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PARTISAN REVIEW
perceived by readers. There probably is no issue where some reader does
not have a grievance, claiming that you were partial. The challenge in
writing for a newspaper like the
Times,
where the power is so immense
and everything that is said is so important, is this effort. One has to dis–
tinguish between the times one has actually made one's best efforts to
assess the truth and establish an impartial perspective, and when one
fools oneself into thinking one has done so. As a reporter one necessar–
ily approaches any subject with a ready-made view of the world, which
affects what questions are asked, what is seen, and what is missed. In
reporting a story I have to ask myself: can I set all that aside when it
comes time to write the story? There are plenty of examples of well–
meaning, high- achieving journalism, which, thirty to forty years later,
are first drafts that should never have become second drafts.
John Patrick Diggins:
About the Solzhenitsyn affair. David Remnick,
who is now the editor of the
New Yorker,
once called me wanting to get
together. He asked me why was there no response to the Gulag in the
United States. I didn't have an answer then. The next morning it came
to me. There was much response in Western Europe, because in these
countries there were large Communist Parties and major intellectuals
like Jean-Paul Sartre denying the slave labor camps. But in the United
States, many intellectuals already knew about it and Soviet Russia was
already identified as a villain and so forth. So, it wasn't really as news–
worthy in the United States as it was in Western Europe. But it came as
a great shock, particularly to French students, some of whom had been
Maoist. Then all of them repudiated communism and became neocon–
servatives or whatnot. So the shock of recognition, I think, was much
greater over there than here, and it was not just confined to the
New
York Times;
it just was not a big issue.
Edward Rothstein:
I didn't have that particular sense of the Gulag. I
thought that when Solzhenitsyn was writing those books they really did
have that kind of impact. But I did have that impression when it came
to a book that was published a few years ago in France,
The Black Book
of Communism.
That became a huge subject of discussion in France; it
had a tremendous amount of interesting material in it. But for me, and
I guess for most other intellectuals at that late date, the basic ideas were
so well known they hardly needed to be discussed. Those who didn't
know them had their heads so far deep in the sand that further discus–
sions would go nowhere. I think that fifteen years earlier, that book
