Author Thomas Powers reviews the memoirs of Victor Navarsky, long-time editor and publisher of The Nation, one of the U.S.'s oldest opinion journals -- and a left-leaning one at that!
An excerpt:
A HOST of demons followed close on the heels of Victor S. Navasky during the anxious decades when it was his responsibility to maintain life support for America's oldest journal of opinion. Born in 1865 at the end of the Civil War, brainchild of New England abolitionists looking for new wrongs to right, new oppressed classes to raise up, new errors in public policy to admonish and correct, The Nation magazine in its first century and a half has never been far from spending its last dollar. More than once in this lively memoir, Navasky reminds the reader that the magazine lost money in all but three years, but even so it was not the specter of bankruptcy that haunted Navasky most. Nor was it meddlesome patrons who covered the losses, viper-tongued columnists who attacked him in his own publication, touchy readers who cancelled subscriptions when the editor had been too radical or too timid; it wasn't even the queasy apprehension, like a perpetual threat of rain, that someday emerging from the archives of the old Soviet Union there would finally appear an official document offering clear, unambiguous, incontrovertible evidence that the accused Soviet spy, Alger Hiss . . . had lied. ...
But it is the fate of The Nation, and of feisty magazines, that concerns Navasky here. His account of what it takes to keep them going is wonderfully complete, a kind of primer, detailed as a county road map, on the practical, political, economic and diplomatic challenges of running a money-losing magazine by persuading men with millions to maintain a literary pulpit for a scribbling rabble mad about everything, while somehow convincing the oft-provoked patrons to bite their tongues. No progressive teacher of toddlers was ever more permissive, but two things at The Nation Navasky would not permit -- editorial meddling by the patron of the day, and public admission that it was Whittaker Chambers who told the truth and Alger Hiss who lied.
There is more about the Hiss case in this book than you might expect, considering the fact that no serious cold war historian now questions the penetration of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's administration by Soviet spy rings, or that Hiss lied about knowing one of the spy handlers. Navasky has often marched to the sound of the guns in this ancient controversy and his appetite is undiminished now. Why does he still care? My guess is it has a little to do with his soft spot for the Old Left, and a lot to do with pure stubborn refusal to concede he believed the wrong man.
Of course anybody can be wrong -- indeed, sometimes nearly everybody can be wrong -- but Navasky's inflexibility on this point goes some distance toward explaining why Buckley's conservative National Review looms over this memoir like the ghost of Christmas Future. The two editors were both sharp, both eager to shape national politics, both quick to spot talent, both ready to let writers say the same thing over and over until the world began to take notice. But conservatives, not ''left liberals'' or any other kind of liberals, occupy the seats of power in Washington. Something about the ''old'' in Old Left helps explain how this happened. Navasky is undaunted; his strategy for dealing with the long eclipse is without guile: never let up, open his pages to writers who can sense Republican blood in the water, and keep The Nation going.