Whoever it was who said that journalism is the first rough draft of history was, presumably, a journalist. For no historian would ever suppose such a thing. And what better proof is needed than the periodic spectacle of journalists attempting to behave as historians?
Comes now the New York Times Magazine, which observed its centennial on April 14 by publishing a lush, slightly thicker than usual edition gleaning (in editor Jack Rosenthal’s words) “bursts of passion and energy” now bequeathed to posterity. To recapture those “moments of memorable writing,” Rosenthal explains, excerpts were presented in chronological order; but, he goes on, “we were struck as we kept reading to see how much powerful writing was provoked by enduring subjects like women, civil rights, Vietnam, and South Africa.” Enduring? More like incessant. So here, then, we know we are in the realm of the journalist — even worse, the Baby Boom journalist. In a hundred years of history, what matters is the world since the Baby Boom began; what endures is the product of the past quarter century.
Most striking, in all its pages, is what cannot be found. The world before 1960 or so can scarcely be discerned; the world before 1940 is practically invisible.
There is one brief, quirky piece set in World War I; there are eight dispatches from Vietnam. From the founding of the magazine in 1896 until the eve of World War II — the “Early Years,” as the editors call them — nearly half the 20th century is artfully dismissed with an airy visit to the Hamptons, four paragraphs about state senator Franklin Roosevelt, two bird’s- eye views of Adolf Hitler, vignettes of Joe Louis and Henry Ford, and nothing whatsoever about the Bolshevik revolution, psycho-analysis, the modernist schools in any of the arts, the Progressive movement, Prohibition, the crash, the Depression, Charlie Chaplin, the talkies, the Armory show, the Armistice, or Aimee Semple McPherson.
Of war, there is nothing about Manchuria, or Korea, or the Marne, or the Somme, or the Bulge, or the Chinese or Spanish civil wars. But there are Bosnia and Beirut and Frances FitzGerald and David Halberstam and “Ho Chi Minh on the Move” against the French.
Of literature, no men tion is made of E Scott Fitzgerald, W.H. Auden, T.S. Eliot, Sherwood Anderson, Evelyn Waugh, William Faulkner, Jean Cocteau, Robert Frost, Thomas Hardy, Franz Kafka, George Orwell, Alberto Moravia, E.M. Forster, Vladimir Nabokov, H.L. Mencken, Boris Pasternak, Ezra Pound, Edith Wharton, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Luigi Pirandello, Wallace Stevens, Virginia Woolf, Henry James, Paul Valery, Willa Cather, William Butler Yeats, or Rainer Maria Rilke.
Space is found, however, for Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Norman Mailer (“The emotional meat of the heart might be free of the common bile”), Joyce Carol Oates, Joyce Maynard (“My generation is special because of what we missed rather than what we got”), and Delmore Schwartz on Marilyn Monroe. Meanwhile, Leo Tolstoy, who once wrote an essay for the New York Times Magazine, is banished to make room for monologist Spalding Gray (“So everyone takes their clothes off and lines up like this huddling mob of naked refugees”) and articles editor Gerald Marzorati, trailing Salman Rushdie around London.
Of science, there is nothing about the theory of relativity, DNA, antibiotics, the fight against cancer, or splitting the atom — not even about the Bomb, a startling omission that would not have occurred in the nuclear-minded 1980s. And in this century of medical science’s greatest triumphs, the cynical reader may guess in advance which topics are included: toxic shock syndrome, breast cancer, and AIDS. No classical music, of course, or jazz, or opera, but a tribute to Woodstock (“It only made the world a little less uptight”) and a plastered Janis Joplin (“Such a strange, unsettled mix of defiance and hesitancy, vulnerability and strengths”).
Where contemporary feminism is concerned, no dissenting voices may be heard on any page: It’s all Vivian Gornick, Bella Abzug, Susan Brownmiller, Kate Millett, even Susan B. Anthony II and a locker roomful of sweating highschool athletes. One woman named Mrs. Arthur M. Dodge makes the case against votes for women (1915); but otherwise, it’s forever 1972 and the Equal Rights Amendment is marching toward passage. Katha Pollitt is enamored of abortion on demand; Gloria Steinem is enamored of herself.
Indeed, once the distant past is thankfully behind them, the editors descend upon familiar ground, retooling the recent past to present-day perspective. From the 1950s, we are once again acquainted with Sen. Joe McCarthy, Jack Kerouac, and John F. Kennedy; you would never have known that Dwight D. Eisenhower had lived, or Bishop Sheen, Adlai Stevenson, Helen Keller, Dean Acheson, Norman Rockwell, Charles de Gaulle, David Riesman, or Robert Taft.
You would learn, however, about the courtier spirit, which the Times seems to nurture. Here is Herbert L. Matthews on Fidel Castro: “Apparently it is hard for some to understand how otherwise he can work so feverishly for 20 or 21 hours a day, every day without a break. But the answer is simple; he has the build of a professional football ball player and the strength of a bull.” This note of adoration is frequently struck: From Robert Lipsyte on Muhammad All (“Youth and light and magic, a Technicolor genie in a bottle- green world”); from Mel Gussow on Meryl Streep, and Joanne Stang on Woody Allen (“What Allen projects . . . is wistful futility”); from Anne Taylor Fleming on Truman Capote (“He sees everything and can make stories out of everyone”); and from William Serrin on Jesse Jackson (“How he can preach. He is perhaps the finest preacher in the country . . . as good as, perhaps better than, Malcolm or Martin. Oral Roberts? Billy Graham? They are run-of- the-mill honkies compared to Jesse”).
For the 1970s, there is J. Anthony Lukas on the Watergate scandal to tell us all we need to know of Richard M. Nixon. There is a somber exploration of the soul of Jimmy Carter, and Merle Miller’s declaration of homosexuality. The 1980s are slightly more varied, but not by much: There is greed, Donald Trump, the Gary Hart affair, a guffaw or two at Dan Quayle’s expense, and poor Andy Warhol on the threshold of death. What, no essay on the homeless? No mention of Ronald Reagan? Mere oversights, no doubt.
And yet, toward the end, a pattern seems to form. By the 1980s and the first half of the 90s, as the century is waning, there’s a mournful, disturbing, almost elegiac tone to the picture Jack Rosenthal is piecing together. The battles of the culture war are starting to be lost, or so James Atlas seems to think. Salman Rushdie faces death. The Communist collapse seems to agitate the world. Chinese dissidents are shot. The Argentine writer Jacobo Timerman is tortured. Nazi Klaus Barbie taunts the French. Bosnia is drenched in blood. The specter of AIDS stalks the land. Right-wing survivalists retreat into the woods, and Howell Raines stages a strategic withdrawal: fly-fishing for a while, then riding poor Grady, his family’s old servant, to a Pulitzer prize, refreshing himself for the challenge of conservatism. TMaybe history, for these journalists, is coming to an end: The Baby Boom editors are starting to slow down, and the last half of the century is slipping away. For the New York Times Magazine, all those four-color graphics and self-congratulations cannot hide a painful truth: The Sixties are over, and it’s all downhill from here. ,
Philip Terzian writes a column from Washington for the Providence Journal.
