Politics: Observations & Arguments, 1966-2003 - Rilegato

Introduction

The Hertzberg Effect
By David Remnick

Hendrik Hertzberg, in his present incarnation, is the political voice of The New Yorker. That pleases me, because, in my opinion, Hertzberg is the most humane and urbane commentator on American public life since Murray Kempton.

I first began reading Hendrik Hertzberg-Rick, to his colleagues and his improbably large circle of friends-when he and Michael Kinsley took tag-team turns editing The New Republic in the nineteen-eighties. National Review and Human Events may have held sway in the Oval Office, but elsewhere in town (on Capitol Hill, in the office suites of cause lobbyists and consultants, in newsrooms and think tanks, even in odd corners of Reagan's White House) no political publication was more eagerly read or more excitedly discussed than The New Republic. The relatively small liberal weekly (its circulation was around eighty thousand) had become an exhilarating cacophony of fractious, even warring, voices of different tones and tempers. In TNR's order of battle, Hertzberg and Kinsley, despite contrasting sensibilities, generally found themselves on the same side. Kinsley was, and remains, a master at lancing an inflated reputation or a fatuous argument. His prose is spare, logical, acerbic. Hertzberg's is a warmer, rounder, more confiding voice, though no less funny and often no less cutting. I had been reading the magazine ever since I arrived in Washington in 1982, but I remember well the first time one of Rick's pieces had on me what I'd later identify as the Hertzberg effect-a twinned zing of provocation and pleasure. The year was 1985, and William Bennett was the Reagan administration's secretary of education and grand inquisitor. (This was long before his Elmer Gantry-Fyodor Dostoevsky moment, when the ever-accusing moralist was forced to reveal he had gambled away millions in family milk money in the gambling dens of Las Vegas and Atlantic City.) In a tone of highest dudgeon, Bennett had complained that the people who really ruled the country-the liberals, the judges, the whatever-had consistently displayed what he called "an aversion to religion" and a disdain for the "Judeo-Christian" values that made America great. Hertzberg, a determined secularist born to an unbelieving Jewish father and a Quaker mother, took unforgettable umbrage:

As a Judeo-Christian who has an aversion to religion, and who is an American as good as or better than any mousse-haired, Bible-touting, apartheid-promoting evangelist on any UHF television station you can name, I must protest.

Where is it written that if you don't like religion you are somehow disqualified from being a legitimate American? What was Mark Twain, a Russian? When did it become un-American to have opinions about the origin and meaning of the universe that come from sources other than the body of dogma of organizations approved by the federal government as certifiably Judeo-Christian? If it is American to believe that God ordered Tribe X to abjure pork, or that he caused Leader Y to be born to a virgin, why is it suddenly un-American to doubt that the prime mover of this unimaginably vast universe of quintillions of solar systems would be likely to be obsessed with questions involving the dietary and biosexual behavior of a few thousand bipeds inhabiting a small part of a speck of dust orbiting a third-rate star in an obscure spiral arm of one of millions of more or less identical galaxies?

Two decades later, I still don't know what to admire most about that passage-its swingy fearlessness, its sly patriotism, or the sheer syntactical gymnastics of its final flourish. The writing is so happy-making it almost reconciles one to the comic, cosmic smallness of our species and the bleakness of its fate.

Some people are changelings, creating themselves as if in a universe of their own making; others create themselves from what is around. Hertzberg is of the latter kind. There is no doubting the particularity of his voice as a writer, but he comes from a tradition that begins with his parents and their political atmosphere and devotion. His father, Sidney Hertzberg, a son of immigrant garment workers, was a teen-age street-corner speaker for the Bronx Socialist Party who grew up to be an itinerant activist-journalist and a member of New York's small and beleaguered but ultimately influential anti-Stalinist intellectual left. Besides agitating for causes as varied as independence for India, justice for southern sharecroppers, and the political campaigns of Norman Thomas and Hubert Humphrey, Sidney kept the family going with a seemingly endless stream of jobs as a writer and editor at various publications, both mainstream (the Times, Fortune) and marginal (Common Sense, the early Commentary). Rick's mother, Hazel Whitman, was the product of a family far more proper and genteel than one might imagine from the reputation of her famous great-great-uncle, Walt. She rebelled, becoming national chairman of the Young People's Socialist League; eventually she became a schoolteacher and then a professor of history at Teachers College, Columbia. When Rick was in first grade, Sidney and Hazel packed up and moved him and his younger sister Katrina out of the city and across the Hudson to Monsey, a sylvan town in Rockland County which is now populated mainly by Orthodox and Hasidic Jews but was then a rural retreat for artistic and intellectual types looking for some quiet and lower real-estate prices. By 1952, when Rick was nine, he was handing out Adlai Stevenson buttons door-to-door. At Suffern High School, he organized a slate of candidates for student council offices. They campaigned against "school spirit," made fun of football, and called themselves the Liberal Party. Not for the last time, the Liberal Party lost.

At Harvard, Hertzberg was managing editor of the student daily, the Crimson. Late one morning, while he was sleeping off an all-nighter at the paper, he got a telephone call.

"Hello, this is William Shawn."

"Yes," came the answer, "and this is Marie of Romania." Hertzberg hung up, sure that his caller had not been the legendary "Mr." Shawn, editor of The New Yorker, but rather a classmate aping the editor's famously whispery tone.

The phone rang again.

"No, this really is William Shawn," the small voice insisted.

This time, Hertzberg was more attentive. It would turn out that Lillian Ross had seen him on a television documentary about "concerned youth" called "The Shook-Up Generation," and he had been not only appropriately shook-up but eloquent about it as well. Shawn, therefore, was inviting him to write for his magazine. As it happened, Hertzberg was in the same class, 1965, as Shawn's son Wallace, and so, too, were Jonathan Schell, Jacob Brackman, George W.S. Trow, and Daniel Chasan, all of whom eventually received similarly welcoming calls from Shawn. "My whole career has been so marked by advantages gained from Harvard's old-boy network," Hertzberg confessed in 2002, in an interview with Craig Lambert for the university's alumni magazine, "that only in the last couple of years have I been getting over the debilitating sense of not deserving anything."

Hertzberg did not take the New Yorker job, not right away. First he was briefly the editorial director for the National Student Association, then reported for Newsweek out of their San Francisco bureau, and, most consumingly, had to deal with Vietnam. In 1966, he enlisted in the Navy, which began a personal drama that he has described with minimal self-dramatics and maximum self-deprecation. The long and short of it, he wrote in 1985, was that he "managed to have it both ways: veteran (sort of), and resister (in a way)." For the full essay, "Why the War was Wrong," written on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the fall of Saigon, see page TK of the book you are holding.

Mustered out of the Navy in 1969, Hertzberg finally went to The New Yorker, where he worked for seven years. It was, despite the times, his least political period as a writer. He did dozens of reporting pieces a year, mostly for the "Talk of the Town" section. He covered antiwar demonstrations and political rallies, but more often he wrote about things like rock concerts, trade shows, countercultural antics, minor-league baseball, local eccentrics, Monty Python's Flying Circus, and movie people-and he grew restless. At the end of 1976, when the call came from James Fallows to join the speechwriting staff of President-elect Jimmy Carter, Hertzberg jumped at the chance.

Hertzberg's four White House years are not represented in this book, unless you count the incisive character assessment of his flawed and saintly boss he wrote fifteen years later. Of course, he was writing like mad during those years, but the results have already been collected-by the United States Government Printing Office. Of particular note, for those who care to dig out the nine musty volumes of "Public Papers of the Presidents: Jimmy Carter" from some particularly well-stocked library, are the addresses to the Indian parliament (January 2, 1978), to the Egyptian parliament (March 10, 1979) and the Israeli Knesset (March 12, 1979), at the opening of the John F. Kennedy Library (October 20, 1979), and to the American people on "Energy and National Goals" (the so-called "malaise speech," July 20, 1979). And, of course, the Farewell Address (January 14, 1981). These speeches, of course, are not exactly "by" Hertzberg. Though his contributions to them were large, Presidential speeches involve an authorial cast of thousands. Still, it's not hard to tell which bits are not Hertzberg's. (He has a framed copy of the Farewell Address in his study at home, inscribed as follows: "Rick-Not bad for a 10th draft-Maybe we should have been more careful on earlier speeches & saved this one 4 more years-Jimmy Carter".)

The Reagan tide washed Carter out of the White House, and Hertzberg landed up The New Republic at the invitation of another Harva...