Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes (24 page)

In fact, given the proper circumstances, Wasserman could himself be an artful critic of the left, within the stringent boundaries it normally set for itself. I say this because I have sometimes been accused of "lumping" leftists together and missing the spectrum of "progressive" opinions. The reverse would almost be more accurate. I have often given too much benefit of the doubt to people like Wasserman, in recognition of mild deviations they have been willing to risk and have failed to see the hard line coming before it smacked me in the face.

When I raised the issue of conservatives' exclusion from the pages of his magazine, Wasserman dismissed my concern out of hand as "bean counting." He compared it to feminist complaints of underrepresentation, even though there were plenty of feminists and feminist sympathizers on the
Review's
list. I found myself wondering whether a leftist writer of reputation comparable to mine would have been invited to lunch by Wasserman and not asked to write a review for his magazine.

I should have known at the time that this was not going to be a long-lived reunion. It came to an end almost a year later when Wasserman finally did ask me to write for the
Review
. He wanted me to join a "symposium" on the sesquicentennial of the publication of the
Communist Manifesto
. My contribution was to be 250 words (which he promptly cut to 5). I made the mistake of assuming others's would be equally brief. When the issue came out, however, I saw that the symposium opened with a three-thousand word illustrated spread celebrating Marx's genius and continuing relevance. This mash note was written by Eric Hobsbawm, a member of the Communist Party until 1990 (!) and a recidivist marxist. Hobsbawm's most recent book had been a five hundred-page defense of the pro-Soviet left in the Cold War, which I had taken on in a lengthy review in the
Weekly Standard
. Hobsbawm's apologia for Marxism was an insult to the historical record and to everything that people like Chambers and I had stood for. In featuring this travesty, Wasserman had revealed the standard by which he lived (and his real opinion of me). Why not ask David Duke to write a paean to
Mein Kampf
on its anniversary, I asked, in an acidic note I sent him.

But I could not let the matter rest there, and decided to take it up with the top editors at the
Times
. Both of them were men of the left as well, who listened politely and ignored my concern. I also wrote a letter to the
Time's
newly appointed publisher and CEO, Mark Willes, previously an executive at General Mills. I had met Willes at a
Times
Christmas Party which was held at the Hancock Park mansion of its editorial page editor, Janet Clayton, an African-American woman whose living room was tellingly adorned with an iconic portrait of Jesse Jackson. Except for the passage of thirty years, the
Times
party could have been organized by
Ramparts
, the radical magazine Scheer and I edited in the 1960s. Clayton's living room was soon filled with the glitterati of the Los Angeles left. Scheer was there, gnashing his teeth at me because of what I had written about him in
Radical Son
. Tom Hayden came too, along with the ACLU's Ramona Ripston and black extremist (and
Times
contributor) Earl Ofari Hutchinson. In fact, the only person not of the left I encountered that whole evening, was Paula Jones's spokeswoman Susan Carpenter McMillan.

It occurred to me to make an appeal to Willes because he had already made a few gestures that seemed to indicate his intention to introduce some balance at the
Times
. He had even demoted several left-wing editors who had climbed the affirmative action ladder to the top of the paper, among them Scheer's wife. In my letter, I challenged the rationale behind pitching the book section of a major metropolitan newspaper to what was essentially a
Nation
audience. I made it clear that I had no problem with the representation of left-wing authors in the paper. It was the exclusion of conservatives that concerned me.

But I had misjudged Willes, whose reason for demoting the editors was related more to the
Times
's poor economic performance than its sometimes extreme political postures. Like many businessmen, Willes showed little political sense when it came to the issues of left and right. Shortly after my appeal, for example, Willes was publicly embarrassed by a leaked internal memo in which he demanded that
Times
reporters include ethnically diverse sources in all articles, regardless of subject matter or context. This was too much even for the quota-oppressed
Times
staff and its politically correct editors. Instead of answering my letter, Willes handed it over to its target, Wasserman, whose reply was understandably terse and revealed that our relationship was effectively over.

In my discussions with Wasserman and the
Times
's editors, I had raised another issue: the exclusion of conservative writers from the annual
L.A. Times
Festival of Books. This was an event normally attended by a hundred thousand readers and five hundred authors flown in from all over the country, eager to show up because of the opportunities for publicity and validation that an appearance entailed. At the previous festival, the only conservative authors I had been able to identify were celebrities Charlton Heston and Arianna Huffington.

I was made aware of the festival as a result of my own exclusion when my autobiography
Radical Son
was published. Like any author with a new book, I had been looking for venues in which to promote it. Given the liberal bias in the general media, securing an audience was already problematic for a conservative author. Although I had co-authored best-sellers with Peter Collier, and in
Radical Son
had a dramatic story of murder and intrigue to tell, I found my book blacked out in the review sections of most of the major metropolitan papers. A chance to have
60 Minutes
do a segment on the book's untold story of Black Panther murders was blocked by its chief investigative producer, Lowell Bergman, a veteran Berkeley radical. I had enough experiences like this to know I needed the book festival venue. As a well-known author based in Los Angeles, it seemed odd to me that I should not be invited. When I brought this up to Wasserman, however, he just brushed me off. "There are lots of authors," he said. To his credit, he did then try to get me invited but was unsuccessful because my request for inclusion had come too late.

That was last year, before the Marx fracas. This spring I answered my phone and to my surprise Wasserman was on the other end inviting me to the festival. We had not spoken for nearly a year, and his voice sounded strained and not particularly friendly as he made the offer. "I want to thank you, Steve," I said, accepting. "I know how hard this must be for you." The conversation was so short I never found out exactly how I had earned the invitation, or exactly who had decided I should get it.

The festival was held on the UCLA campus and was a capsule demonstration, with a cast of thousands, of why conservatives like Hilton Kramer and Norman Podhoretz harbor the "delusion" that the culture is controlled by the party of the left. As in previous years, the festival headliners were leftists like Alice Walker and Betty Friedan — and even Sister Souljah — who had drawn thousands of their dedicated fans to the event. There was no Tom Clancy, no Tom Wolfe, no Thomas Sowell, and no Robert Bork to draw a similar conservative crowd. Among the hundreds of authors, in fact, I counted only a handful (actually, five) who were conservative, all locals. None was flown in like Walker, Friedan, and Sister Souljah as marquee attractions. As a tribute to his own lack of self-irony, Wasserman had appointed himself chair of a panel called "The Ethics of Book Reviewing."

I amused myself by walking around and bumping into former comrades, who seemed omnipresent. Among them were
Nation
editor Victor Navasky and /i>Nation writers Todd Gitlin and Bob Scheer. I especially enjoyed the encounter with Scheer, who was in company with Navasky and Gitlin, but who made an end run around the other two in order to avoid having to shake my hand. Later I came upon Christopher Hitchens showing his parents around the event. Christopher greeted me cordially and thanked me for defending him in
Salon
when he had come under attack from the left. When I told him how Scheer had run away, he smiled. "Yeah, he's not speaking to me."

I had been scheduled for the second of three serial panels on the 1960s, called "Second Thoughts," although in fact I was the only panelist who had had any. The panels were recorded for later showing on C-SPAN and were held in Korn Auditorium on the UCLA campus. When I arrived, the room was packed with five hundred graying and scraggly-faced leftists, many in message T-shirts and
Nation
baseball hats. I counted thirteen panelists in all for the three 1960s discussions, every last one but myself a loyalist to the discredited radical creed. Hayden and Scheer were on a panel together. Russell Jacoby was there, too.

The other panelists at my event were Maurice Zeitlin and Sara Davidson. A third leftist had failed to show. Davidson was the author of a 1960s memoir of sexual liaisons entitled
Loose Change
and the chief writer for the politically correct television series
Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman
. Her politics could be gleaned from her latest book,
Cowboy
, about her affair with a man who was intellectually her inferior and whom she had to support with her ample television earnings, but who gave great sex. The book celebrated this affair as a triumph of feminism.

The panel moderator, Maurice Zeitlin, was a sociologist at UCLA and had written books with titles like
American Society, Inc.
and
Talking Union.
Maurice and I had been friends in Berkeley at the beginning of the 1960s, when the two of us, along with Scheer, were part of a radical circle that produced one of the first magazines of the New Left, called
Root and Branch.
Maurice and Scheer had coauthored one of the first favorable books on Fidel Castro's communist revolution, which I had edited. Although we lived in the same city, I had seen Maurice only once, by accident, in the last thirty-five years.

While waiting for the panel to begin, I thought about the dilemma the whole scenario presented. I owed Wasserman a thank you for being there at all, but at the same time I could not ignore the outrage unfolding before me. A leftist political convention was being held under the auspices of one of the most important press institutions in America, and was being promoted to a national television audience under the pretense that such select and resentful voices somehow represented American culture.

I resolved my dilemma by thanking Steve and the
Times
editors "for allowing me to crash this party," and then remarked that it was a national disgrace that a major press institution would stage a "symposium" on the 1960s stacked thirteen-to-one in favor of the radicals. Later in the discussion, I pointed out that the UCLA Venue reflected the same unconscionable bias. A politically-controlled hiring process at American universities had resulted over time in the systematic exclusion of conservatives from the liberal arts faculties of UCLA and other prestigious schools. In contrast, even nonacademic leftists were regularly appointed to university faculties by their political cronies. Jacoby was one example. Scheer, who had been made a professor of journalism at usc's Annenberg School by its dean, a former Clinton Administration official, was another.

I focused my speech on the way in which 1960s leftists had betrayed their own ideals by doing an about-face on civil rights and supporting race preferences, by abandoning the Vietnamese when they were being murdered and oppressed by communists, and by helping to crush the island of Cuba under the heel of the Castroist dictatorship. I also described my experiences with the Black Panther Party, a gang led by murderers and rapists whom the left had anointed as its political vanguard and whose crimes leftists continue to ignore to this day. I thought it interesting that a left that had supported international criminals during the Cold War was now supporting criminals like Mumia Abu Jamal and the inhabitants of what one of their leaders, Angela Davis, called the "prison-industrial complex" at home. These crusades against law enforcement, so characteristic of the left, hurt the poorest and most vulnerable citizens of our cities, particularly blacks, who are the chief victims of the predators the left defends. While the ideas and programs of leftists were seductive, their implementation had been an unmitigated human disaster. Which is why I had become a conservative.

As was common in my experience on similar platforms, the debate turned out to be a non-event. Adopting a standard tactic of the left I had encountered in the past, Sara Davidson simply ignored the challenge of my remarks and opened hers by saying that she saw the 1960s "in a wider, bigger context than just the Black Panthers." Then she commented, "My challenge is not to revise the Sixties, to re-analyze and reinterpret it, but to get back in touch with the essence and the spirit of that time." This was the kind of thoughtless arrogance one can expect from people inhabiting a cultural universe which they effectively control and in which, therefore, no challenge can threaten their hegemony or require a serious reply.

Stepping in for the no-show panelist, Maurice gave a speech, which could easily have been made in 1964, about the "silent generation" and American imperialism in Vietnam. He concluded with a flourish about the movement and how it was inspired by the idea of social justice. Maurice's eloquence about this commitment and about Vietnam was not tempered by a single fact that had been revealed since the end of the war: not, for instance, the two-and-a-half million Indo-Chinese slaughtered by the communists after America's forced withdrawal, not the interviews with North Vietnamese leaders that showed how the support of American radicals for the communist cause had helped to prolong the war and make the bloodbath possible. Nor did he bother to explain the silence of the crusaders for social justice during the long night of Vietnam's oppression by its leftist liberators.