Man of the left

Victor Navasky's new Ken Starr farce deserved a better fate. But Navasky, the man who reinvigorated the Nation, knows better than most that it's not always the size of the audience that counts.

by Dan Kennedy

As the curtain rises on Starr's Last Tape, we see Ken Starr working out on a treadmill in a prison-orange jumpsuit and singing, "What a Friend We Have in Linda." But it's only toward the end of the play that we learn just how good a friend Linda Tripp has been.

Starr -- played by veteran stage and film actor Brian Reddy -- is on the treadmill again, listening to a tape of himself placing a body wire on Tripp for her final meeting with Monica Lewinsky. "Now, please unbutton your blouse," Starr tells her on the tape. (The treadmill moves more quickly.) "Give me your hand, I'll guide you in," Tripp says. (More quickly still.) "Oh, yes! Yes!" (Furiously now, then slowing down to a walk, his face etched with a mixture of Baptist consternation and orgasmic release.)

Starr's Last Tape, which premiered last week with a five-day run at the Unicorn Theatre, in Stockbridge, is hit-and-run satire -- a broad farce that underscores the absurdity of independent counsel Starr's obsessive interest in Bill Clinton's sex life. It is also the latest in the jape-filled careers of two old college buddies: Victor Navasky and Richard Lingeman.

Navasky is best known as the publisher and editorial director of the Nation, the venerable left-liberal political weekly for which the phrase "humor impaired" might seem to have been invented; Lingeman is a senior editor at the Nation. Their often dour magazine aside, the two have been yukking it up since the 1950s, when, as students at Yale Law School, they started Monocle, a magazine of political satire that continued off and on into the mid '60s.

Richard Parker, a senior fellow at the Kennedy School's Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy and a member of the Nation's editorial board, calls Navasky's sense of humor "wry, urban, Jewish. It's sort of shtick for the well educated." In fact, Starr's Last Tape is more South Park than Woody Allen. But it works. And it serves as something of a punctuation mark for Navasky, whose remarkable career encompasses serious scholarship, satirical lampoons, and an entrepreneurial skill that has resulted in a rise in the Nation's circulation from 20,000 to 100,000 during the 21 years he's been at the helm. It's no exaggeration to suggest that the magazine might have expired of terminal irrelevance without his leadership. (Navasky has not, however, eliminated the magazine's annual deficit of several hundred thousand dollars. Then again, the Nation has lost money in each of its 133 years of publication.)

At 67, Navasky is an unprepossessing figure -- balding, bespectacled, slightly paunchy, with a white beard that gives him a benign, grandfatherly appearance. His arrival at the Unicorn Theatre last Thursday evening was down-to-earth, to say the least. A half-hour before curtain time he walked quickly across the Unicorn's outside waiting area, where several early theatergoers were swatting mosquitoes, pausing only briefly to greet a well-wisher. Inside, he stood at the theater's entrance, nervous and a bit shy, dressed casually in a blue shirt and gray pants.

Starr's Last Tape is based loosely on Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape. As Navasky puts it, the twin inspirations were the "absurdist, existential Beckett play and the absurdist, existential investigation." Except for the disembodied voices of actors portraying Lewinsky, Tripp, Clinton, and Janet Reno, the play is all Brian Reddy, who has Starr's precise, prissy way of talking down cold -- which makes it all the more startling when he bellows in a purple-faced rage. The set appears to be a prison cell, although Navasky himself cautions that the prison may only be in Starr's own mind. Discarded tapes and old Starbucks coffee cups (Starr's favorite, judging from all those photo ops outside his home last year) are scattered about.

The concept -- that the sexual obsession at the heart of the Lewinsky affair is really Starr's -- is a bit too obvious. Fortunately, Navasky and Lingeman's script is sharp enough, and Reddy's performance unhinged enough, to keep Starr's Last Tape from degenerating into a Saturday Night Live sketch.

But why now, when Clinton has survived impeachment, and Starr's $50 million investigation is finally, mercifully, drawing to a close? As it turns out, Navasky wanted to put it out last September, in time to lampoon Starr at the peak of his power, in time -- or so Navasky hoped -- to have an influence on the impeachment process. But the agent for Navasky and Lingeman, Sam Cohn, wanted to wait, to do it "right," to present it in a venue such as New York's Public Theater.

"We kept saying, `Sam, we want it done tomorrow.' And he kept saying, `It's too important to be done tomorrow.' He saw it as a work of theater, we saw it as a political statement of sorts," Navasky recalls.

Though Navasky himself is too much of a gentleman to say so, the result represented the worst possible outcome. When Starr's Last Tape finally appeared, it was way too late to make a difference; and its impact was diminished even further because it made its debut in a limited run before aging Berkshire vacationers. Navasky talks hopefully of his play hitting the road in Boston, Washington, and on the college circuit, and perhaps that will happen. But Starr's Last Tape is essentially disposable art. It would have made a considerable splash a year ago; it's merely amusing now. In another year, it may not even be that.

Cohn should have listened to Navasky. After all, Navasky has made a career of figuring out how to have maximum impact in a culture that rarely values his brand of eclectic iconoclasm.

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To understand Victor Saul Navasky, the son of a New York clothing manufacturer, you first need to know something about his unusual education. His earliest schooling took place at a Waldorf school, inspired by the turn-of-the-century Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner, who placed movement, creativity, and individualism above rote learning.

"I learned my vowel sounds by doing what they call eurythmics, which is sort of like modern dance," Navasky recalls. "You make a big `O' and say ` "O" is for the oak tree.' And I learned my multiplication tables by following the teacher around the room in a snake dance." At age 11, Navasky transferred to the Little Red School House, in Greenwich Village, where his classmates, for the most part, were the children of communists.

After graduating from Manhattan's Elisabeth Irwin High School, which is affiliated with the Little Red School House, Navasky enrolled at Swarthmore College, where he first took up the playwright's craft -- and met an aspiring young actor named Michael Dukakis. Navasky gave him a part in what he recalls as a "very heavy-handed play," in which peddlers were selling wares such as Love, Originality, and Time. "He was very funny," says Navasky.

That will come as news to anyone who has followed Dukakis's political career -- although Dukakis himself is quick to defend his comedic sensibility. "I'm actually a very funny guy, but I lived in the shadow of Bulger and Keverian. That's very tough. We all fade by comparison," says Dukakis, referring to the mildly amusing Senate president turned UMass president, Bill Bulger, and the retired House Speaker, George Keverian. (Keverian once proposed a Big Dig shortcut, suggesting that Dukakis could bore a third harbor tunnel and depress the Central Artery merely by talking to them.) Of the play itself, Dukakis says, "All I remember is that I was a barker. `I'm selling you love. This love, that love, and puppy love.' Those are the lines that I remember."

It was while attending Yale Law School that Navasky, Lingeman, and a friend of theirs, Marvin Kitman, began a humor magazine. "I remember this enthusiastic guy coming up to me in the hall and talking about this magazine he was starting up called Monocle," Lingeman recalls. "I was studying for a tax-law exam, so bored that in my mind, as an escape, I started conjuring up a parody of The Waste Land." The theme: taxes. April is the cruelest month indeed.

Two years out of Yale, the three decided to relaunch Monocle as a professional magazine, a task at which they succeeded only sporadically. The satire itself, though, was occasionally inspired, and the magazine featured writers such as Neil Postman, now a cultural critic at New York University, and Calvin Trillin, best known for his New Yorker work. (Dukakis, apparently still in his funny period, was the Cambridge correspondent.) In one issue, Trillin wrote a weird little essay about fasting becoming a fad among Republican presidential candidates; the piece was redeemed by this delicious non sequitur: "Senator Goldwater was raised as an Episcopalian, but has no accent." In another issue, a previously unknown integrationist group, White Moderates for Militant Non-Action, was introduced. Its slogan: "Freedom Soon," which was also to be the theme of its "Stroll on Washington."

By the mid '60s, Monocle had faded out. And Navasky, having indulged his Waldorf-influenced roots, turned to his leftist/rationalist side, researching Robert Kennedy's Justice Department for a book that would become Kennedy Justice (1971). Critically acclaimed by -- among others -- the conservative commentator George Will, in National Review, the book presented a nuanced portrait of Kennedy as someone who brought both humane values and an insatiable hunger for power to the attorney general's office. A later book, Naming Names (1980), about the Hollywood blacklist in the McCarthy period, won a National Book Award when it was reissued in paperback. Writing that his intention was to produce "less a history than a moral detective story," Navasky contended that Hollywood figures were pressured by investigators to give up their comrades not for evidentiary reasons, but "as a test of character. The naming of names had shifted from a means to an end."

Naming Names may have stereotyped Navasky in a way he hadn't intended: as an unregenerate, old-fashioned leftist still caught up in the ideological battles of the 1930s, '40s, and '50s. It's an image that has only hardened during his years at the Nation. (This despite occasional moments of apostasy, such as a 1996 New York Times op-ed piece in which he sang the praises of Barnes & Noble superstores -- to the horror of much of his own staff.) Navasky notes that, several months ago, Jacob Weisberg interviewed him for a New York Times Magazine piece about the Cold War. Then, recently, a Times photographer came over to take his picture -- odd, given that Navasky does not expect to be a major part of Weisberg's article. But he has a logical explanation.

"I think I'm the only guy that they can find who thinks that Alger Hiss may be innocent," Navasky says, referring to the high-level State Department official who was accused of having been a communist spy by then-congressman Richard Nixon, and who later went to prison for perjury. "Of course," he quickly adds, "I'm not the only guy. But you get typecast. I think that comes with the territory of being editor of the Nation. And I'm happy to be typecast, but that's all that it is. It's not a description of what is."

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At one time there were two liberal political weeklies, the Nation and the New Republic. Today there are, properly speaking, none. The New Republic, under owner/chairman/editor-in-chief Martin Peretz, has veered to the center, espousing anti-communist (now post-communist) hawkishness in foreign affairs and, frequently, an antipathy to affirmative action. Though TNR publishes writers with a wide range of views, its basic editorial philosophy is one of neoliberalism -- pro-business, balanced-budget, welfare-cutting, pro-gay-rights moderation of the sort associated with Bill Clinton and with Peretz's former Harvard student Al Gore. The Nation, founded by E.L. Godkin and other prominent abolitionists in 1865, began moving far to the left in the 1950s, when it couldn't bring itself to break entirely with Stalin. Although the Nation today has a higher circulation than at any time in the past generation, its leftist ideology -- especially evident in the writing of its marquee columnists, Alexander Cockburn, Katha Pollitt, and Christopher Hitchens -- is well outside the political mainstream.

Both TNR and the Nation have a weekly circulation of about 100,000. And, not surprisingly, Navasky and Peretz snipe at each other. As far back as 1985, at a conference on the future of the opinion journal, Navasky quipped, "I briefly considered proposing two trade organizations -- one for right-wing and the other for left-wing publications -- but it occurred to me that this might cause an identity crisis for the New Republic." Peretz, in an interview with the Phoenix last week, returned the disfavor, saying, "Victor Navasky is one of the great journalists of the 1930s."

Pretty amusing stuff, to be sure. What should concern Navasky, though, is this comment from Representative Barney Frank, as quoted in the New York Times in 1991: "It's important for liberal Democrats to show that by and large we don't agree with the Nation." Frank, of course, is about as liberal as the political culture will tolerate. For him to assert that there is little affinity between him and the Nation is to suggest that the Nation's influence beyond the already converted is limited indeed.

Navasky retorts that the Nation has traditionally served two constituencies. "The Nation walks on two legs," he says. "It is important to have, whatever one calls it, the camp that questions fundamental assumptions, and I share that. On the other hand, it is very important to be engaged with the day-to-day political-cultural circumstance. And to do that, you have to proceed from commonly held assumptions, and decide it does matter which party is running the country, even though in some basic way you agree with Gore Vidal that what this country needs is a good second party." But even such mainstream pieces aren't worth it, Navasky says, if they come at the price of clinking glasses with those the magazine should be excoriating. "Bob Sherrill, our White House correspondent for a number of years, always took the view that if he had more than four cars in his funeral cortege, then he would know that he hadn't done his job," he says. "People should feel uncomfortable sitting next to you."

To be fair, the column-writing triumvirate of Cockburn, Pollitt, and Hitchens gives the magazine a far more leftist cast than the articles in the middle of the book -- and their elegant but vicious writing styles give them an appeal that transcends their ideology. Hitchens, who survived a brush with notoriety earlier this year after he ratted out his former friend Sidney Blumenthal to Starr's office, writes for Vanity Fair and is a frequent TV talking head; Cockburn holds forth in the scatalogically inventive New York Press and in his own newsletter, CounterPunch; Pollitt, an accomplished poet, wrote a hilariously biting review of Monica Lewinsky's and George Stephanopoulos's self-serving autobiographies earlier this year for TNR. As for the Nation's feature articles, a recent piece on the Republican contretemps in Ames, Iowa, by Marc Cooper -- host of the Nation's weekly radio show -- was smart, measured, and more insightful than a similar New Republic piece by Dana Milbank. Washington editor David Corn is a mainstream liberal (as well as another New York Press regular). And the Nation manages to break important ground on a semi-regular basis -- such as earlier this year, when Brandeis University journalism professor Florence Graves unearthed a pattern of unseemly collusion between alleged presidential groping victim Kathleen Willey and Ken Starr's office. The back of the book is distinguished by renowned critics such as Jane Holtz Kay on architecture, Arthur Danto on art, and John Leonard on culture, and the loathsome anti-Israel polemicist Edward Said -- recently revealed to have invented much of his Palestinian past -- on music.

"There is a range of views in this magazine," says editor Katrina vanden Heuvel. "I often find it dispiriting to read that we're predictable, that we're the party line, when it's often a great deal more contentious within the pages of the Nation than between the Democratic and Republican parties." Indeed, Cockburn and Hitchens often take potshots at each other, and Pollitt gave up her title as associate editor -- though not her column -- earlier this year after vanden Heuvel published an anti-school-voucher piece written by (gasp!) a conservative.

Perhaps Navasky's signature contribution has been bringing in big-name writers, such as the aforementioned Vidal, his old friend Trillin, and the novelists E.L. Doctorow and Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Sure, he pays them next to nothing. But the Nation provides them with a national audience for political views they might not get a chance to express elsewhere. Besides, Trillin, who used to write a humor column for the Nation and now contributes poetry for $100 a pop, says the rates aren't as bad as they might appear: "I get paid by the poem rather than by the line. So when I write a two-line poem, I'm the highest-paid poet in the United States." On an only slightly more serious note, Trillin says major literary figures are willing to write for the Nation because "Navasky's very good at getting people to do things. That's one of his gifts. Particularly me. That's why I call him the Wily and Parsimonious Victor S. Navasky."

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Navasky's wile and parsimony are more important than ever these days. In 1995 he led a group of investors who purchased the Nation; he gave himself the titles of publisher and editorial director and chose vanden Heuvel -- whom he first brought to the Nation as a Princeton intern in the early 1980s -- as the new editor. He and vanden Heuvel also oversaw a redesign that is noticeably more reader friendly. Though the Nation has generous angels, including Doctorow and the actor Paul Newman, Navasky would like to accomplish the unprecedented: breaking even.

Financial success won't come easy. Yes, Navasky pushed circulation up fivefold over the past two decades, but, in doing so, he managed to do the same to the deficit. The Nation lost about $100,000 a year when he took over; today it loses about $500,000. In the world of small opinion journals, more circulation does not readily translate into more advertising revenue. A year and a half ago Navasky wrote an amusing, stranger-in-a-strange-land piece for the Atlantic Monthly about enrolling at Harvard Business School in hopes of picking up some profit-making tips from his ideological enemies. The best advice he received: sell the Nation and invest the proceeds in Treasury bonds. (The Atlantic piece can be found online at http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/98jan/nation.htm.)

Still, Navasky has shown an entrepreneurial bent. Last year he began offering luxury cruises on which well-heeled subscribers -- the "vanguard of the proletariat," as Molly Ivins quipped -- can mingle with Nation writers and contributors. (Navasky and crew are under sail this week off the Alaska coast.) But the real solution, Navasky believes, is to put the Nation's 133 years' worth of archives online -- and to charge for them.

Perhaps the key to Navasky's career is to realize that he's had many careers, and that he's enjoyed some measure of success in each of them. Judging from the reception for Kennedy Justice and Naming Names, he could have become one of our most celebrated nonfiction writers. (He's currently working on a new book, on the role of the opinion journal in society.) He's dabbled in humor only occasionally, yet his résumé in that field includes a magazine that's still fondly remembered, a book (The Experts Speak: The Definitive Compendium of Authoritative Misinformation, 1984, with Christopher Cerf), and, now, a damned funny new play. He did a stint as an editor at the New York Times Magazine in the early '70s, which leads one to wonder how far he might have gone if he had single-mindedly applied his talents to moving up the Times' editorial ladder.

"If only the Clintons had confessed," the Ken Starr character says toward the end of Starr's Last Tape. "I could have saved this country 50 million bucks." Pause. "That's half the budget of the National Endowment for the Arts." A few snickers, then uproarious laughter, from the audience. Granted, Starr's Last Tape won't have the mainstream impact it could have had -- should have had, if Navasky's agent hadn't screwed up. But Navasky learned a long time ago that a few strategically placed droplets can, over time, create a mighty river.

At the 1985 conference on opinion journals -- the one where he tweaked Marty Peretz -- Navasky recalled a story once told by Frank Walsh, who had written a series for the Hearst newspapers, which reached 10 million people, about railroads in the early part of the century. And heard from precisely no one. Then he published the same material in the Nation, whose circulation at the time was 27,000. "The day the Nation went on the Washington newsstands," Navasky quoted Walsh as saying, "my telephone started ringing. I heard from editors, broadcasters, and congressmen."

As Barney Frank's criticism suggests, the Nation today may not be required reading on Capitol Hill the way it was in Frank Walsh's day. But by reinvigorating the Nation as an independent leftist voice, and through his own writing as well, Navasky has taken his place alongside iconoclastic progressive journalists such as I.F. Stone and George Seldes. And he's had a hell of a lot of fun along the way.

Dan Kennedy can be reached at dkennedy[a]phx.com.