"The Knee Jerk Review of Books"

Louis Proyect, Marxmail

In the winter of 1962-63, during a strike of the NY Times, Robert Silvers and a few close friends decided to launch the New York Review of Books, which is considered the premier intellectual print journal outside of academia.

When I first joined the SWP in 1967, I was a regular reader of the New York Review. Once when I was sitting at party headquarters thumbing through its pages, an old-timer named Harry Ring raised an eyebrow and said, "Oh, you're reading the social democratic press." Of course, I practically took the magazine out and burned it after hearing that. As I began shamefacedly apologizing for reading it, Harry reassured me that if he had the time, he'd read it too since it is important to keep track of the social democracy. These words were hardly reassuring. Did I have so much time on my hands because I was one of those half-digested petty-bourgeois elements that James P. Cannon railed against during the Shachtman-Burnham fight?This is not to say that the New York Review of 1967 was something like the rancid Dissent magazine of today. It regularly featured Noam Chomsky, Gore Vidal and even ran a famous article by Andrew Kopkind backing Chairman Mao's dictum that "morality, like politics, flows from the barrel of a gun." This was accompanied by do-it-yourself diagram of a Molotov cocktail on its cover.

Like nearly everything else that was going on in the 1980s and 90s, the NY Review of Books began a steady shift to the right. To a large extent, this was a function of the growing commercial success of the magazine. It also reflected a general malaise of New Yorkers that something was deeply wrong with their beloved city, which was under siege from homeless beggars, crack-inspired violence and other threats to a perfect urban tableau lifted from the latest Woody Allen movie.

So instead of printing articles on the need for armed struggle, they ran countless articles by Felix Rohatyn, the investment banker/philosopher who was the George Soros of his day. Anxiously warning his upscale readers about the crisis of the system, his recommendations included the need for a more enlightened management in politics and a willingness on the part of the masses to accept austerity. During this period, Rohatyn was a frequent guest at a salon run by Robert Silvers and his literary and academic pals.

Around this time, novelist William Styron said, "I don't regard it any longer as a journal with a specific point of view." John Leonard, editor of The New York Times Book Review during the early 1970s and a respectable liberal, said, "I don't think anyone would describe it as left-wing politically." Citing The New York Review's preference for such contributors as Felix Rohatyn on economic issues and Stanley Hoffman on foreign policy topics, Leonard commented, "It's a lot closer to Commentary than it is to The Nation." (The Washington Post, October 27, 1988)

The magazine became just the place for intellectuals to write an open letter about the treatment of some writer in a Communist dungeon, but not the sort of place to read a truly trenchant analysis of what was wrong with American capitalism. It was also a kind of command center for the wars in the Balkans with Tim Judah writing a flood of articles defending plucky Bosnian Muslims against murdering Serb hordes.

Considering this background, I was somewhat startled (but not too much so) to discover the magazine championed in the latest Nation by a chap named Scott Sherman. Titled "The Rebirth of the NYRB" (Sherman), it advises the reader that the magazine is once again "a powerful and combative actor on the political scene." Why? It seems that it published the resignation letter of Brady Kiesling, a career US diplomat, which stated among other things that: "Our fervent pursuit of war with Iraq is driving us to squander the international legitimacy that has been America's most potent weapon of both offense and defense since the days of Woodrow Wilson.... Our current course will bring instability and danger, not security."

I don't know how to quite break it to comrade Sherman, but at this stage of the game just about everybody in the USA except Bush, Rush Limbaugh and Donald Rumsfeld are beginning to feel exactly the same way. This morning, the 80 year old publisher of USA Today, a bland periodical that defends US interests nearly blindly, called for immediate withdrawal from Iraq. As Willy Loman said just before his suicide, "The woods are burning."

Sherman is cheered by Bard professor Ian Buruma's scathing review of Paul Berman's Terror and Liberalism, a liberal call for war on Wahhabism. Perhaps Sherman did not grasp that Buruma might have seen Berman as competition in a field that he was carving out for himself. Buruma's own The Origins of Occidentalism makes practically the same arguments as Berman's, although ostensibly with less pomposity. I suppose anything is an improvement over the wretched Paul Berman, but hardly worth crowing about in the Nation magazine.

In trying to explain the New York Review's alleged shift to the left, Sherman calls upon Mark Danner, another Bard College public intellectual and frequent contributor to the magazine after graduating from Harvard in the early 1980s. According to Sherman, Danner "has recently produced some searching essays in the Review about Iraq".

Just like "plastic" was a key word in "The Graduate", Danner has a one word explanation for the New York Review's return to the barricades: "Vietnam." Danner is quoted as saying that, "If you look back over the Review's history, you'll find that periods of crisis bring out the best editorial instincts of the leadership of The New York Review. It certainly happened with Vietnam and Iran/contra. It gets the juices flowing."

Characteristically, what Sherman fails to see is that despite all the "searching" in Danner's articles, he remains a supporter of the war as should be clear from a recent New York Review article:

"President Bush's audacious project in Iraq was always going to be difficult, perhaps impossible, but without political steadfastness and resilience, it had no chance to succeed. This autumn in Baghdad, a ruthless insurgency, growing but still in its infancy, has managed to make the President retreat from his project, and has worked, with growing success, to divide Iraqis from the Americans who claim to govern them. These insurgents cannot win, but by seizing on Washington's mistakes and working relentlessly to widen the fault lines in occupied Iraq, they threaten to prevent what President Bush sent the US military to achieve: a stable, democratic, and peaceful Iraq, at the heart of a stable and democratic Middle East."

I supposed beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but this just strikes me as apologetics for the same old shit.