A Matter of Opinion
By Victor S. Navasky
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 464 pages, $27
Robert Conquest is right. It really is a “morbid affliction,” a
mental illness.
I speak of the ability of people on the left to defend
communism, and more specifically, declare the innocence of Alger
Hiss. The latest example of A Matter of Opinion, a recently published
memoir by Victor Navasky, the longtime editor and now publisher of
the Nation, America’s oldest left-wing magazine.
What makes Navasky’s communist sympathies and defense of Hiss so
amazing is that in A Matter of Opinion he gives every
indication of being a man of strict and — for a journalist —
surprising candor. Navasky is also a first-rate writer. For all its
intellectual and spiritual flaws, A Matter of Opinion is a
terrific read. Navasky describes his youth in New York City, his
adventures in the army in the 1950s (he was stationed in
Anchorage), his founding of Monocle magazine, a stint at
the New York Times and finally his stewardship of the
Nation with wit and color. Christopher Hitchens, Paul
Newman, and other luminaries make memorable appearances. I can also
add that Navasky is a very kind and soft-spoken gentleman: in the
late 1980s, before I was mugged by reality and became a
conservative, I was an intern at the Nation.
And yet, there is that blind spot: Navasky just can’t give up on
socialism. Looking back on his education at the “progressive” New
York grammar school Rudolph Steiner, Navasky recalls that the kids
and teachers sang songs in praise of the labor movement, the civil
rights movement, the International Brigade (communists who fought
in the Spanish civil War) and the revolutions in China and Russia.
You’d think that from this vantage point in history, with communism
discredited in most of the world, Navasky would be reluctant to put
his hand back on that burner. Yet he just can’t do it:
Over the years, I have learned from George Orwell, from
Khrushchev’s revelations at the Twentieth Party Congress, from
Gorbachev’s and other memoirs, from the Venona decrypts and
selected Soviet archives, some of the many things wrong with this
particular naive internationalist vision of “the new world
a-comin.” But as the democratic socialist Michael Harrington wrote
in 1977 in The Vast Majority, although the popular-front
vision was sometimes manipulated to rationalize cruelty rather than
promote kindness, “for all its confusions and evasions and
contradictions, it was a corruption of something good that always
remained in it: of an internationalism that is still the only hope
of mankind. My heart still quickens when I hear the songs of the
International Brigade.” Mine, too.
Getting goose bumps over a communist fight song is like tearing
up hearing a Nazi anthem. Do we really need to say it one more
time? Socialism doesn’t work. It is a perverse, evil,
pseudo-messianic delusion based on a false interpretation of human
nature. It always ends up in death and concentration camps. Do we
really need to revisit this?
What’s sad about this is that in A Matter of Opinion
Navasky shows genuine character and honesty. He recalls a story he
didn’t have to — the time he “set up” presidential candidate
Hubert Humphrey in 1968. Navasky desperately wanted Humphrey to
call the “New Politics” of Robert Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy “just
a phrase” because it made “a good punch line.” Navasky ignored
everything Humphrey said in a speech, followed him to his office,
and asked, “Do you think the so-called New Politics has any
content, or is just a phrase?” Navasky then reported the answer
“just a phrase” in the New York Times Magazine as if it
were a central Humphrey idea. Now Navasky comes clean: “At the time
I had mild compunctions about what I had done, but I persuaded
myself that he deserved it. Now I’m not so sure.”
Yet despite this valiant honesty, Navasky still holds out hope
for socialism! He actually revisits the Chambers-Hiss case. (In
1948 journalist Whittaker Chambers accused State Department
official Alger Hiss of spying for the Russians; Chambers has been
proven right.) Despite the mountain of evidence for Hiss’s guilt,
Navasky just can’t help fudging. “Perhaps I am wrong about the Hiss
case. But I am certain I am right that the mystifications
surrounding the subject of espionage, compounded by the emotional
legacy of the Cold War, has interfered with a reasoned assessment
of evidence.” As for the charge that the Nation “didn’t
understand the evils of Stalinism.” Well, “we can have that
argument later.” Navasky never gets around to it.
Sadly, Navasky may not be a dying breed. New Republic
editor and Navasky wannabe Peter Beinart, the new darling of
American liberalism, has come up with a solution to the implosion
of the Democratic Party. A few months ago in the Washington
Post, Beinart, who has just been given a large advance to
write a book about how to salvage liberals from oblivion, proclaims
that folks like Howard Dean and the elites who run the major
universities need to warm up to the military. According the
Beinart,
The biggest problem is cultural. Democrats should
acknowledge that at times the Left’s understandable anger over
Vietnam degenerated into a lack of respect for the
military.
Beinart is trying, but he just can’t seem to make himself tell
the entire truth. I’m referring to the phrase “the Left’s
understandable anger over Vietnam.” If Beinart would investigate
that phrase and the assumptions and deceptions behind it, his
project to resurrect the DNC might be more successful. Like those
he is trying to help — or like an alcoholic who keeps drinking —
he cannot bring himself to face the painful facts that will speed
healing. Peter Beinart cannot bring himself to say that communism,
the cause of the Vietnam war, is evil, and that fighting it in
Vietnam was noble — that, in fact, there was no justifiable anger
over Vietnam. Just anger.
Beinart is said to be attempting to revive the Cold War
liberalism of men like Lionel Trilling and Scoop Jackson. The
trouble is, Beinart is keeping the liberalism and leaving behind
the unambiguous hatred of totalitarianism. Where did all the
protesters and press disappear to once the U.S. fled Saigon and the
communists began the mass murder and reeducation? Not being able to
admit that basic fact, even in regards to Vietnam, is the sign not
only of a morally weak party but of a diseased mind — two traits
that make it difficult to trust the Left with World War III,
otherwise known as the War on Terror.
Still, I recommend Navasky’s A Matter of Opinion. It’s
a feast for magazine and newspaper junkies like me, as well as a
case study of the affliction of communist denial.
