Barbecuing pork

On December 4, 1969, The New York Review of Books published “The Trial of Bobby Seale.” This special supplement contained a partial transcript of the 1969 trial of the infamous Black Panther leader who—along with Tom Hayden, Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman, and other members of the “Chicago Seven”—was on trial in Chicago for conspiracy to incite a riot. (Seale was also facing a first-degree murder charge in New Haven.) The trial riveted the nation’s attention. The disturbances instigated by Hayden (who said he expected twenty-five people to die in the melee) and others on the occasion of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968 had already emerged as an iconic moment in the mythology of the counterculture. The episode was as significant in its way as the Woodstock music festival or college anti-war demonstrations.

The transcript published in The New York Review covers the proceedings of one afternoon in which a mistrial was declared and Seale was cited for contempt of court. (At one point, his conduct had been so obstreperous that the court ordered him bound and gagged.) The transcript was prefaced with an essay by Jason Epstein, a co-founder of The New York Review. It is a remarkable document. Epstein, like most leftists at the time, was clearly sympathetic to Seale. He was also clearly contemptuous of judge Julius Hoffman, the presiding magistrate. Epstein assured his readers that the source of Judge Hoffman’s authority was “not in his juridical wisdom” (which, he claimed, was “hardly remarkable”) but “in an unmistakable theatrical gift.” The transcript was supposed to corroborate these contentions.

It was also supposed to garner support for Seale. Epstein assured his readers that the evidence against him “was sparse.” The charges against the other defendants, too, Epstein suggested, were “metaphysically conceived.” Seale himself, Epstein explained, “had been invited to come [to Chicago] only at the last minute as a substitute for Eldridge Cleaver.” How then could he have been involved in a conspiracy? In Seale’s case, according to Epstein, the evidence consisted of the allegation by an “undercover policeman” (read: an untrustworthy witness) that Seale, at a rally organized by Hayden and others, had urged his audience to “barbecue some pork.” Over the objection of the defense, Judge Hoffman construed this to mean “burn some pigs,” that is, policemen. Epstein did not offer his own interpretation of the phrase. Instead he launched into an exposition of the convoluted law governing conspiracy. It does not take any special hermeneutical gifts, however, to understand what Bobby Seale intended in his speech. What he said was, “If a pig comes up to us and starts swinging a billy club, and you check around and you got your piece, you got to down that pig in defense of yourself! We’re gonna barbecue some pork!” After Seale’s performance, Tom Hayden told the crowd to “make sure that if blood is going to flow, it will flow all over the city.”

“The Trial of Bobby Seale” was typical of the political reporting one could expect to find in The New York Review in the late Sixties. It was the kind of piece that gave the paper its special place in the annals of America’s cultural revolution. Plenty of other publications—Ramparts, for example, and Rolling Stone, The Village Voice, even old-Left stalwarts like The Nation—played important roles in defining the counterculture and propagating its spirit and its ideas.²¹ Some of these publications were explicitly devoted to promoting the drug culture, rock music, and sexual “liberation”; some were openly Marxist, frankly admiring of Castro, Ho Chi Minh, and other totalitarian leaders; all were infused with some version of political radicalism. And as the Sixties wore on, all were “against the war” in Vietnam—that is, against U.S. intervention in Vietnam—and adamantly opposed to the use of American military power. But none commanded anything like the intellectual cachet that The New York Review enjoyed and, to a lesser extent, continues to enjoy among the left-liberal intelligentsia. And none was, at that critical moment in the Sixties, quite so elective—or quite so pernicious—in helping to institutionalize the gospel of political radicalism among America’s intellectual elite.

It is a curious story. The New York Review was the brain-child largely of Jason Epstein, the publishing wunderkind who created the distinguished paperback lines of Anchor Books at Doubleday and Vintage Books at Random House. By the late 1950s, the need for a serious, general-interest review was patent. The novelist and essayist Elizabeth Hardwick, who was then married to Robert Lowell and who went on to become advisory editor at The New York Review, summed up the received feeling in “The Decline of Book Reviewing,” which Harper’s published in 1959:

Sweet, bland commendations fall everywhere upon the scene; a universal, if somewhat lobotomized, accommodation reigns. A book is born into a puddle of treacle; the brine of hostile criticism is only a memory. Everyone is found to have “filled a need,” and is to be “thanked” for something and to be excused for “minor faults in an otherwise excellent work.”

As Philip Nobile put it in Intellectual Skywriting, his intermittently hagiographic history of the first ten years of The New York Review, “everybody talked about a new book review, but nobody did anything about it.”

The necessary spur came during the 114-day printers’ strike in 1962-63. The strike shut down all the major New York newspapers, including The New York Times and the Herald Tribune, whose book pages, along with those of The Saturday Review, constituted the main sources of book reviews and, not incidentally, the chief venues for book advertising. (Looking back on the reviewing scene in The New York Review’s second issue in the summer of 1963, Edmund Wilson remarked that “the disappearance of the Times Sunday book section at the time of the printers’ strike only made us realize it had never existed.”) Although Epstein’s association with Random House precluded his being the editor of the contemplated new book review, his energy, connections, and organizational acumen brought The New York Review into being. It was a fateful stroke that led him to appoint the precocious Robert B. Silvers as editor. (Epstein’s wife, Barbara, has been co-editor from the beginning, but it was always Silvers who imparted to the Review much of its intellectual and nearly all of its ideological sheen.)

Filling a need

Then in his early thirties, Silvers had been working as an editor at Harper’s since 1959. Something of a child prodigy, Silvers had matriculated at the University of Chicago in 1945 at the tender age of sixteen. He was graduated two and a half years later after, Nobile reports, “having numerous requirements waived.” Silvers was briefly press secretary for Connecticut Governor Chester Bowles, Jr., in 1950, after which he went to the Yale Law School for a few semesters. He then joined the U.S. Army, which posted him to Paris. In the mid-Fifties, Paris was still Sartre’s Paris: a Paris in which—among intellectuals, anyway—anti-Americanism was as de rigueur as were brittle intellectual snobbery and left-wing politics. Silvers seems to have found it an intoxicating combination. He lingered in Paris for some six years, absorbing the atmosphere and graduating from the Ecole des Sciences Politiques (where he met Raymond Aron) in 1956. He also worked part of the time for George Plimpton’s newly launched Paris Review (to which he contributed an interview with the novelist Françoise Sagan in 1956). His energy and editorial flair were apparent from the beginning. John P. C. Train, then managing editor of the Paris Review, recalls a “shy but formidable” figure who “made the Paris Review what it was.”

When the Algerian conflict escalated, the Front de Liberation Nationale (FLN) embarked on a program of atrocities explicitly “designed to provoke the French army into savage reprisals.” The policy succeeded. Torture had been officially abolished in France in 1789, but within a few years the French army had been provoked into authorizing the torture of Algerian prisoners to extract information about terrorist plans. The result, as the historian Paul Johnson noted, was “a competition of terror.” The cause of Algerian independence was taken up by all right-thinking (that is, left-leaning) intellectuals. (Of course, the practice of torture by the French army was roundly condemned across the ideological spectrum.) Declaring that colonials had replaced the proletariat in the hierarchy of the oppressed, Sartre called upon French workers to “support Algerian fighters” in their efforts “to break the fetters of colonization.” Numerous first-hand accounts of atrocities perpetrated by the French army were published, much to the consternation of the French authorities. Sartre himself contributed a preface to one such contraband pamphlet, Henri Alleg’s La Question, thus conferring unimpeachable prestige on this mode of political activism. Alleg’s pamphlet provoked moral outrage throughout France. At the request of John Fischer, the editor of Harper’s, Silvers translated a chapter of another such report, La Gangrène, a grisly account by four Algerians of their torture in Paris at the hands of the French police.²²

I mention these details because the intellectual and political posture—indeed, even the social posture—of The New York Review clearly owes a great deal to Silvers’s extended holiday in Paris. By all accounts, Silvers is as shy of personal publicity as Sartre was addicted to it; and where Sartre was a graphomaniac who wrote and published millions of words, Silvers seems early on to have decided against writing. According to Philip Nobile, Silvers’s only published writing, apart from the two items mentioned above, is “A Letter to a Young Man About to Enter Publishing,” which ran, anonymously, in a supplement to Harper’s about “Writing in America” in 1959. (He also published an interview with “David Burg,” the pen name of a young Soviet defector, in Harper’s in May 1961.) Silvers has disputed the influence of Sartre, claiming that his own views were more informed by the example of Sartre’s great critic Raymond Aron. But he brought to his editorship of The New York Review—especially in the 1960s and early 1970s—an engagé attitude very similar to that perfected by Jean-Paul Sartre in the 1950s and 1960s: relentlessly haughty, cerebral, cliquish, at once socially ambitious and disdainful of society, ever in search of approved gauchiste “causes,” instinctively anti-American.

The trick was knowing how and when to mix these qualities—which to emphasize, which to downplay—and at this task Silvers quickly proved himself a master. In the beginning, highbrow elements, leavened by celebrity, predominated. The first, trial issue of The New York Review was cobbled together on short notice in the winter of 1963. The very bulk of the issue was a testament that its time had come. It contained forty-odd pieces, including F. W Dupee on James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, Dwight Macdonald on Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.’s The Politics of Hope, Philip Rahv (a founding editor of Partisan Review) on Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Mary McCarthy on William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch, and W H. Auden on David Jones’s Anathemata; there were also reviews by Norman Mailer, Lionel Abel, Steven Marcus, Susan Sontag, Gore Vidal, and Alfred Kazin; Robert Penn Warren contributed a poem, Irving Howe wrote about The Partisan Review Anthology. William Phillips, another founding editor of Partisan Review, reviewed Elias Canetti’s huge book Crowds and Power. Richard Poirier wrote about Frank Kermode, William Styron wrote about Frank Tannenbaum, Midge Decter wrote about recent novels, and Robert Jay Lifton wrote about Arata Ossada’s Children of the A-Bomb. Elizabeth Hardwick contributed two pieces, as did Robert Lowell (an obituary of Robert Frost, who had just died, and a poem) and John Berryman (a review of Auden’s The Dyer’s Hand and three “Dream Songs”).

By any measure, this was an extraordinary performance. It met, deservedly, with instant and widespread acclaim, generating more than a thousand letters. A second large issue was duly published in the summer, with only a modest falling off of celebrity. In addition to Wilson’s interview with himself, the issue included pieces by (among others) Allen Tate, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Lionel Abel, Stephen Spender, F. W Dupee. J. F. Powers, Alfred Kazin, Richard Wilbur, Robert Brustein, Joseph Frank, H. Stuart Hughes, Steven Marcus, and Kenneth Burke. Again, an extraordinary line-up. The New York Review began regular fortnightly publication in the fall of 1963. Printed on newsprint (and described by some as “Partisan Review on butcher paper”), it instantly established itself as an indispensable journal of academic left-liberal orthodoxy. At first, Silvers’s main innovation was the inclusion of ever greater numbers of English writers, especially titled writers; indeed, a pronounced Anglophilia became a comically defining characteristic of the journal.

The assassination of President Kennedy in November 1963 marked an early turning point. The New York Review commemorated the event with a special issue in December 1963 “largely devoted to comments ... about the present crisis in America.” One contributor to that issue noted that, “as might be expected, the assassination stimulated a good deal of cant.” Indeed. And that issue of The New York Review provided a home for a goodly amount of cant, although what turned out to be most significant was the tone of emergency that the journal adopted in “The Fate of the Union: Kennedy and After.” Of course the mood of the nation following President Kennedy’s assassination did a great deal to encourage grim rhetorical histrionics. But as one looks back over the evolution of The New York Review from the mid-1960s and early 1970S, it is difficult to escape feeling that its editors regarded the assassination more as an existential tonic than as a tragedy; or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that they regarded it as a tragedy that was itself an existential tonic. In any event, with that issue a new element of radical left-wing political hectoring made its appearance in the journal’s pages. The cover story of The New York Review’s inaugural issue was F. W Dupee’s acerb review of Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time. Describing Baldwin as a “Negro in extremis, a virtuoso of ethnic suffering,” Dupee concluded by wondering “how The Fire Next Time, in its madder moments, could do anything except inflame” anti-black extremists and “confuse” blacks. By 1967 we find Tom Hayden declaring happily that “Middle-class Negro intellectuals and Negros of the ghetto have joined forces. ... They assume that disobedience, disorder, and even violence must be risked as the only alternative to continuing slavery.” Such exhortations became almost deafening as the Sixties wore on; it subsequently diminished, but that was only after elite opinion in this country had migrated markedly to the Left—partly under the influence of twice-monthly manifestos emanating from the The New York Review.

A platform of the radical Left

If Kennedy’s assassination initiated a movement toward political fulmination, the Vietnam conflict precipitated a stampede. It was then, for example, that Noam Chomsky began contributing his lugubrious diatribes against American foreign policy, replete with such delicacies as his description of the Pentagon (in a piece called “On Resistance”) as “the most hideous institution on earth.” It was then, too, that Mary McCarthy filed her three-part report on the socialist paradise being prepared in North Vietnam and that I. F. Stone began bludgeoning readers with his interminable essays on the American military establishment (sample title: “The War Machine Under Nixon”). Stone’s pieces read like neo-Stalinist equivalents of those multipart articles on staple crops with which The New Yorker used to anesthetize its readers.

The New York Review never lost its taste for upper-class English dons. But in the mid-Sixties the dons were joined by a more demotic element. Suddenly, political firebrands like Jerry Rubin, Stokely Carmichael, and Tom Hayden began appearing in the paper along with radical fellow-traveler Andrew Kopkind, a refugee from Newsweek. Of the ten pieces that Kopkind wrote for Silvers, the most notorious came in the issue of August 24, 1967. Headlined “Violence and the Negro,” the cover announced in outsize type Kopkind’s piece on Martin Luther King and Black Power and Hayden’s report on the riots—what he called “The Occupation”—of Newark. Underneath was a large diagram instructing readers on the exact composition of a Molotov cocktail.²³ According to Todd Gitlin, a Berkeley commune that habitually trashed neighborhood stores believed that “massive retaliation might be imminent, ... and for that contingency they kept a Molotov cocktail in the basement, designed to the specifications of The New York Review of Books cover of 1967.”

It was about this time that even some of The New York Review’s ideological allies began having doubts about the direction that the journal was taking. Irving Howe, himself a socialist and founding editor of Dissent, noted scathingly in 1968 that the Review had managed to achieve “a link between campus ‘leftism’ and East Side stylishness, the worlds of Tom Hayden and George Plimpton.” Howe continued:

Opposition to communist politics and ideology is frequently presented in the pages of the New York Review as if it were an obsolete, indeed a pathetic, hangover from a discredited past or worse yet, a dark sign of the ClA. A snappish and crude anti-Americanism has swept over much of its political writing.... And in the hands of writers like Andrew Kopkind ... liberal values and norms are treated with something very close to contempt.

Howe was not the only former contributor to express alarm. The sociologist Dennis Wrong, who had appeared in The New York Review’s inaugural issue, wrote a lengthy and thoughtful piece on the journal for the November 1970 issue of Commentary. Noting, with basic approval, The New York Review’s early campaign against the Vietnam War, Wrong pointed out that

by 1966 and 1967 a new tone of extravagant, querulous, self-righteous anti-Americanism began to creep into the NYR’s reports on Vietnam, especially those of Noam Chomsky, Mary McCarthy, and I. F. Stone. The war seemed increasingly to provide the occasion for an extreme and bitter repudiation, marked by an unmistakable touch of Schadenfreude, of a great deal more in American life than the Johnson administration’s foreign policy, the Pentagon, the military-industrial complex, and the wretched clichés of cold-war propaganda.

The May 1971 Esquire went even further, predicting in a press note that “from among [The New York Review’s] authors the next Stalin, and his speechwriters, will emerge.” In Philip Nobile’s phrase, what began as “a literary proposition ... infused with liberal politics” had become a “politicized platform of the radical Left.”

As Dennis Wrong suggested, although the Vietnam War occasioned much of The New York Review’s radicalism, the real target was not America’s policy about Vietnam but America itself. Indeed, anti-Americanism—a prominent feature in almost all countercultural rhetoric—became a major leitmotif, almost a unifying theme, in The New York Review within a few years of its birth. For example, when Mary McCarthy traveled to Vietnam early in 1967 for The New York Review, she began the first installment of her report—the cover story for April 20—with this acknowledgment: “I confess that when I went to Vietnam early in February I was looking for material damaging to the American interest and that I found it, though often by accident or in the process of being briefed by an official.” In the course of her reports, McCarthy naturally places the phrase “Free World” in scare quotes and consistently portrays Americans as venal monstrosities. (When she converses with a CIA agent, his “lips flexed as he spoke like rubber bands.”) Glorifying the industry and pluck of the North Vietnamese, she tells her readers that the “sense of fair play ... has atrophied in the Americans here from lack of exercise.”

At the beginning of her second installment, McCarthy famously declared that “the worst thing that could happen to our country would be to win this war.” Years later, in 1979, after the horrific spectacle of the Vietnamese boat people and similar phenomena consequent on America’s losing that war, she was asked if she had changed her views on Vietnam. Noting that her ideal was still “socialism with a human face” (one might as well wish for wooden iron), she nevertheless acknowledged that

as for my current views on Vietnam, it’s all rather daunting. I’ve several times contemplated writing a letter to [the Vietnamese premier] Pham Van Dong (I get a Christmas card from him every year) asking him can’t you stop this, how is it possible for men like you to permit what’s going on? ... I’ve never written that letter, though.

The combination of arrogance and naivete implicit in Mary McCarthy’s retrospective musings about Vietnam was a staple of The New York Review’s anti-Americanism. Jason Epstein provided a truly vertiginous example in an essay called “The cia and the Intellectuals” (April 20,1967). Following up on the revelation that the CIA had provided covert funding to some student and cultural organizations (including, most famously, Encounter magazine in England), Epstein’s piece was a meditation on how “organized anti-Communism had become as much an industry within New York’s intellectual life as Communism itself had been a decade or so earlier.” Among other things, “The CIA and the Intellectuals” was an early masterpiece of what came to be called “moral equivalence.” In one remarkable passage, Epstein writes that Stalin

not only purged and tortured his former comrades, killed millions of Russians, signed the pact with Hitler, and suppressed the writers and artists. He had also done something which directly affected their own lives, much as the ClA and the State Department have not only burned the crops and villages and peoples of Vietnam, but have also brought so much anguish into the lives of so many young people today. What Stalin did to the generation of intellectuals who came of age between the Thirties and Fifties was to betray the idealism and innocence of their youth. By perverting revolutionary Marxism, he cheated them, as it were, in their very souls.

Epstein concludes sadly that certain radical intellectuals, robbed of their Communist ideals by nasty Joe Stalin, devoted “the rest of their energies to retribution.” Hence, you see, the birth of Neoconservatism. It’s not simply that Epstein transforms a principled rejection of Communism into a psychological tic; he also insinuates an equivalence between the murderous behavior of Stalin and the activities of the American ClA. What Epstein does not see is that his friends who turned against Communism did so not because Stalin perverted “revolutionary Marxism” but because they finally understood that Stalinism was the natural fulfilment of revolutionary Marxism.

Epstein’s essay is notable for its exhibition of the way liberal disillusionment can be elevated into a kind of metaphysics of anti-Americanism:

The facts are clearer now than they were ten years ago. Then it surprised us to find that the country seemed to have fallen into a frenzy of self-destruction, tearing its cities apart, fouling its landscapes, poisoning the streams and skies, trivializing the education of its children, and not for any substantial human happiness, ... but for higher profits and rapidly increased economic growth.... What we were experiencing was the familiar philistine expansionism (of which the Vietnamese are only the latest victims), this time attached to a formidable technology whose alarming possibilities were as yet unclear, but which was even then depressingly out of human scale and growing larger and more autonomous every day.

Now at last, Epstein concludes, it is clear that “pursuit of money and power became openly America’s main, if not its only, business.”

Which is worse, Epstein’s moralism, or his hypocrisy? By psychologizing politics and attempting to replace basic political commitments with a melodrama of virtue, Epstein is really engaged in a species of moral blackmail. As Diana Trilling observed in a withering response to “The ClA and the Intellectuals,” Epstein would have us believe that “depending on how we respond to the poisoning of our streams and skies we will take either a Left- or a Right-Wing position on—say—the Vietnam War. Whoever abhors polluted air and desecrated landscapes will have adequate grounds on which to judge American foreign policy. He will recognize it in all its ‘philistine expansionism.’ What further guide to decision in foreign affairs does anyone need?”