The New Yorker's Hendrik Hertzberg on Bush, blogging, and what's wrong with the Washington Post

Hendrik (Rick) Hertzberg is one of the giants of the mainstream media. A two-time editor of the New Republic and an off and on contributor for nearly 40 years to the New Yorker, his Comment essays at the front of the magazine are required reading for every literate liberal in America. Along with Frank Rich and the late Molly Ivins, Hertzberg has also provided one of the fiercest and most intelligent critiques of the Bush administration available in print. Back in the 1970s, he did stints as a speechwriter—for New York governor Hugh Carey in Albany and for Jimmy Carter in the White House. After graduating from Harvard in 1965, where he was managing editor of the Crimson, Hertzberg got a job in the San Francisco bureau of Newsweek, just as the '60s began to explode. In 1966, he wrote a magnificent file about Bill Graham's Fillmore, Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin, and the Grateful Dead. Almost none of it made it into the magazine, but Hertzberg held on to it, and nearly four decades later the essay became the opening piece in "Politics," the superb collection of his journalism published in 2004 by Penguin.

This past summer, the quintessential magazine writer turned his attention to the Web, and started one of the four blogs now available at NewYorker.com. Does this make him a canary in the mine shaft of the mainstream? Veteran journalist Charles Kaiser interviewed him about that, how he avoided service in Vietnam, and his definition of the "inside the Beltway" problem.

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Hendrik Hertzberg: When I was in the Navy in 1969, I lived on Sheridan Square across from the Stonewall Inn, in the top two floors of a nice brick house. My roommates were Anthony Hiss and Robert F. Wagner, Jr. I saw the Stonewall riot from my bedroom window.

Charles Kaiser: What did you think?
I thought it was just an exaggerated version of the usual weekend excitement. I would have slept right through the storming of the Bastille. I didn't realize that history was being made until later, when Jim Fouratt, whom I knew from hanging around the War Resisters League, explained it to me.

You had asked for conscientious objector status after you went into the navy?
That's right—Christmas 1968.

And they said, "Fuck you, kid"?
Yeah, essentially—but in a very civilized way. I'd been going on peace marches; I'd been a volunteer in Bobby Kennedy's campaign.

While you were still in uniform?
Yes. All these things were against military regulations. I didn't wear my uniform to Kennedy headquarters, usually—or to the War Resisters League. But I was doing lots of volunteer work for all of them. A few days after I filed my application for conscientious objector status, I got orders to Vietnam. I went in and saw my commanding officer. I said, "Well, gee, I've got these orders to go to Vietnam—you realize I can't go." And he said, "Of course, I understand that, you're a conscientious objector, so you can't really go." They were all surprisingly pleasant about it. However, they didn't let me out.
The Washington Post's editorial page has been pathetic. Really pathetic. There are still a few twitches left in it—every once in a while it takes on some egregious violation of civil liberties—but for the most part it's just pitiful

But they didn't send you to Vietnam.
Well, the showdown never came. I was looking forward to all sorts of antiwar glory. I was going to be a famous antiwar hero. So in preparation for going to jail after a court-martial, I had a long talk with an enlisted man in my office who had been a guard at Portsmouth Naval Prison, in New Hampshire, which was where I was expecting to go. He advised me to get any dental work done that I needed before I got to prison, because all dental problems were dealt with there by extraction. So I went to the VA hospital on Staten Island to take care of a couple of wisdom teeth. And then the next day I woke up and my pillow was all red—I just bled all over the place. I ended up in the hospital. Finally they got a hematologist in there and it turned out I had a blood-clotting deficiency, a form of hemophilia—a very mild one, but one that's on the list of conditions incompatible with military service. So, boom, so fast it would make your head spin, I was out of the navy. That was August 1969. And I immediately checked to see if [William] Shawn still wanted me at the New Yorker. And he did.

You've written for Shawn, Tina [Brown], and [David] Remnick [three of the four modern editors of the magazine]. Who puts out the best New Yorker of those three?
I guess the consistently best is probably Remnick's—the one with the highest average level.

Because Shawn would have magnificent things and then he would have...
...A lot of dreck. Along with the great stuff. Some of it was not only long, but bad. Quite a lot of it, actually. But the highs were very high. It was like a pre-Zoloft world.

Are there any magazines that you read regularly now?
For pleasure, above all, the New York Review of Books—that's in a class by itself for me. And then the New Yorker. Then, dropping down a little bit, I read the New Republic. It's very good. The American Prospect, the Atlantic, the Nation. The American Conservative—I like that magazine. And Private Eye. Those are the ones I read for pleasure.

What newspapers do you look at every day on paper?
The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Sun, and the New York Post. I spend quite a lot less time with them than I used to—and more time online. But the New York Times is still totally indispensable. All the savor and meaning would go out of life if there were no New York Times.

When did you start looking at a lot of things online?
In a big way I guess maybe three years ago; and in a small way, five or six.

How many hours a day do you spend looking at things on the Web?
Two or three—sometimes four or five.

Where do you go every day on the Web?
I go to Talking Points Memo several times a day—the main site and its offshoots. That's the set of sites I go to by far the most. TPM feels like home; ideologically and politically it's a perfect fit for me. I can rely on it to draw my attention to anything that's of major interest to me in the world of public affairs. I go to two of the Atlantic blogs, namely Sullivan and Yglesias. Slightly less often I go to Romenesko and Crooks & Liars and Wolcott and Fallows; and Kevin Drum at the Washington Monthly. The American Prospect I go to almost daily. The Plank, the New Republic's group blog. Steve Clemons' Washington Note. Glenn Greenwald is someone I go to a lot. I check out Kos now and then to take the temperature of the teeming liberal masses.

Which newspaper does the best job of covering national politics?
The Times and the Post, I guess. But they're not really my main sources anymore. My base for all that is Talking Points Memo.

That's a sea change, isn't it?
Yeah. But when I don't have access to the Times on paper I always go to the Times website. I wouldn't miss Krugman for the world. And I wouldn't miss Frank Rich. Or E.J. Dionne and Harold Meyerson in the Washington Post. The Post's op-ed page has a few pearls amidst the shit.

Certainly the New York Times editorial page has done a lot better on the main issues of the day for the past five years.
There's just absolutely no comparison. The Post's editorial page has been pathetic. Really pathetic. There are still a few twitches left in it—every once in a while it takes on some egregious violation of civil liberties—but for the most part it's just pitiful.

This is something that people should give Arthur Sulzberger a little credit for, which he never gets.
Yeah, he definitely deserves praise for that.

What about the class of people 24-hour cable news has produced who never would have been public figures before CNN and Fox were invented?
It's a whole new class of public anti-intellectuals.

Is your blog edited the same way your Comment section is edited?
The blog is edited. But it's neither written nor edited with the same excruciating care as the Comment.

Do you still stay up all night when you're writing a New Yorker comment?
I don't, no, not in the sense of not getting any sleep. I often stay in the office and spend the night in the office and work in the middle of the night. But I'm too old to [stay up all night]—I need to get a few hours sleep.

Does Virginia edit the Comment? [Virginia Cannon, a New Yorker editor, who is also Hertzberg's wife.]
Yes, she certainly does.

Is it very complicated having your wife as your main editor?
Of course it's potentially very complicated. But it has proved so far to be great from my point of view. She's a great editor. She's absolutely unflappable. She's very tactful. She has pretty close to unerring instincts when something is wrong. Whenever she says there's a problem, in 99.9 percent of the cases, it turns out there is a problem. She generally leaves it to me to do the fixing, but without her I wouldn't know what to fix. And she doesn't get put off if I sulk a bit first.

What about the blog?
If I'm worried about a post, if I think there might be a problem of tone or something, then I show it to Virginia. But that's more of a traditional husband-and-wife kind of thing.

Did you go to Remnick with the idea for a blog, or did he ask you to do this?
There had been sort of an open invitation to me to do one if I wanted to. Then, in August, when I wanted to go to the YearlyKos convention, I said, kind of on a whim, well, why don't I go out there and blog it? Sort of as a one-time thing—blogging the bloggers. [Click here for Hertzberg's first post.]

That was where you noticed there were a thousand news junkies, and not one was carrying a newspaper.
A terrifying moment.

Did you suddenly find that you like this form?
Yeah, I like the form. It's easier than writing a finely crafted essay. It's much more casual. It's much more relaxed. It's much less scary. It's much less demanding. Of course, that's one of the things that's dangerous about it. But I find it extremely useful as a sort of pump primer; it keeps my fingers limbered up and my brain turning over. And the minute-by-minute stakes are not as high; for one thing, it's no big deal if you write a blog post, and then decide not to post it.

Does your nine-year-old son go on the Web?
[With resignation.] Yeah. We tried to keep him away from computers as long as we could. And I think we may have succeeded in keeping him away long enough so that he will occasionally read books when he grows up. But we have computers sitting around the house, and they're not under lock and key. And he goes and starts looking stuff up, often as a supplement to his reading. There's a huge universe of Harry Potter stuff and Star Trek stuff and Star Wars stuff and space program stuff. He's very into the space program lately.

Who is your favorite president?
Lincoln, of course.

Do you have a candidate for president for 2008?
Not in the magazine. But I certainly have my personal hopes and wishes. I have leaned all along toward Obama. I just think if Obama were president it would blow minds all over the world. But I think we have a great field. I'm warming more and more to Hillary. I like Edwards a lot. I like Dodd and Biden. I think it's a great bunch.

When you and I were boys, you had to go through some period of apprenticeship or training, you had to go through a process before you reached the point where your words would be shared with a large portion of the wider world. Whereas now, all you really need to be able to do is...type. [Hertzberg laughs.] Has this made the world a better place?
Too early to tell. [Kaiser laughs.] Again, at first glance, it seems obvious that it has to have made the world a worse place.

Because?
The way you framed the development is that people who know nothing and have learned nothing are filling our ears with worthless garbage.

The Web really is kind of a miracle. Of course, it's killing so many great institutions. Not just newspapers, but libraries. You can get a lot of info without even getting out of bed. The Web is a very caveat emptor place.Well, there's the potential for that.
Is it a good thing or a bad thing? I just don't know. I know there are a lot of interesting voices out there in the blogosphere.

My overall feeling about the Web is that it's the best of everything, and the worst of everything.
Yeah—because it's everything. It really is kind of a miracle. Of course, it's killing so many great institutions. Not just newspapers, but libraries. You can get a lot of info without even getting out of bed. The Web is a very caveat emptor place.

You've spent roughly half your career in Washington and half in New York. Do D.C. journalists have an inside-the-Beltway problem?
Of course there's an inside-the-Beltway problem. There's also an outside-the-Beltway problem.

Which one is worse?
The one that one happens to be discussing at the moment. The inside-the-Beltway problem is a type of tunnel vision and a sense of narrow possibilities. It's also a fear of not being Serious with a capital S.

I would say Serious/Masculine.
Yes, right. In other words, it's much harder to damage your career by consistently supporting war and cruelty than by consistently supporting peace and love. The default position is "bombs away." The problem with the outside-the-Beltway mentality is an ignorance of what the actual human pressures and incentives are inside the Beltway, why politicians and pundits behave the way they do, and why that is not necessarily entirely attributable to their moral depravity.

Washington is the world's largest company town, which makes the debate more intense, but also more limited. You know, the person who got everything right about Iraq was Molly Ivins. She predicted the civil war, predicted the quagmire. And she hardly had any Washington sources at all.
Yeah. The way that this war was slid into—that was a nightmare. It was largely all about 9/11. I think the [Bush administration] very skillfully played into the fear of terrorists with nukes. Legions of people both inside and outside the Beltway—I was certainly one of them—were spooked by the idea of terrorists with nukes. And the sort of "what if they're right" fear. In the end, I didn't go along with it. But for me, being against the war was not an automatic thing. It was after much agonizing thought and a lot of emotion.

I think I was pretty sure that I had seen this movie before, and I knew how it ended. With helicopters above the American embassy.
You were right.

It was a lucky guess. But it certainly feels more like that every day.
Does it ever.

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