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PARTISAN REVIEW
victimhood. Any news, particularly of such a historic nature, that would
soften a
Times
reader's sense of black victimhood was disallowed. Now,
this is the crassest kind of bias in journalism and, I think, very destruc–
tive, for reasons I don't think I need to explain to this audience.
There are many other such stories that affect virtually every part of
the paper-in the reporting side of the paper as well as the editorial side.
This was a pervasive way of dealing with stories that would lend them–
selves to political censorship. One of them involved the writer and
philosopher Sidney Hook. Back in the fifties, Sidney Hook was a
favorite contributor to the
New York Times.
He published articles in the
Sunday Magazine;
he often did front page reviews in the
Sunday Book
Review.
I remember particularly his long and tremendously interesting
review of Whittaker Chambers's
Witness
on the front page of the
Sun–
day Book Review,
which helped to make that book a bestseller. That
was in the fifties. But in the seventies, Sidney Hook's name was unoffi–
cially blacklisted, as a lot of people who were then considered unrecon–
structed anti-communists were no longer welcome in the paper. There
was a two-year period in the seventies when Sidney Hook published
three books, none of which were reviewed in the
Times.
Many of these
dealt with topical subjects. In one of them there was a piece in which he
excoriated the political dissembling of Lillian Hellman, for example.
The whole book wasn't about that, but there was a fairly lengthy
account of it. Lillian Hellman was news. She had just published
Scoundrel Time
with an introduction by Garry Wills, in which Wills
described Harry Truman as the man who started the Cold War. He
somehow never got around to mentioning an obscure figure named
Stalin in this introduction. Sidney Hook's book was one of three vol–
umes. Suddenly, he was a nonperson at the
New York Times .
Needless to say, he was upset about it. Sidney was then doing some
writing for the
American Scholar,
where our mutual friend Joe Epstein
was the editor. (That was before he got caught in one of these webs and
was fired for political reasons. But that's a different story.) In the course
of a conversation, Hook complained to Epstein that not only could he
not write for the
Times
or for some of these mainstream publications
that had been eager to welcome him some years earlier, but he couldn't
even get his books reviewed. Joe Epstein said, "Well, I'll call my friend
Hilton Kramer. He knows his way around the
Times.
He might have
some advice for you." Joe called me, and I was pretty upset. I have to
mention that though I had been read ing Sidney Hook since my student
days, and bad been writing for
Partisan Review
and
Commentary
and
a lot of the places where Sidney Hook had written, I had never actually
