The Los Angeles Times provides a great capsule bio of the now late Victor Navasky. As editor and later publisher of The Nation, Navasky was not perfect nor even the greatest editor, but definitely in the top three or four. Navasky was a genial person and very much an open book. But, the strange thing for me is his (and Eric Alterman's) strong dislike of Freda Kirchwhey, The Nation's first female editor (Katrina vanden Heuvel would be the second) during the tumultuous left period of the 1930s through mid 1950s. Freda did end badly, wanting to sue various people for libel, but I tended to agree with Alexander Cockburn that Freda was no Stalinist, and penned one of the greatest short editorials of the 20th Century, Red Totalitarianism in May 1939. She allowed Stalinists some space in The Nation pages, to be sure, but she was very clear where the disagreement was, and where the absurdities and murder were in the Stalin era of the Soviet Union--something the late Susan Sontag seemed to have missed in her admittedly off-handed praise of Readers' Digest while dissing The Nation.
For me, I adored Navasky's book, Kennedy Justice, about a 35 year old RFK taking over the Justice Department, and learning from his staff as much as leading it through the heart of the African-American Civil Rights era. His book on the blacklist suffered from his ironically liberal's view of the Red Scare, and one recalls with some wincing, after Allen Weinstein's book was released, his attempt to deny Alger Hiss was a Communist Party member or affiliate, instead of hitting the main question head on: Was Hiss really a spy for the Soviet Union any more than Allen or John Foster Dulles were in the latter brothers' footsie relationships with various and leading Nazis? Navasky was unable to properly articulate how American foreign policy, within the DC power corridors, is really about leverage, maneuvering, and power relations--and how American domestic politics drives American foreign policy politics in nearly any particular time or era. One thinks back even to the 1790s and how Jeffersonians and Hamiltonians accused each other of treason. The anti-New Deal right, in the immediate post-FDR period, successfully used the mass corporate media to push an anti-Communist hysteria, and its initial focus was to purge from government the New Deal Internationalists, meaning those who sought what was ironically a premature detente with the Soviet Union. Thus, it was necessary to make the usual diplomatic relationships various people in the FDR orbit maintained with Soviet officials from the late 1930s through World War II into something far more nefarious than any sober analysis would have revealed. I once met Navasky at the Los Angeles Times Book Festival in the early aughts, and sought a chance to explore this point as part of a defense of Hiss and certainly Harry Dexter White. I don't blame him for a lack of interest as I remain a nobody. :). Still, he could have used the insight, if I may be so bold and perhaps arrogant to say. LOL.
Navasky's brilliance was to brand The Nation, something which his immediate successor, Katrina vanden Heuvel, even more fully embraced and developed. I used to proudly wear my black baseball cap of The Nation logo and t-shirt of the same style till they could not be worn anymore. Over the years, though, The Nation faded as a place where I learned all that much--too many other outlets arose on the Internet--so that it is only the NYRB where I find I learn something profound in every issue. I don't know if that speaks as much to my activist side or my antiquarian side as I myself age. I hope Navasky's legacy in his works will burn bright, and his leadership of a political magazine continue to inspire.
