New York in the '50s (41 page)

After striving so hard to be a “big dog” (we literally called it that) in high school and succeeding, when I failed to achieve the same high status at Northwestern, I suddenly knew what it felt like to be Out. I realized that people who were Out (out of jobs, out of the right fraternities or country clubs) might be good guys just like me, and that their low circumstance, whatever it happened to be,
might not be their own fault!

I argued this with my old Boy Scout friend Johnny when he came to New York my last semester at Columbia, while I lived in my wondrous basement apartment on West 77th Street and cooked up frozen tuna pot pies (still icy in the center but ameliorated by Chianti). I had taken history courses that dealt with the Depression, I was taking C. Wright Mills's seminar in liberalism, and I had come to see, for the first time in my life, that sometimes world, national, and local economics determined the circumstances of individuals, whose futures were often beyond their own control. This was a revelation!
Growing up in Indiana, we were so imbued with rugged self-reliance that we believed every unfortunate turn of events was the fault of the individual. Now, as I explained to Johnny, you can see, can't you, that in the Depression, when millions of people were out of work, it wasn't their fault.

No, he didn't see that at all.

“I mean, it wasn't that millions of Americans in the course of a few weeks suddenly just got lazy, was it?” I asked.

“Yes,” Johnny said, “that must have been it.”

There was no other explanation he could accept. In light of my new belief that there were forces beyond the control of these individuals that forced them out of work and onto bread lines, I was—in Johnny's terms—a left winger and a liberal, if not a pinko or a Red.

At Columbia I heard, for the first time, real left wingers spoken of with respect and I listened to their stirring words and was moved by them. I remember the force of the eloquence of Eugene V. Debs, the declaration of his faith, which I read in history class and then in Dos Passos's
U.S.A.
: “While there is a lower class I am in it, while there is a criminal element I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”

Those words had all the more power for me because they were not uttered by Karl Marx, V. I. Lenin, or any such foreign thinker or enemy of my country, but by one of its own, one who, in the words Dick Stout had used to describe Elmer Davis, was a “son of Indiana.” Eugene V. Debs was a guy from Terre Haute!

But was he, in the lingo of McCarthy and Jenner and the Cold Warriors of the fifties, un-American?

Such questions filled the pages of the
Indianapolis News
in the late spring and summer of 1954, when the biggest headlines of all, and the biggest TV spectacle, were the Army-McCarthy hearings. I had watched them at the West End near Columbia, and I continued to watch them back home in Indiana in my parents' den, just off the breezeway. By the time they were over, so was McCarthy's power: a Gallup poll rated McCarthy's popularity at only 34 percent, with 45 percent expressing disapproval. The Senate's condemnation (not “censure”) of McCarthy came that December.

Millions of Americans watched the televised hearings, and everyone
who watched has memories of them and their impact. “I recall watching the Army-McCarthy hearings,” Marion Magid says, “and my father was terrified. He was an anti-Stalinist, very much aware—and rightfully so—of the Communist Party as a threat, but he also hated McCarthy. He wanted America to vindicate itself, and when Joe Welch stood up and did that, when Welch finally embarrassed McCarthy and stood up to him, my father saw it as proof that Golden America had triumphed again.”

Richard Lingeman, from Crawfordsville, Indiana, says, “I went into the Counter-intelligence Corps of the Army in 1954, when the Army-McCarthy hearings were on TV. I went to Washington, and everyone was arguing about McCarthy. A friend and I had enlisted together, and my friend's father was considered a security risk, so my friend was bumped out of the CIC—it had a chilling effect.

“There was a guy in my college class whose parents were kicked out of teaching jobs, a sociology professor who got in trouble because of McCarthy. It kept filtering in—but there I was in the CIC, scared that I'd be dropped out, and we were investigating people who needed security clearance. I was against McCarthy, but like many people in the fifties, I felt sort of politically schizophrenic. Luckily, when I was sent to Japan, my field was ultra-right-wing nationalists who wanted to bring back the emperor.”

Sometimes fear of the Red menace became so ludicrous it brought a few laughs. Calvin Trillin was stationed on Governors Island in New York when he was in the Army. “I wrote for the base newspaper,” he recalls. “The editor of the paper was Rudy Wurlitzer [a former Columbia student and future novelist and screenwriter], and when he wrote an editorial supporting National Library Week, they took his security clearance away. After that, we called him Red Rudy.”

Norman Mailer thinks the McCarthy period “increased the inner tension with which I lived, but it didn't have a hell of a lot of effect on my work. When
The Deer Park
came out [1955], one reviewer did a snide review in
Time
, and said I must be suffering from ‘subpoena envy'—he must have been the hero of the office for the next week.”

According to the journalist and editor Walter Goodman, “A very
small number of people were really hurt by McCarthy. You had to be in Hollywood or TV, though some of the academics were also hurt. I don't mean to downplay it—for those who really were injured by it, it must have been awful. But I was working at the CIA when McCarthy was riding high, and no one I knew there liked him. I covered the McCarthy hearings for
The New Republic
, and we used to knock him all the time, but we weren't concerned or fearful. I feel there's been a rewriting of history from people like Lillian Hellman, that the liberals took a dive during the McCarthy period, and it's not true. They were split on how to deal with him, but plenty of criticism came from the liberals, sharp stuff.”

The split over how to deal with McCarthy left many deep divisions, and one of the deepest and most basic was over the issue of “naming names.” Most of the people called before the McCarthy committee were willing to tell about their own past political histories but didn't want to give names of friends from the past who might also have belonged to or attended meetings of Communist or Communist front organizations.

One of the leading liberals who vigorously opposed McCarthy and yet did name names was our former
Spectator
editor James Wechsler. McCarthy demanded that Wechsler give his committee a list of people he remembered from his youth who had been in the Communist Party or the Young Communist League. Wechsler complied, and one of the names he gave was that of his own colleague at the
Post
, Murray Kempton.

I didn't know at the time that Wechsler had given Kempton's name to the committee. I simply wasn't following the hearings that closely, but would tune in and out as exams and studies permitted. Though I've known Kempton since 1955, I never heard him mention this. When I ask him about it now, he simply explains Wechsler's point of view: “When Jimmy gave names to the McCarthy committee, he felt he would discredit the
Post
if he didn't cooperate.”

When I once criticized Wechsler over something I'd read in the
Post
(I never met the man, so it probably was criticism of what I considered the clichéd nature of the
Post
's liberal editorials, like their use of the phrase “he happens to be a Negro”), Murray defended him. He made that kind of squint he has that expresses discomfort
and disagreement, and said, “Jimmy is a man who's been badly served.” There was no suggestion that Jimmy had badly served anyone else.

Kempton had told the McCarthy committee's chief counsel that if called to testify, he would not give names. Murray says, “When Roy Cohn said he might subpoena me, I told him, ‘I'm not giving you any names.' I said, ‘I could give you a lot of high-minded reasons for it, but I'll give you a low-minded reason—I can't afford it commercially.'”

Murray is disturbed that this was misinterpreted by a writer who thought that when he said he couldn't afford it commercially, he meant he just didn't want to offend his liberal friends. “I wasn't just talking about liberals,” Murray explains. “I wouldn't give names because Bill Buckley would have had no respect for me. Everyone whose opinion I value would have had no more use for me. So at any rate, Cohn never called me.”

I had always assumed that Murray wasn't called before the McCarthy committee because there wasn't anything to expose about him, since he spoke and wrote freely about his past, including having been a member of the Young Communist League when he was a student at Johns Hopkins.

“I dined out on having been in the Young Communist League.” Murray says. “But aside from that, my curse and blessing is I am incapable of being taken seriously.”

I don't believe it. I spent too many evenings on West 92nd Street with my friends, fresh out of college, reading and reciting passages from
Part of Our Time
or poring over his columns in the
Post
. I continue to look for them in
Newsday
whenever I take the shuttle down from Boston, and sometimes search them out when they're reprinted in
The New York Review of Books
.

Besides, Murray's use of “serious,” like that of most of his words and ideas, has many nuances. I'm reminded of this when he speaks of his good friend William F. Buckley, Jr. “I've never thought of Bill as a serious man, which is a sort of compliment. There's a wonderful letter Whittaker Chambers wrote to Bill, and in a review of their correspondence someone said something like, ‘In Buckley, Chambers found what he was looking for all his life—the friend
who didn't understand.' Wechsler was ‘serious,' and it was his undoing.”

The friendship of Kempton and Buckley is now legendary, and when it began in the fifties it was almost a scandal, the ultimate definition of “politically incorrect” for its era. If Kempton was, as Buckley described him in a column, the “pinup boy of the bohemian left” in New York at the time, Buckley played much the same role for the conservative right. Joan Didion says that when she was writing for Buckley's
National Review
, she thought of him not so much as an editor (she worked on her pieces with Frank Meyer, the back-of-the book editor) but as “a very glamorous presence.”

Buckley and Kempton, the two bright stars from opposite ends of the political firmament, both armed with literary grace, acerbic wit, and political acumen, were supposed to be opponents, if not downright enemies, like medieval knights crossing lances in furious battle on behalf of their respective camps. How shocking and confusing it was to see them prance forward, smile, do a bit of gentlemanly tilting, and ride off in absorbing conversation, a dialogue that continues today.

Back at the White Horse Tavern with some of my left-wing liberal friends, I was called upon (or seized by the lapels of my corduroy jacket) to defend Murray for being a friend of Buckley's. Raging arguments over ethics, politics, responsibility, credibility, and other issues personal and political foamed over the pints of arf 'n' arf in the great debate. Should they be friends? How could they be friends? How
dare
they be friends?

Similar internecine wars were waged, I am sure, over sherry in the inner sanctums of the Yale Club and the New York Yacht Club, wherever supporters of Buckley tried to defend his friendship with Kempton of the high-liberal
New York Post
, his pal the former Red who left the Communist cause but didn't turn right, refusing to follow the course of so many from the thirties—Frank Meyer, James Burnham, Whittaker Chambers, John Dos Passos—who found a conservative home at
National Review
in the fifties.

So how did this ideologically surprising friendship come about?

Murray Kempton: “I met Bill Buckley when I did a radio program with him about McCarthy. Buckley's different from most conservatives
—the ex-Communists on the far right who feel guilty, desperate for the good opinion of their fellow conservatives. Bill's to the manor born, and he has no political past he feels guilty about.

“The important thing about Buckley is he's incredibly decent. He's the only man I'd call for a loan, long distance, and be sure I'd get it. There was a young woman who wanted to be married in church, but she couldn't get anyone to stand up with her, and she asked Bill if he'd do her a favor. He said ‘Anything,' and went to the church with her. This generosity is automatic with him, you could see that a mile off, so I always liked him.”

Bill Buckley: “Murray covered right-wing activities, like protests against Khrushchev coming to America. I thought of him as the guy who walked around with a steno pad and a pipe. He invited me to Princeton, and Pat and I went for dinner there with his family one night. When I ran for mayor, Murray was there two or three days a week, doing pieces on my campaign.”

Buckley says friendships between figures of the left and right in New York were difficult, if not impossible, during the McCarthy period, and though he met Kempton at the end of that era, Murray was a rare exception to that, or almost any other, rule: “Murray's a bird of paradise. I don't know anyone who doesn't like him. But don't tell him that—he wouldn't like it. He's always defending the underdog. I remember him saying once, ‘God help me, but I'm defending Roy Cohn. He always helped anyone who was down.' Nixon always liked Murray.”

Despite that exception, however, Buckley feels that “those kinds of friendships, between people on the left and people on the right, were only possible post-McCarthy. Dwight Macdonald and I were friends—I admired his journalism—but after my book on McCarthy came out [
McCarthy and His Enemies
, written with L. Brent Bozell], Macdonald said, ‘Anyone who can tolerate that guy, I can't tolerate.' I asked Dwight to help me with the title of the book, and he said, ‘Why should I give a title to a terrible book?' He took out his fury by writing a review for
Commentary
on
National Review
's first issue, and he said I had no sense of humor, I lacked intelligence.