At the outset I want to make known that I was not a personal friend to Victor Saul Navasky, one of the titans of Independent media in the United States, who died this week. I was just a shy intern at The Nation in 1995 when he was Publisher and Editorial Director, at the height of his powers. But he was one of the first powerful people that I had ever encountered who had accomplished something in media that I admired, so I observed him somewhat closely over the years.
I was just out of college and trying no navigate the incessant game of thrones before Game of Thrones that magazine journalism was be at the time. Victor never played that game and regarded interns and building maintenance — the lower tier of office hierarchy — as fellow workers, all. So, one of the many great things about Victor Navasky’s character that I observed in my brief time at the Nation is that he appeared almost entirely unaffected by NYC’s social hierarchy. That was and is a very rare thing in New York media, where human vanity pervades everything. A jacket and tie to him seemed more of a work uniform than a statement of social class, which seemed just about right for the Editorial Director at The Nation.
When he was Publisher and Editorial Director at The Nation, he seemed to prefer boxing matches at home to fancy cocktail parties. This seemed to me, then and now, distinctly not a part of the Game. Editorial Directors are not supposed to invite building maintenance staff over to watch heavyweight boxing! Would Graydon Carter ever be so egalitarian? The Nation, unapologetically Progressive, founded at the end of the Civil War in 1865, was not above such gamesmanship from some of its editors. Everyone kind of did it. Navasky, however, was different.
Further, Navasky seemed, from my distance at least, to be more animated and interested in talking about the heavyweight division than who was the Editor at Vanity Fair or Travel and Leisure, quite frankly. This seems entirely at odds with his CV, which included The Little Red Schoolhouse and Swarthmore and Princeton and Columbia and Yale Law. But the way Navasky explains it in the Berkeley Globetrotter, his elite education was far from something he achieved solely to ascend the Great New York Media status mountain, but rather it was a means to a greater understanding of the liberal arts, of humanity and a grounding for being productive:
I first went to the Little Red Schoolhouse and Elisabeth Irwin High School after I got out of Rudolf Steiner, and then I went to Swarthmore, which is a non-denominational school but it was founded by Quakers. It had a peace collection, and this Quakerly belief in nonviolent resistance pervaded the campus. But it was a highly intellectual place, so I felt I had a great experience because on the one hand, at Rudolf Steiner they cultivated the spirit and the arts, at Little Red Schoolhouse and Elisabeth Irwin they cultivated the social conscience (it was a progressive school in the tradition of John Dewey), and at Swarthmore they cultivated the mind. Then I went into the army and they cultivated whatever they cultivate in the army …
…. That was part of it, but part of it, as I talk about in the book, is that you had to learn the military arts; so I learned how to use a bayonet.
… I had the GI Bill and I thought -- I edited a newspaper, both at Swarthmore, [where] I edited the Swarthmore Phoenix, and in the army I edited the 53rd Infantry News. I always thought part of me wanted to be a journalist, part of me was interested in politics and public affairs, and because I had the GI Bill I thought I could wait three years to be a writer because I didn't have that much to say yet, if anything, and that I would educate myself.
Then I went to law school rather than graduate school because the Yale Law School seemed from its catalogue like a place where you could carry on your liberal arts education and get a law degree, and I believed I had an entrepreneurial bent and that a law degree would serve me better in life than a graduate degree in political theory or political science.
It almost certainly did. Years later, I met a friend of his that attended the Little Red Schoolhouse — a Progressive alternative elementary school, founded in 1921 — at his suggestion to her parents. She told me Navasky was, even in his later years, an enthusiastic supporter of the school and the particular education it offered. His commitment to progressive and alternative education (as well as to boxing) is something that a lot of the obituaries will omit, but it seemed singular to his character and thus important to this final sketch of the man.
Screwing the World (1984). Source: Go Comics
Also, Victor Navasky was intrigued at the power of political cartoons. I am not sure when exactly Victor became intrigued by the power of political cartoons, but he included an analysis of the subject in his courses at Columbia in later years. Victor even ended up writing a book on the subject in 2014. He grew quite animated when he talked to us interns about a particular cartoon (see image above) in 1995 that sparked much conversation ten years previous. From Jeet Heer.
The Nation habitually publishes controversial essays—the famed contrarian Christopher Hitchens was a star columnist for several decades—but Navasky found that the one piece that really unnerved his staff and readers alike was a cartoon David Levine did in 1984 showing Henry Kissinger copulating with a woman whose head is shaped like a globe.
Titled “Screwing the World,” Levine’s drawing was both visually superb and very disturbing. Once you’ve seen it, it’s hard to forget Levine’s image of Kissinger’s pig-like mid-coital ejaculatory glee. Yet, as feminist staffers at The Nation rightly noted, implicit in Levine’s cartoon is the idea that sex is both dirty and a form of male domination. Although aimed at Kissinger, Levine’s cartoon carried with it a whole cartload of troubling cultural baggage, made all the heavier by the sheer mastery of Levine’s rendition of Kissinger’s grotesquely globular face.
Dealing with words all his life, Navasky was blindsided by the ability of a drawing to conjure of intense emotions. If there is a divide between words and pictures, Navasky started off on the literary side of the fence, but has made a strong effort to learn the language and history of his picture-making neighbors.
Finally, one last observation that will probably not make many obits. Victor Navasky loved political pranks, or, rather, satire in all its forms. He liked to make mischief. Navasky was an editor at the satirical journal Monocle in the late 50s and early 60s. It is not inconceivable that Navasky’s fascination with political cartoons is related to his love of satire and satirical stunts. It is hard to imagine from this distant remove how disappointing the conservative post-war 50s and early 60s must have been to idealistic young Progressives. Satire may have been solace in those dark days of Conservatism and middle of the road Centrism. The Report From Iron Mountain, published by Navasky’s Monocle in 1967, written by Leonard Lewin, is a masterpiece in postwar satire.
The Report From Iron Mountain pretended to be the product of a “think tank” issuing a dire warning about what would happen to postwar America if "permanent peace" should arrive. It was written in 1967, 22 years after the end of the Second World War and at the height of Vietnam. One can almost hear the soft chuckling of Victor Navasky as the extreme right continues to cite this masterful literary hoax as an influence ….
RIP, Victor Saul Navasky