Cared about words a lot, and so you stayed out of his way when you were editing him and basically in my experience was you said yes or no to what he wanted to do, and you could say no, and its not for us, and but i like to say grow gore vidal. I was going to speak of someone else in the protradition of great writers and essayists contributing to the nation. Tony cushner, who i brought on to the editorial board, he in 1994 was so incensed by Andrew Sullivans piece on the case for gay marriage because it was in a very participatory aroundal capitalist, militaristic framework and we talked about it and he wanted to reply. I knew as victor has done brilliantly over the years he wanted to put tony cushner with any copkind, who had, who was really someone who came to the nation with a sensibility the nation had not had and did the first issue on gay rights called the gay moment when victor was editor, but in that piece, tony finally produced called the socialism of the skin its an extraordinary piece about liberation and the project of liberation, and also about the importance of utopia and not losi losing sight, the left not losing sight of utopian vision, even as its grounded in today. Now tony in some ways doesnt fully agree with that piece anymore, but thats fine, and there are many people as our special issue in a very different context of people who came to the nation of the left and turned to the right but thats a case or you know, victor also brought Tony Morrison onto the editorial board, so the tradition is one of having great essayists. Another writer who ill tell you a story about, you ask what it was like to edit him. Christopher hitchens, who was a supreme stylist. Now, of course christopher had his own differences, even before he left the nation over political, what he decided was a political reason to leave, which i was sorry he left, because his column was called minority report and i encouraged him to stay and even though he didnt agree with much of what we were saying about the war in those days, it was a voice that it was worth hearing, it seemed to me. Anyway, christopher used to have running disagreements with, among others, Katha Pollitt on issues of abortion, feminism and all of that, and christopher, the first he came toe the nation because i had written things he had written for the new statesman and i sent a letter inviting him to contribute to the nation and he sent us two or three pieces while he was on the road for the new statesmen that we were thrilled to publish and pried a one day this head popped, stuck, this person stuck his head in my door and christopher had a deep voice and it was christopher hitchens, very beautiful to look at, and he said one word, which was drink . Question mark . So we went out for a drink. In those days the office was down the block from the lions head. When i say a drink, im understating christophers capacity, because for christopher and me what would be one drink, and i like to drink, christopher would have two or three during that period, and then when you went to lunch with him, he would, after lunch, where you might have two or three drinks to start, he would say he had to go to the loo and meet me back in the office, that was code for stopping at the bar for another glass of wine on the way back. So the nation started some years ago a fundraising cruise, and various of our writers would come on it, and the first cruise christopher came on the following thing happened. He was on a panel at 8 00 or 9 00 in the morning and he put a bottle of scotch down in front of him, and he said, let me begin with a question, a joke, however he put it. Why is princess di, who was still alive at that point, like a land mine or what do they have in common . The answer, they are both difficult to lay and expensive to remove. At which point the audience started booing and hissing and laughing a combination. Lanny guaniere on the cruise organized a womens caucus to protest and the rest of the cruise dealt with how to deal with christopher hitchens. And i have to say, my advice to incoming interns, when christopher was at the magazine was, in factchecking christopher, you should give him your report before lunch, because after lunch, he would not accept any criticism of what came in. You got your fact wrong here, you got your fact wrong there, but before lunch, he was reasonable and would listen to what they had to say and we saved him from a lot of aggravation that way. But christopher could go to lunch, have three drinks and come back, sit down at his typewriter, and write beautiful editorial prose, not a word of which had to be changed, but the facts of which had to be checked, so thats about christopher hitchens. I wondered, i recommend to everybody deedee gutterplans history of the nation. I was reading about sorry, i recommend to everyone deede deedee guttenplans history of the nation. Theres a story that the back of the book, which is where you have your book reviews, there was a very harsh review of Jesse Jacksons book, just before i think andrew copkind wrote this. You had an editorial in favor of Jesse Jackson 1988. I think it says a lot about the character of the magazine and of the editor, that this could happen. Could you tell us a little bit about because it shows how you really did have sort of a marketplace of ideas. Among other things the nation has an independent book review section, and in hiring the editor for the back of the book, before i came there, i have to say i lined up someone to be the editor and then i met elizabeth bacoda who was already there and i had a long talk with her and asked her for a memorandum of what she would advise for the next, for successor, because i told her that i had someone that i had already spoken to as possibly coming, and it was so brilliant that i told whoever it was going to come in, forget about it, and betsy stayed, but the deal was that when you have someone whose values and intelligence you trust, that basically you dont interfere and you dont interfere with what theyre going to do. You feel free to give them suggestions. You talk over what comes in, and they will, and the healthiest environment, ask you what you think about this or that, if theres a problem and alert you to problems that are going to come down the line, but the understanding at the nation was always that the back of the book was independent, and this goes back to carrie mcwilliams, when, during the height of the cold war and before that, the back of the book editor didnt agree with what the front of the book editor was assigning and doing, so it had a history, and katrina, i dont know how its played out for you that way. I was going to say you drilled down a little bit, i was an editor at large, liberty and freedom living in moscow. And i think you have to use the mike. I was an editor at large and at liberty living in moscow during this period, but the reverberations were so deep that i could feel the waves in moscow and i later learned that, tell me im wrong, victor, but that Jesse Jackson editorial, which was a very important editorial was an endorsement of Jesse Jackson in the new york state primary in april 1988. That precipitated, you know, i cant say i mean, i think its a great thing but precipitated fist fights, almost fist fights inside the office because there was a real division on the Editorial Team. I wont name names, that is our mantra at the nation, but it did, and so that victor, i dont know, we never really talked about this, how you resolve that, because it was, you know, you had tough people on both sides who were making the case. Yes. And then people weighing in and this is before, this is before email. This is way before social media you can imagine now. You had people on the west coast and abroad weighing in on which side the nation was going to take. To me, you dont resolve it. The beauty of having a weekly magazine is you move on to the next week. No, no, wait a minute, that editorial your letters column becomes a more interesting column because of that. That editorial is a very important statement and somewhere, somehow, there was a resolution that the magazine was going to endorse Jesse Jackson, and do it in it was an endorsement of Jesse Jackson and the movement. The endorsement of the movement was the advanced way to resolve that question. There were questions about him personally. There was, it seemed to me a consensus on the values that his movement stood for, and i tried to be as careful as possible in the language of the endorsement that it was an endorsement of the movement, but nevertheless, what you say is right. But just in terms of endorsements, the history of endorsements, the magazine is structured, its been a forprofit, making a profit for five years under victor, two minutes under me, and anyone on cspan who wants to contribute to the nation, email me, email me, contact me at the nation but ralph nader, ralph nader, who wrote his first piece for the nation in 1959, which became the safe car you cant buy, i think one of the most interesting moments at the nation in terms of debate was when you had a magazine divided, half, you know, magazine wanted to endorse ralph nader for president and half felt that the history of third parties nationally was not a happy one, there had been a division over Henry Wallace in 1948, with the magazine not endorsing Henry Wallace in the end and so it was people on the barricades and the resolution there was we called it the molly ivans principle, we did, inside the office. If you lived in a state in which your Electoral College mattered, vote pragmatism if if your state, Electoral College didnt matter, vote your conscience. I dont know, somewhere in there the liberators founder is not finding the purity of the great idea. Garrison. But this was the consensus of the group that this was the principle that would be followed . There was an editorial which was, you know, we believed what i dont make light of it. We believe what is at stake is the supreme court. We believe in that lives will be, you know, lives are in the balance, so there was an argument, but it was a complicated the other thing that should be said is that, for many of these magazines, the nation, i suspect National Review and human events way on the other side of national and the weekly standard, that the editor is a dictator. The editor has the final say of everything that goes in. At the nation, the, i was going to say katrina is much more democratic than i was, but at the nation and much more consultative than i was in a much smarter way, but at the nation, the exception to that rule was president ial endorsements, that from at least from the time i was there, we would always open that to a discussion. It wasnt that we would count up the votes at the end, but we would try to reach a consensus on that which didnt mean that everyone joined it, but we came as close as it was possible. Were going to open up the session to questions, and wed like to you use one of these two microphones, and line up behind the microphone, if you could. While youre doing that, i, in honor of edgar, i wanted to ask victor about the report from Iron Mountain. Yes. Which is the one of the great spoofs in literary history. Okay so the report from Iron Mountain. The nation mondayical magazine, this journal in political sapphire which Marvin Kitman and Richard Langerman who are in my audience today were very much a part of and we were in the Book Business at this point, and we would get our ideas for books and then have basically they would be idea books rather than written books. They would be and like a collection of famous funny telegrams and then have a researcher collect them. And one day, i read in the New York Times i believe it was a story that the headline of which was peace scare breaks out and the stock market had taken a fall because of a scare about peace, and i said, hey, this is wild. The stock market goes down because of the possibility of peace . Its supposed to go up, and we had this idea for a book that would tell the story of how a government, the government had commissioned a study of how to make the transition from the war time to the peacetime economy under the kennedy administration, but the commission which met at the secret place called Iron Mountain which had underground vaults, which was a real place and included people and we didnt identify the names but you could tell who they were, harvard professor with a gutteral accent, you could figure out who each of them was, the commission had the series of meetings and they concluded that you couldnt stop that you couldnt have a transition to a peacetime economy because the economy would tank if you gave up all of the military investment that the government was making, so they killed the report, and that was the idea, and we hired a writer who had written a drill brilaliant paroy for monacle before that, len aerd lewin to write the story how they killed this report. Leonard said i cant write the story about the story of them killing a report until they have a report to kill. He wrote a brilliant parody of the government report which made the case for, ending a planned transition to a peacetime economy, because you couldnt do it. The thing about his parody was, the parody was all false and a hoax, but all of the footnotes were real, to real sources, and what happened was that we found, we were looking for a publisher that was willing to pub lush this and not tell its sales force that this was a hoax, a parody, and would treat it like a real study, and we found an unknown editor named e. L. Dr. Rowe who is working at dial press at the time and a quirky publisher named Richard Barron and together they agreed, with he had worked with them on a collection of essays about what was happening at berkeley, together they agreed to list it as nonfiction, and the result of that was, when the catalogue went out, the reporter for the New York Times called to ask questions about it, and was told by prearrangement that, and this prefigured edgars ability to take fiction and nonfiction and do something totally original with them, and was told, look, if you dont they didnt lie to the reporter. If you dont believe it, check the footnotes. So the reporter checked the footnotes and then called the white house, and the white house was the Johnson White house, and what did they know . Maybe kennedy had commissioned such a thing. So instead of saying no, theres no way that they would have published such a report, although they suspected it wasnt, they said no comment, the result was the reporter for the New York Times wrote a front story that ended up on the front page saying this possible hoax is possibly a real government report, and the book ended up on the best seller list, and then in a weird coda many years later it turned out the liberty lobby, this right Wing Organization on the assumption that it was a real report, without clearing copyright, published their own version on the theory that it was a government document and anyone could publish it. And Leonard Lewin sued them, and they made a settlement and they had to withdraw that. So thats the brief story of report from Iron Mountain. Great story. Became a best seller. Thank you, sir, you have a question sir . Yes, thanks a lot. That was a terrific talk, and my question really is, because we are in the premise of the law school im very, very much interested on the intersection or the absence thereof rather of journalism and law. Now, we have of course three branches of government, one of them is judiciary, federal judiciary, and which is really operating in my experience, its the ministry of justice, and the judges give themselves the right through the caseload to maliciously and corruptly the whole thing is sort of arbitrary. They replaced partys argument with their own imagining, so that they can judge, adjudicate the case which ever way they want. All this is in the open, and press expresses not the slightest interest. Here it is absolute cesspool of inequity, corruption, federal judiciary, are essentially sleazed, legalize sleaze, and why is it that the press, and im not talking just about the left wing press, the right wing, press, the conservative press, the professional press, the legal professionals, they all want to look the other way from the judicial procedure and kind of treat judges and those kind of supernatural creatures where they would have ripped to pieces any member of the executive or any member of the legislature who would have presumed to say well, you know what . Ive got the right to act malicious and corruptly. Judge writes it in his opinion and thats kosher and im really not understanding it. So if you could explain the journalism of all this, id appreciate it. Thank you. I can explain the journalism but i want victor to reply but i would say the nation treats the courts ooze a political instrument. I sat here a few years ago and the nation just published a special issue called the 1 court but the history of the nation the court attempted to invalidate the new deal, key elements of roosevelts new deal. The nation became, if you read theres a book called supreme justice by jeff schessel, came out a few years ago, about roosevelt and the Court Packing plan. I grew up in a family we called it court reform, no, but [ laughter ] but the nation divided in those years and this was in the 30s to the point where the then owner of the nation, morris worthheim, may be better known as barbara tuckmans father essentially sold the publication to a group of editors because he was so sick of the infighting, the debating, the vitriol. You had a group saying roosevelts plan is worthy, had a different proposal it be a constitutional amendment and Hayward Brune and others lass rate rascetrating it. We have i would say in victor and i brought him on one of the great legal correspondents in this country in david cole. Before david there was her man schwartz. I invite you to read the columns and essays of david cole and her man schwartz and then come back and say again wha