Philip Berroll

An Obsession with Anne Frank:  Meyer Levin and the Diary

Lawrence Graver. University of California Press, 1995. 254 pp.

By P.H.I.Berroll

In his novel The Ghost Writer, Philip Roth observed that if the Jewish religion had saints, Anne Frank would have been canonized.  More than fifty years after she perished in the Bergen-Belsen death camp, the teenaged girl has taken on a symbolism beyond the facts of her short life and the diary of her two years in hiding.           

But has Anne’s basic humanity become distorted in the process?  Some critics found the recent Academy Award-winning documentary Anne Frank Remembered “revelatory” because it depicted many mundane details of her life, both before and during the Holocaust.  This was confirmation of an indisputable fact: for many people, Anne has become – for better or worse – more of an icon than a flesh-and-blood human being.           

This phenomenon is at the heart of Lawrence Graver’s An Obsession with Anne Frank:  Meyer Levin and the Diary. Graver, the author of critical studies of Beckett, Conrad and Carson McCullers and a faculty member at Williams College, here recounts the bitter dispute between a Jewish-American writer, who saw Anne as one kind of symbol, and his opponents, who saw her as quite another kind. On one level, it is a graphic, chilling account of one man’s descent into conspiracy-mongering paranoia. But it also raises issues about anti-Semitism, Jewish identity and the conflict between art and politics that persist to the present day.

At the center of the book is Meyer Levin (1902-1981) – novelist, journalist and essayist, a man who at the height of his career enjoyed both popular success and respect, if not adoration, from many serious critics. The fact that he is widely forgotten today is not simply due to changing literary tastes.

Graver begins his story in Paris in 1950, when Levin was given a copy of the French edition of the Diary by his wife. By then a writer of some repute, Levin had been profoundly affected by his experiences as a war correspondent in Europe, where he had witnessed the liberation of Dachau, Buchenwald and other camps. Already insecure and conflicted about his place in the world (and America) as a Jew, Levin was provoked by these new horrors into a sense of mission: he was determined to bring the full story of the Holocaust to the widest possible audience, Jews and gentiles alike.

When Levin read the Diary, he knew he had found his instrument.  The book had been a critical and financial success in Holland and France, but Otto Frank, Anne’s father, had been unable to find an English-language publisher.  Levin offered his services to Frank, who accepted.           

Over the next two years, Levin tirelessly promoted the Diary in the U.S., acting as an informal agent for Frank. When the book was finally published by Doubleday in 1952, Levin praised it on the front page of The New York Times Book Review (without mentioning his personal involvement). Both Doubleday executives and other observers gave Levin much of the credit for the Diary‘s becoming a best seller in this country.

Meanwhile, Levin was also corresponding with several theatrical producers about adapting the Diary for the stage. The most prominent of these, Cheryl Crawford, agreed to give him the inside track on an adaptation, as did Otto Frank – despite Levin’s lack of playwriting experience.

It was at this point, as Graver recounts in painstaking detail, that things began to go badly. Levin gave the first draft of his adaptation to Crawford, who did not like it; she showed it to her colleague Kermit Bloomgarden, who was even more negative. Frank began to think about using another writer, though he still felt he had an obligation to at least consider Levin. At the same time, Levin insisted that he had “a right” to adapt the book – despite the fact that he and Frank had never signed a formal agreement.

Finally, Frank gave Bloomgarden the go-ahead to produce the play, and Bloomgarden hired a veteran husband-and-wife team of Hollywood scriptwriters, Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, to write it. For Levin, this was the ultimate insult.  Not only was he being deprived of an important creative (and financial) opportunity; even worse, that opportunity was being given to gentiles, whom he felt could not possibly convey the book’s essential message – that Anne and her family were persecuted, and eventually slaughtered, solely because they were Jews.           

When the play opened in October 1955, it confirmed Levin’s worst fears. “Most people,” Graver writes, “adored the Goodrich and Hackett Diary because they felt it transformed horror into something consolatory, inspirational, and even purgatorial… People came out of the theater thinking not of all the eradicated lives and the monstrous implications of the German attempt at genocide, but rather of a smiling young girl who affirmed that ‘In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.'”

Levin sued Frank, Crawford, and Bloomgarden for fraud and breach of contract, and Goodrich and Hackett for plagiarism. He also mounted a campaign in the press in which he asserted that his play had been “suppressed” by the Broadway establishment for being “too Jewish.”  Increasingly paranoid, he claimed that Lillian Hellman, who had recommended the Hacketts to Bloomgarden, was a key figure in the conspiracy. He was convinced that Hellman – who as Graver notes was “an assimilated German-Jew [and] an anti-Zionist” – had determined that only a play reflecting her views would be produced.

The case became a cause célébre in both the Jewish and entertainment communities; at one point, Eleanor Roosevelt was asked by Levin to intervene (she begged off). The ugliest aspect was Levin’s treatment of Otto Frank, a decent man who only wanted to create something positive out of his life-shattering tragedy.  By any standard, Levin’s actions toward him were reprehensible – besides tying him up with litigation, Levin attacked Frank in the press, and wrote him insulting letters that accused him of betraying his daughter’s memory.

Levin’s behavior would normally preclude the reader from having any sympathy for him, and Graver hardly condones it. But the author repeatedly shows that Levin ultimately did more damage to himself than to Frank, or anyone else.  His marriage nearly collapsed; he became alienated from many of his friends (Martha Gellhorn told him bluntly that his adaptation “simply isn’t a very good play… not that the one shown on stage was very good either”); he wasted incalculable amounts of time, money, and energy. And while Levin wrote several best-selling books in the years that followed, his critical reputation was forever damaged by his conduct. (Indeed, it wouldn’t be such a bad thing if this book inspired some readers to take a second look at Levin’s major works, such as Compulsion and The Old Bunch.)           

The court case was settled in 1959, with Levin being paid $15,000 by Frank in exchange for giving up any claim of “rights” to the Diary.But Levin could not let it go. For the rest of his life, he continued lambasting his enemies in print and pushing for a production of his “suppressed” play (which was finally produced in Israel in 1966, to generally good reviews). In his 1974 memoir The Obsession, Levin acknowledged, like a mental patient with periods of lucidity, the irrational nature of his decades-old battle and the crippling effect it had had on his life. Yet he was still unable or unwilling to give it up.

But did Levin in fact have a case?  As the saying goes, even paranoids have enemies; and Graver makes it clear that for all the craziness of Levin’s behavior, his claims were not without merit. It seems likely that Bloomgarden et al. did indeed want a sanitized, de-Judified version of Anne’s story, because they believed such a treatment would appeal to the widest possible audience.  It makes one cringe to read of the play’s director, Garson Kanin, himself Jewish, telling the Hacketts, “The fact that in this play the symbols of persecution and oppression are Jews is incidental.”

Yet in purely commercial terms, one can understand their thinking. Levin’s real problem was that he was battling more than a few individuals. As Graver points out, he was up against the mindset of American popular culture in the Fifties – moderately liberal, optimistic, looking to nudge rather than provoke its audience, preferring Rodgers and Hammerstein to Brecht and Weill.  By refusing to take the “majority” view of Anne’s suffering, he put himself outside the mainstream in that era. It is quite possible that even if his play had been staged on Broadway, it would have gotten bad reviews and a very short run. And then who would Levin have blamed?           

The larger issue remains:  since the Hacketts’ play has been translated into countless languages and performed around the world, has it not fulfilled Levin’s dream, even in a truncated fashion?  And could it have been realized in any other fashion?  Graver does not attempt to answer these questions; perhaps it is still too soon after the original events for anyone to do so.  But he has made an important contribution to the discussion, which makes his book well worth reading.

Originally written for Tikkun magazine, 1996.

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Walter Winchell:  A Novel

By Michael Herr.  Alfred A. Knopf, 1990. 158 pp.

By P.H.I.Berroll

Fifty years ago, The NewYorker devoted an unprecedented six issues to a profile of Walter Winchell – actually, it was more of an attack – by the essayist St.Clair McKelway. It was later published in book form.  On the surface, this seems absurd.  Winchell was not an artist, a statesman (except perhaps in his own mind), or a philosopher.  He was a “reporter” and “broadcaster” in the very loosest sense – his words appeared in a newspaper, and he spoke into a microphone.  But much of what he said and wrote had been given to him by others, and most of it was hardly profound – a potpourri of news “flashes,” jokes, capsule reviews, political commentary, and above all, gossip about celebrities of the day.

Yet he was impossible to ignore – indeed, at that time, he was arguably the most powerful journalist (however one defines the term) in America.  His influence was felt from the halls of Congress to the executive suites of Hollywood; it is estimated that 90% of the adult American population followed his daily columns and his Sunday night broadcasts.  His very name had become iconic:  when John O’Hara referred to “the local Winchell” in his story “Pal Joey,” his readers needed no explanation.  As the saying goes, if he didn’t know you – and mention your name – you probably weren’t worth knowing.

Considering all this, there is no question that Winchell merited serious attention in his day.  But what of the present – given the fact that he later fell so far into obscurity that at his funeral in 1972, the only people in attendance were his daughter, Walda, and a rabbi hired for the occasion?  Does he still have relevance to anyone other than the most devoted historians of popular culture?

The answer is yes, and not just because his life was the classic American rise-and-fall story.  Winchell exploited, and personified, a social phenomenon which predated him, but which he brought to a previously undreamed-of level:  the cult of celebrity, the adulation of the famous and/or accomplished by the majority of “ordinary” Americans.  The effects of this on American journalism, politics, and society in general are still being debated today; as recently as March of this year, Time devoted a cover story to the “new” American gossip industry… strikingly similar to a Newsweek cover piece from the mid-Seventies.

Thus the time would appear to be ripe for another look at Winchell, a true pioneer of that industry. All we have had since his death are a few minor biographies – no one, it seemed, considered his story particularly “commercial.”  Now comes Michael Herr’s Walter Winchell, an attempt to make his life compelling by presenting it, in effect, as a kind of movie-on-paper.  One could regard this as either appropriate or redundant, since that life, even without embellishment, has all the elements of a traditional Hollywood production:  a riveting protagonist, a straightforward narrative, sharp dialogue, supporting characters right out of Central Casting, even a clear moral.  Indeed, the real question is why Herr, a writer as skilled at screenwriting (Full Metal Jacket, Apocalypse Now) as at journalism (Dispatches), chose to render the tale in this fashion.  Why not do it as a pure, straightforward screenplay?

As it turns out, he did.  Herr originally conceived the project as a film, several years ago – at one point, Robert Benton (Kramer vs. Kramer) had been penciled in as director – but it never materialized, for what I imagine were the usual myriad Hollywood reasons.  Yet as he tells us in his rather tortured, overlong preface, “I always meant it to be read, and in that sense thought of it as something ‘more’ than a screenplay… You could call it a screenplay that’s typed like a novel, that reads like a novel but plays like a movie.”

Come again?  Well, in technical terms, what happens is that most of the “scenes” are written as if intended to be filmed, beginning with terse settings of time and place (“A delicatessen on Broadway, early afternoon”) and filled with asides to the reader-as-audience (“We see a train speeding through the night, hear music on the sound track suggestive almost of flight and pursuit”).  Characters both famous and obscure are introduced with capsule descriptions (“A tall, well-dressed man, SHERMAN BILLINGSLEY, comes by”).  Few sections go beyond three pages, and some are nothing more than quick snatches of dialogue:  “Walter, broadcasting with great force:  ‘Listen, Adolf and Benito and Tojo – don’t think the oceans can protect you…We’re coming at you now with everything we’ve got, and it’s plenty!  We did it before, and we can do it again…'”

What we have, then, is a cinematic life depicted in cinematic terms. And while it would be stretching things to say that Herr has created a new literary form in the tradition of Capote and Mailer’s “non-fiction novels” – in most cases, the “screenplay novel” style would be too clumsy and unsubtle – for this particular subject, it works quite well.  The book, like Winchell himself, is fast, loud, aggressive, often funny, sometimes obnoxious, occasionally moving, and never, ever dull (and it would still make a hell of a movie).  But also like its subject, it often conveys a sense of being all surface and no depth; we are too aware of unanswered questions, of vital points left unraised.

The book begins with a long opening scene: Winchell in 1943, at the height of his power, holding court at his personal table in New York’s Stork Club with Billingsley, the owner, and a close friend, Damon Runyon (Ernest Hemingway also drops by). It then flashes back to his childhood in turn-of-the-century Harlem, then still a Jewish neighborhood, before progressing forward.  Herr presents the young Walter, trying to escape his early poverty by cracking the vaudeville circuit. His efforts bring him nothing but failure and humiliation, but at the same time, he develops a rather nasty but enjoyable hobby:  jotting down bits and pieces of overheard “dirt” on his fellow performers, then posting the stories on backstage bulletin boards for everyone to read.  The gimmick gets him attention, then employment on various second-level newspapers… and, in 1929, a column for the Mirror, one of several New York publications owned by legendary press baron William Randolph Hearst.

Over the next three years, Winchell was one of the few Americans whose “stock” went up.  He was featured on the cover of Time, called “a national institution” by Alexander Woolcott; even those who dismissed him as a sort of yente for the masses had to concede that his use of language – the bizarre coinages and alliterations (“infanticipating” for pregnant, “phfft” for romantic breakup), the separation of items by three dots to suggest telegraphic urgency – was unlike anything previously seen in print.

With his entry into broadcasting in 1932, his rise was complete; that breathless, machine-gun voice, suggesting barely controlled hysteria, went out weekly to “Mr. and Mrs. America and all the ships at sea” – and millions stopped their lives to hear the tribune of the famous, granting them a brief, thrilling glimpse into a realm as distant and fabulous as Camelot, or Oz.

But to extend the metaphor, the wizard was really just a small man behind a curtain, grotesquely puffed up with a sense of his own importance.  Some of this may have been rooted in his background; his hardscrabble childhood gave him an overabundance of energy and ambition, common to thousands of young men from similar backgrounds.  But Winchell was not only determined to escape the ghetto; he was obsessed with attention, perpetually craving the spotlight – and achieving that aim made him a monster of egotism, selfishness, and near-sadistic cruelty.

Much of this was not, as one might assume, directed at those whose names, and secrets, appeared in his column; many of his subjects were happy to be mentioned as long as he spelled their names correctly.  But those with less status in his world – including the press agents who provided much of his material – learned to expect a steady diet of abuse, often for the minutest of provocations. And anyone who crossed him could face professional oblivion (“‘Barry Gray is dead, you got it?  Move it around, and make sure everybody understands.  Anybody who goes on his show is dead too…'”).  His neglect of his family was abominable:  his wife was literally driven to drink by his philandering, and his son’s “acting out” included wearing Nazi regalia in public (“‘Just ask yourself,'” sneers Junior, “‘how would you act if you had Walter Winchell for a father?'”).

And the damage done by Winchell went beyond the realm of the personal; loving power in any form, he was, inevitably, drawn into the political sphere, his near-total ignorance in such matters notwithstanding.  At first, the results were praiseworthy: he was ahead of many of his “serious” colleagues in alerting America to the evils of Nazism and exposing its supporters in this country, and his admiration for Franklin Roosevelt – even though it was fortified by FDR’s skillful stroking – was heartfelt and honest.  But with the end of the war and his cold-shouldering by Harry Truman (again, the personal and the political were mixed), Winchell shifted rightward.  He sided with Billingsley, a reactionary bigot, against Josephine Baker when the latter claimed racist treatment at the Stork Club; the ensuing controversy helped drive him into the McCarthy camp, and he became one of the most vicious red-baiters of the era.  His more liberal audiences were permanently alienated, and everyone else found him tiresome – he had been a lonely crusader in his anti-Nazi campaign, but as an anti-Communist, his braying was indistinguishable from the rest of the pack.

After that, his fall was precipitous and unbroken… and the causes were numerous.  When television supplanted radio as the dominant medium in America, Winchell tried to adapt; but his attempt at breaking into TV, in competition with his hated rival Ed Sullivan, was disastrous – when audiences had an image to go with the disembodied voice, they were repelled by “an angry middle-aged man yelling at the camera.”  In print, competitors such as the kindler, gentler Leonard Lyons began encroaching on his turf, and the number of papers carrying Winchell’s column declined from over 1,000 to less than two hundred. Narrating the popular TV series “The Untouchables” kept him in the public eye for a few more years, but as a voice of nostalgia, as much a part of the past as the events he was describing.  His end became official when his last employers, the Mirror and the New York Journal-American, were destroyed by labor disputes, as had happened to the Stork Club. But in truth, he had long since become irrelevant; as the loss of power fed the loss of access and vice versa, he had been reduced to reporting such marginalia as “Gina Lollobrigida never wears a girdle.”

As anyone who knew him could have predicted, Winchell did not go quietly from the scene, but kicking and screaming – and plenty of people were happy to give him a kick of their own on the way down.  Yet if he never completely accepted his fate, the shock of it, at least, seemed to lessen with the passage of time. (Or perhaps he had half-consciously expected it; Herr asserts that Winchell “always knew that fate’s natural and expected malice would do something awful to him, just as it had to all his friends”).  The book’s final image is of Winchell retired in Arizona, his wife and son dead, the latter a suicide.  He’s saluting the flag – a reminder of his patriotism, the one unshakeable value for this child of immigrants who symbolized the best and worst aspects of the American Dream.

In presenting evidence for the “what” of Winchell’s importance, Herr has done an excellent job.  But as this is a novel and not a critical biography, he inevitably leaves us curious about the “why” and “how.” Why would a sixth-grade dropout of unsurpassed vulgarity – his favorite forms of exercise, he said, were “bending, stretching, and coming” – be treated as respected oracle by so many of his countrymen?  How could someone who once referred to Paris as a seaport and to Emile Zola as a woman, who walked out on Waiting For Godot insisting that it was “a hoax,” be taken seriously, to the point where a word from him could make or break careers and reputations?

To answer this, we have to place Winchell in the context of this nation’s cultural history.  Of course, “dishing the dirt” is a basic human impulse; we’ve had village gossips for as long as we’ve had villages.  But in America, where individualism and its corollary, privacy, are sacrosanct, gossip – the revealing of secrets, essentially a violation of privacy – has taken on the particular lure of the forbidden.

This is especially true when those being gossiped about are “prominent” in one way or another.  Since we are supposedly a nation without fixed classes, where every citizen has an equal chance in life, it inevitably follows that as Kurt Vonnegut once observed, “the [real] political parties in America …are Winners and Losers,” and that the latter will often take a not-so-secret enjoyment in seeing the former brought low (e.g., Donald Trump, Leona Helmsley, Claus von Bulow, etc., etc.).

Thus it is not surprising that publishers first discovered that gossip could sell newspapers in the late 19th century, when a distinct American aristocracy emerged: the “captains of industry” – later “robber barons” – whose lavish entertaining and consuming habits became the stuff of dreams for the less-fortunate reading public.  Many papers began running a “society column,” a record of the comings and goings of the wealthy (primarily the established wealthy; those whose riches were too nouveau, or who had the wrong religion or accent, need not apply).

In those days, the coverage was respectful, even adulatory – it was assumed that readers were content to know about the parties and possessions of the upper class, not their scandals. But Winchell changed all that.

Entering the field at a time when heroes and fantasy figures were suddenly emerging from previously obscure or nonexistent areas – radio, movies, professional sports, even organized crime – he tapped into the new hungers of the public by democratizing the pantheon of fame.  Winchell opened his pages to anyone, and for any reason; attracting his attention, for anything from a riveting stage performance to a juicy sex scandal, was the only criterion.  At the same time, he added an undertone of adolescent nastiness, like someone painting a mustache on the Mona Lisa; sure, anybody could get in, but it could just as easily be as an accused “swish” or adulterer as for writing a literary masterpiece (“‘Al Capone,’ he says in the book, ‘[is] as famous as Al Jolson.'”).

And the very arrogance that made Winchell so loathsome as a human being helped fuel his professional success.  No matter how powerful he became, he always maintained the persona of the outsider, the tough “little guy” exposing and bringing down the big shots.  (This was not entirely a fantasy. Though as assimilated, and nonobservant, as many Jews of that period, Winchell could still be graphically reminded of his origins; he was once denounced by Mississippi congressman John Rankin as “a little slime-mongering kike” – this was duly entered in the Congressional Record.)  And as someone who had spent so many years in the futile pursuit of headliner status, he could identify with all those Americans who might, however vaguely, harbor similar dreams – and resentments.  It helped that he was operating in an era when such feelings were in abundance:  we tend to forget that many Americans in the 1920’s weren’t invited to the Jazz Age party, and during the Depression, the party crowd had become an even smaller minority.  Indeed, the greater social and economic security of Americans in the postwar years could have been a factor in Winchell’s loss of popularity.

What about his legacy?  A scene in the Stork Club, late in the book, depicts Winchell watching “Roy Cohn… dancing with a pretty young woman.” It brings to mind Barbara Walters, who occasionally dated Cohn in the ‘50s and went on to become, in a sense, Winchell’s journalistic “daughter.”  Walters’ celebrity journalism, where Mother Teresa and Eddie Murphy are assigned equal significance – once again, fame in itself, rather than how one attains it, is all that matters – is essentially latter-day Winchellism. And his influence can be seen throughout American media, from People to “Entertainment Tonight” to countless local news shows. In Herr’s words, “If people go around today treating themselves like celebrities because not to be a celebrity is just too awful, we may have Walter Winchell to thank.”

But there are differences, both pro and con.  There is no single figure who possesses, or abuses, as much power as Winchell – whatever happened to “Miss Rona” Barrett or Joyce Haber? – which is just as well.  On the other hand, gossip itself has become all-pervasive in ways that Winchell never would have imagined, to the point where celebrity dirt is assigned equal or greater status with events of truly historic import.  (In that recent Time story, Carl Bernstein noted that “supposedly responsible newspapers [gave] over Page One to Donald and Ivana Trump” just as Nelson Mandela was being liberated and the Allies of World War II were approving German reunification.)  Winchell, at least, understood the difference between the serious and the trivial; if Liz Smith or Diana “The Ear” McClelland wouldn’t presume to make foreign policy pronouncements, neither would Winchell have tried to get a Trump-like story on the front page.  Herr recreates a 1939 broadcast where Winchell spends ten minutes attacking Congressional isolationists before throwing in a tidbit “‘just for those of you who think I ought to stick to Broadway gossip'” about a starlet’s presumed bed-hopping.

But one similarity between Winchell and his successors is clear:  the basic impetus for their work is still negative.  Smith et al. may proclaim their essential niceness, just as positive items such as marriages and “legitimate” births were a staple for Winchell.  But as any honest editor will tell you, it’s the scandals that really boost circulation; and when people refer to “juicy” gossip, they’re not talking about parties where no one misbehaved.

And perhaps this is a good explanation for the latter-day revival of the gossip industry. Once again, we are in a period of great economic and social uncertainty, where a small, loud group parties on while everyone else presses their collective nose against the window, hoping to see something embarrassing.  Given current conditions, I wouldn’t bet on the industry losing steam any time before the next century.

Originally written for Tikkun magazine, 1992.

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The Inheritance:  How Three Families and America Moved From Roosevelt to Reagan

By Samuel G. Freedman.  Simon & Schuster, 1996.  464 pp.

By P.H.I.Berroll

In a photograph at the front of this book, three fortyish political activists – Frank Trotta, Jr., Leslie Maeby, and Tim Carey – stand together at a restaurant in Peekskill, N.Y.  Peekskill is the home base of conservative Republican George Pataki, who was elected New York’s Governor in 1994 on promises to cut taxes and spending (i.e., social-service programs) and bring back the death penalty.  Both Carey and Maeby worked for Pataki’s campaign, and it’s a safe bet that Trotta, a lifelong Republican, gave him his vote.

A progressive could be forgiven for being repelled by this trio of plump, smug reactionaries – I certainly was.  But it is a measure of Samuel G. Freedman’s achievement in The Inheritance that one finishes the book with a deeper understanding of the three… and a feeling of sadness at losing them to the “enemy” camp.

I say “losing” because Carey, Maeby, and Trotta all came from families – Irish, Polish, and Italian respectively – who had an allegiance to the Democrats that rivaled their love of America itself.  Those families typified the working-class Catholics who formed the bedrock of the party for decades, especially after the election of Franklin Roosevelt in 1932.  But the younger generation is symbolic of the “Reagan Democrats” who helped return the G.O.P. to power almost 50 years later.

In The Inheritance, Freedman, a former New York Times reporter and author of two previous books – Upon This Rock, a portrait of a black church, and Small Victories, about a teacher in an inner-city public school – has put a human face on this phenomenon, using a skillful blend of the “macro” of national trends and statistics and the “micro” minutiae of everyday lives.  I can’t recommend the book strongly enough for Tikkun readers, for it addresses one of the most frequently discussed questions in these pages:  why have millions of voters from blue-collar backgrounds abandoned the Democrats, even though it seemed clearly against their economic interests to do so?  The theme of The Inheritance is that for these voters, it’s not just the economy, stupid – gut issues have competed with pocketbook issues for primacy, and in recent years have frequently won.

Freedman begins his story with one grandparent from each of his three families.  All of them had truly Dickensian childhoods.  Silvio Burigo was raised by relatives after his immigrant father committed suicide; he left school at an early age to become a plumber.  Joseph Obrycki’s father, a leader of the Polish community in Baltimore, was a business failure, and the teenaged Joe became the principal support of his family – as a numbers runner.  Lizzie Sanford (later Garrett) and her widowed Irish mother fled the poverty of Liverpool and settled in New York City’s Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood, where things were not much better.

The Depression years found all three with families of their own, struggling to get by.  For Burigo and Garrett, support for the Democrats was a matter of bread-on-the-table survival:  Roosevelt promised economic improvement and a social-welfare safety net.  For Obrycki, now active in Baltimore’s Democratic machine, it was about political loyalty.  But in varying degrees, they all came to establish a deeper emotional connection to the party (class resentment was also a factor – in their eyes, “Republican” meant “rich Protestant”).  And they helped spread the gospel to their relatives, friends, and co-workers.

For more than three decades, more loyal Democratic voters could not be found.  But then cracks in the bedrock began to appear, not among the older generation – though Burigo was angered by the government-ordered integration of his union in the 1960’s – but with their children and grandchildren, who knew not FDR.  For them, liberal-Democratic politics came to be seen not as a source of aid and protection, but as an enemy.  And the fault lines, as Freedman illustrates, were often created by the clash of opposing social values.

As a young military policeman, Sanford’s grandson Tim Carey stood guard at the Pentagon during the massive antiwar protest of October 1967.  It awakened his class consciousness, but in a radically different sense from his grandmother:  he saw himself as being attacked by college kids with draft deferments while he and his buddies were “bearing the burden they shirked.”  (With his reporter’s eye for the telling detail, Freedman depicts Carey “[seeing] the first can fly…Tomato soup, he noted as it lay dented on the ground; he had stocked plenty in his days at Shopwell.”)

Frank Trotta, grandson of Burigo, was also alienated by the antiwar movement’s excesses, and resentful that tenants of the complex where his father worked as a janitor were given low-rent apartments, on which many neglected the upkeep, by the government.  And both he and Carey were angered by the apparent ease with which nonwhite students were given admission and scholarships – for which they had to struggle – to New York’s state university system.

Joe Obrycki’s daughter Vilma, meanwhile, had left Baltimore with her husband, Jack Maeby; they eventually settled in Colonie, N.Y., a suburb of Albany, the state capital.  In their case, liberalism had done its job all too well:  towns like Colonie grew with plenty of help from government programs (e.g., FHA housing loans and the interstate highway system).  Yet local Republicans thrived by attacking Albany’s Democrats for their “bloated payroll” and other financial excesses.  All across the country, suburban, formerly blue-collar voters were buying into a similar ideology.  And it was passed down to their children – including the Maebys’ daughter Leslie, who eventually became finance director for the state Republican party.

It is disheartening to read about Maeby, Tim Carey (a campaign strategist) and Frank Trotta (a lawyer) expending their energies on people like Pataki and Alfonse D’Amato.  And Freedman suggests that this was not inevitable:  he devotes a chapter to Tim’s uncle, Richie Garrett, whose ecological concerns made him a Democratic activist in the late ’60s.  But he also depicts, convincingly, the political incompetence and arrogance that helped drive other such voters from the Democrats.

Indeed, arrogance, and elitism, is a recurring motif in the book.  Freedman doesn’t object to most Left/liberal ideology; but he makes it clear that if it had been presented to these people in a dialogue of equals, instead of with the attitude of we know best, and you must be a racist/fascist/militarist if you disagree, the wholesale defections of the ’80s might have been avoided.  He suggests, for example, that while Silvio Burigo was something of a racist, bigotry alone did not explain his resistance, and that of his fellow plumbers, to integrating their union.  It was more a matter of ethnic solidarity – membership was one of the few things these men could pass on to their sons and nephews – and this attitude, however narrow-minded, could have at least have been addressed by the union’s opponents.

What of the future?  At the end of The Inheritance, Freedman sounds pessimistic:  “When [the older] generation passes, so will the collective memory of the New Deal.”  But while the South, that other one-time bastion of Democratic solidarity, may be irretrievably lost, the rest of the country, judging from the election of 1996, is still up for grabs.  And if there is any hope of winning back the Reagan Democrats and avoiding the creation of new ones, the lessons of this book must be put into practice.

Originally written for Tikkun magazine, 1998.

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By P.H.I.Berroll
When Richard Nixon resigned the Presidency, I was a college sophomore. His years in office overlapped most of my adolescence. Perhaps that was the reason — beyond his conduct while in the White House — that I hated him as I have not hated any other President, even Ronald Reagan, before or since. Most teenagers have a degree of hostility toward their fathers, and the President is the ultimate patriarch, Big Daddy to the nation. Certainly Nixon himself embraced that concept when he declared in 1972 that “the average American is like the child in the family.”

But then, Nixon always provoked strong feelings. The term “Nixon-haters” enjoyed wide circulation, while I cannot recall seeing “Johnson-haters,” “Carter-haters,” etc. in print. And while few outside his immediate family could be said to love him, those who defended him did so with undying passion, up to and beyond the end of his disgraced presidency. (Just consider Bob Dole, not exactly known as a Sensitive Guy, breaking into tears while speaking at Nixon’s funeral.)

And this is why anyone expecting Oliver Stone’s film Nixon to be a straightforward recitation of historical events was bound to be disappointed. Any treatment other than a no-frills documentary would have to include an emotional component. Any filmmaker who lived through Nixon’s presidency would find it difficult to keep his own personal feelings out of the film — particularly Stone, who has become famous (or notorious) for grafting his own obsessions onto his subject matter.

And it’s not surprising that Nixon has provoked strong – and often negative – reactions across the political spectrum. On the right, George Will has compared Stone to Leni Riefenstahl; the centrist Richard Reeves has denounced the movie as “pretty shabby stuff…the man who made [it] seems to have tunnel vision.” And the left? I have a friend, a veteran of SDS and the 1968 Columbia strike, who refuses to see the film. It has nothing to do with his feelings about Nixon – he just has no respect for anything Stone has to say on the subject.

There is, undeniably, something in Nixon to offend everyone — too harsh for his defenders, too “understanding” for his attackers. And I doubt that Stone would want it any other way; he has always operated on a visceral level, without apology. But too many critics have been unable or unwilling to consider the film on those grounds. They have, instead, couched the discussion of Nixon in terms of accuracy, condemning Stone for allegedly rewriting or fabricating history. Such attacks were to be expected after Stone attempted such a rewrite in JFK (1990). It’s not surprising that he would be held to a higher standard than other filmmakers when dealing with historical events. As with Nixon himself, his enemies have their reasons, and they are legitimate.

But that doesn’t mean that their objections are entirely fair. As John Dean, one of several Watergate figures who served as a consultant to the film, said in an interview: “(W)hen people see Schindler’s List (or) Apollo 13, they don’t ask these questions.” Or, one might add, when they see Danny DeVito’s Hoffa or Spike Lee’s Malcolm X. It all seems to depend on the subject matter, or the director’s reputation.

Certainly, Nixon has plenty of distortions, inaccuracies, and what David Letterman used to call “writer’s embellishments.” Stone implies that Nixon (Anthony Hopkins) was connected to the Bay of Pigs invasion; there is no evidence of this. Stone isn’t content to repeat the allegation that J. Edgar Hoover was gay; he shows Hoover (Bob Hoskins, about twenty years too young for the part) provoking boyfriend Clyde Tolson by flirting with a cute Latino houseboy. And while I am no fan of Henry Kissinger, was it really fair to have Paul Sorvino play him as a devious, amoral bootlicker with no redeeming qualities? (At the other extreme, the recent cable-TV movie Kissinger and Nixon depicted him as a sensitive peacemaker — and Nixon as a bloodthirsty, football-obsessed buffoon whose opening line is “Where’s my Jewboy?”)

But Stone has not claimed to present the verbatim historical record; he wants to convey the emotional truth of Nixon and those around him. Of course we have no way of knowing what Nixon and his wife said to each other when they were alone; but the exchanges between Hopkins and Joan Allen’s bitter, defeated Pat Nixon jibe with everything we know about their troubled relationship. And he also, at times brilliantly, shows the connection between Nixon’s twisted psyche and the larger currents of the society in which he lived.

Nixon ran for office eight times; he won all but twice. Obviously, this was not because of his wit, charm, or good looks, or simply because a majority of the voters agreed with his specific policy positions — or through a combination of good timing and slick p.r., as many liberals would like to believe. Nixon’s genius was in his ability to plug into the darkest emotions of his audience — the fears and hatreds which (try as he might to suppress them) he felt as deeply as they. And those feelings, as Stone shows us, were rooted in Nixon’s Southern California childhood.

By all accounts, Nixon’s early years were grim. His beloved older brother, Harold, died of tuberculosis, as did a younger sibling, Arthur; many observers believed he felt guilty for having survived. Nixon’s father was a humorless, bigoted petty tyrant. His mother, Hannah, was famously described by her son as “a saint.” But it was a saintliness like that of Lady Marchmain in Brideshead Revisited — an implacable self-righteousness, guaranteed to drive her family crazy. In the film, Hannah (Mary Steenburgen) sets impossible standards for her son; she reacts with pleasure when young Richard pledges to be “your humble dog.” (In reality, Nixon said this in a letter to his grandmother, but we get the point.) Both parents preach a gospel of hard work and absolute self-reliance, where nothing is to be expected from other people — what you have, you earn for yourself. “Strength in this world,” says Hannah when Harold dies. “Happiness in the next.”

Such a worldview lends itself all too easily to intolerance and mean-spiritedness toward those who do not live by the same standards. Nixon often described his family as poor, but more accurately, they were lower middle-class — the kind of people whom historians and liberals tend to downplay, or forget completely. They were not the noble, compassionate poor of The Grapes of Wrath; like many Californians, they would have disdained Steinbeck’s Okies as lazy parasites who had failed because they had loose morals or didn’t work hard enough. These were the Americans who never accepted the New Deal, preferring a crude Social Darwinism to Franklin Roosevelt’s vision of a mutually supportive American community.

Though Nixon’s own views became more refined during his years in Washington, he never forgot his roots, and his people knew it. “People vote not out of love, but fear,” he says in the film. The politics of fear, and resentment, was always the key to his appeal — resentment of the despised Other, be it those on the bottom of the economic ladder or the liberals and intellectuals who championed them. (Nixon never went after minorities, but he didn’t have to; his audiences knew that the people he attacked were often members or allies of those groups.)

It was no great stretch for Nixon to brand many of his opponents as “un-American.” On a certain level, he truly believed this. They were in opposition to the established order, which provoked his authoritarian streak. They were often critical of the fairness of American capitalism, and such criticism was anathema to him. Rich liberals, reporters who seemed to share their attitudes, the Eastern Establishment (“They don’t trust us… because we speak for the American people”), the “spoiled rotten” college protesters who need “a good old-fashioned trip to my Ohio father’s woodshed” — all were linked in Nixon’s passionate hatred. He achieved success by channeling and exploiting that hatred. But when he gave it free rein, as he acknowledged in his final speech to his White House staff, it eventually destroyed him.

There are moments in the film when Stone gets off this track. At times he indulges in simplistic Freudianism (Kissinger: “Can you imagine what this man might have been had he ever been loved?”). At others, he attempts to show Nixon as a schlemiel at the mercy of more powerful players — Hoover, the Mafia, the CIA, etc. In a sense, he was, but of forces less vague, and less monstrous, than Stone suggests.

Stone gives us silly, invented sequences where Nixon visits a sinister cabal of Texas billionaires (led by “J.R.” himself, Larry Hagman), who ply him with liquor and loose women to get him to do their bidding. But I wish he had depicted the actual meeting of a group of Southern California businessmen in 1946. These men operated quite openly, and they respected the American system of government; but they hated the New Deal, unions, and any other restrictions on their right to make a buck. They chose a young lawyer and Navy veteran to do their bidding. Richard Nixon did so, with no reluctance, by smearing and demonizing his opponent. And the die was cast, as inexorably as for Macbeth or Richard III.

That first campaign, and the decade of failure and frustration that preceded it, are worthy of a film in themselves (Young Mr. Nixon?). But Stone did not intend his film to be the last word on its subject — at the end of Nixon, we are told that of the 4,000 Watergate tapes, only 60 have been made available to the public. This film is a useful starting point, but there is a great deal more to learn about this man, and what he represented.

In one scene, Howard Hunt (Ed Harris) calls Nixon “the darkness reaching out for the darkness.” That the line is another of Stone’s inventions is ultimately beside the point; what matters is the essential truth of the comment. And the darkness did not die with Nixon. Bush and Dole, Gingrich and Buchanan – more than a few of his successors and acolytes successfully exploited it. We ignore this at our peril.

Originally written for Tikkun magazine, 1995.

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