Hertzberg gets the Kempton Treatment

I was fortunate yesterday to get a slightly-early copy of a new book: Hendrik Hertzberg's Politics: Observations & Arguments, 1966-2004. My immediate reaction was that this 650-page collection seemed almost like a counterpart to the retrospective of columns and articles by Murray Kempton published about a decade ago, Rebellions, Perversities, and Main Events, right down to the introduction and jacket blurb from David Remnick of the New Yorker. (My memory tricked me here: Remnick wrote a blurb, but not the introduction to the 1996 Kempton collection, although he did write an introduction to the more recent Modern Library reissue of Kempton's Part of Our Time, his book on the 1930s.) But that seems bizarre: The Kempton collection appeared when the author was in his late 70s, and Hertzberg is not only young, he seems even younger. It is astonishing to think that his career goes back to 1966, as editor of the National Student Association magazine, especially for a lot of readers who only became acquainted with Hertzberg's work when he returned to the New Yorker and began writing the lead political piece in Talk of the Town most weeks. Other than the New York Times op-ed page, or perhaps a Time or Newsweek column, that's probably the most widely read political slot there is.

The comparison with Kempton goes further, though, because you can't name another weekly writer about politics whose work retains any interest even two months after it's written. Kempton's mind-altering syntax, his obsessive moral complexity, his dedication to leaving poignant questions in the air rather than tying down every loose rope, make even short columns from 50 years ago, about politicians or labor leaders you've never heard of, as fresh as the Iliad. I admire David Broder, but the only reason to read a Broder column from the 1988 presidential primaries, for example, would be for seriously wonky research purposes. (Which is not to say that such writers can't write great books with lasting value, just that their weekly output does no more than it is intended to do, which is to enlighten the readers in that week.) I suppose some people think George Will is such a writer, since they buy his collected columns, but to me, regardless of whether I agree with him, his columns seem reliably faux-erudite and formulaic. I haven't read mch the Hertzberg collection yet, but he is such a writer and I'm looking forward to it.

(It should go without saying, by the way, that if you are reading this, and you have never read anything by Murray Kempton, you must. I was fortunate enough to live in New York during his last flourishing, as a columnist for New York Newsday, which published from 1985 to 1995 and is probably the only paper I ever loved. I sometimes try to reproduce that experience of tabloid fun mixed with serious insight by reading the New York Post and the Financial Times, and nothing else, but it's not quite the same.)

As soon as I got the Hertzberg book, I l flipped pages looking for a piece that he had written in the New Republic in June 1987, which I vaguely remembered as a profound thought about politics and culture. I recalled it as a long essay -- to be more specific, I can picture myself reading it standing on the uptown #1 train at the end of a day shortly before I moved to Washington -- but in fact the key insight is in just a paragraph, really a single sentence, in a column reacting to the newspaper-photo evidence of adultery that abruptly ended Gary Hart's front-running campaign for the 1988 Democratic nomination:

The gross violation of the privacy of Gary Hart, Lee Hart, and their children is part of a general degradation of the public sphere and a general weakening of the distinction between the public and the private realms of life in the United States. This is a social phenomenon with many sources -- the Reagan Administration's deligitimation of public action, the human potential movement's hostility toward "hypocrisy" and exaltation of "authenticity," and the feminists' dictum that the personal is the political, to name three. But none of this justifies the Miami Herald and the Washington Post any more than the correlation between poverty and crime justifies mugging.

There are so many heavy ideas in that sentence, some of which are perhaps infuriating, an insight so complicated that if David Brooks had it, he would parlay it into a three-book contract. (What a smooth cheap shot, coming out of nowhere!) But the idea that stuck with me, and that has seemed hugely relevant through all the Clinton melodrama and into the Bush era, is that there is a symbiotic relationship between the weakening of the boundaries of private life, and the denigrating of the public sphere. The more we made the private public, the more we would erode the idea of the public sphere as a separate one with its own moral obligations. The more the boundary is smudged, the more private virtues substitute for public duties, and private vices are allowed to distort and twist the public debate about health care or taxation, the more illegitimate and merely a matter of individual preference will the larger moral choices we make as a society seem.

This is obviously a helpful insight into Bill Clinton, especially coming at the moment when he seems to have almost given up, and allowed so many of his television interviews to be devoted more to his private shame than his public record, rather than holding firm as he did in 1998. But it is also key to the understanding of George W. Bush's bizarre glorification of private morality. "I will restore honor and integrity to the White House" meant absolutely nothing more than that he would refrain from screwing the interns, for which we are expected to give thanks. Meanwhile, to take only the most obvious of a hundred examples, Bush is entirely comfortable gleefully denying gays and lesbians the right to form loving legal partnerships, safe in the certainty that he himself is "a good man," "not a hater," and not "against" homosexuals as people. The only reason that the press and public buys for one minute the idea that Bush's private decency -- which for these purposes we will not question -- somehow substitutes for or offsets his public endorsement of cruelty is that they made private behavior and attitude the ultimate measure of fitness to serve in public office.

Hertzberg's point also suggests why it is not sufficient simply to show that Newt Gingrich cheats on multiple wives with progressively younger women, that Bill Bennett spends his evenings in his underwear pumping hundred-dollar coins into slot machines installed in his VIP suite, that Dick Cheney says fuck. All true, and these are all creepy characters. But exposing them does nothing to restore the idea that we have a public sector in which we as a society have an obligation to ensure that people have the means to make a living, that some goods belong to all of us and cannot be parceled out to owners. By making "hypocrisy" the principle standard of morality, it reinforces the idea that private acts and attitudes prevail over public deeds, especially for politicians. Perhaps I'm reading too much into a sentence, but it is amazing that Hertzberg understood in 1987 exactly where we were headed.