n-s-future-in-cuba/
"Are we really prepared to send these children back to their countries without an independent adjudication of whether they might face danger back home? To do so would set a dangerous precedent for other refugee children who need and deserve our protection."
Clinton and his shadow attorney general were in a rush to avoid a careful, independent adjudication of Elián's fate. Both Reno and Clinton should read the April 18 condemnation of Cuba by the United Nations Human Rights Commission in Geneva. It cited that nation's "continued violation of human rights and fundamental freedoms."
And now, on May 11, thanks to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, Elián may finally have his real day in court—and may yet live in freedom, unless sent back by Clinton, Reno, and public opinion.
(DW377:)No one is claiming Hentoff is a conservative; he’s not, he’s a liberal. Yes, he was befriended by I. F. Stone. I have known and liked and loved many liberals, and many of them have positively influenced my life. Should I have asked them to become conservatives before I associated with them? That sounds suspiciously like the childish DU crap. I associate with Americans, of all kinds of political persuasions. And yet I am anti-communist, pro-life, pro-free speech, anti-illegal immigration, etc. Hentoff is a great example of the independent thinking you claim to be so enamored of, while you slam him for publishing in a leftist newspaper, where he has pressed conservative positions on abortion and indeed communism to those who need to read them the most. Talking about prolife positions HERE doesn’t change any minds; talking about them THERE has. In the future, a lot of people should criticize Hentoff less and follow his example more, and let facts instead of comfortable kneejerk reactions inform their opinions, even if I don’t agree with many of them.
No, her incapacitation didn’t put her 6 feet under. What put her 6 feet under was her court-ordered death.
Nat Hentoff may be a man of the old left, not the so-called New Left of the ‘60s, but he is in mind one of the few true civil libertarians out there and one of the best advocates for life. He never hesitated to call out the hypocrisy of the ACLU or the totalitarian impulses of today’s so-called liberals. I always enjoyed reading his columns.
The Village Voice was one of the few publications writing seriously about Jazz at a certain point. That’s like blaming fiction writers for publishing in The New Yorker.
But this simply isn't true. Hentoff did not go deaf, dumb and blind with regard to Communist oppression.
Google Hentoff Cuba and you'll see he waged a vigorous multi-year campaign to expose Castro's jailing of dissident librarians and to pressure the castroite ass-kissers at the American Library Association to support freedom of speech and other basic human rights in Communist countries.
Google Hentoff Chinese prisons and you'll see him excoriating the Chinese Communists over their treatment of the Falun Gong as well as their suppression of the Catholic Church in China.
As a lover of freedom, Hentoff also broke with the Left over the need for the U.S. to oppose Jihadi Terror.
In February 2003, he signed a letter advocating the removal of Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq on human rights grounds, citing reports detailing Hussein's disregard for fundamental liberties. In summer 2003, Hentoff wrote criticizing the Democratic Party for casting doubt on President Bush's pre-war assertions about Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction in an election year, and deriding the idea that an international consensus was required before forceful action could be taken.
As he put it in the Village Voice, "...if you had been in a Hussein torture chamber, would you, even in a state of delirium, hope for rescue from the UN Security Council?”
Hentoff also attacked head-on the complicity of Middle Eastern leaders in the “cartoon jihad,” as a means of “criminalizing insults of Islam and its prophets.” He wrote, " The Organization of Islamic Conference’s goal is to inhibit criticism of Islamic jihadism by threats of violence."
He exposed the fact that the UN's Kofi Annan, working together with the Islamic Conference, was opening to door to "enforce censorship by U.N. members and NGOs (nongovernmental organizations there) against purported defamation of Muslims in print and other forms of speech."
He did a great deal MORE to oppose Communist and Islamist oppression than the great majority of us Keyboard Kommandos at Free Republic.
And why I'm I writing in the past tense? This is no obit. Hentoff is still writing, still speaking, and still defending freedom on a more consistent basis than almost anyone you can name in the journalistic profession.
Exactly. Thank you for saying this so well. And see mine at #69
That's gold. Nice that he included it. That said, Nat Hentoff's one of the all time greats. I'm not saying he's kept us free - and fought for decency and justice and the American way - even if some suspect that... just that I'm glad he's moving on and not moving out...
One of the all time greats... ping.
Your analogy fails to consider the unborn have not been declared brain dead.
Nice try, though. Next, try comparing me to Hitler.
Darkwolf, in your belief on this matter, is it ever ok not to cling to life?
Ditto. Any (self-described) atheist, liberal Jew who has the guts to write the truth about abortion — in the Village Voice, of all places! — is a hero to me.
It’s changed a lot in the five years I’ve been at FR. Used to be more intellectual discussion and thought-provoking debate.
..Yea, I miss the old FR, but, things change. I still like it here. Still some reasonable folks around. I follow Hentoffs’ philosophy, and take one issue at a time. Not into partisanship party line idol worship. There’s enough of that here all ready...
...Amen to that Mrs. and bravo, Doc Watson...
That's such a broad statement that of course my answer is yes, of course it's sometimes ok not to "cling to life".
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