Books in Brief

The Thirty Years’ Wars: Dispatches and Diversions of a Radical Journalist, 1965-1994, by Andrew Kopkind (Verso, 531 pp., $29.95)

THE late Andrew Kopkind was perhaps the premier radical journalist of his time. After quitting Time in disgust, he became an early promoter of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and Students for a Democratic Society. In the Sixties his essays appeared in Ramparts. Mayday, and The New York Review of Books (in its early, radical phase); he ended his career at The Nation. This collection chronicles his political and personal odysseys over thirty years. The two were never separable for him: he once wrote that his political work had “obliterated the emptiness of the life [he] had grown up with in the Fifties.” His emergence from the closet in the Seventies, like the Vietcong’s resistance to “imperialism,” was part of the struggle against oppression and for authenticity. In that struggle liberalism, permeated by bad faith and corrupted by the Cold War, was not a reliable ally. Kopkind hauls out liberal icons one by one—King, RFK, McCarthy, Mondale —and finds them wanting, incapable of remaking society. He pinned his hopes on Jesse Jackson for a time, but by 1992 had grown weary of “the Reverend’s willingness to swallow any offal so long as he can attend the banquet.” His cultural and political analysis could be very sharp, whether he was discussing the rise and fall of the New Left or the “dialectic of disco.” He had blind spots: the idealism that informed his analysis was unsentimental to the point of moral obtuseness, a vice most evident in his treatment of the murder of Israeli athletes in Munich. But reading Kopkind is a pleasure: his prose style was clear, ideologically inflected, and bracing—in a way that more responsible commentary perhaps can’t be. —Ramesh Ponnuru Friendship, Etc.

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The Thirty Years’ Wars: Dispatches and Diversions of a Radical Journalist, 1965-1994, by Andrew Kopkind (Verso, 531 pp., $29.95)

THE late Andrew Kopkind was perhaps the premier radical journalist of his time. After quitting Time in disgust, he became an early promoter of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and Students for a Democratic Society. In the Sixties his essays appeared in Ramparts. Mayday, and The New York Review of Books (in its early, radical phase); he ended his career at The Nation. This collection chronicles his political and personal odysseys over thirty years. The two were never separable for him: he once wrote that his political work had “obliterated the emptiness of the life [he] had grown up with in the Fifties.” His emergence from the closet in the Seventies, like the Vietcong’s resistance to “imperialism,” was part of the struggle against oppression and for authenticity. In that struggle liberalism, permeated by bad faith and corrupted by the Cold War, was not a reliable ally. Kopkind hauls out liberal icons one by one—King, RFK, McCarthy, Mondale —and finds them wanting, incapable of remaking society. He pinned his hopes on Jesse Jackson for a time, but by 1992 had grown weary of “the Reverend’s willingness to swallow any offal so long as he can attend the banquet.” His cultural and political analysis could be very sharp, whether he was discussing the rise and fall of the New Left or the “dialectic of disco.” He had blind spots: the idealism that informed his analysis was unsentimental to the point of moral obtuseness, a vice most evident in his treatment of the murder of Israeli athletes in Munich. But reading Kopkind is a pleasure: his prose style was clear, ideologically inflected, and bracing—in a way that more responsible commentary perhaps can’t be. —Ramesh Ponnuru Friendship, Etc.