IN JULY 1960, McWilliams traveled to Los Angeles to cover the Democratic National Convention for the Nation. He had not been away from the city long, but it was still changing quickly. When Hollywood was a village and Westwood did not exist, McWilliams had plied the city's boulevards, recording the strange mélange of images that washed over him, wondering about the locals on the trolley cars, and savoring the yellow blaze of wild mustard that grew in the open fields between La Brea and Beverly Hills. Now the trolleys were gone, open space was evaporating, freeways honeycombed the sprawling metropolitan area, and the automobile was the region's prime mover. In his address to the delegates, Senator John F. Kennedy alluded to the city's rapid development, depicting Los Angeles as a frontier whose early residents had sacrificed “their safety, their comfort and sometimes their lives to build a new world.” Kennedy did not mention, however, the sacrifices that this new world demanded of its current residents. As the delegates gathered in the Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena, which resembled an enormous flying saucer, they were issued eye drops to help them cope with the effects of the city's thick smog.
The convention itself, McWilliams noted in his coverage, presented few novelties or surprises. Kennedy's nomination was a foregone conclusion. Two other senators, Hubert Humphrey and Wayne Morse of Oregon, had offered only token opposition to Kennedy in the primaries, and Adlai Stevenson made little effort at the convention to rally his enthusiastic supporters. Hoping that Kennedy could not win on a first ballot, Senator Lyndon Johnson announced his candidacy only days before the convention. When it became clear that Kennedy had wrapped up the nomination, however, Johnson stayed behind the scenes. The only unanswered question was Kennedy's choice for vice president, and Johnson confirmed his reputation as an expert infighter when Kennedy added him to the ticket. Given Johnson's strong, long-standing ties to leading segregationists in the South, that decision gave McWilliams pause.
In “The Kennedys Take Over,” McWilliams credited Kennedy's walkover to his political assets combined with weak leadership within the party.
The Senator is an excellent campaigner, his attractive family constitute a distinct political asset, and his organization is a thing to marvel at. But while the Kennedys have scored a personal family triumph, they have also filled an enormous leadership vacuum in the Democratic Party. The house was not vacant, but it was not defended; and the Kennedys, all of them, led by Jack and brother Bobby, simply moved in and took over.
McWilliams wrote that Kennedy's most direct appeal was to Catholics and young people, yet his typical supporter was not a youthful idealist. “The Kennedy ‘young men’ are young junior executives: they feel they have it made,” McWilliams observed. “They may be young in years and energy, but they are not young ideologically.” The young people in Los Angeles, he observed, were for Stevenson.
Back on his old turf, McWilliams also called attention to a local story involving California governor Pat Brown. Brown should have run as a favorite son, McWilliams wrote, if only to unite the state's divided delegation: “Solidly pledged to Brown, California alone could have stopped the Kennedy putsch.” In fact, Brown had laid the groundwork for a presidential or vice presidential bid, but he eventually endorsed Kennedy without releasing the state's delegates. The result of this maneuver, which McWilliams described as an “inept political fan dance,” was that the state's full strategic strength was never realized. In his report, McWilliams also credited the story circulating at the convention that Brown's decision was the result of an earlier meeting with Kennedy's father, Joseph Kennedy, at which it was agreed that Senator Kennedy would stay out of the California primary in exchange for Brown's personal support.
For McWilliams, the highlight of the convention was Eugene McCarthy's nomination speech for Stevenson, which fired the audience but had no effect on the outcome. As for the party platform, McWilliams appraised it with the cool eye of a literary critic. It was “in many ways an excellent document,” but “it reads as though two dozen precocious political science majors had pooled all their ‘bright’ ideas. It lacks selection, emphasis, vital relevance, organization and, on key issues, it is vaguer than need be.” In the end, McWilliams could muster only two cheers for “the hollow, synthetic quality of the Kennedy movement.” Later, he criticized both the unpleasant techniques used to advance Lyndon Johnson and Kennedy's “empty, pretentious, and imitative” language (ECM, 257).
Some of McWilliams's misgivings about the Democratic nominee can be ascribed to his feelings about Robert Kennedy, who managed his brother's campaign and later served as attorney general. During the height of the Red Scare, Robert Kennedy had worked as staff counsel for Senator Joseph McCarthy; later, he conducted an aggressive investigation of labor leader Jimmy Hoffa and stalled progress on civil rights by nominating Harold Cox for a federal judgeship in Mississippi. (Cox would later call black defendants chimpanzees from the bench.) None of these achievements recommended him to McWilliams, and when Robert Kennedy ran for the Senate in New York in 1964, McWilliams joined a group of liberals and leftists—including I. F. Stone, Richard Hofstadter, James Baldwin, Gore Vidal, Nat Hentoff, and Paul Newman—that supported Republican incumbent Kenneth Keating (Newfield 2003, 152–53). An unsigned editorial in the Sept. 14, 1964, issue of the Nation reviewed the records of both candidates unenthusiastically before recoiling from Robert Kennedy's political ambition: “What should defeat him is his patent attempt to use the Senate seat, to use the New York electorate to further his grandiose ambitions, and to do this in a hard-boiled, almost insolent fashion.” Later, McWilliams called his endorsement of Keating a protest against “the way in which Kennedy by barging into New York politics had kept Robert Wagner from being elected to the Senate seat his father had once held. In our view Wagner would have made the better senator” (ECM, 281). However, McWilliams also mentioned Kennedy's connection to Joseph McCarthy and the tactics used to “get Hoffa.”
McWilliams was no more enthusiastic about the Kennedy administration than he was about the campaign. When President Kennedy authorized a halfhearted invasion of Cuba in the first months of his presidency, McWilliams was not surprised. During his televised debates with Republican opponent Richard Nixon, Kennedy had sought to bolster his credentials as a cold warrior by advocating a U.S. intervention in Cuba. But the prospect of invading Cuba was more than exuberant campaign rhetoric. In November 1960, McWilliams learned that the CIA was training a guerrilla force in Guatemala for that purpose, and the Nation ran an editorial that month calling for the administration to “abandon this dangerous and hair-brained [sic] project.” Later, the New York Times acknowledged the existence of the base but reported that its purpose was to train forces to defend Guatemala against an invasion by Cuba (Jan. 10, 1961). After the invasion was repelled in the Bay of Pigs fiasco, Kennedy complained privately to Turner Catledge of the New York Times that the paper's coverage had amounted to a premature disclosure of security information. Catledge reminded Kennedy that the information had already appeared in the Nation and even earlier in La Hora, a Guatemalan newspaper. Kennedy replied, “But it was not news until it appeared in The Times” (ECM, 229). McWilliams included this exchange in his own memoir, perhaps to establish the Nation's prophetic status. Insightful, even prescient, the magazine was ignored by U.S. policymakers unless it somehow managed to influence the newspaper of record.
When the internal memos about the Cuban invasion were made public in the 1970s, McWilliams singled out Arthur Schlesinger Jr.'s role in the preplanning. Interviewed by Los Angeles journalist Derek Shearer, McWilliams continued the sniping that had begun in the early 1950s.
Schlesinger has tried to do a turn, a real turn, since the CIA disclosures, and all that's known about the Bay of Pigs and his role in that, sitting there feeding Kennedy suggested alternative scenarios—all the rest of it. He was caught with his trousers down, and he's now trying to offset that. They all are. They're all running for cover. You know, in those days Schlesinger spoke the language of McCarthyism with a Harvard accent.
McWilliams's memoir goes further: “A series of preinvasion memos which Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., then a top aide, prepared for President Kennedy clearly anticipated the Watergate ethic” (ECM, 227). Returning the favor, Schlesinger panned McWilliams's memoir in the New York Times Book Review.
Although McWilliams remained unenthusiastic about President Kennedy and his policies, he was shocked by Kennedy's assassination. His diary entry for November 22, 1963, which he labeled “Black Friday,” recorded the exact local time of Kennedy's death and his own location— the Humpty Dumpty coffee shop in New York—when he heard the news. Three days later, with Lee Harvey Oswald also dead, McWilliams recoiled from the tableau in Dallas, where officials were “on TV re-establishing the terrible image of Big D … I don't like those Texas voices nor do I like the white Stetsons—they're trigger-happy, paranoid about ideas, and generally stupid” (Nov. 25, 1963). It was the harsh assessment of a grieving citizen who, even in less catastrophic times, harbored a low opinion of the region. He later described the Kennedy assassination as a key national event. “Measured in terms of political impact, the rifle shots fired at Dallas had the explosive force of a nuclear blast,” he noted in his memoir. “The initial reaction was a combination of shock, sorrow, dismay, fear, rage, panic, and deep national concern. Overnight the popular mood changed from exuberance to paranoia” (ECM, 258).
WATCHING THE REPUBLICANS
If McWilliams was uncharmed by Kennedy, he was even less impressed with Kennedy's Republican opponent in 1960. Yet Richard Nixon had come a long way since 1950, when McWilliams described him as a “distinctly third-rate Thomas Dewey.” After short stints in the House and Senate, Nixon served two terms as Eisenhower's vice president before garnering the Republican presidential nomination. McWilliams wrote no signed pieces about Nixon or his narrow loss in 1960, but when Nixon reemerged as the Republican nominee for California governor in 1962, McWilliams profiled him in the Nation. In “Has Success Spoiled Dick Nixon?” McWilliams suggested that Nixon was not a political personality so much as a list of political strategies.
As in 1952, the faceless, amoral Nixon is still on the make, still “fighting communism,” still full of tricks, haunted as always by the lack of self-knowledge, of identity, that makes everything he says sound empty of meaning and turns everything he touches into putty.
Noting that Nixon's decision to run for California governor was “a desperate gamble,” McWilliams predicted, “If he is defeated in November, he is through. True, he may retain an influence, even a major one, in the Republican Party; but as a Presidential contender he will have had it.”
After losing to incumbent Pat Brown, Nixon seemed to agree with McWilliams's assessment, famously remarking in a postelection press conference at the Beverly Hilton that the newspapers “won't have Dick Nixon to kick around anymore.” McWilliams quickly made that speech the basis for a follow-up piece, “Mr. Nixon and the Press,” in which he pointed out the irony of Nixon's remarks. From the beginning, McWilliams claimed, Nixon's remarkable career had depended heavily on “the well-known incapacity of the press to resist the news bait of ‘charges’ and ‘denunciations.’” McWilliams maintained that Nixon had exploited this weakness to defeat Jerry Voorhis, to persecute Alger Hiss, and to triumph over Helen Gahagan Douglas.
For McWilliams, however, the deeper irony lay in another Nixon comment: “And I can only say thank God for television and radio for keeping the newspapers a little more honest.” Certainly television had helped Nixon on various occasions, most notably in the case of the so-called Checkers speech of 1952, when Nixon went on air to defend himself against charges of financial improprieties. Yet this reference to television, McWilliams argued, expressed a deep delusion.
But it was television that, in a famous Presidential campaign debate, revealed to the American people more sharply than the press had ever succeeded in doing, and in a matter of minutes, the real Nixon: not the black-jowled villain of the Herblock cartoons, or the haloed hero of the far Right, but an empty, faceless, insecure, weak, almost abject opportunist striving mightily, with no sense of values and a most uncertain sense of self-identity, to claw his way to the top by fair means or foul. In brief, Mr. Nixon is an American tragedy in the classic pattern, but it took television to reveal the truth.
McWilliams was not alone in this view. As David Greenberg notes in his study of Nixon's image, many liberals in the 1950s thought that the American public was vulnerable to what they regarded as Nixon's phony populism and demagoguery. After the televised debates, however, these liberals were relieved that “Americans were able to see through the scrim of appearances that Nixon draped before them and glimpse the heavy hand of the petty striver pulling the strings” (2003, 71). But as Greenberg also observes, that account overlooks how close the 1960 presidential election actually was. If we accept McWilliams's view, almost half the voters in that election, having learned the truth about Nixon, preferred a weak, insecure, nihilistic opportunist to an excellent campaigner with a powerful organization and an attractive family. Moreover, McWilliams's prediction before the 1962 gubernatorial election was well off the mark. Even after his loss to Pat Brown, Richard Nixon was far from through politically. Once again, McWilliams had underestimated Nixon's resourcefulness if not his ambition.
Following the California election, McWilliams continued to monitor the Republican Party and its leaders, paying special attention to their rising influence in “the sunshine belt” stretching from Cape Canaveral to San Diego. Fueled by federal contracts in the aerospace industry, business in the Sun Belt was booming, and its leaders were becoming less reliant on the Eastern Establishment for support. The region was prime habitat for Goldwater Republicans, and McWilliams quickly perceived the long-term significance of the Arizona senator's 1964 presidential campaign. To many, Barry Goldwater's positions on immigration and school prayer, not to mention his failure to court labor, blacks, and liberal Republicans, were not calculated to win a general election. McWilliams, however, saw a larger strategy behind them. In “High Noon in the Cow Palace”—the GOP convention that year was held in the San Francisco arena—McWilliams wrote about Goldwater.
He wants the liberals out of the party the better to get the conservative Democrats in. On balance, he feels that he would gain by the exchange, but he also feels that undisputed control of the Republican Party would in any case be a tactical advantage worth the price.
This swap was made easier by the civil rights legislation President Johnson signed after Kennedy's assassination in 1963. Johnson knew the resulting white backlash could hurt the Democratic Party in the South, but McWilliams correctly observed that nondiscriminatory housing legislation would also have significant consequences in California. McWilliams also took note of Goldwater's organization and the true believers within it. “The Kennedy organization at Los Angeles, in 1960, was impressive, but this one is awesome,” he claimed. “It will not disintegrate even if Goldwater suffers a smashing defeat.” Its goal was not a victory in 1964 but party control and increasing power as the nation's population, moving inexorably south and west, became more conservative. “In one form or another,” McWilliams concluded, “the consequences of the hard turn to the Right, which the Republican Party has taken, will be with us for a long time.”
That prediction would be borne out most clearly in the career of Ronald Reagan, who in 1966 challenged Pat Brown's bid for a third term as California governor. By that time, McWilliams had known Reagan for decades. In 1946, Reagan participated in the Los Angeles fund-raiser that McWilliams had organized for the Nation, and the two men had fought on the same side of the Hollywood labor battles going back to the Willie Bioff days. Even then, Reagan was showing more than a passing interest in politics, contemplating congressional runs in 1946 and 1952. In 1947, the Screen Actors Guild elected him president for the first of six times. The same year, he cooperated with both the FBI and HUAC in their closed-door investigations of Communism in Hollywood, and the following year he testified in a HUAC open hearing. For most of the 1950s, he hosted television's General Electric Theater and toured the country on General Electric's behalf. During this time, he became a practiced and sought-after speaker, and his politics became increasingly conservative. A Truman supporter in 1948, Reagan supported Nixon in 1960 and offered to register as a Republican, but GOP leaders agreed that he was more useful to them as a Democrat. Two years later, he officially became a Republican, and after his speech at the Republican National Convention in 1964, many considered him a rising star in the party (Cannon 2003).
McWilliams's piece on the 1966 California gubernatorial election, “How to Succeed with the Backlash,” opened with a bold claim: “California is in the throes of one of the most subtle and intensive racist political campaigns ever waged in a Northern or Western state.” For him, the election's key issue was nondiscriminatory housing. The state legislature had passed the Rumford Fair Housing Act in 1963, but California voters used the state's initiative process to pass Proposition 14, which disabled the housing legislation and prohibited future laws to the same effect. Although the fate of Proposition 14 was later settled in the courts, the issue reverberated through the 1966 gubernatorial contest. Brown referred the matter to a nonpartisan commission; Reagan decried racism but declared that “the right of an individual to the ownership and disposition of property is inseparable from the right of freedom itself.” Delivered to an audience of real estate brokers, Reagan's declaration received a standing ovation. Brown's Democratic challenger in the primary, Los Angeles mayor Sam Yorty, opposed Proposition 14 until it passed by a two-to-one margin. Seeking an advantage over Brown, Yorty then predicted that the California Supreme Court, to which Brown had appointed six of the seven justices, would invalidate the proposition, which it did. “Unless Governor Brown can find some potent issues to outweigh this obsessive fear of open housing,” McWilliams concluded, “he is in grave danger.” In any case, McWilliams added, the key issue in the election would receive no direct examination.
There won't be much plain talk from Californians about the racism that they know permeates the Brown-Reagan contest. Most of them won't talk about it at all if they can escape it. They don't want the nation to know—they don't want to admit to themselves—that the number-one state may elect Ronald Reagan governor in order to “keep the Negro in his place.”
Two years earlier, he had predicted a white backlash in California; now he was bracing himself and the Nation's readers for its consequences.
McWilliams's piece identified a potent issue, but there was much more to the 1966 gubernatorial election than fair housing. California's postwar growth had created a host of problems, including congestion, pollution, and high taxes to finance Governor Brown's ambitious public works and social programs. Facing a large deficit as well as a constitutional requirement to submit a balanced budget, Brown used an accounting gimmick to delay a tax increase until after the election, and the state's reputable legislative analyst, A. Alan Post, publicly criticized the move as irresponsible. Another issue was law and order. In December 1964, protestors acting in the name of the Free Speech Movement had occupied the administration building at the University of California, Berkeley. Brown eventually ordered the California Highway Patrol to remove and arrest almost eight hundred protestors, but Reagan and others criticized him for dithering, and the campus protests continued to irk many residents throughout the state. The next summer, a more momentous challenge to social order arose in the predominantly black Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts. After a routine arrest of a drunk driver spun out of control, six days of rioting, looting, and arson left thirty-four residents dead, more than one thousand injured, the neighborhood's business district in flames, and white residents even more anxious about residential integration. Vacationing in Greece, Governor Brown was unable to provide leadership during the crisis.
Meanwhile, labor actions were heating up in the San Joaquin Valley. In September 1965, the National Farm Worker Association endorsed an ongoing strike against thirty growers over the right to represent field-workers. The union's leader, César Chávez, recruited student activists from Stanford and Berkeley and invited workers from the Congress of Racial Equality and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee to organize the picket lines. In March 1966, the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Migratory Farm Labor held hearings in Delano, where Kern County sheriff Roy Gaylen informed subcommittee member Robert Kennedy that picketers had been arrested and charged with unlawful assembly. As Gaylen explained, “The men right out there in the field that we were talking to said, ‘If you don't get them out of here, we're going to cut their hearts out.’ So rather than let them get cut, we removed the cause” (Dunne 1967, 29). That spring, Chávez led a twenty-five-day, three-hundred-mile march from Delano to the steps of the state capitol in Sacramento, but Governor Brown was not there to meet him; instead, he was spending Easter weekend at Frank Sinatra's house in Palm Springs.
Reagan's aides cringed when their candidate referred to the Chávez march as “an Easter-egg roll,” but Brown could not capitalize on the gaffe (Cannon 2003, 159). Reagan easily defeated Brown in the general election, and another Southern California Republican began his march to the presidency. The hard turn to the right McWilliams had noted in 1964—and partly ascribed to the decimation of the radical left in the 1950s—shaped the nation's political life for decades. Between 1968 and 2000, only two Democrats would occupy the White House, and by the end of the century, conservatives would also control Congress and the Supreme Court.
THE NEW GENERATION
As McWilliams monitored national politics from New York, Bill Carey was finishing his graduate studies in political science at Berkeley and launching his academic career. Although most of his professors discouraged activism, he had become involved in Berkeley's student party, SLATE, which Tom Hayden later called the grandfather of the New Left. Because SLATE supported civil rights and opposed nuclear testing, the cold war, capital punishment, and HUAC, his participation led to several citations in the annual CUAC reports. In 1961, he accepted a teaching position at Oberlin College and began writing regularly for Commonweal. He also coauthored a piece for the Nation on campus politics with Steven Roberts, then editor at the Harvard Crimson. His byline on that piece, like the entries in the CUAC reports, was “Carey McWilliams, Jr.” Both the shared byline with Roberts and the moniker were his father's ideas. From early childhood, the younger McWilliams had been going by the name Carey (without Junior), but both men agreed that some distinction had to be made between their names to avoid confusion. When he signed his subsequent work with the name Wilson Carey McWilliams, a rumor circulated that he and his father had clashed over the name issue. According to that rumor, Carey Sr. declared that he had spent decades building his own good name and insisted that his son make his own way.
If the rumor was unfounded it was nevertheless true that McWilliams's closest friends did not give him high marks as a parent. Although his diaries reveal his warm regard for his sons, he was often busy, had high expectations, and rarely expressed his affection directly. (According to Carey Jr., he was much more comfortable signaling intimacy with gentle teasing.) It was one longtime friend's impression that McWilliams left it to Carey Jr. to reach out to him if he wished to have a closer relationship—not an easy task, especially after the move to New York. In 1967, Carey Jr. closed the geographical gap by accepting a faculty position at Brooklyn College. By that time, his first marriage had dissolved, and he had married Nancy Riley, a former student at Oberlin who would go on to become an accomplished psychotherapist and author. Three years later, he moved to Rutgers University, and in 1973, a year after his mother's death, he published his first book, The Idea of Fraternity in America. Moving easily between the realms of political theory and American literature, that work focused on citizenship, community, and moral values—topics that Carey Sr. would later stress in the conclusion of his memoir.
Although Carey Jr. dismissed the reports of his estrangement from his father as “indications of how enigmatic he was to most people and how little they understood him,” the rumors led some young writers to speculate that McWilliams's interest in their careers was somehow compensatory.1 In fact, the Nation's spare budget made it necessary for McWilliams to recruit young, relatively unknown writers. For those seeking an active mentor, McWilliams could be a disappointment. Many who worked closely with him described him as gracious but reserved. For more than a decade, Robert Sherrill, the Nation's Washington correspondent, spoke almost daily with McWilliams on the telephone; he admired him personally and was one of only four speakers at McWilliams's memorial service in New York City. In a recent interview, however, Sherrill noted that he and McWilliams were not particularly close. McWilliams had sent Sherrill few letters aside from story ideas and newspaper clippings, and they had met only twice—once in New York and once in Washington, where they dined with I. F. Stone.2
In Somebody's Gotta Tell It, New York journalist Jack Newfield recalls an even greater distance between McWilliams and himself.
In his memoir, The Education of Carey McWilliams, Carey described me as a contributor and as a door-opener to a new generation. But the truth was I was never able to form a strong bond with him. He was an aloof and formal man, whose strength was his intransigent radicalism on the big issues like McCarthyism, civil rights, and Vietnam. (Newfield 2003, 115)
Although they met frequently during the 1960s, Newfield never visited McWilliams's home—indeed, he had no idea where McWilliams lived—and their meetings highlighted the differences between their worlds. At the Village Voice, where Newfield worked, the office was likely to be occupied by people “smoking dope and listening to the Rolling Stones.” But crossing over to the Nation's office “was like walking into the 1930s.”3
Even the Nation's musty office at 333 Sixth Avenue (two blocks from the Voice) felt like a relic. An old-fashioned switchboard sat in the outer office, and you had to take a rickety freight elevator up to the fourth floor. I used to joke that I feared getting black lung every time I went up to that office, where dust seemed to drift like snow through the dirty Venetian blinds. (115)
Judging from this description, the Nation's office seemed as old-fashioned to Newfield as McWilliams's first law office in Los Angeles had seemed to him.
Dan Wakefield also described the Nation's offices as a kind of time machine. Heightening this effect was the fact that Wakefield knew only one other staff writer, Norman Thomas di Giovanni, who was under thirty years old, while the rest were over forty. McWilliams struck Wakefield as curiously passive and soft-spoken, especially during their weekly editorial meetings, when publisher George Kirstein seemed to be a fountain of energy and ideas. Wakefield was surprised to hear that McWilliams's friends in Los Angeles considered him fun-loving. “That would be the last description I would apply,” he said. More impressive to Wakefield was the footwear that McWilliams sported in the office, a futuristic-looking pair of shoes that helped McWilliams deal with his long-standing foot pain. “I never saw him without them,” Wakefield said. “They looked like the kinds of shoes Frankenstein would wear.” He also noted that di Giovanni came to refer to McWilliams as “Old Space Shoes.”4
Wakefield's recollection bears a strong resemblance to the ranch hands' view of Jerry McWilliams's garb and footwear, but it also emphasizes a difference in sensibility that separated Wakefield and di Giovanni from McWilliams. Wakefield's book on the period highlighted that difference.
We were both young and crazy for literature and experience, and to us Carey McWilliams, with his space shoes, buttoned-up cardigan, and thinning black hair slicked straight back from his pale forehead, seemed like the ultimate square. The image was reinforced by what we regarded as his sober, right-thinking, well-meaning, unexciting editorials. McWilliams seemed like the safe, predictable liberal, the person who believed in all the correct causes but without any passion or fire. (1992, 66)
Di Giovanni, who would later translate the works of Jorge Luis Borges, could charm McWilliams, but Wakefield's own relationship remained distant. “Carey and I simply never hit it off; we worked together and maintained a polite manner toward each other, but really felt no rapport” (66). Despite differences in age and fashion sense, however, McWilliams seemed attuned to the exigencies of Wakefield's career. Early in Wakefield's tenure with the Nation, for example, McWilliams asked if he would like to cover the trial of a Communist defendant. Murray Kempton advised against it, maintaining that the Indiana-born Wakefield would soon be known as “The Hoosier One.” Perhaps mindful of the toll he himself had paid for his own advocacy on this point, McWilliams did not insist.5
Other contributors held related but more sympathetic views. Stanley Meisler noted that there was “no phony backslapping of any kind” with McWilliams, but that he helped many young writers and made them feel welcome in the New York office. McWilliams also wrote Meisler a strong letter of recommendation for a Ford Foundation grant to travel in Africa—an opportunity that did little for the Nation but helped launch Meisler as a foreign correspondent. After a long career with the Associated Press and Los Angeles Times, Meisler held a high opinion of McWilliams's editorial abilities as well. “He was, beyond any doubt, the finest editor that I have ever worked for,” Meisler maintained. “I never ran into anyone who has as many good ideas. With a full-time staff of his own, he would have been very far ahead of the major newspapers.”6
BACK AT THE RANCH
A group of West Coast journalists held a similar range of views about McWilliams. Some contributed to the Nation but worked more closely with Ramparts, a new magazine that exemplified San Francisco radical chic. According to Ramparts editor Gene Marine, who was also the West Coast contributing editor for the Nation, McWilliams could be difficult to approach with new ideas. Following Mencken's example, McWilliams responded quickly to submissions and queries, but this practice required him to test story ideas against his own experience, which was extensive but not an infallible guide. “He was stubborn,” Marine recalled, “and pretty sure he was right.” McWilliams rejected Marine's idea for a story in 1964 on the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley, calling it “a local California story”—the same criticism a Houghton Mifflin editor had applied to Factories in the Field twenty-five years earlier. In Marine's retrospective view, California had become an idée fixe for McWilliams, as much a product of his memory as a continuously unfolding reality. Nevertheless, Marine regarded him as one of the greatest editors he worked with in his fifty-year career.7
Robert Scheer, who became managing editor of Ramparts after writing a seminal book on Vietnam, also noted the distance between McWilliams and the Ramparts staff. Respectful of McWilliams's reputation at the Nation, where he is now a contributing editor, Scheer believed that McWilliams regarded the Bay Area journalists as “hicks”—an ironic observation given Scheer's New York origins. According to Scheer, McWilliams also seemed to consider the Ramparts writers “fresh,” suggesting a difference in manners as well as urbanity. Like Marine, Scheer thought that Ramparts was too flashy for New York intellectuals, including McWilliams.8 The magazine invited that perception with its radical tone, lavish spending, and bold visual design. Each of these qualities distinguished the San Francisco upstart from the Nation, which celebrated its one hundredth birthday in 1965 with a centennial issue that highlighted its place of honor in the history of American journalism.
Bay Area peace activist and historian Theodore Roszak was less ambivalent about McWilliams, whom he met for the first and only time in 1964. McWilliams struck Roszak as a gentle, friendly, avuncular, and remarkably generous older man who listened carefully to Roszak and astutely assessed his strengths and weaknesses. After McWilliams suggested an article on the state of the universities, he introduced Roszak to Pantheon editor André Schiffrin, and the idea evolved into an edited volume, The Dissenting Academy (1968), which concluded with Noam Chomsky's seminal essay “The Responsibility of Intellectuals.” Three years later, McWilliams proposed a series of articles on prominent figures in the student protests. Roszak struggled with the format, however, and found himself developing a more specific thesis: that the campus protests reflected a broader cultural movement that questioned much of Western industrial society itself. Roszak cast about for a fitting label for this movement, which encompassed radical politics; psychedelic experience (“counterfeit infinity,” in Roszak's parlance); sexual freedom; an aversion to “technocracy”; and an interest in Eastern religions, mysticism, and the occult. Based on his experience with the antiuniversity movement in London, Roszak toyed with the term anti-culture, but this label suggested philistinism or even barbarism, which worked against his claim that the movement had its roots in Romanticism. He then coined the term counter culture, which McWilliams immediately endorsed.
Like many contributors, Roszak was grateful for McWilliams's hands-off editorial style. “He didn't intervene, interfere, or climb over the work,” Roszak recounted. Instead, he supported Roszak and let him develop his thesis in his four-part series. “It was exactly what I needed at the time,” Roszak recalled.9 The series formed the core of Roszak's subsequent book, The Making of a Counter Culture, which created a popular neologism and became his signature work. Later, Roszak contributed a piece to The California Revolution, a 1968 volume McWilliams edited.
Another West Coast writer who benefited from his contact with McWilliams during this period was reporter Lou Cannon, who was hatching a book on Ronald Reagan and Jess “Big Daddy” Unruh, who at that time was speaker of the California Assembly. At the outset of the project, Cannon sent over forty letters to various figures and received exactly two responses: one from William F. Buckley and the other from McWilliams. After striking up a correspondence, Cannon met McWilliams for the first time in 1968 at a journalism awards dinner in Sun Valley, Idaho, where McWilliams was one of the speakers. (According to Cannon, McWilliams made the trip to meet young journalists and to visit Hemingway's grave.) The two saw more of each other in the 1970s, when Cannon served as the Los Angeles bureau chief for the Washington Post and McWilliams made frequent visits to the city. Later, when McWilliams taught a course on muckraking at UCLA in the late 1970s, he asked Cannon to address his students. Cannon came to admire McWilliams's work on California for its scope, insight, and prescience. He also appreciated McWilliams's unassuming manner. When UCLA did not publicize his presence on campus, for example, McWilliams took his anonymity in stride. “That was just fine with Carey,” Cannon recalled. “He didn't give a rat's ass if you knew him. He was interested in you, or ideas … I thought he was great to be around because he wasn't demanding in the way great men could be demanding.”10 Cannon later became senior White House correspondent for the Washington Post and has cited McWilliams in each of his eight books to date, including several on Ronald Reagan as well as Official Negligence (1997), the definitive account of the 1992 Rodney King incident and Los Angeles riot.
Yet another writer living on the West Coast was even more grateful for his contact with McWilliams. In 1964, Hunter S. Thompson was an obscure journalist and aspiring novelist living in San Francisco when he received a letter from McWilliams praising his work for the National Observer. Eager for assignments, Thompson alerted McWilliams to his dire finances: “I am long past the point of simple poverty, and well into a state of hysterical destitution. The wolves have eaten my door” (Thompson 1997, 481). Less than two months later, McWilliams suggested a piece on California's motorcycle gangs. Thompson regarded the story idea as “a pleasant surprise … I'm surprised anybody in an editorial slot would be interested in a long look at this action” (497). McWilliams offered Thompson one hundred dollars for the article. “That was the rent,” Thompson observed in a November 1974 Playboy interview, “and I was about ready to go back into journalism, so I said, ‘Of course, I'd do anything for a hundred dollars.’”
Thompson began his research for the piece by crashing a Hell's Angel meeting near Hunters Point in San Francisco, where he showed club members articles about them in Newsweek and Time. “I'd go nuts if I read that stuff all the time,” one of them told Thompson. “It's all bullshit.” After the meeting, Thompson invited five Hell's Angels back to his apartment, which he shared with his wife and young son, Juan, for an all-night drinking session. “Before I let them in, I explained that I wasn't in the habit of settling my beefs with my fists, but with a double-barreled 12-gauge shotgun,” Thompson recounted to a colleague. “This seemed to strike a balance of terror that eventually dissolved into a pleasant evening” (1997, 502). Based on two weeks of research, “The Motorcycle Gangs: Losers and Outsiders” appeared in the Nation in May 1965. The following year, Thompson told a friend, “Writing for Carey McWilliams is an honor … So what if he doesn't pay much … When your article appears in The Nation you feel clean” (xxvii). That clean feeling may have subsided temporarily when several Hell's Angels attacked Thompson during a 1966 Labor Day rally in Cloverdale. Badly injured and bleeding profusely, he repaired to a Santa Rosa hospital.
The Hell's Angels article was the turning point in Thompson's career. It introduced him to editors at major publishing houses, including Angus Cameron, who by that time had resurfaced at Knopf.11 The article also formed the centerpiece of Thompson's best-selling book, Hell's Angels. “More than any other person, Carey was responsible for the success of Hell's Angels,” Thompson acknowledged in the 1999 Modern Library reprint. After that success, Thompson wrote a series of articles and books animated by his legendary appetite for alcohol and drugs, his penchant for firearms, and his deep if somewhat fantastical suspicion of America's corporate and political leaders. He soon became a pop culture figure enshrined in Hollywood films (Where the Buffalo Roam, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas) and in the character of Uncle Duke in Garry Trudeau's comic strip, Doonesbury. Thompson continued to correspond with McWilliams, dropped by his office while in New York, and held him in the highest regard. Historian Douglas Brinkley, who edited Thompson's letters, notes that “throughout his long literary career there was one editor whom Thompson unhesitatingly admired: Carey McWilliams of The Nation” (Thompson 1997, xxvii).
Even in the early 1970s, when McWilliams was preparing to step down as editor of the Nation, he was still supporting young—sometimes very young—West Coast writers. One was Derek Shearer, whose piece on the Pentagon McWilliams accepted when Shearer was in his early twenties. Over the next several years, the two traded correspondence and story ideas, and Shearer eventually profiled McWilliams for In These Times. In a recent interview, Shearer recalled that McWilliams was “not the kind of guy who was your buddy. What I liked was that he treated me like a professional and a grown-up writer when I was 21.” Shearer also appreciated McWilliams's modus operandi at the magazine: “He knew there were a lot of good reporters whose papers wouldn't run their longer, tougher pieces, and he gave them a national outlet for that work.” Shearer was drawn to the Nation's fact-based reporting as well. “It wasn't all ideological,” he recalled. “You actually learned something by reading it.”12 Like McWilliams, Shearer went on to mix journalism, activism, and government service, eventually serving as ambassador to Finland during the Clinton administration and teaching at Occidental College.
BEFORE THE REVOLUTION
Over age sixty when Hell's Angels, Ronnie and Jessie, and The Making of a Counter Culture appeared, McWilliams inhabited a different world from that of his younger West Coast colleagues. However, he would soon figure incidentally in the cause of one former Ramparts staff writer, Eldridge Cleaver. By 1968, Cleaver had become the minister of information for the Black Panther Party for Self Defense, which Bobby Seale and Huey Newton had founded two years earlier to monitor police activity in the black neighborhoods of Oakland, California. Confrontational, heavily armed, and legally informed, the Black Panthers quickly drew the suspicion and animosity of the Oakland police. The feeling was mutual and eventually led to several shootouts.
In April 1968, two nights after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., Cleaver reportedly organized four carloads of Black Panthers for an outing. Cleaver would later claim that he and his friends were preparing for a picnic the following day, but their ostensible goal was to ambush a police officer while they transported weapons to various apartments in Berkeley and Oakland. When they encountered police officers on a routine patrol in West Oakland, gunfire broke out. Two officers were wounded, and Cleaver and seventeen-year-old Panther Bobby Hutton fled to the basement of a nearby house. Police surrounded the house, and a gun battle ensued. The police lobbed tear gas into the house, a fire started in the basement, and Cleaver, who was wounded in the foot by a ricocheting bullet and hit in the chest by a tear gas canister, shouted that he was coming out of the house. He emerged from the house naked with his hands in the air. Hutton also emerged with his hands up, but after he was apprehended and searched, he stumbled while walking. His hands dropped, and the police shot and killed him (Pearson 1994, 154–55).
James Baldwin, Norman Mailer, Susan Sontag, and others promptly signed a letter decrying the violence against the Black Panthers. “We find little fundamental difference between the assassin's bullet which killed Dr. King on April 4, and the police barrage which killed Bobby James Hutton two days later,” the letter read. The following month, McWilliams joined many of the same writers, journalists, and celebrities in signing a more modulated letter that ran in the New York Review of Books. The signatories called the events in Oakland “further evidence of the continuous oppression of black people. We particularly condemn the murder of Bobby James Hutton and the wounding of Eldridge Cleaver as acts of violent white racism” (May 9, 1968). But the violence in Oakland was just getting started. Later that year, a jury found Huey Newton guilty of voluntary manslaughter in the death of an Oakland police officer. Displeased that the jury did not convict Newton of homicide, two drunken police officers fired shotgun rounds into the headquarters of the Black Panther Party that night. Cleaver responded by calling for attacks on whites, especially judges and police officers. While addressing a group of San Francisco lawyers in September 1968, for example, Cleaver said, “We need lawyers who have a gun in one hand and a law book in the other, so if he goes to court and the shit doesn't come out right, he can pull out his gun and start shooting.” After a polite ovation, one lawyer asked Cleaver, “What can we whites do to help the black man's cause?” Cleaver responded, “Kill some white people!” (Pearson 1994, 170). As seventeen-year-old Jonathan Jackson's lethal shootout at the Marin County courthouse showed, Cleaver's scenario did not lack for real-life counterparts.
In a December 1969 speech to the ACLU, McWilliams noted in passing that the leadership of the Black Panther Party had been “marked for extinction.” He also collected some issues of the Black Panther, the party's weekly newspaper, one of which included a front-page photograph of Cleaver and a quotation:
The American flag and the American eagle are the true symbols of fascism, and they should elicit from the people the same outraged repugnance elicited by the swastika of Nazi Germany and the flag of the rising sun of the Japanese imperialists.
The same cover included a quotation from Kim Il Sung of the Peoples Democratic Republic of Korea: “U.S. Imperialism is the most heinous common enemy of the Peoples of the world and target No. 1 in their struggle.”13
Although McWilliams was suspicious of the government's actions regarding the Black Panthers, he had long been averse to such revolutionary bombast. Interviewed about the Chicano movement during this time, for example, he noted that it included elements that were “demagogic, that tend to be rhetorically flamboyant.”14 He may have had in mind the words of David Sánchez, a member of the Brown Berets in Los Angeles. In February 1968, while serving a jail term of sixty days for unlawful assembly, Sanchez wrote a piece admonishing Chicano activists to avoid Anglos: “DO NOT TALK TO THE ENEMY, FOR HE IS EITHER A DOG OR A DEVIL” (Chávez 2002, 46). The following year, the Brown Berets disrupted a speech by Governor Reagan at the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles, where small fires broke out on several floors. That same year, Chicano student activists met at the University of California, Santa Barbara, to draw up a manifesto to promote cultural nationalism, self-determination, and education. The manifesto, which came to be known as El Plan de Santa Barbara, claimed that there are “definite advantages to cultural nationalism, but no inherent limitations”—a view that McWilliams did not share. It also proposed a consolidation of student groups into MEChA—El Movimiento Estudiantíl Chicano de Aztlán (The Chicano Student Movement of Aztlán). For its symbol, MEChA chose an eagle with a stick of dynamite in one talon, and the organization's slogans included “Por la Raza todo. Fuera de la Raza nada.” (For the race, everything. Outside the race, nothing.) The manifesto also proclaimed a policy of liberation for Aztlán, its name for the American Southwest.
McWilliams did not comment specifically on the Brown Berets or MEChA, but he endorsed the work of University of California, Santa Barbara, history professor Joseph Navarro, which McWilliams believed balanced militancy with intellectual responsibility. (Navarro subsequently wrote a laudatory article on McWilliams for the Journal of Mexican-American History, which Navarro founded and edited.) In fact, McWilliams rarely denounced left-wing activists for their excesses, including the incineration of a bank next to Navarro's home campus and the bombing of the campus's faculty club, which killed a janitor. When he did criticize these actions, he usually dismissed them as counterproductive or tactically unwise. He did not regard similarly inflammatory language or violent action from right-wing groups as merely counterproductive, however. Rather, he kept a close eye on them and did not hesitate to raise the warning flag about impending fascism.
THE NEW LEFT
The turbulent California scene bore little resemblance to the one McWilliams left in 1951, and his distance from it was both geographical and generational. In the 1930s, his notion of revolution meant militant trade unionism, collectivization, organizing, and meetings—not bombings, shootouts, or strident ethnic politics. Just as the Black Panthers and Brown Berets could not be mistaken for the Sleepy Lagoon defendants or Zoot Suit Riot victims, the cardigan-clad McWilliams, planted in his archaic office, would never be confused with student leader Tom Hayden—although Hayden would eventually be named the Carey McWilliams Fellow at the Nation Institute. As cultural and political differences sharpened during the 1960s, a new generation of leftists came to idolize I. F. Stone, for example, but saw less need to monitor McWilliams's views or those of the Nation.
That feeling was not mutual. McWilliams followed the younger generation and its politics carefully, and he wrote frequently and perceptively about them. In its earliest forms, the New Left struck him as little more than an attempt “to put a new gloss on the causes of the 1930s.” Later, a more distinctive form of political engagement emerged under that name, and McWilliams complimented its ideals. Asked to contribute a foreword to a collected volume called The New Student Left (1965), he saluted the movement's utopian impulse and its attention to a “multitude of ugly and difficult domestic problems.” Yet some misgivings can be detected in McWilliams's generalities and silences. He stopped short of endorsing what he called the New Left's “unconventional action,” noting only that “the substance of a new politics will emerge” from it. He also claimed that the mass media's interest in student unrest was “not intended to be helpful and in fact it isn't.” In his view, that media coverage did not explain the movement so much as “smother it in a froth of words” (Cohen and Hale 1965, x).
Like the Old Left it sought to replace, the New Left stressed civil rights, social justice, and an end to the arms race. Its proponents, however, had not endured the labor struggles and Red scares that had shaped and scarred their precursors, and their own lives had been cushioned by an unprecedented postwar economic expansion. Unburdened by lingering attachments to or delusions about the Soviet Union, their hopes were hitched more firmly to the promise of Castro's Cuba. As universities proliferated to accommodate the baby boomers, campuses became breeding grounds for various New Left groups, including Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), which began as a branch of the anti-Communist League for Industrial Democracy.15 In general, these groups drew more heavily than their predecessors on the media and popular culture, harbored a deeper suspicion of hierarchy and institutional power, and placed more emphasis on self-expression and personal commitment as opposed to doctrine and strategy. Later, they rallied around a critical issue, U.S. involvement in Vietnam, which propelled their movement.
Unlike Dissent editor Irving Howe, McWilliams scheduled no meetings with SDS leaders to forge cross-generational links. Instead, he “did what I usually did when a new movement or major social trend seemed to be emerging—i.e., gather materials about it while looking around for the right person to examine them and report what was happening” (ECM, 247). One of those persons was Jack Newfield, whose 1965 article on the student left gave SDS its first national exposure. Another was Theodore Roszak, who had impressed McWilliams with his rare ability “to examine new social and cultural developments in an unbiased, reasonably sympathetic, and profoundly curious way” (ECM, 248). Indeed, McWilliams regarded Roszak's The Making of a Counter Culture as the classic statement of the cultural constellation it described.
Like Roszak, McWilliams was reasonably sympathetic to the New Left and its aspirations. What criticisms he had were offered mildly, as in an October 1968 campus speech in which he said, “Our generation is realizing that thought without action is not good, but [student protestors] must still learn that action without thought will not accomplish the end they are seeking.” In his thank-you letter to McWilliams after the speech, the chair of the faculty lecture committee wrote that he thought McWilliams's treatment of SDS was “over-gentle.” In many ways, however, his 1979 memoir previews the analysis offered by sociologist and former SDS leader Todd Gitlin in The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (1987). Like Gitlin, McWilliams focuses on the movement's ability to attract media attention and its “revulsion against the complacency, stuffiness and conformity of an ‘affluent’ society” (ECM, 246–47). He also claims that the new radicalism “was more a product of irritation, resentment, and boredom than a reaction to social inequalities and injustices personally experienced or observed at first hand” (247).
Yet these resentments were real, and when neither major party assumed leadership on key issues of the day, McWilliams realized that the young activists “had to strike out on their own.”
The young radicals were eager to break, not merely with the bipartisan Cold War consensus, but with the “liberalism” of their parents, to which they initially responded but later came to regard as unreal and pretentious. Theirs was in part a personal revolt; they sought to “liberate” themselves by repudiating conventions and attitudes that had grown irksome. In a sense, they were more concerned with finding where they stood, who they were, and what it was they found so hateful in the society than they were in defining political positions or drafting action programs or organizing at the grass roots. (247)
The last sentence hints at the differences between McWilliams and the student activists. He, too, had found many aspects of American society deplorable, but for him, these were problems to be solved rather than occasions for self-expression or self-fashioning. Much of what he witnessed in the 1960s was too symbolic and self-indulgent for his taste, too much Allen Ginsberg and not enough Harry Bridges. While many Americans were letting it all hang out, McWilliams probably hoped that they would tuck it all back in and organize a caucus.
McWilliams also had misgivings about the movement's pervasive suspicion of institutional power. For activists of his generation, the federal government was a potential ally of great importance, and during the early 1940s, he had testified that his political views were entirely consistent with the New Deal. New Left activists could make no such claim about the Kennedy, Johnson, or Nixon administrations. Their politics traded more heavily on opposition and disaffection, and McWilliams began a January 1968 piece for the Nation by noting an irony.
A preoccupation with power—black power, student power, flower power, poor power, “the power structure”—is the most striking aspect of the American political scene at the moment. Oddly enough, obsession with power goes hand in hand with a fear of power. Some of the New Left groups that talk the toughest about power are extremely reluctant to see power operate in institutional form; within their own organizations, they shun “hierarchies” and formally structured relations of authority. What the preoccupation with power reflects, essentially, is a deep-seated, pervasive feeling of powerlessness.
That feeling, he maintained, prevented many Americans from participating in politics in the most productive way. What was needed was a radical politics “to goad the major parties, to offer a general critique of the society, and to give political expression to the discontents that can gain a hearing in neither major party. The New Left may meet this need; it has not done so to date.” His use of italics signifies that, for him, such protests only became political when they were tied to a specific campaign or program.
Whatever its merits, McWilliams's critique failed to move the New Left leaders, who considered the Nation a muckraking magazine rather than a journal of ideas.16 Moreover, McWilliams's contributions to the radical politics he called for were modest, at least compared to his prodigious efforts of previous decades. His legal activism was limited, he had not written a book-length work since 1950, and there was no possibility of his serving in government again. His journalism, too, had undergone a gradual transformation. He was writing fewer, longer pieces, many of which originated from predictable news sites, such as party conventions. Compared to his earliest political journalism, which turned a gimlet eye toward electoral politics, his output during the 1960s focused more on major-party candidates and their positions. Furthermore, his articles increasingly reflected the view from the cultural if not the political center of the country. Although they retained his usual perceptiveness, fluency, and critical posture, fewer grew out of his own fieldwork. There were no more weeklong drives through the Central Valley or firsthand reports of civic disturbances in Los Angeles. For the most part, only fund-raising tours and occasional trips abroad interrupted his editorial work in the Nation's downtown offices.
When he did travel, McWilliams gravitated to Europe—hardly the chief concern of the New Left. He visited Ireland and England in 1963; Poland in 1965; Holland, Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Rumania, and Yugoslavia in 1967; and Switzerland, Germany, Belgium, and Holland in 1972. He scheduled many of these trips around publishing conferences, but they also reflected his continuing interest in the cold war and his curiosity about life in the Warsaw Pact countries. In Poland, he met with former agent Maxim Lieber, who helped him arrange interviews with public officials. His prepared questions for those meetings offer a glimpse into his worldview. One question was whether West Germany would be tempted to “establish an opening to the east” now that East Germany had become the tenth-ranking industrial power. Another asked, “Suppose that West Germany, tired of stalemate, decided to make some settlement with the USSR. Would such a settlement be feasible? What would the attitudes of the East European countries be?” The questions suggest that Eastern Europe was on the right side of history and that Western Europe might eventually accommodate this fact. Although his dispatches from these locales do not press this suggestion, neither do they demonstrate the prescience that characterized much of his domestic reportage.
Although McWilliams spent most of his time in New York, he did not write about the city frequently or with the insight he brought to the California scene. Indeed, his only regionalist effort during this time was The California Revolution, a collection of essays he edited in 1968. His introductory essay rehearsed and updated his argument about California's exceptionalism, mentioning the early promise of the computer industry and reemphasizing the commercial importance of the Pacific Rim. However, his crystal ball was becoming murky in spots. Although he correctly perceived the potential of Pacific Rim trade to California's economy, he focused on Australia, “one of the most interesting areas of international commerce,” and argued that trade with and immigration to that country were the keys to California's future. By training his attention on Australia, which he had never visited, McWilliams neglected the Asian economies that would play an increasingly important role in California's economy.
If McWilliams's instincts in the international arena were faulty, his critique of the New Left was on target. Although sympathetic to the movement, he sensed a disjunction between its virtues and effective political action. The New Left's appeal was never broad enough to supercede the coalition of labor, ethnic and religious minorities, and intellectuals that had been forged in the 1930s, and it therefore provided no practical alternative to Republicanism.17 Like his younger counterparts, he opposed the war in Vietnam and sought to push the Democratic Party toward a reordering of its priorities, but his voice was largely drowned out by the hectic events of that fractious time.
VIETNAM
The New Left's key issue, the war in Vietnam, dominated national politics during McWilliams's final decade as editor of the Nation. By the time the war came to the forefront of U.S. politics, McWilliams was thoroughly familiar with the issues surrounding it. Throughout the 1950s, the Nation had monitored the situation in Indochina with reports and analysis from its European correspondents, Claude Bourdet and Alexander Werth. It also ran several critical pieces by Bernard Fall, a former French soldier and professor of international relations, which culminated in Street Without Joy (1961), a history of French and American involvement in Vietnam to that point. Supported by detailed descriptions of specific tactics, strategies, firefights, and results, Fall's book left little doubt that the United States was repeating many of the mistakes made by the French. Even Colin Powell found its analysis irrefutable. In his 1995 memoir, Powell claims that its timely reading in Camp David might have saved many American and Vietnamese lives. Fall continued his work until 1967, when he was killed by a land mine in Vietnam.
Soon after President Kennedy took office, the Nation began issuing a series of warnings about U.S. involvement in Vietnam. July 1961: “The dirty war may not be lost by the United States, but neither will it be won. At the expense of mounting American casualties, it will drag on.” January 1963: “Despite our arsenal of weapons we do not have the power to ‘win’ this war.” September 1963: “The odds are that the Communists will eventually win in South Vietnam, their patience is more durable than America's enthusiasm for an expensive, futile war.” A May 1964 editorial, “Mr. Johnson's War,” also called attention to the military escalation in Vietnam, but McWilliams later admitted that the magazine's criticism was muted by its support for Johnson's domestic program and its antipathy for Goldwater. The following summer, the Nation published Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm's conclusion that the United States' chances of defeating the guerrillas in Vietnam were zero. A very different sort of piece, written by Daniel Ford and published in 1964, offered a firsthand report of the problems U.S. aircraft were experiencing in the field. Later, Ford commented on the gap between McWilliams's politics and his own.
I put [the dispatch] in an envelope with a five-cent stamp on the outside, and the U.S. Military Assistance Advisory Group generously flew it to Carey McWilliams in New York. McWilliams was what most Army officers would have called a pinko, but he was happy to publish even Republicans like me, if they'd work for what he could afford to pay, which in this case was $65.18
In publishing Ford's piece, McWilliams was both challenging the wisdom of U.S. policy in Vietnam and continuing the tradition of H. L. Mencken, whose willingness to feature authors from all walks of life had impressed McWilliams as a young man.
In McWilliams's view, Vietnam was the inevitable culmination of the cold war mentality, and he could not resist tracing it to anti-Communist hysteria in the 1940s and 1950s. For historical background on the conflict, he turned to figures such as Owen Lattimore and Edgar Snow, but a new generation of leftists did not need a thorough understanding of the debates and debacles of yesteryear to oppose the war firmly and loudly. Vietnam was the formative political experience for them, just as the Depression and labor struggles of the 1930s had radicalized McWilliams. Recognizing this fact, McWilliams also called on younger writers, including historian Howard Zinn, to provide this perspective.
McWilliams's opposition to the war took other forms as well. He served as vice chairman of the Lawyer's Committee on American Policy Toward Vietnam, which was founded in 1965 by a group of New York lawyers to protest what McWilliams called “State Department sophistries” (ECM, 301). Initially chaired by Robert Kenny and drawing most of its members from the National Lawyers Guild, the committee challenged the legal and constitutional basis for the undeclared war in Vietnam. In 1972, a month before the Watergate break-in, the group pressed for the impeachment of Richard Nixon. Later, it drafted a bill of impeachment, a modified version of which was introduced by Representative John Conyers. The bill never made it out of committee, but McWilliams considered it a notable achievement. His memoir notes that “a small group of lawyers, mostly of the so-called ‘old left,’ had offered the first legal challenge to the legitimacy of a war that had been waged for nearly three decades in defiance of the UN Charter and the Constitution” (ECM, 302). However, U.S. involvement in Vietnam did not end because of legal action, and impeachment was a nonissue until the Washington Post broke the Watergate story.
In 1967, McWilliams arranged an event in Los Angeles, patterned on the one he had coordinated for the Nation more than two decades earlier. This time, the theme was “the imperative need to mobilize national political opposition to the war in Vietnam and to reorder and redirect American priorities” (ECM, 274). His emphasis suggests that he regarded most antiwar activism to that point as local, insufficiently political, or both. He later described many of these protests as fruitless activity in which “discussion had been superceded by uproar, debate by demonstrations, dialogue by confrontations, civil disobedience by overt resistance.” Such demonstrations “angered and annoyed thoughtful critics of the war and made it difficult to launch a serious political opposition” (ECM, 277). To help launch that opposition, he recruited an impressive list of speakers for his event, including Senators Eugene McCarthy, George McGovern, and Mark Hatfield along with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who was beginning to speak out more forcefully against the war. McWilliams also clarified what he meant by national political opposition when he suggested to McCarthy that “a respected political figure, preferably a senator not up for reelection,” enter key 1968 primaries on an antiwar platform. McCarthy agreed, leading McWilliams to conclude that his conference helped set the stage for McCarthy's candidacy in 1968.
Privately, McWilliams recoiled from the war and its effects. “War in Vietnam is ghastly beyond description,” he noted in his diary in early 1968. “And how, I wonder, can it get better” (Feb. 3, 1968). He was also repulsed by the traditional efforts to support the troops. “Listened to Bob Hope on Vietnam: ghastly and unbelievable. He says the ‘natives’ regard us as Jolly Green Giants” (Jan. 13, 1968). But more ghastliness was in the offing. In April of that year, Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis, an event that McWilliams described in his diary as “a shattering experience.” After hearing the news over the radio at a paperback bookstore in New York, he and Iris returned home to watch the coverage on television. “Iris was crying and I must confess I had tears in my eyes—a great good man—Dr. King” (Apr. 4, 1968).
Three months later, while McWilliams was busily preparing for an extended trip to Europe, he recorded no such powerful emotion following the assassination of Robert Kennedy. But Europe had its own problems that summer. When the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia, McWilliams was frustrated and concerned. He noted in his diary, “This ghastly Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia has just about capped the climax—this is about it. The impudence of the alibis, for one thing. But more than that, the effect on the climate of opinion here is likely to be very bad” (Aug. 21, 1968). As usual, McWilliams was more concerned about the reaction in the United States, especially during an election year, than he was about international affairs. Although he was never as attached to the Soviet Union as his critics charged, Prague marked the end of whatever illusions he still harbored about the Kremlin's goals and methods.
Five days later, McWilliams traveled to Chicago to cover the Democratic National Convention for the Nation. He found there “a mob of people and police all over the place—big, pot-bellied aggressive cops, Chicago-style.” His diaries, however, indicate that he spent little time out on the streets, where demonstrators clashed repeatedly with those officers. Instead, he visited with I. F. Stone, Nelson Algren, and Studs Terkel, who interviewed him for Hard Times, his book on the Great Depression. The convention itself did not encourage McWilliams's hopes about national political opposition to the war. As per McWilliams's suggestion, Eugene McCarthy entered several key primaries in 1968, but that campaign did not result in an antiwar plank at the Democratic Party convention. Combined with the assassinations of King and Kennedy, that failure left McWilliams with a feeling of hopelessness. In his memoir, he described that disappointment: “For the moment, Chicago wrote finis to the brave talk, the long marches, the fervent teach-ins, and the violent agitations that had preceded the convention. Chicago was a bad scene, one of the worst of my political experience” (ECM, 284). By his reckoning, a sense of national frustration beginning with President Kennedy's assassination “built to a climax in 1968, when the nation suffered what might be described as a kind of moral, ideological, and political breakdown” (ECM, 258).
The election brought more bad news. Following the implosion of the Democrats in Chicago, Richard Nixon defeated Hubert Humphrey for the presidency, and Wayne Morse and Ernest Gruening lost their reelection bids in the Senate. Both were close allies of the Nation, where Gruening was a former editor. Four years later, when the Democratic Party finally selected an antiwar presidential candidate, Senator George McGovern was soundly defeated. In the aftermath of that loss, Theodore Roszak later wrote, “the liberal wing of American politics found its position in the national mainstream steadily undermined, as, one by one, the old Democratic Party constituencies drifted into the conservative camp” (Roszak 1999, xxix). Composing his memoir during the Carter years, McWilliams tried to find a lesson in the Vietnam fiasco and its domestic consequences. “Perhaps the debacle in Vietnam has finally taught us to respect other people's history,” he wrote hopefully (ECM, 246). Read a generation later, even this conclusion must be regarded as overly optimistic.
THE NEW NIXON
In the aftermath of the 1968 election, McWilliams's antipathy for Nixon was stronger than ever, but he no longer underestimated the new president's resilience or political skills.
The instant dislike and distrust which I felt for him in 1946, when he made his political debut in California, had grown with the years, but I had learned not to discount his special brand of political cunning, his basic opportunism, or his often canny readings of American political attitudes. (ECM, 287)
By the late 1970s, McWilliams agreed with William F. Buckley that Nixon was the central figure in American politics between 1945 and 1975. He also shared James Reston's amazement that “such a figure without belief, for whom ‘winning’ was everything, could for a quarter of a century so dominate the political life of a country that prides itself as the greatest democracy in the world” (ECM, 288).
McWilliams did not trust Nixon to do the right thing in Vietnam, but he did trust him to seek political advantage at every opportunity. He therefore sought to raise the political cost of the war by following Nixon's words and deeds carefully and using the Nation to hammer away at U.S. policy. These efforts, however, were often overtaken by domestic and international events. Following the U.S. bombing of Cambodia and the deaths of six protestors at Kent State University and Jackson State University, a more militant antiwar insurgency threatened to supercede the peace movement. McWilliams traced much of this militancy to a more pervasive disenchantment, which led many activists “to dismiss political action as meaningless and a waste of time” (ECM, 276).
He did not have to look far for examples of such activists. One was Kathy Boudin, who followed three relatives—great uncle Louis, father Leonard, and uncle I. F. Stone—into leftist politics. McWilliams knew and respected all three men. In an obituary published in Lawyers Guild Review, McWilliams had called Louis Boudin a mentor and “the wisest person I had ever known.” His memoir thanked civil rights lawyer Leonard Boudin (whose clients included the ECLC, Paul Robeson, Fidel Castro, and Daniel Ellsberg) and Boudin's law partner, Victor Rabinowitz, for encouragement. Stone, of course, was a longtime friend and former Washington correspondent for the Nation who had touted Factories in the Field in 1939. Kathy Boudin's activism, however, would take a very different course from her relatives'. After graduating from Bryn Mawr, where she dated the son of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, she quickly became a leading figure in the antiwar movement and eventually a member of the Weathermen (later, the Weather Underground), which Tom Hayden described as the antiwar movement's id. When that group split off from SDS in 1969, even other activists regarded its political philosophy and strategy as increasingly incoherent.
Eventually, the Weathermen were responsible for at least twenty bombings, including one planted by Boudin and a colleague in a women's room at the U.S. Capitol. In 1970, Boudin herself survived a bomb blast that killed three Weathermen who were assembling explosives in a New York townhouse. Stumbling out of the building naked, she borrowed clothes from a neighbor and went underground. Five years later, McWilliams noted in his diary, “Bomb went off in State Department. No one hurt but major damage. Weathermen claimed credit in a 12-page statement. Shows how vulnerable the Establishment is to this kind of terror” (Jan. 29, 1975). The next night, he appeared with Leonard Boudin at an NYU Law School event. When the United States withdrew from Vietnam, Kathy Boudin joined a black liberation group. In 1981, that group robbed a Brinks truck of $1.6 million in 1981 and killed three people, including two police officers at a roadblock. With her father acting as her attorney, Boudin pled guilty to homicide and robbery. She received a sentence of twenty years to life and was paroled in 2003 (Braudy 2003).
Boudin's exceptional story dramatizes the challenges faced by McWilliams's “thoughtful critics of the war.” Chief among them was a combination of youthful disdain for workaday politics and a penchant for anarchic destruction. “We have to create chaos and bring about the disintegration of the pig order,” read the Weathermen's invitation to their 1969 National War Council (Gitlin 1987, 399). But at least some of the Weathermen's anger and violence was directed at themselves. An excerpt from their last aboveground communiqué reads, “Smashing the pig means smashing the pig inside ourselves, destroying our own honkiness” (403). Until the Brinks robbery, the Weathermen had not killed anyone but themselves. Among their chief victims, however, was the English language. As Todd Gitlin has argued, bad writing was essential to their purpose. Clarity would have exposed their fantasies, but revolutionary slogans kept logic at a safe distance.
McWilliams had little appetite for the fantasies or the rhetoric. He declined to “go all out in support of the insurgents,” and his memoir comments on their methods and effectiveness.
Tactically the violence was counterproductive; so, too, was much of the gaudy sophomore rhetoric with the mindless repetition of such words as “pig,” “bullshit,” and “motherfucker.” And so, too, was the inexcusable mistake of permitting the hardhats to monopolize the symbols of patriotism, and the failure of the activists to relate the war to the issues of most immediate concern to blue-collar workers and other elements of the middle and lower-middle class who might have been won over by more intelligent tactics. (ECM, 292–93)
To the insurgents, such objections no doubt exemplified weak-kneed liberalism and tired blood. Certainly McWilliams's assessment strikes a note that would have been out of place in his own youthful writing. The middle class he disdained in the 1930s was by this time a potential ally, at least on the nation's most important issue. Moreover, that class no longer consisted solely of complacent bourgeoisie immune to the insights of Herbert Croly. Rather, it included blue-collar workers and others who might be responsive to more intelligent tactics. The times were changing and so was McWilliams, but not in the same direction.
During these years, the Nation entertained but finally distanced itself from the more extravagant claims about Nixon's character and activities. Many of these claims were not completely baseless. The Nixon administration was routinely monitoring, wiretapping, infiltrating, disrupting, and auditing protest organizations throughout this period. Likewise, Nixon's fears about violent revolutionaries were not entirely fantastical, and the two sets of suspicions reinforced and escalated each other. In 1970, the Nation mentioned but stopped short of validating a story that the Nixon administration had commissioned a RAND Corporation study of whether violent rebels would make it unsafe to conduct the 1972 election. An editorial maintained that, as “an old-time Red hunter,” Nixon was “inclined by temperament in that direction himself.” However, an article by Ron Dorfman criticized former SDS leader Carl Oglesby's book for suggesting that Nixon was responsible for both Kennedy's assassination and a plane crash that killed Howard Hunt's wife and dozens of other passengers.
McWilliams's suspicions did not run that deep, and he had too much respect for evidence and logic to go in for conspiracy theories. Yet he admitted that Nixon unnerved him. “One never knew what he might do next, for he was capable of almost any action,” he later recalled (ECM, 288). This nervousness persisted even after Nixon's impeachment and resignation.
Once Nixon had left the White House, a mood of relief and self-congratulation swept the nation … In general, it was agreed that “the system” had worked, and so it had, after a fashion. Even so, the nation had come closer to a coup d'etat than many cared to admit then or later. (ECM, 304)
Viewed historically, McWilliams's nervousness was the product of several decades of disappointment interspersed with occasional victories. He had embraced the labor movement and the New Deal in the 1930s only to witness a string of administrations that he found lacking. Truman was ineffective, Eisenhower a lost cause, Kennedy hollow and synthetic. Even Johnson's Great Society programs and civil rights victories were tainted by his Vietnam policy. After Nixon's comeback, McWilliams was skittish about the American polity as well as its electorate, whose predilections he frequently misread.
Following Nixon's departure from the White House, McWilliams wondered why and how Nixon had become his generation's dominant political figure. “Again and again I asked myself why it was that so many Americans either found it difficult to take Nixon's measure or were prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt” (ECM, 304). Although Nixon was politically unpredictable, McWilliams maintained that his character was not particularly hard to read. By the late 1970s, however, he had come to a sobering conclusion. Despite the liberal view that he had once advanced—that Nixon was a ruthless demagogue playing on the emotions of a gullible public—McWilliams eventually acknowledged that many Americans had not been fooled. To the contrary, much of the electorate understood Nixon perfectly. In his memoir, he notes, “A section of the public apparently felt that the times called for a bastard and that Nixon met the specification” (ECM, 305). He also claimed in the Nation that many Americans not only tolerated Nixon, but they resonated with him: “An important section of the public identified with Nixon; they would not admit it publicly, but they would have done what he did had they been in his shoes” (Dec. 23, 1978).
For at least two reasons, this conclusion must have been a difficult one for McWilliams to draw. First, he never felt this identification with Nixon or anything like it. Indeed, he instantly disliked Nixon and identified strongly with his arch-nemesis, the courtly Alger Hiss, with whom he continued to correspond. Perhaps for this reason, he consistently underestimated Nixon's appeal to the average voter. Second, the public's identification with Nixon was probably more disturbing to him than was the notion that a demagogue could fool the electorate for a generation. Political health can be restored when the demagogue leaves or is evacuated from the public square. The moral equation is more complicated, however, when the public knowingly places a soulless opportunist in a series of increasingly important posts, including the nation's highest office. In that case, the electorate would be at least partly responsible for the White House corruption.
This sobering conclusion also had implications for McWilliams's self-understanding. In particular, it placed him outside the country's political mainstream and in direct opposition to the major political figure of the postwar era. McWilliams began seeing himself as an outsider like his heroes Mencken and Bierce: an unreconstructed radical, western style—not part of any particular movement but nevertheless connected to a tradition that surfaced intermittently in American life. As such, he was part of “a minority within the minority of the left. Unlike liberals, [radicals] never feel part of the existing order and are invariably critical of it … The radical is the perpetual outsider, the odd man (or woman) out, constantly critical of the power structure and of things as they are” (ECM, 322). One cannot refute this sort of self-description, which is inherently subjective and expressive, but it should be tempered by a consideration of McWilliams's objective status. For most of his adult life, he enjoyed immediate access to countless officeholders, candidates, judges, and policymakers of different stripes, not to mention writers, journalists, and Hollywood celebrities. He had served in state government, edited a distinguished journal of news and opinion, and was an exemplar of civic engagement. If McWilliams was an outsider, the average citizen was an isolate by comparison. Yet this self-description made increasing sense to McWilliams in the immediate aftermath of the Nixon era.
LIVING IN THE RUINS
If political corruption at the top was a concern to McWilliams, another was urban decay. His diaries began to devote more attention to the problems he observed in New York City—crime, poor city services, housing shortages, office vacancies, and unpredictable mail. In March 1972, he noted a mugging—not the first—in his apartment building. Two months later, he was dismayed to learn that crime had spread to health-care facilities: “In New York, hospitals have security problems. Druggies rob nurses and attendants and create an atmosphere of fear and terror. In hospitals—it has come to that. Sad and depressing, and weirdly irrational” (May 18, 1972). A later diary entry observed, perhaps ironically, “The Democratic mess in New York is getting messier. Maybe Boss Daley can show them how to do it” (Mar. 16, 1976).
His concerns about safety came to a head in August 1972. As he was leaving his office at the Nation, four young black men stepped off the elevator on his floor, asked a question of McWilliams and a fellow office worker, and returned to the elevator. In an act of “total folly,” McWilliams joined them. When the doors closed, the youths began beating McWilliams, and he clutched his briefcase to his stomach (“I was afraid of a knife”) and started yelling. “They really let me have it,” he noted in his diary. “As they left, one took aim and gave me a knockout punch” (Aug. 10, 1972). The sixty-six-year-old McWilliams was relieved of $160 and came away with a fractured cheekbone, a black eye, and cuts. He spent the evening at St. Vincent's Hospital and returned for X-rays the next day.
After the robbery and beating, McWilliams directed his aggression at himself: “A bloody nuisance and I felt lousy, hating myself for ever having been so stupid as to step into that elevator with those 4 young blacks.” The next day, an acquaintance from Los Angeles happened to see him. McWilliams looked terrible, but his only comment was that he wished he could get to work without using an elevator.19 (Elevators had made McWilliams nervous since early childhood, when one in the state capitol in Denver began rising and shutting its bars as he was entering it.) When discussing the incident with friends, Iris could become agitated, but McWilliams urged her to consider the social factors that led to crime.20 Two months later, however, when his secretary's purse was taken from her desk on her first day of work, he remarked, “What a world, what a crazy demented cruel world!” (Nov. 13, 1972).
McWilliams contacted the New York Times about the robbery, and the paper mentioned it in the “Notes on People” section: “The editor said the incident had not altered his liberal views, but ‘I'll be a little more cautious about getting on elevators’” (Aug. 16, 1972). The San Francisco Chronicle also picked up the story, and McWilliams began to mention the robbery—along with the fact that Iris was robbed at knifepoint in a Columbia University elevator—in his speeches on liberal approaches to crime prevention. For the next months, however, he was taken aback by the volume and hostile tone of the mail that he received as a result of the Times notice. Not everyone was willing to shrug off the problem of violent crime—a fact that Nixon seemed to understand better than McWilliams. Nor did McWilliams relate his own concerns about Jerry—who, after a sojourn in Paris, had moved to San Francisco to study creative writing at Stanford—to Nixon's claim that the culture had become too permissive. Although Jerry's partying, financial dependence, and lack of direction worried McWilliams, such concerns did not affect his politics. The same day his secretary's purse was lifted, for example, he reflected on Nixon's huge win in the 1972 presidential election. “I think Nixon has misread the returns. This is no big personal triumph, no big mandate, hardly a mandate of any kind. He seems to think it is a referendum on ‘permissiveness,’ etc.”
McWilliams's concerns about New York and Jerry persisted, but he became more adept at living with them. Later, he noted that his neighborhood near Columbia was “a scene these days: bizarre types, old ladies, Negro dudes, you name it … Still there are some advantages in living in the midst of urban decay, in the ruins, so to speak” (Feb. 13, 1976). He also wondered whether Jerry and his friends—whom McWilliams dubbed “California's new Polynesians”—had “shrugged off progress, and opted for ‘the steady state.’ Time will tell” (Feb. 12, 1976). Even as he adapted to the times, however, questions of civic and moral values bulked larger in his thoughts.
McWilliams's mood remained dour through the fall of 1972. In October, he joined George Kirstein and his successor at the Nation, James J. Storrow, for lunch at the Harvard Club. “I was not feeling very bright—no sleep; and perhaps for this reason I was deeply disgusted with both of them. The rich are the rich and they live in a different time and space zone; Scott Fitzgerald was right about them” (Oct. 5, 1972). Later that month, he reflected on the death of Jackie Robinson, who courageously broke the color barrier in major league baseball. “Jack Robinson is dead at 53 and the media is pulling out all the stops—but not mentioning how he threw Paul Robeson to the wolves—such details are soon forgotten. Robeson was and is a much more important and admirable figure” (Oct. 24).
After Nixon's victory in November, McWilliams's year did not improve. In December, he learned that Dorothy had died suddenly in Merced. “I heard by chance this morning that Dorothy had passed away last night around 11:30,” he noted in his diary. “A colleague of Bill's. I had phoned him—told me he had seen a sign to this effect on Bill's office door.” After checking in with Nancy, Carey Jr. (who was already in Merced), Casley, and Jerry, he wondered, “What next can happen? This has been for us the year of the toad” (Dec. 8, 1972).
SUMMING UP
When not putting out the Nation, McWilliams devoted much of his attention during this time to reflection, consolidation, and summing up his experience. He accepted awards, wrote new introductions to earlier books, attended conferences, donated his papers to university libraries, and sat for interviews. The awards often provided the occasion for correspondence with old friends. A 1974 letter from Matty Josephson, then a faculty member at the University of California, Santa Cruz, mentioned a New York Times article about McWilliams receiving the mayor's Legion of Honor ribbon. The article, Josephson noted, described the sixty-eight-year-old McWilliams accepting the award and demonstrating his vanity and pride in “extravagant variations of reticence.”
Many of the favors he performed for old friends also had a retrospective quality. In 1972, he complied with a request from Marilyn Murphy-Plittman, a graduate student gathering biographical material on John Fante, to describe his friend's work, its significance, and their relationship. Before agreeing, however, McWilliams wrote to Fante seeking his guidance on the matter.
Do you want me to cooperate; if so, to what extent and at what level? … Am I to tell her about the total desolation that you have spread among young ladies from Roseville to Calexico? Shall I tell her of all the places we have visited together or describe in what condition we were when the visits were made? Please advise. Remember, despite my years, I have nearly total recall! (Fante 1991, 289)
The response was vintage Fante.
Marilyn Murphy-Plittman is a seeker after the true facts of my life and any reticence on your part would prove embarrassing in the long run. By all means spare me not and let the chips fall where they may. However … I prefer you make no mention of Roseville, or of my knowledge of the Smart or Dornfeld families.21 I think too that you must be very careful not to indicate any deep or lasting relationship between you and me, since, as everyone knows, you are a member of the Communist Party and I could be besmirched by association. I would prefer that you make no mention of my friendship with Ross Wills. This is a dark and shameful era of my life which can add very little to my skill as a writer. Avoid too any mention of Jo Pagano, Frank Fenton, Bob Brownell, Helen Purcell, Marie Baray, Jean Winfield, and, in truth, all incidents having to do with my life on Bunker Hill. I also prefer that Stanley Rose and William Saroyan not be mentioned in connection with myself. Do not mention William Faulkner or Edmond Kohn. I think too that any reference to Musso-Frank would be in very bad taste. In your letter you speak of “all the places we have visited together,” but for the life of me I cannot remember them, and am convinced you are thinking of somebody else. Mrs. Murphy Plittman will probably ask you about Camilla, the heroine of Ask The Dust. I prefer that she be mentioned as a purely imagined characterization and not a real person. Otherwise, by all means let her have the truth with both barrels blasting. I have nothing to hide. (289–90)
McWilliams's letter to Murphy-Plittman, a copy of which he sent to Fante, provided a lengthy and forthright response to her concerns, but he also tried to guide her away from her concerns about Fante's ethnicity. “I have some doubts that ethnic differences and ethnic backgrounds are as important as the current fashion makes them out to be,” he wrote. “In my view, for what it may be worth, John is as American as Huckleberry Finn” (Fante 1991, 291). He suggested that she focus on other factors, for example, Fante's natural gifts and the fact that he was most productive when least affluent.
Joyce Fante, an able manager of her husband's literary legacy, later remarked that McWilliams's comments were “very shrewd for the most part,” but she bridled at his notion that Fante was “pretty much a pre-World War II writer.” “Despite the close friendship that existed between the two men,” she concluded, “McWilliams seems to have underrated Fante as a novelist” (Fante 1991, 291). Fante's immediate response was more playful: “Your letter to Ms. Murphy-Plittman of Feb. 18 is interesting, informative and possibly even truthful. I enjoyed it thoroughly. The fellow you write about is most unusual. I should like to meet him sometime, but I don't think I would care to know him intimately.” At the end of the letter, which included comments on and corrections of McWilliams's assessment, Fante dropped the jocular tone. “Your letter to Plittman is generous, thoughtful, warm, kind, honest and essentially the truth, a nice balance of affection and honesty, and I thank you for having written it” (293–95).
Two years later, Fante asked for a more important favor, this one also pertaining to literary posterity. After receiving a copy of Carlos Bulosan's America Is in the Heart, reprinted by the University of Washington Press with a new introduction by McWilliams, Fante praised his friend's writing at length before making a request.
The reprint of Carlos' book is a beautiful job, and I would give both testicles if the editors could be persuaded to do my Ask The Dust for their list. I can't just bust in and ask them, however. I need someone like yourself to pass the word. Will you, can you do this for me without compromising yourself? (Fante 1991, 295)
McWilliams wrote to two presses, the University of Washington and Peregrine Smith, which was handling his own paperback reprints, on Fante's behalf. Although Ask the Dust had been out of print for some time, it was not completely dormant. Screenwriter Robert Towne had optioned the film rights three years before, and Fante described how Towne had come upon his novel.
You will be interested in knowing how I came to meet Robert Towne. Five year ago he was seated in the Seattle Public Library reading Southern California Country, where he came upon a mention of Ask the Dust. He got hold of a copy, read it, and immediately got in touch with me. Small world. (298)22
Despite Towne's interest in Ask the Dust, both publishers passed on the reprint. The novel remained out of print until 1980, when Charles Bukowski persuaded a small West Coast publisher, Black Sparrow Press, to reissue it with his new preface.23
Towne also contacted McWilliams while finishing the screenplay for Chinatown, which adapted the Owens Valley water controversy to the film noir style and the political mood of the early 1970s. In one letter to McWilliams, Towne wrote that Southern California Country “really changed my life. It taught me to look at the place where I was born, and convinced me it was worth writing about.” Since then, Towne has frequently acknowledged that McWilliams's 1946 book inspired his screenplay, which earned him an Academy Award in 1975. For his part, McWilliams considered Chinatown brilliant. The formal perfection of its screenplay, its masterful direction, and its excellent performances recommend the film to anyone. For McWilliams, however, the film also worked at the autobiographical level, for it dramatized both the events in the Owens Valley and the scope of his career. In effect, his life and work connected the experiences of Mary Austin, who witnessed the Owens Valley developments personally, with those of Robert Towne, an A-list Hollywood screenwriter of the 1970s who polished scripts for Francis Ford Coppola and partied with Jack Nicholson. Rooted in Austin's world, that work was still blossoming long after Towne himself was regarded as a senior Hollywood eminence.