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The most recent example and the most, I think, appalling example was when Martin Peretz, the owner - and I stress owner - of The New Republic fired a journalist who I think was uncommonly skilled and full of integrity and passion and all that stuff. But he had criticized regularly the former pupil and friend of Martin Peretz, Al Gore, so he was fired. That's contrarianist that went around - that did - that was not rewarded.
[A.J. Muste] was from Michigan and he grew up in the Dutch Reform Church there, which is a fairly strict church. He later came to New York. He was the minister of a labor temple in the - on the East Side. Then he founded, to my knowledge, the first, maybe the only, labor school; that is, Cornell has a labor department and other schools. But this was a school for - entirely for labor organizers, and he was the - the chairman.
When [Bill Clinton] was running for president. I'll never forget this one. He was running in New Hampshire. He was not doing well. And he suddenly, over a weekend, rushed back to Little Rock to execute a guy who had killed a cop, but in the process, the policeman had shot him in the head and he was out of it. He didn't know today from tomorrow, good, evil, whatever. His lawyer begged - his lawyer was an old friend of Clinton.
I was very much against the Vietnam War, and Max Askeli was visiting Lyndon Johnson in the White House cheering him on, writing editorials. And in The Voice one day I once referred to him as Commander Askeli. And I called in to The Reporter to go over the galleys of a music piece I had written, and the editor whispered to me, `It's not gonna run. You're not gonna run. Max Askeli has fired you because of what you said about him.'
I got a letter one day from somebody saying, `You're always criticizing the press. Why don't you talk about what Clay Felker is doing to your own paper [The Voice]?' And my 10-year-old son Tom, now with Williams & Connelly, put in a legal opinion, not - an opinion from the back of the car saying, `You know why? What are you, afraid?' So I wrote the column. I - you know, - the column simply said that Felker is destroying this paper.
I had written a book called "Boston Boy" some years ago, and that took me from the time I could speak, I guess, in Boston through the time when I finally left to come to New York. One was understanding and coping with anti-Semitism. Boston, at the time, was the most anti-Semitic city in the country. And I found out when I was an adolescent that you have to be crazy to go out after dark all by yourself; you'd get your head bashed in.
When I first knew Bob Dylan, he lived in the Village. And for a man who, years after, would disdain publicity or any attempts at interviews, whenever I'd write something about him, he'd be on the street corner saying, `When's it going to run? When's it going to run?' But I must say that album that was - it was the second album he did, and though I've never been a fan of his guitar-playing, he did - I have to admit, he did catch the Zeitgeist of the time.
I found out - the paper used to go to bed on Tues - on Monday. I found out that on Monday nights, the editors would cut out - literally cut out passages, sometimes whole paragraphs, of some of the writers that might possibly offend blacks, lesbians, gays, radicals. And I wrote a couple of columns about that. And they're - of course, they were annoyed that I had written about it, but, I mean, it - another example - and [my wife Margot] always also conjured that.
Carl Armstrong was one of those people in the anti-war years who had been so convinced of the righteousness of their cause that he and some friends decided they would blow up a building at the University of Wisconsin, in which they said research was being done to help the war against the Vietnamese. What they blew up at three or four in the morning was a young scientist, who was married and had a couple of kids, who wasn't working on war stuff at all. And he was killed.
Those who created this country chose freedom. With all of its dangers. And do you know the riskiest part of that choice they made? They actually believed that we could be trusted to make up our own minds in the whirl of differing ideas. That we could be trusted to remain free, even when there were very, very seductive voices - taking advantage of our freedom of speech - who were trying to turn this country into the kind of place where the government could tell you what you can and cannot do.
After [Bill Shawn] was fired, I was going to the YMHA [Young Men's Hebrew Association] on the Upper East Side to do a talk on free speech.I went into a coffee shop to get a piece of pie and a coffee, and I was reading a paper and I hear a voice. And it was -it was not a voice I was familiar with, but I looked across the table and I saw Lilian Ross.And sitting next to her was William Shawn - no tie, needed a shave. His voice was kind of coarse and rather loud. He wasn't drunk, but I was just stunned.
I was less angry at [Carl] Armstrong, though I was angry at the people who came to his trial: Dan Ellsberg, who ordinarily I respected a lot; Philip Berrigan; the guy who teaches at Princeton still - I can't remember his name. And they were saying - well, they were saying, really, what Arthur Koestler had people saying on "Darkness at Noon." The means were unfortunate and, sadly, someone died, but the end is what is important and this was a great symbolic - something or other - sign against the war in Vietnam.
A woman in the audience asked [Barack] Obama about her mother. Her mother was 101 years old and was in need of a certain kind of procedure. Her doctor didn't want to do it because of her age. However, another doctor did and told this woman there is a joy of life in this person. The woman asked President Obama how he would deal with this sort of thing, and Obama said we cannot consider the joy of life in this situation. He said I would advise her to take a pain killer. That is the essence of the President of the United States.
Tom [Hentoff] - it started when he was the editor of the paper at Wesleyan and the - members of the staff. This was the first wave of political correctness. The editors of the staff members came and said he must - he must, from now on, stop using `freshmen' and - in-as part of the policy of the paper. It had to be `freshperson.' Therefore, you don't - you're not discriminating against males or females. They were very fervent about that, and he was equally fervent about not politicizing language. So until he left, `freshmen' stayed.
I was writing - at least beginning to write Boston Boy and there were a lot of holes in my so-called research. I didn't know the towns my mother and father came from in Russia. I didn't know the name of the clothing store I went to work for when I was 11 years old. I didn't know a lot of things. So I called for my FBI files, not expecting to have that stuff there, but I wanted to know what they had on me.But they did have the towns my mother and father lived in in Russia. They had the grocery store I worked in when I was 11 years old.
I told [a big investor in The New Yorker] - I was complaining the way writers complain.I said`[Bill Shawn] pays very well, but a lot of my pieces don't get in,' and that was true of most of the writers there.But he pays you for them, that was very nice of him. This guy didn't think it was very nice. He figured, `Oh, my God, that's more of my investment gone,' and paying money to writers for not printing them. That became, apparently, one of his weapons against Shawn when he - in the corporate skirmishes that went on. It was a bad mistake on my part.
There's a black lawyer in Galveston, Texas, who was the unpaid NAACP general counsel in Texas. He had a great record in housing discrimination, labor discrimination. He decided to take as a client a member of the Ku Klux Klan because the state wanted to get the membership lists of the Klan to find out if they could get something on the Klan. And he said, `I got to take you. I despise you. But we, the NAACP, won that case; NAACP vs. Alabama in the 1950s. Nobody has the right to get your membership lists.' He was fired from the NAACP. To me, he's a hero.
Clay Felker was then - he had - to his credit, he had created New York Magazine, which was the first of the city magazines that covered the city and gave all kinds of advice and all that sort of stuff. And there were copies all over the country by the time he left. He had, however, a view of journalism that was very much, I must say, like Tina Brown's at The New Yorker. You hit 'em hard, fast, give 'em something to talk about the day after the paper comes out, as contrasted with William Shawn, who gave them something to talk about two or three years from then.
My favorite story about O'Connor - one of them - is I was in Toronto at a pro-life conference.I had a session before he was to come on,I thought very moderately - that not have unwanted abortions was to have much more research on contraception. Two true-faith people came out of the audience, wrested the microphone out of my hand and said, `That is im - inappropriate, improper. Pro-lifers do not believe in contraception.' [John] O'Connor's watching this said,`I want to tell you I'm delighted that Nat is not a member of the Catholic Church. We have enough trouble as it is.'
In our country, [habeas corpus ] means that if you've been sentenced and convicted in a state court, either to death or to some other kind of sentence, you have the right to petition a federal court to review what happened to you. And until [Bill] Clinton, you had three, four, five, even more years I collect records of people who have been on death row for eight, 10, 12, 14 years - this is before Clinton - who finally got a decent lawyer, usually a pro bono lawyer, and an investigator, and were able to find out - they - they're but approved that they're - that they were innocent.