BTW: When I applied for a Fund for Investigative Journalism grant (at age 21) to investigate TVA and coal monopolies in Tennessee, Mr. Kilpatrick was on the board that approved it; I was told he voted for me even though I had "split an infinitive." Thus chastened inspired, I never split an infinitive for the next 40 years in the millions of words that I have written for publication or litigation.
Here are obituaries from The New York Times and Cato Institute's Reason:
Nicholas von Hoffman, a provocative author, broadcast commentator and syndicated columnist who examined American politics and culture for five decades from a left-wing perspective, died on Thursday in Rockport, Me. He was 88.
His son Alexander said the cause was kidney failure. Mr. von Hoffman, who died in a health center in Rockport, lived in Tenants Harbor, Me.
In a journalistic métier of mingled fact, opinion and literary devices, Mr. von Hoffman wrote for The Washington Post from 1966 to 1976, contributed to major magazines, aired his views on national television and radio and wrote more than a dozen books, including “Citizen Cohn” (1988), a best-selling biography of Roy M. Cohn, the chief counsel to Senator Joseph R. McCarthy in his 1950s anti-communist crusades.
Mr. von Hoffman, who never attended college, styled himself a “creative troublemaker” after his mentor, the social activist Saul Alinsky, for whom he worked as a community organizer in Chicago before starting his journalism career at The Chicago Sun-Times in 1963.
Mr. von Hoffman proved to be a superb reporter and writer, covering civil rights in the South with vivid accounts of protests and racial violence.
Once hired by The Post, he did not fit into regular news beats. But given the latitude of a column, he became Washington’s enfant terrible, attacking the Nixon administration over the war in Vietnam, violent police crackdowns on protesters at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and President Richard M. Nixon’s taped Oval Office profanities as the Watergate scandal closed in, forcing his resignation in 1974.
Mr. Hoffman sounded the political death knell with a bitter irony.
“Nixon,” he wrote, “is going into the history books as the president who absent-mindedly didn’t mind having his people drop the Bill of Rights from the Constitution, but who was chased from office for public profanity. You commit treason but they get you for littering.”
He caricatured subjects with rapier cuts: Nixon “looks like he’s got lip cramps and a Charley horse in the cheek.” Attorney General John N. Mitchell, who helped plan the Watergate break-in, was “a Peeping Tom.” And in the Rev. Billy Graham “we can see the formal union of state, society and religion, the working partnership between God and Caesar, not rendering to each other so much as washing each other’s hands.”
“My approach to reporting is nothing new,” Mr. von Hoffman told Newsweek in 1969. “It’s no different than the methods used by people like Hearst, Pulitzer or Mencken. They certainly didn’t adhere to strict news objectivity. I think you’re mad if you come into journalism with the idea that you’re going to change things for the better. I write because I enjoy it. I sincerely believe in what I write, and I get a kick out of getting those Washington mossbacks angry.”
He provoked more outraged letters to the editor than any writer in memory at The Post, said Chalmers M. Roberts, a longtime correspondent.
In 1970, Mr. von Hoffman raised a storm of protest with a column that referred to American prisoners of war in Vietnam as a political issue involving “just 1,500 men.” Angry letters from prisoners’ families and support groups flooded in; many were published, along with a Post editorial disagreeing with the column but defending the author’s right to his opinion.
“My life would have been a lot simpler had Nicholas von Hoffman not appeared in the paper,” the publisher, Katharine Graham, wrote in her 1997 memoir, “Personal History.” But, she added, “I firmly believed that he belonged at The Post.”
Mr. von Hoffman, a thickset man, sometimes let his prematurely gray hair get a bit long. But he hardly looked the part of a radical. He wore spectacles, dressed casually in sports jackets and jeans, smoked a pipe and looked cool, smiling and relaxed, even when caught up in a dispute on national television.
In the early 1970s, he became a familiar commentator on the CBS program “60 Minutes,” paired on the “Point/Counterpoint” segment with the conservative James J. Kilpatrick. Don Hewitt, the producer, fired Mr. von Hoffman in 1974 after he called Nixon, on the air, “a dead mouse on the kitchen floor that everyone was afraid to touch and throw in the garbage.”
Nicholas von Hoffman was born in New York City on Oct. 16, 1929, to Carl von Hoffman and the former Anna Bruenn. His father was an immigrant Russian cavalry officer. After graduating from Fordham Preparatory School in the Bronx in 1948, Nicholas went to Chicago, intending to enroll at Loyola University. Instead, he took a research job at the University of Chicago, and in 1954 joined Mr. Alinsky as a field organizer in black and Hispanic communities on the South Side.
His marriage to Ann C. Byrne in 1950 ended in divorce in 1968. She was also a social activist in Chicago and was later a dean at the University of Rhode Island. She died in 2015.
Besides Alexander, Mr. von Hoffman is survived by two other sons from his first marriage, Constantine and Aristo, and two grandchildren. A second marriage, to Patricia Bennett, also ended in divorce.
Mr. von Hoffman’s first book, “Mississippi Notebook” (1964), grew out of his civil rights coverage for The Sun-Times. Early on at The Post, on the education beat, he wrote a book, “Multiversity” (1966). In cultural affairs, he explored San Francisco’s hippie drug scene and wrote another book, “We Are the People Our Parents Warned Us Against” (1968).
Finally given latitude as a columnist, he hit his stride. At the 1969 trial of the Chicago Eight , the leftist radicals charged with inciting to riot at the Democratic National Convention the previous summer (they became the Chicago Seven after one defendant’s trial was severed), he depicted a theatrical parody of jurisprudence.
The defendants were portrayed as part of the satire: Abbie Hoffman was the “street theater social critic,” David Dellinger was “the old-line pacifist-socialist who’s only recently dared to grow sideburns,” and Jerry Rubin was “a freelance wild man.” Judge Julius J. Hoffman, presiding at the trial, became “an aging Hobbit who never stops talking with the voice of a man reading horror stories to small children.”
Reporters for other news organizations could not convey Mr. von Hoffman’s absurdist view of the trial. “He has caught its tone and flavor in a way that has been almost impossible for those of us operating under tighter editorial restrictions,” said J. Anthony Lukas of The New York Times.
But even the more objective reporters found rare spectacles to write about: The Black Panther Party activist Bobby Seale, whose case was severed, called the judge “a fascist dog,” “a honky” and “a pig.” When he refused to be silenced, the judge ordered him bound and gagged in court. Two defendants, Mr. Rubin and Mr. Hoffman, appeared in court wearing judicial robes. They complied with an order to remove them, revealing Chicago police uniforms underneath.
After leaving The Post, Mr. Hoffman wrote syndicated freelance columns for King Features for decades. He also wrote book reviews and magazine articles for The Times and contributed to The New Republic, Esquire, Vogue, The Nation, Harper’s, The New York Review of Books and other publications.
He collaborated with the Doonesbury political cartoonist, Garry B. Trudeau, on two books, “The Fireside Watergate” (1973) and “Tales From the Margaret Mead Taproom” (1976). He also wrote two novels, “Two, Three, Many More” (1969), on the campus disruptions of the 1960s, and “Organized Crimes” (1984), about gangland Chicago in the Great Depression.
His most successful book was “Citizen Cohn,” which was on The Times’ best-seller lists for eight weeks in 1988 and inspired a 1992 movie of the same title starring James Woods. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, in a review for The Times, called the biography a “richer, more rounded, better balanced view” than Sidney Zion’s contemporaneous book, “The Autobiography of Roy Cohn,” based on interviews with Mr. Cohn, who died in 1986.
Mr. von Hoffman broadcast 250 commentaries on public affairs in the 1980s for the syndicated Cato Institute radio program “Byline.” From 1993 to 2008, he wrote columns for the weekly newspaper The New York Observer, and from 1996 to 2007 he contributed to Architectural Digest.
He also wrote for The Huffington Post, and composed the libretto for Deborah Drattell’s 2003 production of “Nicholas and Alexandra” by the Los Angeles Opera.
Mr. von Hoffman also wrote “Hoax: Why Americans Are Suckered by White House Lies,” (2004), and “Radical: A Portrait of Saul Alinsky” (2010), based on his recollections of his years working as a community organizer with Mr. Alinsky.
Another of his mentors, Benjamin C. Bradlee, the executive editor of The Post, offered perhaps the highest praise for his former reporter and columnist, calling Mr. von Hoffman’s work “landmarks in the early, timid years of the new journalism: personal, pertinent, articulate, vital glimpses of man trying to make it in a more complicated world.”
Farewell to Nicholas von Hoffman, the Newsman Who Got Fired for Comparing Nixon to a Dead Mouse
Friday A/V Club: Columnist, broadcaster, and critic of concentrated power
Nicholas von Hoffman died yesterday. He was 88 years old and he wasn't that famous anymore, but he used to be all over the media: He had a Washington Post column that was syndicated across the country, he recorded radio commentaries for the CBS show Spectrum, and he had a recurring gig doing point/counterpoint segments for 60 Minutes, speaking for the left while James Kilpatrick represented the right. He was fired from that last job after the night he compared Richard Nixon to a dead mouse on a kitchen floor. "The question," he said of the president, "is who is going to pick it up by the tail and drop it in the trash. At this point it makes no difference whether he resigns, thereby depositing himself in a sanitary container, or whether Congress scoops him up in the dustpan of impeachment. But as an urgent national health measure, we've got to get that decomposing political corpse out of the White House."
I'm trying to think of the last time von Hoffman had a big moment of public notoriety. It was probably in 2001, when Andrew Sullivan started handing out a sarcastic "Von Hoffman Award" for "stunningly wrong political, social and cultural predictions." The columnist had earned the honor by writing skeptically about the then-young war in Afghanistan—he had said the U.S. was "fighting blind" and "distracted by gusts of wishful thinking." What a nut, right? After a few years, an abashed Sullivan confessed that von Hoffman had had a point, and he renamed the prize for Dick Morris.
Von Hoffman got his start as an activist, not a journalist, and in the '50s he was a lieutenant of sorts to the Chicago-based organizer Saul Alinsky. (My review of Radical, von Hoffman's memoir of his Alinsky days, is here.) From there he drifted into reporting, filing lively dispatches for the Chicago Daily News and then The Washington Post. He wrote sympathetically about the counterculture and the civil rights movement, unsympathetically about Nixon and the Vietnam War; he developed a reputation as the Post's in-house New Leftist. And that he was, more or less. But like the more anarchistic New Left types—and like his old boss Alinsky—von Hoffman didn't have much faith in big government.
By the early 1970s, when he had his newspaper column and his 60 Minutes job, that distrust sometimes led him to unexpected positions. Take the time he devoted a column to the notion that the John Birch Society offers a useful "corrective to our thinking." (When they denounce Nixon or the Fed, he wrote, they start "talking about the uses of power, money and politics in ways we can learn from.") He still kept the Birchers at arm's length, naturally. But he didn't add any caveats in 1971 when he wrote a piece praising the foreign policy views of the isolationist Ohio senator Robert Taft. After quoting extensively from a speech the late Republican had given two decades earlier, von Hoffman announced that Taft was "right on every question all the way from inflation to the terrible demoralization of troops."
Von Hoffman also wrote several '70s articles applauding the ideas of Louis Kelso, an apostle of employee ownership. That might sound more like what you'd expect from a New Left writer—worker power!—except that both Kelso and von Hoffman presented the proposal not as an alternative to capitalism but as a more radical form of it. When Henry Fairlie read some of those dispatches, he threw up his hands and complained that von Hoffman "parades himself as a radical" but wants "to make everyone a capitalist."
And then there was his column about the libertarian economist Murray Rothbard. It didn't endorse the full ancap program, but it did embrace the most radical part of it. "One of Rothbard's best, new ideas is to shut down the police departments of America," he enthused. As von Hoffman expounded on this notion, he started to sound like an anarchist Mike Royko:"As almost anybody who's tried to call a cop knows, they are next to useless. About the only way you can get one is to tell the operator at headquarters a cop is being murdered. Then they'll come. If you tell her that you're the one being murdered, you'd best hope your killer is a slow sadist who'll take three-quarters of an hour to polish you off." If you didn't have to pay taxes or bribes to the police, he continued, you could spend that money on private guards or start your own citizens' patrol; and if you couldn't afford to do that, well, at least you'd have the cops off your back.
When Reason interviewed von Hoffman in 1976, he denied that he held any sort of well-developed political philosophy. ("Saul never made any attempts at internal consistency," he said of Alinsky. "I followed that brilliant intellectual tradition.") He certainly didn't claim to be a libertarian: While he knew big business uses the regulatory agencies to create cartels, for example, he told Reason that he still thought regulation could be a check on corporate power. But he was happy to write the occasional kindly column about the Libertarian Party and to have the Cato Institute publish his articles in Inquiryand air his commentaries on its radio show Byline. Toward the end of his life, von Hoffman contributed gladly to both The Nation and The American Conservative. He was an eclectic skeptic; a journalist, not a philosopher. He liked libertarians because they seemed idealistic and anti-authoritarian. Libertarians liked him because he cast a jaundiced eye at anyone in power, and because he skewered those powerful people entertainingly.
And that brings us to my favorite von Hoffman book, Make-Believe Presidents, which roasts everyone from Herbert Hoover to the Kennedys. I recommend reading it in conjunction with Gene Healy's The Cult of the Presidency. They're an odd couple—Healy's book, published in 2008, posits that the presidency is too powerful, while von Hoffman's, published 30 years earlier, argues that presidents aren't nearly as powerful as we think. But the books complement each other rather well. Make-Believe Presidents catalogs countless ways we've been abused by executive power: wars, repression, foolish regulatory schemes. It just doesn't give the presidents enough respect to trust their assurances that they're in charge. The "growth and elaboration of the mega-institution," it argues, "pushed, drove, controlled, and guided presidents as much as it did lesser people." Executive power was larger than the executive.
The two videos below show von Hoffman promoting Make-Believe Presidents on a Chicago TV show. (The end of the interview is missing, alas.) They're fun to watch, and though it's 40 years later they still sometimes feel resonant. Presidents "all come in the first day in the Oval Office, they look at this wonderful desk, they see all these buttons, they start hitting them," the writer says. "Nothing happens. And finally they look under the desk and they see all the wires have been cut." Then he grins.
(For the full text of Make-Believe Presidents, go here. For Reason's review of the book, written by Karl Hess, go here. For Reason's review of another von Hoffman book, go here. For an hour's worth of von Hoffman's CBS radio commentaries, go here. For past editions of the Friday A/V Club, go here.)
CORRECTION: This post originally stated that von Hoffman worked for The Chicago Sun-Times before he joined the Post; in fact, it was the Chicago Daily News.
Photo Credit: Pantheon
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