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Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
As a writer, your primary specialty has been the McCarthy era. Was the government more intrusive then, or now?
During the McCarthy time there was a de facto collaboration between private industry and government to disqualify people from employment because of past political activities. If you were named as being a member of the Communist Party, and if you did not confess your own past or present party membership to a congressional committee and name others, then you were disqualified for employment. That kind of thing doesn't exist now, and I don't think it could happen in that way again. On the other hand, 50 years ago it was unthinkable that we'd ever be without some of the rights that we've lost now. Back then, you had the right to counsel if you were indicted, and you had the right not to be preventively detained. Now they can pick you up, haul you off to Guantánamo, and if the president finds that you are a threat to national security, no one will even know you're there. Today's terrorists are yesterday's communists.
Your colleague Peter Beinart at the New Republic also makes the comparison between communists and terrorists, but he goes on to argue that just as the left was too soft on communists then, so they're ignoring the terrorist threat now, and losing the political center in the process.
I disagree with him about then, and it depends what he means about now. Right now, the history profession is engaged in an argument about the Venona Decrypts and other materials we've gotten from the Soviet archives about the nature of the so-called threat. My own belief is that there was no American communist threat of the dimension that required such a massive encroachment on civil liberties. Sure, there were American spies for the Russians, just as I assume we had spies over there. Although the Communist Party never had more than 75 or 80,000 members at one time, a million Americans passed through it, and I'd say 99 percent had nothing to do with that.
They joined the party because they thought it was the best way to fight racism, to fight the Depression, to fight on behalf of the poor in this country. Most became disillusioned, and they left. Of those that were prosecuted as spies, such as the Rosenbergs, the severity of the penalties visited upon them were disproportionate to the nature of their actual crimes. My view on terrorism is that, yes, it is a threat but it's not, as Bush put it, us vs. them. It's the world community, and you need a world organization -- the United Nations -- to deal with a problem of these dimensions. You pay your dues and help transform it into the kind of responsible organization that you want it to be, instead of mocking it, attacking it, and belittling its agencies as we did during the search for the weapons of mass destruction. That's the wrong way to fight terrorism.
You quote one of the Nation's past editors, Carey McWilliams, saying that "it is always a question of finding that reader for whom a publication like the Nation is a lantern in the dark," suggesting that publications with smaller circulations form a stronger connection with the people who do find them.
Right, once you find that reader, you'll have a lifetime subscriber.
Back in McWilliams' day, readers looking for a certain niche of opinion had to turn to small magazines. Now they have blogs. Do blogs threaten the continuing relevance of journals of opinion?
My children and younger people say I don't get blogs. Well, here's what I do get. I do get the point about interconnectivity and the possibility of an exchange that you could never have before. That's very important. Two, people say blogs are going to replace magazines. My view was, and still is, that the relationship of the Internet to print is not the relationship of silent movies to talking movies, which put the silent movies out of business, but more like the paperback to the hardcover book. It extends the audience for the product, rather than replacing it.
I really liked the section of the book where you attend the Owners, Presidents and Managers program at Harvard Business School. Your fellow managers approached the Nation as a case study and recommend that you "liquidate" the magazine's "goodwill," and essentially reap a financial harvest from the history of your brand. Do you think it would be possible to start a publication like the Nation today, from scratch, without that accumulated tradition?
Shortly after I became publisher, I gave an interview and announced that I wanted the magazine to become self-sustaining. The interviewer asked me how I was going to do that, as the Nation has lost money for 135 years. I answered that people have invested millions of dollars in the Nation over that time, and what I'm going to do is cash in on their investment.
I was joking at the time, but because of the Internet that's exactly what's happened. Last year, 28,000 people subscribed to the magazine who found us through the Web site. The year before, there were half as many, and the year before that it was a quarter. We have what Harvard Business School calls a brand name, a magazine that was founded by abolitionists 135 years ago and has since fought against colonialism, against imperialism and on behalf of civil rights and liberties for all of that time.
I think you could start a magazine of our sort today, but it would cost you a minimum of $25 million for a weekly. (Compare that to $125,000, which is what the proprietor charged for the magazine when I arrived.) Even if you spent the $25 million, it wouldn't have the same historic resonance that this magazine has.
