KNOWING HOW REVOLUTIONS BEGIN

The Happy Cold Warrior: Arnold Beichman at 90. (David Brooks, Summer 2003, Hoover Digest)

Beichman rose to become city editor and assistant managing editor [of PM] and thus took part in a series of ferocious battles for control of the news coverage, amid vicious attacks from the communist press. One secretary disappeared and showed up later on the payroll of the New York office of the Soviet news agency Tass. At one point Ingersoll got permission from Earl Browder, the head of the Communist Party of the United States, to fire a few of the more incompetent Communists, just to preserve the paper's credibility.

It was during this period that Beichman did the most amazing thing: He became a fellow traveler. This was during the Spanish Civil War, the so-called national front period, when leftists and Communists worked together against Franco. Arnold did publicity for an outfit he knew was a front group, supposedly raising money for the anti-fascists in Spain. Eventually he deduced that not some of the money but all the money being raised in the name of Spain was in fact going to the Communist Party.

During World War II, Beichman published the first American reports of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, having found a man who had escaped from the battles and could provide maps and a firsthand account. After the war, he interviewed Holocaust survivors as they landed in New York. He came across one beautiful young woman who had seen her five children killed but who had been kept around to serve the Nazi officers. Beichman innocently asked her how she could have preserved the will to live after her children's murder. "That's what I cannot forgive God for," she replied. "You still want to live no matter what. But I will never have children. That I know." [...]

In 1949, Stalin launched a peace campaign, and a group of 800 intellectuals gathered at the Waldorf Astoria to call for the United States to endorse Soviet foreign policy. Beichman, Sidney Hook, James Burnham, Mary McCarthy, Dwight McDonald, and others organized a counter-demonstration. Through his connections with the hotel service workers' union, Beichman got the anti-communist group members a suite at the Waldorf, and they successfully undermined the conference, with Hook and others embarrassing the Soviet delegation with uncomfortable questions and harsh arguments.

In the 1950s and '60s, Beichman was one of the New York intellectuals who worked to delegitimize communism. "A staunch anti-communism was the great moral-political imperative of our age," Diana Trilling once declared, which became the credo of Beichman's professional life. He headed the American Committee of the Congress of Cultural Freedom (refusing to accept what turned out to be the CIA money that eventually tainted the international branch of the congress). He fell in with the Partisan Review crowd and became friendly with Irving Kristol, whom he regards as his most important intellectual influence. [...]

Beichman wrote a book about the United Nations and-this being Columbia in the late 1960s-found himself again in the middle of the action. Knowing that he had been a student radical, some of the 1960s radicals came to him for advice. "What's your ideology?" Beichman asked, but of course they had none. Beichman was also appalled by the cowardice of much of the faculty, who hissed administrators trying, belatedly, to preserve order. "I remember warning Jacques Barzun," Beichman recounts. "They just didn't know what was going on under their noses, any more than the ancien regime knew before the Bastille. They didn't know how revolutions began."

Beichman went on to write a book called Nine Lies about America, defending the United States from the waves of anti-Americanism. During his book tour he found himself on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, along with the actor Jon Voight. Carson asked Voight what he thought of Beichman's pro-American arguments. "I'm frightened by America today," Voight responded. To which Beichman-by now an old pro at winning debates-turned to the audience and asked, "Is anybody else afraid of America?" to which the audience roared, "NO!"

Because Diana Trilling was right, it is somehow easier to forgive those who were committed communists than those who were anti-anti-communists.

MORE:
-ESSAY: Eight Years That Shook the World: On the anniversary of two of his great speeches, an appreciation of Ronald Reagan, the "indispensable president." (Arnold Beichman, Summer 2002, Hoover Digest)
-ESSAY: Barbarians at the Lectern: The troubled history of our chattering class. (Arnold Beichman, Spring 2002, Hoover Digest)
-ESSAY: A Holiday for Freedom: With some help from George W. Bush, Hoover fellow Arnold Beichman explains why November 9 is a day to celebrate. (Hoover Digest, Winter 2002)
-ESSAY: Who Trained the Terrorists?: Looking for clues in the aftermath of the deadly attacks. By Hoover fellow Arnold Beichman, Fall 2001, Hoover Digest)
-ESSAY: The New World Disorder: The bloody ethnic conflicts in Kosovo, Chechnya, and East Timor are symbols of the new world disorder, as small-scale civil wars become the new threat to international peace. (Arnold Beichman, Spring 2000, Hoover Digest)
-ESSAY: In the Balkans to Stay: We're doomed to spend the next decade or more policing the Balkans. (Arnold Beichman, Winter 2000, Hoover Digest)
-ESSAY: Save This Date: Reflecting on the tenth anniversary of "the most important historical event of our lifetime," Hoover fellow Arnold Beichman explains why we should forever commemorate November 9, 1989 (Hoover Digest, Fall 1999)
-ESSAY: Arsenal of Poison: The Tocqueville-quoting president of Iran, Mohammed Khatami, has impressed the West as a moderate-while at the same time amassing an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction. By Hoover fellow Arnold Beichman, Summer 1999, Hoover Digest)
-ESSAY: Guilty as Charged: Hoover fellow Arnold Beichman surveys recently declassified Soviet documents. What Hiss and the Rosenbergs didn't want you to know. (Hoover Digest, Spring 1999)
-ESSAY: Two Freedoms: Beijing is attempting to establish economic freedom while stifling political freedom. Can it have the one without the other? (Arnold Beichman,Hoover Digest, Winter 1999)
-ESSAY: Between Iraq and a Hard Place: Saddam Hussein still appears determined to develop chemical weapons. Should Israel consider a preemptive strike? (Arnold Beichman, Summer 1998, Hoover Digest)
-INTERVIEW: Beichman@90: A Cold War warrior talks about his first nine decades. (Interview by Kathryn Jean Lopez, Summer 2003, Hoover Digest)
Fearless Sidney Hook (Thomas Main, August 2003, Policy Review)

THERE IS, however, one opinion - or better, one set of opinions - that one had to share with Hook in order to admire him much. This was his anti-communism and the policy conclusions that he drew from it. After the 1930s, anti-communism was probably the theme Hook most frequently took up. Hook?s writing was always intense, but when he wrote on anti-communism it could be with the urgency of someone calling life-saving instructions to a drowning victim. Such was the tone of his book from the early fifties, Heresy, Yes - Conspiracy, No, in which he argued that communism was not "an open and honestly avowed heresy but an international conspiracy centered in the Kremlin, in a state of undeclared war against democratic institutions." Hook was very seldom personal in his polemics but he could be stinging in his characterization of an antagonist's reasoning when the issue of communism came up. Thus, he blasted "Lillian Hellman, who in her book Scoundrel Time seems to have duped a generation of critics devoid of historical memory and critical common sense." Or again, he began his condemnatory review of a book by David Caute on the McCarthy period by noting, "It is a well known phenomenon that without containing a single falsehood, a description of an historical situation, personage or event can still be a lying account." Sometimes, in presenting a passage from anti-anti-communist authors, Hook could not resist inserting a "sic" or even a "sic!" in the quotation, as if reading such stuff was almost too much to bear.

Hook faithfully pursued what he saw as the policy consequences of his anti-communism. He supported the Cold War, rejected the New Left, and - most fatefully for his reputation - opposed allowing Communist Party members to hold teaching positions. All of this led to the common complaint that Hook was an obsessive anti-communist. Indeed, Arthur Schlesinger has claimed that Hook's "great error" was "in letting anti-communism take over his life." This judgment is unfair. Precisely what Hook did not do was allow his anti-communism, or any other single idea, to determine the whole of his thought. Many of the characteristic ideas that he continued to express prolifically to the end of his life had nothing to do with anti-communism. Nonetheless, anti-communism was a major theme in Hook's work, and the perception that he was overly preoccupied with it has had a negative impact on his reputation.

Allegedly obsessive anti-communism is not the only feature of Hook's work that has damaged his reputation. Hook was a polemicist, "probably the greatest polemicist of [the twentieth] century," as Edward Shils has written. And Hook's modal form of expression was the essay, rather than the book, and that often published in a nonacademic journal. His philosophical interests - Marxism, pragmatism, and public affairs - were considered marginal concerns in academic philosophy throughout much of his university career. For this reason, an article in the National Post (December 17, 2001) condemns the trajectory Hook's career took after the publication of one of his early books as follows: "unlike Hook's later and more polemical work, Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx was a genuine original contribution to philosophy." In this way, Hook has often been seen as a politicized intellectual journalist rather than as a serious philosopher.

Recently, however, this judgment seems to be waning. Several developments suggest that Hook is beginning to receive serious consideration as something other than a street-fighting debater. One indication of this change was a symposium entitled "Sidney Hook Reconsidered: A Centennial Celebration," held at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York last October. Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx, originally published in 1933, is back in print for the first time in decades. And a much-needed representative sample of Hook's essays from throughout his career is now available, The Essential Essays: Sidney Hook on Pragmatism, Democracy and Freedom.

Posted by Orrin Judd at August 13, 2003 7:47 PM