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| Victor Navasky | |
Victor Navasky, author and longtime head of the Nation, died on January 23. He was 90.
Navasky's best-known book was Naming Names, which the New York Times called "a breakthrough chronicle of the Hollywood blacklisting era." Published in 1980, Naming Names won the National Book Award in 1982 for general nonfiction paperback.
"The book focused on the ex-Communist writers, directors and producers who testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee and chose to inform on colleagues," the Times wrote. "Critics praised the book for its fairness and its compassion for people grappling with wrenching choices. However, some conservative critics said it was more inclined to denigrate the so-called informers, like the novelist Budd Schulberg and the director Elia Kazan, whose tortured explanations for their decisions Mr. Navasky found illogical."
Richard Sennett wrote in the New York Times Book Review that Navasky's "sympathies are clearly with those who refused to name names. But he refuses to prejudge the informers, to treat them simply as cowards or monsters."
The Washington Post quoted Navasky: "Those who resisted the committee and refused to name names were acting in the spirit of the Constitution and defending the First Amendment. Those who named names ended up contributing to the worst aspects of the domestic Cold War."
Another major title was Kennedy Justice (1971), about the Justice Department when Robert F. Kennedy was Attorney General in the early 1960s. Joseph Kraft called it "probably the best book ever done on the workings of a great department of American government."
And in 2005, Navasky wrote A Matter of Opinion, which the AP called "a memoir and a passionate defense of free expression." The book won the George K. Polk Book Award.
In A Matter of Opinion, Navasky wrote, "I was, I guess, what would be called a left liberal, although I never thought of myself as all that left. I believed in civil rights and civil liberties, I favored racial integration, I thought responsibility for the international tensions of the cold war was equally distributed between the United States and the U.S.S.R."
His most recent book was The Art of Controversy: Political Cartoons and Their Enduring Power, which was published in 2013.
At the Nation, from 1978 to 2005, Navasky published and encouraged such writers as Alexander Cockburn, Christopher Hitchens, Calvin Trillin, Toni Morrison, Eric Foner, Katha Pollitt and Katrina vanden Heuvel. From 1972 to 1976, he wrote "In Cold Print," a monthly column on the publishing world for the New York Times Book Review. (He was an editor at the New York Times Magazine before he joined the Nation.)
Navasky was also at the center of a case that tested the principle of fair use of copyrighted material. In 1979, the Nation obtained an early copy of A Time to Heal, former President Gerald Ford's memoir, and printed extensive excerpts from it. Harper & Row sued for copyright infringement; the Nation argued it was fair use of the book. The Supreme Court sided with Harper & Row, and the Nation had to pay damages of $12,500.
Navasky's busy career included his early founding and editing of Monocle, a political satirical magazine; his stint at the New York Times; managing Ramsey Clark's 1974 losing campaign against Senator Jacob Javits; teaching at Columbia University; chairing the Columbia Journalism Review; and contributing to NPR's Marketplace. Among the many awards he won was the I.F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence from Harvard's Nieman Foundation for Journalism in 2017.