The headquarters of the Nation magazine, just east of Union Square in downtown Manhattan, are far from luxurious by the standards of the New York media world. But Victor Navasky's book-strewn corner office is nowhere near as shabby as you might expect of a man with a reputation as American journalism's biggest skinflint. "The wily and parsimonious Victor Navasky," as he is affectionately known among colleagues, has spent 27 years at the journal's helm, pinching pennies and soliciting donations to keep alight a rare flame of the US left. The writer Calvin Trillin - who was signed up for a sum he described as being "in the high two figures" - once called the Nation "a pinko magazine printed on very cheap paper ... It's probably the only magazine in the country [that] if you make a Xerox of it, the Xerox looks a lot better than the original." A similar strain of cost-consciousness runs through A Matter of Opinion, Navasky's newly published memoir of a life in journalism. "After almost 10 years in the editor's chair, at least three things were clear," he writes. "First, I needed a new chair."
Yet, as its writers are fond of saying, "what's bad for the country is good for the Nation" - and judging by the surge in readership and influence the magazine is enjoying, things must be pretty bad for the country. The trauma of September 11 2001 and the divisiveness of the Iraq war have fuelled a near-doubling of the Nation's circulation towards 200,000 since George W Bush took office . For the last three years it has even, almost unprecedentedly, made money. "Well, 'made money' - I put that in quotes," says the 73-year-old Navasky, seated at a vast desk blanketed with manila folders and yellow legal pads. "For example, I got an anonymous cheque for $100,000 last year, and last year we made a total of $250,000. Do we make money? Yes: the magazine is a magnet for anonymous cheques of $100,000."
A publication founded at the close of the civil war - and castigated by the right ever since for sins ranging from humourless monotony to cold-war treachery - now finds itself a high-profile platform for such luminaries as Gore Vidal, EL Doctorow, Naomi Klein and Jonathan Schell. "In large part, that's because you now have a media that has been largely timid and cowardly and has failed to tell the news, and tell the truth, as millions of Americans now see it," says Katrina vanden Heuvel, who has edited the Nation since Navasky moved to the position of publisher in 1994, after being cajoled into buying the magazine himself for "a million dollars I didn't have".
That profile received a significant boost in 2002, when Christopher Hitchens loudly resigned as a columnist. "When I began work for the Nation over two decades ago, Victor Navasky described the magazine as a debating ground between liberals and radicals, which was, I thought, well-judged," Hitchens wrote in his final column. "In the past few weeks, though, I have come to realise that the magazine itself takes a side in this argument, and is becoming the voice and the echo chamber of those who truly believe that [then attorney general] John Ashcroft is a greater menace than Osama bin Laden. (I too am resolutely opposed to secret imprisonment and terror-hysteria, but not in the same way as I am opposed to those who initiated the aggression, and who are planning future ones.)"
Yet Navasky's geniality is such that even the acerbic Hitchens - not known for his aversion to personal feuds - cannot bring himself to disdain his former boss, recently describing him as exhibiting "malice towards none ... he prefers being furry to being spiky". "In fact the only thing I don't like about Victor is the fact that everybody likes him," Hitchens says now. "I think he should have made some more enemies by now. Even hardline rightwingers could never bring themselves to say 'Navasky's a real snake, a treacherous bastard'. They would say he's a really nice guy. I'm not sure I would want that said about me by everybody."
Eric Alterman, a Nation columnist since 1995, recalls being present once when Navasky's wife, Annie, "criticised [her husband] for saying there was no one he didn't like. And eventually he did manage to think of someone he didn't like. But that guy's dead now, so there's probably no one." Such equanimity, translated into an editorial approach, has built a church a little too broad for Alterman's tastes. "There are things the Nation does that I can't defend," he says. "The worst is publishing Alexander Cockburn," the radical columnist as visceral in his condemnation of most of the left as he is of the White House. "If Alexander Cockburn weren't published in the Nation, he would be considered a crank beyond the limits of intelligent discourse." ("Alterman is like my stalker or something. He's called me Stalin, Hitler and Robespierre," retorts Cockburn, who, with characteristic disregard for organisational loyalty, condemns the Nation as now representing "the slightly left of centre ... there was a period when it had crackle.")
A friendly temperament may be essential for managing this kind of internecine squabbling. But it also means Navasky's memoir risks being seen as nothing but an amiable account of an agreeable career, first as Nation editor, and then as its publisher. In fact, though, A Matter of Opinion combines an impassioned defence of the role of the opinion journal with a sharp critique of what Navasky labels "the ideology of the centre": the dangerous and deceptive idea that there can be such a thing as purely objective, value-free journalism. This "spurious pretence of neutrality" - best exhibited, he contends, by the New York Times, where he once worked - actually masks centrist values that tend to bolster the status quo.
The Nation, by contrast, makes no attempt to temper its criticisms of the current administration: last year, the magazine's editors, in a characteristic editorial, called Bush "the worst president in modern history", who is "so out of step with the needs of Americans" that he "can only rule by sowing division and fear". They have described the Iraq war as "a military, fiscal and moral crisis", arguing that "the public increasingly recognises what Washington has been slow to accept: indefinite US occupation will lead neither to peace in Iraq nor to genuine democracy".
The mainstream US press "has never resolved this question of politics at the core of its own ideology", says Jay Rosen, professor of journalism at New York University and a longtime acquaintance of Navasky's. "This notion that you go into journalism to make a difference co-exists with 'we just present the facts'. That's a contradiction that has taken its toll on our press," leading to a loss of reader respect. While the average American reporter sees opinion writing as secondary and derivative - an after-effect of "real" journalism - the Nation profits from the fact that readers disagree. "For many people, argument is what engages them in the news," Rosen says. "Argument is what causes them to seek out more information."
Journalists, Navasky argues, should refuse to be mere stenographers, recording what those in power have determined to be "the facts". "We used to call Bob Sherrill our White House correspondent," he recalls, referring to a veteran Nation writer, famed, among other things, for the number of times he resigned from the magazine in disgust. "Yet he was banned from the White House! But so what? He interpreted. If you just sit there waiting for them to read you the day's official reports, what good is that?"
Liberalism pervaded the atmosphere of New York's Upper West Side between the wars, but Navasky, born there in 1932, seems to have become politicised almost by accident - not least because of his enthusiasm for stickball, the street version of baseball, played with broom-handles. His father Macy, who worked in the clothing business, and his mother Esther first sent him to a Rudolf Steiner school, but when he was old enough for high school he petitioned for a change. "We'd moved on to a new block, and I ran into two guys I played stickball with. One of them went to this school that sounded like a lot of fun. And he was the best stickball player, so I said, 'I wanna go there!'" That school, it turned out, was the Little Red School House in Greenwich Village, a teaching experiment founded in the 1920s by the psychologist Elisabeth Irwin with the aim of importing John Dewey's pioneering educational philosophies into a multi-ethnic urban setting. Years later, a young Robert de Niro would enrol there too.
"We had one Marxist history teacher who taught a straight Marxist view of history," Navasky recalls. "I remember he once asked where diamonds got their value. Someone said, 'because they're beautiful'. He said, 'no, no'. Someone else said, 'supply and demand'. He said, 'no'. Someone else said, 'from the sweat of the workers in the mines!' And he said 'right!'"
The nascent cold war even impinged on him at summer camp. "The swimming counsellor at the camp was having an argument with another counsellor," he says. "At the end of every summer, we'd do a show, a benefit, and the question was: should the money go to United Nations war relief - this was 1945 - or Russian war relief? Some counsellors said let the UN decide, this is for all mankind. And the others said, that's very nice in theory, but the Russians saved our lives at Stalingrad, millions of them died, and now they're being discriminated against because people hate communism." Navasky asked his own camp counsellor who was right. "He told me a long story about Plato. I later figured out he was telling me about his sexuality."
Only dimly, amid all this invigorating political argument, could Navasky discern a much darker dimension: some parents of his friends at school and summer camp were falling victim to McCarthyism, either as part of the Hollywood blacklist or the New York teacher investigations, an east-coast front in the search for communists. "Some of the parents shared their politics with their children, and others wouldn't tell them about it," Navasky says. "It was a mystery that hung over our parents' generation", and one that would prove a lasting topic of fascination to the older Navasky.
His education continued at the exclusive Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, where he exploited a classmate's connections to arrange, at the start of one summer holiday, a meeting in London with the editor of the News of the World. The editor refused Navasky's request for a holiday job, but agreed to write a letter of recommendation to the editor of a provincial paper, the Berrow's Worcester Journal.
"Dear Jack," Navasky remembers the letter reading, "This is to introduce Mr Victor Navasky, an American student interested in learning by working on a British newspaper. Mr Navasky is a friend of Miss Pat Bryson. Miss Pat Bryson is the daughter of Mr George Bryson. Mr George Bryson is the founder and managing director of Young & Rubicam's London office. Young & Rubicam is responsible for 80% of the advertising in the News of the World. News of the World owns 100% of Berrow's Worcester Journal. Please help Mr Navasky in any way you can." This unsubtle approach worked, leading to a surreal summer in which the young New Yorker wrote up cricket scores and accompanied a colleague on an otter hunt.
But hard reality reclaimed him in 1954: with the Korean war barely finished, he was drafted into the army. After a punishing period of training in Georgia, he ended up at Fort Richardson in Alaska as a company clerk, but soon manoeuvred his way to the post of editor of the base newspaper, the 53rd Infantry News. The entrepreneurial strengths of the successful freelance journalist seemed in plentiful supply: by the time his military service ended, Navasky had persuaded the editor of the Anchorage Daily News to pay for him to report on the 1956 Democratic party convention in Chicago. For days, Navasky dutifully filed copy, only to discover at the end that, contrary to his naive assumption, the Western Union wire service was not free. None of his words had reached their intended destination.
This false start in civilian journalism was soon followed by a more sure-footed one. Arriving at Yale Law School - as an army veteran, the government paid his tuition fees - Navasky and two friends established Monocle, "a leisurely quarterly of political satire", that was published intermittently for years afterwards. Navasky excelled at the profile-raising publicity stunt: in 1964, Monocle ran its news editor, Marvin Kitman, as a Republican candidate for president, challenging the rabble-rousing conservative Barry Goldwater. "I prefer not to discuss the issues, because I am campaigning on my personality," Kitman told baffled reporters at that year's Republican convention. (He gained more delegates' votes than one prominent serious candidate, the governor of Pennsylvania.)
Monocle sealed Navasky's reputation as a journalist worth watching, and he began to freelance for the New York Times; he later took a staff job as an editor on the paper. He also landed a deal for a book about Robert Kennedy, and asked Anne Strongin, a Wall Street secretary he was dating at the time, for advice on how to invest the advance. "She doubled it," he recalls. "I said: 'I'm yours'." They married in 1966, and have three children, Bruno, Miri and Jenny.
At the Times Navasky had his most direct encounter with the set of taboos and assumptions that constituted "the ideology of the centre". Working as a commissioning editor on the Sunday magazine, he found that his ideas for stories sank or swam depending on whether they were deemed newsworthy - and that newsworthiness was largely defined by whether the subject had already risen to the status of "news" by being covered in the Times. Opinions could only be advanced if the assumptions of the "reasonable man" (in practice, the outlook of the Times's publisher, Arthur Sulzberger) were taken as the baseline.
"This didn't mean that you wrote fawningly to please the publisher," Navasky says. "But it meant that if [an opinion writer] assumed, say, that black nationalism was a good thing, rather than integration, an article based on that assumption couldn't appear there. But if you made the argument that black nationalism was a good thing, based on values you shared, then it could." In any case, Navasky seems not to have been temperamentally suited to spending the rest of his life in a large media bureaucracy, and by 1974 he had moved on, first to manage the senate campaign of the former attorney-general, Ramsey Clark, and then to teach journalism at Princeton.
Critics of American administrations are accustomed to the insinuation that their dissent is actually a lack of patriotism, and when Navasky assumed the editorship of the Nation in 1978, he was aware he was stepping into a snakepit. He had persuaded Hamilton Fish III, a friend from a philanthropic family, to purchase the ailing magazine, but Fish imposed one condition - that Navasky be editor. "You were walking into history, but history was in jeopardy," Navasky says. There was barely enough money to pay the rent for the magazine's offices, which were insalubrious at best: the previous editor had been mugged in the stairwell. Navasky felt a weighty burden of responsibility towards a magazine that had published the likes of Albert Einstein, Martin Luther King and Jean-Paul Sartre, and was founded by abolitionists, who, having won their battle against slavery, wanted to continue their philanthropy. "I was extremely aware that I didn't want to be the one who brought this great institution down," he says. "Because of its great heritage, it couldn't be written off as radical fringe. It had politics that were beyond the mainstream, but it was part of the woodwork of the establishment."
Among the writers he hired in those early days - in an effort to boost a circulation ailing at around 30,000 - was a young Hitchens, who was on the point of relocating to the US. "Victor invented me, in a way," Hitchens says. "He gave me a desk and a sponsor and a place to hang my hat, which was what I needed."
The Nation's coverage of Soviet politics had long been a target of criticism - some of which Navasky accepts - and the problematic distinction between necessary dissent and irresponsible disloyalty would continue to haunt the magazine under his editorship. A strain of conservative hostility to the Nation had been brewing for years, but it came to the boil in 1980 when he published Naming Names, an account of the Hollywood blacklist, exploring the motives of those who betrayed their friends to Joseph McCarthy's House Committee on Un-American Activities. The New York Times praised Navasky for confronting the moral issues raised by the episode "with almost exquisite precision". But the rightwing historian Ronald Radosh disagreed so violently he wrote a book, Red Star Over Hollywood, that is essentially an attack on Navasky. "Navasky completely cannot accept what everyone else knows - that many communists became Soviet agents," argues Radosh, who also clashed with Navasky over the case of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the US communists executed for espionage in 1953. Most commentators agree with Radosh that Julius was guilty; Navasky did not, though he now accepts he was probably wrong. (He continues to believe in the probable innocence of Alger Hiss, the subject of the other most famous domestic espionage case of the era.)
"Every time a new edition of Naming Names comes out, his introductions get worse and worse," Radosh goes on. "The blacklist was unnecessary, and unwarranted, but what Navasky does is that he makes everyone who was blacklisted into major moral heroes just because they were blacklisted ... This is all a holdover from Navasky's roots in the old left. He defends and identifies with the communist left and the fellow-travelling left. It's the post-Soviet era, but the Nation continues to identify the world in terms of the United States being an evil force. So they will say 'we were against Saddam Hussein', but it's still the US that is the evil power."
Navasky maintains that his point in Naming Names "was a very different one. I just think that there were ways of exposing the communist apparatus, and the way the communist party in this country tried to bully people, without collaborating with the Un-American Activities Committee's wrecking expedition." Navasky does not evade the allegation that the western left treated the atrocities of Stalin's rule with inexcusable indulgence, but he insists on a firm distinction between philosophy and practical politics. "I thought of communism and capitalism as economic systems, not political systems, to the extent that the Soviet system was a totalitarian system that didn't flow from socialism, just as democracy didn't flow from capitalism.
"What Stalin did internally in the Soviet Union is something that there is no excuse for. It was a subject of debate at the time, but it wasn't understood or appreciated in parts of the left ... And yet having said all that, I do think there's a difference between fascism and communism. Hitler encoded racism into his official public philosophy. The philosophy that was put forward in the name of communism and socialism was 'from each according to his ability, to each according to his need' - something that didn't exclude blacks or Jews or Gypsies or homosexuals. That's a very important difference. But it doesn't change the fact that hundreds of thousands, millions, were victims of Soviet totalitarianism and tyranny."
Navasky's style masks the steeliness of his commitment to the politics of his youth, Hitchens says. "The Nation was an apologist for the failed so-called Soviet experiment, and amazingly enough still is," he says. "When there's a democratic revolution in Ukraine, for example, Katrina vanden Heuvel will still say it's an America-backed attempt to encircle Russia. There's this instinct to support Moscow. And for all Victor's broad-church stuff, when it comes down to it, he will always take a version of that side. His core is quite hardline, very tenderly presented. Which is to his credit: he's not going to run from a fight. He will try to come at it crabwise, in his shrugging, charming way, and to leech the anger out of it. But he's quite a hard leftist."
Day-to-day responsibility for grappling with these issues in an editorial capacity at the Nation has been Vanden Heuvel's job, rather than Navasky's, since 1994. That was the year he said yes to what he describes as "an offer I should have refused". Arthur Carter, the liberal-minded investment banker who by then owned the Nation, interrupted a sabbatical Navasky was taking at Harvard with the news that he was planning to scale back his $500,000 annual subsidy to the magazine. The result was that Navasky bought the magazine, moving from editor to publisher, and embarking on a new round of fundraising. "I went to see this friend on the faculty of Harvard Business School, and I said, 'Hey, why don't you take the Nation as a case study for your students? Give them this as a problem: how do you take a magazine that's lost money for 120 years and, without changing the magazine, turn the economics around?'" Navasky took a course at the business school to polish his entrepreneurial skills. The financial support of the actor Paul Newman was also to prove essential.
Is he slowing down with age? "Yes and no," he says. Earlier this year, he dropped his other title of editorial director, handing more autonomy to Vanden Heuvel. "I've had what I felt were three full-time jobs over the last few years. Maybe now this book is done I can bring it down to two." He continues to provide inspiration and a motivating force for the Nation's journalistic mission, which he describes as a balancing act between committed advocacy and fair, accurate reporting. Two key sentences from the Nation's earliest days crystallise this for him. One, the first sentence from the first issue, in 1865, embodies, to an almost comical extent, the refusal to sensationalise, hype or distort: "The week was singularly barren of exciting events," the editors wrote, with an honesty few circulation-hungry publications would be willing to match today.
The other comes from the Liberator, a 19th-century anti-slavery publication whose subscription list was inherited by the newborn Nation: "I will not equivocate, I will not excuse, I will not retreat a single inch." That, Navasky says, "is the statement of an embattled, impassioned abolitionist. At our best, we take these two charges - the telling of truth as best you can, and fighting for the things you know or believe to be right. And then, if the country has lost its moorings, or the world has gone off in some crazy direction, you can help restore the equilibrium by talking common sense."
Life at a glance
Born: July 5 1932, New York.
Education: Rudolf Steiner School, New York; Little Red School House, New York; Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania; Yale Law School.
Married: 1966 Anne Landey Strongin (two daughters, Miri and Jenny, one son, Bruno).
Career: 1960 co-founder, Monocle magazine; '70-74 staff editor, New York Times Magazine; '74-78 Princeton; '78-94 editor, the Nation; '95- publisher, the Nation.
Books: 1971 (reissued '77) Kennedy Justice; '80 Naming Names; '84 The Experts Speak: The Definitive Compendium of Authoritative Misinformation (with Christopher Cerf); 2005 A Matter of Opinion.
· A Matter of Opinion is published by The New Press at £16.99
