Booknotes

Mr. NAT HENTOFF (Author, "Speaking Freely: A Memoir"): Well, it happened so frequently. I think what I was most maddest about--and it's in the book--when the House and the Senate, back in 1984, were debating a bill that would --at least delay and maybe stop some of the ex--summary execution of disabled children--infants. And the Down syndrome kids and other kids had been, in some cases, routinely let die, to use the euphemism. And I saw the debate on the floor of the House. And I considered myself, at the time, a liberal; I don't know what I consider myself now. And here are the leading liberals at the time Geraldine Ferraro, Don Edwards, who I'm--I admire enormously, Henry Waxman--saying, `You can't do that. That's an interference with the doctor-mother'--not the doctor-infant, but doctor-mother--`relationship.'

And I figured, `My God, these are --the--this isn't fetus time. This is--they're born children.' And--and as Harry Blackmun said when he wrote Roe v. Wade, `Once a child is born, the child has basic constitutional rights: due process, equal protection of the laws.' And they were acting as if you could just dispose of these kids. I was angry.

Mr. HENTOFF: Well, I grew up in a household in which we had a clock that we won at Revere Beach during the Depression--one of those brass clocks that didn't work--but it showed Franklin D. Roosevelt standing at the wheel of the New Deal. Even though the clock didn't work, we kept the clock because of how we felt about FDR. A lot since then I knew about FDR I wouldn't have been so enthusiastic.

But a liberal was somebody who expected and hoped that government would help the poor--you know, that whole routine. I did not know then and I've learned since that in an area that means a lot to me, free speech, liberals are as bad as many conservatives in trying to censor speech. The whole politically correct movement, if it--if that's what it is, was spawned by liberals. So I try to avoid categorizing myself.

Mr. HENTOFF: Well, 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. And a lot--that book had a number of sort of rites of passage for me. 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. More fulfilling, I was introduced to jazz, and that's become a basic concern and passion of mine ever since.

This book, "Speaking Freely," starts when I came to New York. And the first chapter is about a man who became a friend of mine, much to our mutual surprise, Malcolm X. And it goes through other rites of passage, I guess you'd say, including the--what I just spoke about, the learning that liberalism isn't quite as liberal as it pretends to be. And it goes through my adventures with the FBI during the anti-war period and the civil rights period. And a particular moment--and I'm not, to this day, quite sure how I feel about it--I had always wanted to be in the law books--you know, Hentoff vs. something or other. And then Congressman Icord headed a House on American activities committee. It was called the House Internal Security Committee. And he put out a report, and he named a number of very destructive people who lectured at colleges and left arson in their wake and did other terrible things. And he mentioned me and he ascribed to me three organizations to which I'd never belonged, and I decided I would do something about this.

When the ACLU took my case and we got a ruling I think, for the first time, they could--the Congress could put out the report internally but they couldn't put it out at taxpayers' expense around the country. And I felt odd about that because I, in a way, I was interfering with free speech, but then, you can't always win.

Mr. HENTOFF: Oh, well, the most controversial subject-issue I've ever gotten involved in to this day was when I became pro-life. And liberals are very--many liberals are very angry at me because of that. In part, because--they could understand it, they say, if I came to it from a religious kin--a Catholic perspective. But I'm still a Jewish atheist, and that really bothers them. And I come to it entirely from the point of view of biology. And what Roe v. Wade has led to, I--what I did in the 1980s--I tracked all of the state Supreme Court decisions concerning people who wanted to have their relatives--their husband, their wife, their child--taken off of feeding tubes or respirators.

Every time the Supreme Court of a state would say, `That's OK,' they based it on Roe v. Wade. And it turned out when--the--in terms of the physician-assisted suicide, the first federal district judge in the history of the United States out in Washington--state of Washington--came to the same conclusion, basing it on Roe v. Wade. And around that time, I met the angel of death, Derrick Humphrey, who introduced the whole concept of assisted suicide, and he was exultant. He was talking about things that had happened to him for the good. He said, `When I came to this country, I couldn't get my ideas across to anybody, practically, but then a wonderful thing happened and the door opened.' I said, `What was that?' He said, `Roe v. Wade, because when Roe v. Wade said that you can remove a fetus for privacy, and privacy is the safeguard of that, then it was extended through the courts to, "You can take the respirator off your husband's--your husband," or whatever and, finally, physician-assisted suicide.' So when I say I'm pro-life, I mean pro-life across the legal board.

Mr. HENTOFF: I write a syndicated column for The Washington Post that goes to about 200, 250 papers. I write a column for The Village Voice, which I've done since time immemorial, and occasionally--and books. And I occasionally write minor notes for record albums and occasional articles.

Mr. HENTOFF: Yeah. I've always been amused by Dylan; I don't think he's been amused by me. When I first knew him, 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.

Mr. HENTOFF: Oh, that was--he was really mad with my wife. I had asked by Rolling Stone--the only assignment I ever had for them--to do a story on the Rolling Thunder Review, which was Bob Dylan, Alan Ginsberg, Joan Baez and a host of stars. My wife, some weeks before, had written in The New York Times that The Kid wasn't The Kid anymore and he wasn't all that winning anymore.

So when I approached one of his secretaries for an interview, I was told that Bob didn't want to see me anymore because of what my wife Margot had written. So I went ahead and did the piece anyway. A reporter is never put off by somebody not wanting to be interviewed. And I got Joan Baez to talk and Alan Ginsberg and some of the guys in the band. And by the end of the piece, another emissary came and said, `Bob is willing to speak to you now.' And I said with great pleasure, `No, thanks. The piece is over.'

Mr. HENTOFF: That--well, I guess I haven't talked to him since before then. I follow his career. And...

Mr. HENTOFF: Oh, gosh, my chronology is not always very good. That was at least--let's see--at least 30 years ago, maybe more.

Mr. HENTOFF: I live in the Village right near NYU, which is taking over most of the Village. I've lived there for most of my time in New York. One of the things I like about the Village is, it's considered the kind of area where you can't have skyscrapers or, actually, many tall buildings. So you can see the sky which, I think, is a benefit.

Mr. HENTOFF: Yeah. The first one--a very nice person--that didn't last terribly long. We'd lived together before then. The second one...

Mr. HENTOFF: Where?

Mr. HENTOFF: How long? About eight months, I think.

Mr. HENTOFF: That was back in 1951--'50, '51. Then the second wife--the best part of that union, our two daughters, and that lasted about five years. And I've been married to Margot now for about 38 years.

Mr. HENTOFF: I wish she did. She used to write regularly for The Voice, for The New York Review of Books, for Harper's Bazaar, and she really had the most distinctive writing style, even more than mine, than I've ever seen in this business. But she stopped. She decided that she had nothing more to say. And yet, every day, she has a whole lot to say, and I wish she'd write it down.

Mr. HENTOFF: Well, I think one thing we share is a complete bottomless disdain for Bill Clinton. My--mine is based on the fact that he has done--and I'm--this sounds like hyperbole, but he has done more harm to the Constitution and the Bill of Rights than any president since John Adams. And he outshines John Adams in that regard. Margot dislikes him because he's totally untrustworthy, and you really ought to have some faith in whoever's going to be your president.

Mr. HENTOFF: All right. To begin with, when John Adams--when-- James Madison was writing--pretty much writing the Constitution, he got a letter from Thomas Jefferson, who was then-ambassador to France. And Jefferson said--I am paraphrasing--`Do not forget to keep habeas corpus and strengthen it.' That--in--that's the oldest English-speaking right. It goes back to the Magna Carta in 1215.

Mr. HENTOFF: But in our country, it 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. Was it fair? Did you get due process? Was there prosecutorial misconduct? There are any number of things that could happen. And until 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. And now, these days, with DNA, that happens even more often.

But under Clinton--under this part of the anti-crime bill that he-- had passed with the Republicans--they're just as bad, but he was the power. Under Clinton, you're limited to one year. You have one year to petition. If the court doesn't want to hear it, too bad. And that is outrageous.

Mr. HENTOFF: Oh, I think--I don't think he does anything--I don't think it's ill will. I don't think he's evil in the sense that he hates the Bill of Rights. He does what he figures will help him politically. It's like when he 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. He begged Clinton not to have this guy executed. It was absurd. But he did it anyway. And that was to show that he wasn't tough on crime. And the habeas corpus business, that's to show that he's not tough on crime. And you have an electorate that wants to see people who are not tough on crime.

Oh, and other things he's done. The immigration bill--the new immigration bill--he has stripped the courts, which Congress can do under the leadership of the president, so that people who had a right to asylum or to petition --for asylum who were legal residents are now unable to go through because that part of the bill has been taken out. I mean, he has called for expanded wiretaps for the FBI. I mean, he goes on and on and on. And he was the man, as a matter of fact, who, in terms of the Communications Decency Act, which would have made the Internet, the whole concept of cyberspace, vulnerable to rampant censorship--he pushed that bill, and I know the man in the Justice Department whom he persuaded -- the guy didn't want to lose his job--to write the bill. And, of course, the Supreme Court, 9-to-nothing, said it was unconstitutional.

I mean, did this happens on a regular basis. And what--the crucial part of it to me is, I--the press is practically uninterested in this. In the last campaign, the '96 campaign, I can't remember this coming up in any of the television interviews that were done, the presidential debates that Jim Lehrer held and the like, except for Tony Lewis of The New York Times and maybe one or two other people. Now that is dangerous, when the people don't know what's happening to their Constitution.

Mr. HENTOFF: Well, we disagree heavily on abortion. She thinks--first of all, she --this I hear from a lot of people beside her. She thinks that men have no business getting into this argument at all unless they're going to be pro-choice. But it turns out that a fair number of fetuses are male, and besides that, we are all one part of humankind, it seems to me.

Mr. HENTOFF: We had--well, I met her on Fire Island when I had a house there many years ago. And then I was co-editor of the magazine called The Jazz Review, which was a pioneering magazine because it was the only magazine, then or now, in which all the articles were written by musicians, by jazz men. They had been laboring for years under the stereotype that they weren't very articulate except when they picked up their horn. Anyway, she was the--I guess, the coordinator or the production manager, and we got to know each other and we married.

Mr. HENTOFF: Two boys. One, Nicholas, is a criminal defense attorney in Phoenix in which he --gets into --a lot of very controversial cases. He has sued Sheriff Arpaio, the famous sheriff who keeps people in tents, gives them green bologna and the like. My other son Tom is with Williams & Connolly in Washington, where he does intellectual property defamation cases.

Mr. HENTOFF: Tom?

Mr. HENTOFF: Oh, yeah. Tom--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. It is no longer in use there.

Mr. HENTOFF: Oh, Jessica is--she is a--one of the great risk-takers in --my experience. When she was at State University of New York at Purchase, they had a 4014 system. You go to --you have four semesters. Then, in between the other four semesters, you can take whatever courses you want. And a pied piper came along, a circus performer--a professional circus performer--and Jessica found her vocation and she became, to my great alarm, a trapeze artist with a friend. She played all over the United States. I boycotted her for a while. I couldn't stand it because--for example, I'd say, `Why don't you use a net?' `Oh, we don't use a net. Europeans don't use a net. We don't use a net.' And I said, `But people come and expect you to break you neck.' And I bought her a net, which, of course, was never used. But then I figured, after all, I have my obsessions; she's entitled to hers. And I did --see her perform, and she was very good. Fortunately, however, she now has three small children; she's now on the ground. She runs her own everyday circus in St. Louis.

Mr. HENTOFF: The pied piper.

Mr. HENTOFF: No, not at all. No. She's singular in that respect. I mean, in terms of the boys, I always wanted to be a lawyer and would often talk law with them, but I certainly never wanted to be a trapeze performer.

Mr. HENTOFF: Miranda is a complete musician. She's a composer, a singer. She writes scripts along --with her projects. And she's a superb teacher. Her teaching pupils have ranged from Itzhak Perlman to Sting. And, it's one of the great, great pleasures of my life--I mean, talk about vicarious satisfaction from --your kids. She was teaching once at Lincoln Center, and the hall was full of other professionals--musicians, professors, teachers. And she was explaining how Bartok composed his second piano concerto. And she explained how the music was interwoven with the rhythms and what he had in his mind. And I was just stunned. This is a kid who used to work --on a piano with a cracked keyboard.

Mr. HENTOFF: Four children.

Mr. HENTOFF: Ah.

Mr. HENTOFF: No. A.J. was a--as he likes to say, a radical pacifist; that is, he never engaged in violence but he believed, as Gandhi did--and he knew Gandhi slightly--he believed that a pacifist had to be active in the community. And in that respect, Martin Luther King, whom A.J. advised in the civil rights movement, was also a radical pacifist. He--A.J. never got much credit, never got much attention. For example, I wrote a biography of him and nobody ever heard of it. But he was very influenced--in--influential in the peace movement, in the civil rights movement. And he was extraordinarily calm--the most--I couldn't--I've never known a man who would go through--I mean, the cops would be arresting him. There'd be turmoil around him. And he was just watching and...

Mr. HENTOFF: He 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.

He was--and this was funny in a way. Trotsky found out about him--Leon Trotsky--because A.J. worked. He was an activist. And he organized the first sit-in strike in Toledo in a factory. And Trotsky was very impressed with that. And...

Mr. HENTOFF: Oh, '33, '34, something like that.

Mr. HENTOFF: A.J. died in the late '60s, I think. He was 81, something like that.

Mr. HENTOFF: Oh, I knew him very well. I tried for a while to be like he was, and that is a total pacifist. But then Margot hit me hard in the stomach one day to prove to me that I wasn't as perfect a pacifist as I thought I was.

Mr. HENTOFF: She literally hit me as hard as she could, which is pretty hard.

Mr. HENTOFF: Yeah, that was the whole point. And I didn't-- hit back, but I knew that if it had been anybody else, I would have hit back, and that was the point of her metaphorical blow.

Mr. HENTOFF: No.

Mr. HENTOFF: Oh, yeah, The Voice--to begin with, The Voice has been politically correct in many of its aspects since before that term was ever used. It's always been--well, I'll give you an example. 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 she always also conjured that. She was an editor there for a time as well as a writer.

But Jules Feiffer once wrote a strip. He was then, as now, a syndicator. Of course, he's not at The Voice anymore. But his strip would come to The Voice first. And the strip showed an Archie Bunker-type sitting in the kitchen--speaking of stereotypes--with a can of beer, saying, `I can't say "kike" anymore. I can't say "fag" anymore. About the only think I can say anymore is "nigger."' There was an uproar at The Voice. Great pressure was put on the editor, David Schneiderman, to not run the strip. It was offensive. It was racist. And nobody apparently read the strip and saw what it was about. And I wrote a column about that.

So the --obviously, the--there have been other very good reporters at The Voice. We've done good muckraking stuff, good political stuff. But the--spirit of the paper, until fairly recently, with a new editor who doesn't go on that route, has been, well, politically correct.

Mr. HENTOFF: Oh, Felker took over The Voice...

Mr. HENTOFF: 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.

Mr. HENTOFF: William Shawn was the editor of The New Yorker and for whom I worked for, God, 27 years; a man I respected enormously because of what he did, --what the magazine was about. Anyway, I got a letter. He took over The Voice and tried to turn it into New York Magazine--very glitzy covers that promised practically nothing in terms of what was inside, very rushed paper anymore. You--not very contemplative, thoughtful or whatever.

So 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?' 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. And I heard that he was about ready to fire me, but two other people on The Voice interceded and, fortunately, he had a very short attention span, so I wasn't fired.

Mr. HENTOFF: The...

Mr. HENTOFF: Did I do...

Mr. HENTOFF: Oh, yeah. I was...

Mr. HENTOFF: Yeah, but I was getting a big fat $100 a week at that time. No, it's being done--I mean, 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.

Mr. HENTOFF: Well, it's perfectly within his rights. It's a private--you know, th--it's not censorship. The First Amendment doesn't come into play because it's a private magazine. What's wrong with it is, it lowers, to say the least, the credibility of the magazine. And if I were writing for it, I would feel diminished because the owner had done such a thing.

Mr. HENTOFF: It means that I was never able--I mean, I really envy, in some respects, some of the people of faith I've known--A.J., for example.

Mr. HENTOFF: He was--he--I don't know what he finally came out believing in, but it was some kind of higher being. But Kierkegaard said it for me a long time ago. He said, `You can't really think yourself into a faith, into a religion. It's something you have to make a leap into faith.' And I've never been able to do that. I wish I could. Then maybe I could believe in an afterlife.

Mr. HENTOFF: Well, we were--I mean, my parents were Orthodox Jews but not very regular Orthodox Jews. I was bar mitzvahed and all that. But God was hardly ever mentioned in my family. Franklin D. Roosevelt was.

Mr. HENTOFF: They liked him a lot.

Mr. HENTOFF: I think at least two of them--and I'm--I better not speak them by name because I'm not sure where they are these days, but at least two of them believe in some kind of higher force. The--another is an atheist and the other is still pondering.

Mr. HENTOFF: Oh, I like him a lot. He--I started a--to know him--when I asked William Shawn at The New Yorker, `Sh--can I do a profile of Cardinal O'Connor?' He said, `All right. Find out what he's like.' So I went to his office, and I heard somebody--and it turned out to be O'Connor--yelling outside, and I've never heard him since raise his voice.

At the time there was a hospital strike in New York and the Catholic hospitals were part of a general consortium, and the head of the consortium had decided that they were finally going to replace some of the striking workers. And I hear O'Connor yelling, `Over my dead body will you replace any of those workers! They have a right to strike.' So I figured, `This is interesting.' Here is a guy who's supposed to be the Genghis Khan of the church, the pro-choice people hate him, and I don't know about his labor background so I figured there must be more to him, and there is. I wrote a book about him.

My favorite story about O'Connor--one of them--is I was in Toronto at a pro-life conference. And I was --I had a session before he was to come on, and I was explaining--I thought very moderately, calmly--that the best way to not have unwanted abortions was to have much more research on contraception. And two very large, 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.' And O'Connor's watching this. I get up again and introduce him, and O'Connor 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.'

Mr. HENTOFF: I guess pretty close. He had Margot and me over for drinks a couple of times. That was something I never could have envisioned back when I was a kid in Boston, that a cardinal and I would be, if not breaking bread, at least breaking Scotch. And I've I call him from time to time and he calls me. And when I think there's something he ought to think about doing, I call him and he usually does it.

Mr. HENTOFF: Well, counting the ones I've co-edited, I guess about 28 or 29.

Mr. HENTOFF: No.

Mr. HENTOFF: No. I--this sounds corny, but I once told a kid when I was in a the library conference, the best--not the best, what I really hope for is that someday 20, 30 years from now, some kid, 12-year-old, 15-year-old, in Des Moines will be going through the stacks, if they have stacks anymore--they probably won't--and find a book of mine and get something from it. But in terms of money, no.

Mr. HENTOFF: Well, it depends on what you mean by decent. I'm--you know, it's comfortable. We live in the village. We have a summer place in Westport, Connecticut. We don't spend a lot on all kinds of things. But I have no complaints.

Mr. HENTOFF: No. Again, I wish she would because--especially now the kind of--I mean, honesty is hardly the word. She writes with a ferocity of clarity that--nobody else around has now.

Mr. HENTOFF: Yeah. And she has some investments and stuff.

Mr. HENTOFF: I read like everybody--like every other writer. I've been reading since I could read, which was about four or five years old. And I'd pick--my father would bring home about six newspapers. We had 10 in Boston at the time. I went to the library as soon as I could walk. So the training came from reading all kinds of people, from fairy tales and later on to--I don't know why--Schweitz's "Life of Christ."

And the book that really, really shaped my politics and has forever is Arthur Koestler's "Darkness at Noon," which is a novel based on terrible fact about what it was like in Russia during Stalin's time when people actually believed that to get to the point where the Proletariat would triumph, anything that was necessary to be done should be done; the means didn't count. And, of course, that's not--that's just not Russia.

But I went to school at a place that also shaped my life, Boston Latin School. Sandra Day O'Connor--once she said that there are--there were no public schools in America until the 18th century, and she overlooked my alma mater because we started--I say we--in 1635. And among the people who went there--and they're on--the walls in the auditorium, the names are: Ralph Waldo Emerson and Cotton Mather, Benjamin Franklin, except he split when he was 10 years old to go to work. But it--Santiana, all that sort of--but the marvelous part of that school was all kinds of kids went.

It was a competitive examination. Poor kids, Brahmans, middle-class kids. The masters, as the teachers were called, didn't give a damn about --how we felt, what was-- things like at home. I mean, this goes against the current grain. All they thought about was: `You're here. You made the exam. You can do the work. And if you can't, we'll throw you out.' And it was a great lesson because I found out, and as the other kids did, that I could do the work.

Mr. HENTOFF: Oh, my father--my mother's always been--well, my mother, when she was younger, worked at Filene's in Boston. And she was chief cashier. And I always wondered why she never went back to some kind of work 'cause that was a very responsible position. My father had always been a traveling salesman--New England, the South, whatever. He was very impressed when he saw "Death of a Salesman," I must say. He recognized himself to some extent.

Mr. HENTOFF: Oh, that's hard to figure.

Mr. HENTOFF: Well, the main jobs would be The New Yorker, The Village Voice, The Washington Post and--I'm thinking of the--stray one...

Mr. HENTOFF: The Reporter when Max Askeli was there, but I got fired from The Reporter. Max Askeli was a very courageous, principled man up to a point. He had left Italy before he was thrown in jail by Mussolini. And he started this very good magazine. In fact, Meg Greenfield, who's now the editorial page editor of The Washington Post, was one of the star reporters there. I was in the back of the book doing music. I once did a--the first piece on Malcolm X that anyone had ever seen in the-- white press.

But 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.' You see, the person who has the strong ownership of free speech is the one who owns the press.

Mr. HENTOFF: Yeah.

Mr. HENTOFF: I don't know. It seems to be the thing to do. I don't like to feel intimidated by where I make a living.

Mr. HENTOFF: I suppose I have. I think it--yeah, I must have. I can't remember, but it'll come to me later.

Mr. HENTOFF: My father was pretty independent. He was--he was arrested once in Nashville when he was on one of his sales trips because he had a black -- guy to lunch. So that took a fair amount of courage at the time. Otherwise, no, I guess not. But I don't...

Mr. HENTOFF: Did I ever...

Mr. HENTOFF: Oh, I thought it was funny. I mean, I'm sor--I was sorry I lost the gig, but, I mean, I felt better about myself that I did it, rather than have--rather than thinking it and not writing it for being afraid of what might happen to me.

Mr. HENTOFF: Yeah.

Mr. HENTOFF: Again, you can see my chronology is terrible. It must have been about seven or eight years ago. It was after he was fired by Newhouse. After New--when Newhouse bought The New Yorker, he said in one of those grand press conferences that `Bill Shawn will stay here as long as he wants to be here.' Well, he wanted to be here until he died, but he wasn't allowed to.

Mr. HENTOFF: I've never met anybody quite like him. He created--and I'm sure it was conscious--an aura about him of quietude. But inside that quietude there was the firmest of wills. He knew exactly what he wanted to do. He--I mean, he didn't, at least in my case and I think most of the others, he didn't edit the writers very strongly, but he knew what he wanted. And if he liked the piece, then he would run it. But he wanted the magazine to be something that was more than just a weekly event. And as a result you could pick up a New Yorker under him, as I mentioned before, a year from then or 10 years or 20 years and there would always be something worth reading in it.

Mr. HENTOFF: Yeah. I've--that I regret. That was stupid and ignorant on my part. I went to a party as a guest of a friend of mine, a lawyer. And he had a client who I didn't know, except--maybe I'm pretending I didn't know, but he was a big investor in The New Yorker. And as I found out later in a book about The New Yorker, this guy was very unhappy about Shawn. He thought Shawn was spending out--spending too much money on writers.

And then I told him--I was complaining the way writers complain. You know, I said, you know, `He pays very well, but a lot of my pieces don't get in,' and that was true of most of the writers there. And then he--but he pays you for them. That's very--that was very nice of him. This guy didn't think it was very nice of him. He figured, `Oh, my God, that's more of my investment gone,' and paying money to writers for not printing them.

So 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.

Mr. HENTOFF: That was--he had been fired. And he had always been in The New Yorker immaculately dressed--quietly, immaculately dressed, very soft-spoken. On the phone I could hardly hear him sometimes. And after he was fired, I was going to the YMHA on the Upper East Side to do a talk on free speech.

Mr. HENTOFF: Young Men's Hebrew Association. YM--yeah. And 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. Lilian Ross was a --veteran writer for The New Yorker. She, in fact, brought me to The New Yorker many years ago. 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.

Mr. HENTOFF: Yeah. There wasn't mu--much said, but I was thinking, perhaps unkindly--not unkindly, but on--inaccurately of Theodore Dreiser's "Carrie," when the main character in "Carrie" has been brought down by Carrie and his--he-- dress is disheveled and all that sort of thing. And that's the last I ever saw of him.

Mr. HENTOFF: 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.

And I was less angry at 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 Vietnarm--nam. And I thought that was utterly disgusting. Fortunately most of the people who were involved in anti-Vietnam activity did not con themselves into being like the violent people they didn't want.

Mr. HENTOFF: Let's see...

Mr. HENTOFF: I went to a lecture of his once, I never met him. I'm trying to -- I know he--he fought in the Spanish Civil War. He was in prison, I think, in Spain and in--and in Russia. He came to the United States; that's when I saw him in the mid-1940s. Then he went to England where he lived and died, but I'm not sure of the dates of his death. He wrote some other very interesting books, but that book--I mean, if I were teaching, I don't care what the course is, I would say you really have to read "Darkness at Noon."

Mr. HENTOFF: Yeah. It's in paperback.

Mr. HENTOFF: I gave me the book. I saw it lying around somewhere. In the library, I guess.

Mr. HENTOFF: Yeah. Sure.

Mr. HENTOFF: Yeah. 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. And--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.

Then they had a lot of clippings, a lot of articles I'd written. And to me the--the funniest one was--I had done a piece for Playboy about J. Edgar Hoover. I had not been very kind to J. Edgar Hoover. And the field agent had written on --it was sent directly to Hoover--that--the director should see this--`And, besides, Hentoff is a lousy writer.' And I thought that went a bit far.

Mr. HENTOFF: I think you can apply under the Freedom of Informa...

Mr. HENTOFF: I went through the Freedom of Information Act.

Mr. HENTOFF: You know, then they re--as they say, they redact it. If they don't want you to see something, it comes out black. Then you can appeal. If you have enough money, you can appeal again. But they showed me a lot of stuff.

Mr. HENTOFF: Let's see, I guess 1980, something like that.

Mr. HENTOFF: Right.

Mr. HENTOFF: Well, I never expected to get to know him as well as I did. I called his chambers once. I'd gotten the go-ahead from Shawn to do a profile of him. I didn't even know if he'd agree because most of the justices do not sit for profiles. And he answered the phone and he said, `Sure, come up.' Gave -a date. And I saw him quite often from time to time.

He--I mean, my two heroes are Brennan and, even more so, a man I didn't able--wasn't able to write about, but--at least then was William O. Douglas because they both really--they lived the Bill of Rights. They believed, you know, as if it were religious faith, that everybody had the right to speak, the right to assemble; all those things that Clinton has a very dim view of.

And he was--the thing that impressed me about Brennan, he'd been on the court a long time; he had really shaped the jurisprudence of our times until the last 10 or--years or so, and yet he had, as the British say, no side, no pretentiousness, very easy guy. He laughed a lot. He could take criticism. Very impressive fellow.

The one thing he did that I never--I understood it, but I didn't like it. There was a case against Ralph Ginsberg. Ralph Ginsberg edited a magazine called Eros. Eros was about --erotic material, both in print and pictures, etc. I wrote a piece for it on Sam Hyakowa and his very useful distinction between the lyrics of the blues--the black blues and popular lyrics. Black...

Mr. HENTOFF: He was a semanticist who later became a rather sleepy United States senator. But he was a good semanticist. And all of a sudden at my door one day, at my office, there appeared a detective from the district attorney's office carrying a gun. And I was to go forthwith to an interview in the DA's office about Eros magazine. I was not hip then to the task--I mean, you know, `Where's your warrant?' and all that sort of stuff.

So there was a real press on to get Eros. And finally, Ginsberg himself was indicted and convicted of pandering. And Brennan, of all people, read the decision from the bench, and Brennan had been the key man on the court to get away from obscenity, let alone pornography, and to say that it also--it's also subjective it oughtn't to be justicable. And as he read the decision, his neck grew redder and redder and he was furious. I mean, he could have hit Ginsberg, I guess, except he wasn't that sort of fellow.

And I asked a clerk, `What is this all about?' And he said, `Oh, well, Justice Brennan has a daughter, and she's of the age where he feels she might have been shaped in some way by this magazine.' So even Brennan at a crucial point--and it didn't last beyond that decision--succumbed to his visceral feelings rather than his liberal--libertarian feelings.

Mr. HENTOFF: Well, I --first of all, I do believe that everybody, including people I abhor, have the right to speak and not be censored.

Mr. HENTOFF: As far as you want. I can--the only exceptions, I would think, is if someone were to threaten somebody--specifically, a person and say, `I'm gonna see you at dawn and I'm gonna knife you.' That's not protected speech.

Mr. HENTOFF: Any words at all. Words are--I mean, there is a great--there was a great scene in New York once when Lenny Bruce, who was a friend of mine, was on trial for his words. And Richard Cue, the assistant district attorney, was making a name for himself trying to blast all of the witnesses for the defense. And he got Dorothy Kilgallen, who was a very famous then syndicated columnist, a devout Catholic, a conservative and a great admirer of Lenny Bruce. And he con--he strung together, Cue did, all of the words in Lenny's monologues that could be considered terribly offensive, and he hit her with them. It was a barrage. `What do you think then, Ms. Kilgallen?' `Well,' she said, `they're words. They're words. That's all. Words.' That's the way I feel.

Mr. HENTOFF: I did, indeed. I had differed with the ACLU in the past, as most of the people in the ACLU do from time to time. But I had a lot of respect for much of what they're doing, and I still do. I still call the affiliates from time to time to get stories. But they did one thing that was beyond the possibility of my staying.

The Centers for Disease Control, since 1988, had been testing infants at birth for various diseases--sickle-cell anemia, syphilis, whatever, and HIV that leads to AIDS. HIV was not allowed to be the results of that test was not told to the parents or the physician--the attending physician because of political reasons. The gay groups and the feminist groups didn't want that sort of violation of privacy to go on. And the ACLU went along with that.

And, finally, a very brave assemblywoman in New York, who was pro-choice, Nettie Mayersohn, finally got a bill through that made this testing mandatory so that people--for example, if a woman took her child home and the woman was infected and didn't know it, but the child was not, the child--the woman would breast-feed the child and the child would die. And I kept saying to the people I knew in the ACLU, `How can you allow people to die for the sake of an utterly rigid, wrongheaded principle?' And they wouldn't budge, so I left.

Mr. HENTOFF: Oh, they wouldn't try to get me back. Like Cardinal O'Connor, I think they're delighted I'm not there. I'm too much trouble.

Mr. HENTOFF: Yeah.

Mr. HENTOFF: Stokely was a very bright young man who was active in the Southern civil rights movement, took over SNCC and became what I call a tribalist. He is all for blacks and is a--become a terrible anti-Semite and I think is one of those people who has done a lot of harm not only -- to integration, but to the whole sense of possible communality between whites and blacks.

Mr. HENTOFF: Not well. Too well. I didn't know him, hardly.

Mr. HENTOFF: Oh, Murray Kempton was, you know, perhaps the most singular journalist of our time. He was another person who wrote beautifully with great understanding of jazz, as well as politics, as well as what it was like to live.

Mr. HENTOFF: Well, one of the things he told me, the way Izzy Stone did, was, `Don't go to press conferences 'cause it's a PR thing to begin with. Anything you want to know, they're not gonna tell you.' That's why they have a press conference is not to tell you things. And also Izzy then said, `Go see some middle-level bureaucrat whom nobody ever asks about--asks to see, and then you'll find out things,' which was true. But I liked Murray 'cause of his personality. He --he was quirky and continually interesting.

Mr. HENTOFF: Adlai Stevenson--you know, I--when he was running for president, I thought he was going to be the hope of our time. But then when he became part of the Johnson administration and was UN ambassador, --our ambassador to the UN--and lied. He lied again and again on the basis of policy that was set for Washington. And a bunch of us went to see him because we wanted--we were trying to get some people of stature to come out against the Vietnam War. And he was marvelously graceful, charming and dishonest. So I didn't like him.

Mr. HENTOFF: I hardly knew him. I interviewed him once. I--the thing about King that--that I especially admire--I mean, obviously what he did in the South. But when he decided to expand his influence to go against the Vietnam War, and this went against the advice of Roy Wilkins and other black leaders and naturally a lot of white politicians, he said, `No. That's--that's what I have to do. I mean, that's the thing we have to talk about.'

Mr. HENTOFF: Dizzy was a very warm, brilliant trumpet player, general wise man. I mean, --I don't mean that in a derogatory sense. It sounds funny, but the thing I most remember about Dizzy--I hadn't seen him for several years, and I went to a rehearsal of his at Lincoln Center. And as he came down the hall he was talking to somebody, and then he saw me and he gave me a big embrace. And he said to the guy, `It's like seeing an old broad of yours.' I thought, `Gee.'

Mr. HENTOFF: Oh, Duke was--I was--I-- got to know him quite well, but I was almost always in awe of him, first because he was the most original composer this country's ever had; I think Charles Ives is a close second. But there was--the-- presence of the man, the-- grace, the steel behind the grace--he was an extraordinary person.

Mr. HENTOFF: Not so it matters to me. And they're both pre-eminent anti-Semites. Father Coughlin perhaps had a wider range of hatred and bitterness. I mean, he--although now that I think of it, when--I remember when I was a kid I listened to Coughlin, and Coughlin would say that the Jews are the international bankers who take away the widows' might. At the same time, the Jews run the Politburo in Moscow, which made us very busy. And Farrakhan says pretty much the same thing: `The Jews run the Federal Reserve Board. The Jews get us into wars. The'--I mean, the fact that Farrakhan was named by Time magazine last year as one of the 25 most influential Americans I found chilling.

Mr. HENTOFF: Yeah. Play the clarinet well so I could be in Duke Ellington's band, but that's now impossible. And the other thing I miss is teaching. I did teach for awhile and I love teaching 'cause that's the fun of getting interplay of ideas, not just talking to your typewriter.

Mr. HENTOFF: Well, I'm working on one now. It's called "Living the Bill of Rights," and it's about people--well, it starts with Brennan and Douglas as people who not only live the Bill of Rights, but try to shape the reason for that. But then--the--these are people who--there's a valedictorian in a high school in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, a born-again Christian, who got into a lot of trouble because she wouldn't let her principal--this is a public high school--censor or see her valedictorian speech. She said, `No. That's First Amendment right. I'm gonna do that.' And the whole school closed against her almost physically.

Then 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. He became a pariah, until he stopped his practice and went around the state talking to black church groups and other black groups explaining why he had done what he had done. To me, he's a hero.

Mr. HENTOFF: That was taken at the studio of a photographer in Chelsea.

Mr. HENTOFF: Oh, about--let's see, this year, I think. Yeah, earlier this year.

Mr. HENTOFF: Thank you.