THE MEDIA AND OUR COUNTRY'S AGENDA
S77
met him at that time. I told Joe, "Well, this is a long shot, but I think
you ought to tell Hook to telephone Abe Rosenthal," who was then the
executive editor of the
Times.
Now a lot of my conservative friends
would ask me, "Isn't Abe Rosenthal a conservative?" because he was
part of a dining group with Bill Buckley and a few other conservative
writers. I always had a ready answer: "Yes, Abe is a conservative. Two
days a week. And on the other days he's hiring people like Seymour
Hirsch." But despite a wobble here and a compromise there, he is an
anti-communist. He spent too much time as a reporter in Warsaw to
give that up. I said, "I think you ought to tell Sidney to call Abe Rosen–
thal and say that he would hate to believe that there was a blacklist at
the
New York Times."
Sidney took the advice. He called Abe Rosenthal
and said that his three books had gone unreviewed, and he would hate
to believe he was blacklisted. Abe Rosenthal went into orbit. He called
in Harvey Shapiro, who was then the editor of the
Sunday
Book
Review,
and demanded an explanation as to why these books had not
been reviewed. Harvey explained that there was
sort of
a policy against
reviewing books of essays, which of course, everybody knew wasn't
true. Abe Rosenthal said, "I want a review of either the three books or
the most recent one in the next issue that goes to press." Harvey
Shapiro, who probably didn't care one way or another about the work
of Sidney Hook, was clearly on the spot. I think he understood his job
was on the line and, without knowing any of this prior skullduggery
that I had been part of, called me. He said, "Are you a friend of Sidney
Hook?" and I could say honestly that I had never met him. He said,
"Look, we're old friends. Would you do me a big favor and review his
book?" This is how Sidney Hook got reviewed in the
New York Times.
As far as I know, he's never been reviewed again.
Now these were disturbing, irritating, really unforgivably malicious
examples of liberal media bias . But the real whopping story was the
Solzhenitsyn saga . The
Times
had a policy, more than a policy, a cam–
paign against Solzhenitsyn. Solzhenitsyn was kicked out of the Soviet
Union in what promised for a while to be a brilliant policy decision by
the Kremlin, because the Kremlin was gambling on the fact that Solzhen–
itsyn was so difficult a person that he was bound to antagonize the
American media. And they weren't wrong about that. When Solzhenit–
syn first arrived in this country, as some of you may recall, the AFL-CIO
organized a banquet in his honor in Washington, at which Solzhenitsyn
would give his first public speech in the United States. This was a few
weeks before his Harvard commencement address, and I didn't know
anything about this. I found out because Tom Kahn, who was working
