Jack Newfield R.I.P.
With great sadness I am compelled to note for the second time in two weeks the death of an honored colleague and friend. First, Gary Webb. Tonight, legendary investigative reporter and columnist Jack Newfield.
Jack died late Monday night in New York of cancer. He was 66. I last saw him, in the offices of The Nation, during this past summer's Republican National Committee. He looked great; slimmed down. I didn't know it was cancer that had eaten away at his girth.
Jack's passing is a great loss for all of us who knew him. And another great loss for our profession. Indulge me, if you will, the awful cliché — but in this case it is absolutely appropriate: Jack Newfield is one of the very last of a disappearing breed.
Take a look at any of the cautious, manicured, closely-clipped corporate journalists who make up our reigning national punditocracy and you will be viewing the opposite of Jack Newfield.
More clichés: a tough-talking, street-wise, wise-cracking, cigar-puffin, swearing, gruff curmudgeon, Newfield was — till the very end"”a warm-hearted humanitarian, idealist and passionate advocate for the underdog. When his reporting led him toward a southern jail, he went without protest. When a New York newspaper strike required him putting his comfortable job on the line — and losing it"”he didn't hesitate.
The only thing he loved more than skewering some blowhard pol like Ed Koch or Rudy Giuliani was watching two guys pummel the stuffing out of each other in a boxing match.
Newfield imported that same pugilistic passion into his work, eventually writing ten books. His most noted book , a paean to RFK for whom he worked in 1968, is the one where I most differed with Jack -- not even remotely sharing his love for Bobby Kennedy.
But Jack's lyrical autobiography, "Somebody's Gotta Tell It: The Upbeat Memoir of a Working Class Journalist"held me absolutely transfixed. I remember the morning, two summers ago, while sitting on the steps of a pool in Arizona, I opened the book and read these opening lines:
"I am a child of the working class, a product of public institutions and public places. I am an American — Brooklyn born. I am proud of these origins. They made me what I am."
I next picked my head up about six hours later — severely sun-burned and water-logged"”but emotionally roiled by the compelling story of a man who -- as a youngster-- was inspired to enlist in a career of social justice by the heroic courage of Jackie Robinson. Here's an excerpt from Newsday's obit:
Newfield's career included stints at the Village Voice, the Daily News and the New York Post. Most recently, he was a columnist at the New York Sun. "I think he invented a whole new form of journalism, a new form of personal investigative journalism that was rooted in a consuming ethic and a brilliant search for truth," said Wayne Barrett, Newfield's longtime colleague at the Voice and his co-author on "City for Sale: Ed Koch and the Betrayal of New York." "¦Newfield was born in Brooklyn in 1938 and grew up worshipping the Dodgers and Jackie Robinson, who integrated the major leagues in 1947. "He was the first outsider/underdog I identified with," Newfield said in 2000. "¦Like many idealistic young people, Newfield was drawn to the civil rights movement in the South. He was arrested at a sit-in in 1963 and spent two days in jail with Michael Schwerner, who was later murdered along with James Chaney and Andrew Goodman. In 1964 Newfield went to work for the Voice, one of whose founders, Norman Mailer, was among his journalistic models. His first book, "A Prophetic Minority," published in 1966, was about his experiences in the civil rights movement in Mississippi. Newfield traveled with Kennedy during his presidential campaign and was present at the Ambassador Hotel when the candidate was assassinated on June 5, 1968. "¦"Jack never forgot where he came from," said Nation publisher Victor Navasky. "Everything he wrote was on behalf of the dispossessed and we were honored to be able to publish him in his last years and proud that the late Nation editor Carey McWilliams helped discover him in his early years." Newfield won several journalistic awards, including a George Polk Award for his reporting on state and city politics at the Voice in 1980. He won an Emmy in 1991 for a documentary, "Don King: Unauthorized," that aired on PBS.
Jack Newfield should be an example for every young journalist. Make that"¦ an example for every working journalist.
I miss him already.
December 22nd, 2004 at 6:27 am
Amen. He will be missed.”City for Sale” is one of my favorites.
December 22nd, 2004 at 6:31 am
That is sad.
December 22nd, 2004 at 7:56 am
Newfield was a great journalist. He was among the best of the social critics shaped by the early “New Left”, but he also managed to uphold the tradition of the great, quintessentially New York scribes like A.J. Liebling and Jimmy Breslin who seem as comfortable in bars and boxing gyms as among literati.
I’m going to be digging back into his writing to catch up with some things I missed, but to inject a lighter note regarding Newfield into very sad news, the HBO film, “Don King: Only In America”, starring Ving Rhames and based on Newfield’s book, is one you shouldn’t pass up if you’re into “guilty pleasures”. Not a great film, but a lot of fun.
December 22nd, 2004 at 8:47 am
Since Marc’s post started off with an aside on Gary Webb, I guess it’s appropriate to add an aside on Bobby Darin, another recent subject. Along with Newfield, Bobby Darin worked on RFK’s ‘68 campaign and was equally devastated by the assassination. That’s when Darin was moved to do the “folk-rock” social protest albums.
RFK was an immensely complex figure but Marc’s dismissive cynicism aside, I think that Newfield - and Bobby Darin, no less - saw something real and transformative in the RFK of 1968. His murder was undoubtedly one of the tragic “what if” turns of the sixties that sidetracked progressive possibilities into divisiveness and disaster for the entire the nation. Newfield and Darin (!) understood RFK’s loss - particularly in the wake of Martin Luther King’s murder - as ultimately the loss of a lot of hopes that had emerged in the early ’60s in the wake of civil rights activism and that were fueled to some extent by the JFK “New Frontiers” myth. The doors that a second less-mythological-but-more-pragmatically-liberal Kennedy administration would have opened most likely would have stemmed a lot of the self-marginalization of the left and systematic unhinging of the Democratic Party from white working-class voters that began full-speed with Nixon’s ugly ascension.
Newfield was much more of a down-to-earth pragmatist than his friend Tom Hayden who veered into the ultra-left during those years, and he understood that protest divorced from practical politics with the potential for broad appeal is futile, if not counter-productive.
(Re: RFK’s riling the “Clean for Gene” crowd, Gene McCarthy was a great early catalyst for the anti-war movement among Democrats but he obviously couldn’t even get nominated, much less elected, and he would have been an ineffectual president.)
December 22nd, 2004 at 10:03 am
I really liked his last book American Rebels. He had great insights into RFK. He seemed like a different breed.
Damn shame.
December 22nd, 2004 at 10:13 am
A true loss. Wish I’d known him as a friend. I envy you for that, Marc.
December 22nd, 2004 at 3:11 pm
Your words about Jack are heartfelt and touching. Thank you.
December 23rd, 2004 at 10:54 am
Gleanings
From Marc Cooper, a eulogy for the late great reporter Jack Newfield, who died Monday.
December 24th, 2004 at 3:13 pm
Newfield’s book on Guiliani was terrific.
December 25th, 2004 at 12:48 pm
“Then Murdoch bought the Village Voice, where I was working at the time. He came down to 80 University Place, pledged not to fire the editor, climbed back into his limo, went back uptown and fired the editor the next day. Jack Newfield and I took a taxi uptown, knocked on the door of his apartment at, I think, 834 Fifth, and Murdoch opened it with a broad smile, saying everything was back the way it had been and that the editor could stay on another year.
Here we are today, and I just heard that Jack died of kidney cancer earlier this week. Though we later battled mightily over Israel, anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, he was supportive when I was fresh off the boat at the Voice in the early 1970s.
Rupert has fired hundreds more editors and now has three floors instead of one. I don’t grudge him his triplex. He’s the one who has to climb up and down endless stairs or wait for the elevator so he can go to bed.”
http://counterpunch.org/cockburn12252004.html
December 25th, 2004 at 3:02 pm
Hate to break this to you, but Rupert sold the Village Voice about a decade ago and he and his triplex has nothing to do with it. I also worked at the Voice for a while when he did own it. There were bad times and good times and Alex rose to fame under Murdoch’s administration. In the end, Rupert’s ownership was considerably more benign that some that followed. Firing the editor that he did was a good move and he was actually replaced by a much more liberal and humane fellow (who was later fired by those who succeeded Murdoch).
Cockburn’s are nothing but crocodile tears. Alex is a cold and spiteful person, totally without personal ethics and as far as I can reckon, totally bereft of compassion. He has not flinched from using “friends” like Newfield for fodder, shredding them up and mischaracterizing them just to get him through one more column.
Do me a favor and dont post any more counterpunch links on this blog. I have not removed the one above only out of respect to Jack. Any other crap from Cockburn will go where it belongs — in the rubbish bin.
August 6th, 2006 at 12:42 am
At Crimeshare.net HELP IS AT HAND!
Have you been trying to sell your timeshare week, points, holiday Club membership?
Are you FEED UP with spiralling maintenance fee costs?!
Are you sick of phone calls “out of the blue” with ridiculous offers?
Do you simply want to GET OUT?!
At Crimeshare.net we show you the fraudsters so you know you can trust US !!
For a one time registration fee of $295 the value of your week can be redeemed within a six month period or YOUR MONEY BACK!
6454dd999429007ee1a24be907bf6bc8