← So to Speak: The Free Speech Podcast
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- [00:02]
Matt Henshoff
My name is Matt Henshoff. I am 88 and a half years old and I am a reporter. Sometimes I write books and my reporting has essentially been for well over 60 years, in large part about how to keep this country what it's supposed to be, a self governing republic.
- [00:27]
David Lewis
Somewhere I read of the freedom of speech.
- [00:30]
Nico Perino
You're listening to so to spe, the Free Speech podcast brought to you by fire, the foundation for individual rights and Expression. All right folks, welcome back to so to Speak, the free Speech podcast where every other week we take an uncensored look at the world of free expression through the law, philosophy and stories that define your right to free speech. I am your host, Nico Perino. On January 7, 2017, the Associated Press announced that free thinking author and columnist Nat Hentoff is dead at 91. I came to know Nat early in my FIRE career. Occasionally, Nat would call Greg Lukianoff, FIRE's president, and ask for some information about one of our cases. Nat famously didn't do email, so he would ask Greg to fax him the information. I was Greg's assistant at the time, so the task fell to me. The problem was I was just out of college and didn't know how to use a fax machine. But I had to learn. It was the Nat Hentoff asking. For well over 60 years, Nat was one of America's foremost public intellectuals and a familiar byline to free speech advocates and jazz aficionados the world over. He was arguably the world's preeminent jazz critic and a pioneering crafter of so called liner notes for Jazz albums. In 2004, Nat was the first non musician to receive the title of Jazz Master by the National Endowment of the Arts. Nat moved to New York City from Boston in 1953 and in the towering writing career that followed, he wrote dozens of nonfiction books, novels, children's books and memoirs. He interviewed some of the 20th century's most prominent cultural figures for his newspaper columns, including Malcolm X, Che Guevara, and Bob Dylan. In fact, he wrote two of the most famous profiles of Bob Dylan, one for the New Yorker and another for Playboy. And he provided liner notes for Dylan's second album, the Free Willing Bob Dylan. In 1980, Nat published his first book on free speech, which covered the history of free speech in America. And in 1992, he published Free Speech for Me but not for Thee how the American Left and Right Relentlessly Censor each Other, which remains a classic defense of free speech even to this day. With the book's title also becoming an online Meme. For Nat, free speech was a defining characteristic of the individual. It imbued all aspects of life. Indeed, seemingly disparate passions for the Constitution and jazz weren't so different, according to jazz percussionist and composer Max Roach, who once remarked to Nat, you know, Nat.
- [02:57]
Matt Henshoff
You write a lot about the Constitution. What do you think we do what we do in jazz. We are individual voices, right? Have to be. And we come together and that voice is different and sometimes larger than the sum of the parts. Isn't that what you're talking about?
- [03:17]
Nico Perino
For my part, Nat Hentoff was the quintessential free speech civil libertarian, always principled and always fiery. And this year marked his 100th birthday. So to commemorate the occasion and discuss his life and legacy, we are joined by his son Nick, and filmmaker David Lewis, who directed the Pleasures of Being out of Step, a fantastic documentary profiling Nat's life as a jazz critic and a civil libertarian. Nick Hentoff. David Lewis, thank you for joining us.
- [03:44]
David Lewis
On so to Speak, and thank you for having us.
- [03:47]
Nick Hentoff
Thank you, Nico.
- [03:49]
Nico Perino
David, let's start with you. Why make a movie about Nat Hentoff?
- [03:53]
David Lewis
Well, it was really a personal choice, I have to say. I grew up reading the Village Voice and always admired his work and his willingness to be outspoken and speak truth to power, at least as I saw it then. And I didn't know that much about jazz music and I wanted to learn about it, so that was an added benefit.
- [04:11]
Nico Perino
What do you think Nat was most known for, you know, at that time that you're making the film, what Was like the late 2000s, early 2010s? What were people associating with the name Nat Hentoff?
- [04:23]
David Lewis
Well, by that time, he had been writing for the village voice for 50 years or so, I guess. And so I would have to say that that's how he was best known. Although if you were a jazz fan and you grew up reading his liner notes, you knew them very deeply.
- [04:38]
Nico Perino
And what are liner notes for our listeners who are maybe younger and haven't heard that phrase before?
- [04:44]
David Lewis
Well, the liner notes, you don't see them that much anymore, are for the big 12 inch LPs when they were invented on vinyl. I guess vinyl is coming back now, right? I don't know about. I don't know if liner notes are coming back, but there was a lot of space on the back of those album covers. And so they hired writers to write about the album, about the music that was being made, and. And Nat often focused on that exclusively, I think, in rock A lot of bands put their own liner notes on the albums, but back in the day, they used to hire writers to write them. And Nat would interview the musicians and ask them about the music and what they were trying to accomplish with the music and use his own ear and write it up that way. And some of them were quite memorable. And a lot of people learned about jazz by reading those liner notes.
- [05:32]
Nico Perino
And Nick, what was it like to be Nat Hentoff's son?
- [05:36]
Nick Hentoff
Well, from my earliest memories, it seemed perfectly normal that everybody was talking about your father that. Didn't everybody have a father who appeared on TV frequently? Didn't everybody have a father who, who was on the radio or who wrote and was published and was talked about? And the most frequent question I got growing up, after I told the person what my name was, the question would be, are you related to Nat Hentoff? And it's something that's, that's been a feature of my life from the very beginning all the way up to the present. I remember that the first time I appeared in a newspaper was when I did the unusual thing for a 12 year old. And I bought at auction an autograph document signed by both George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. And the gallery owner, a guy named Charles Hamilton, who was kind of like an impresario, a P.T. barnum of the autograph industry, he released that to the AP wire. And back then the AP wire was fed to all the little newspapers all across the country. Hundreds and hundreds of newspapers. Unlike today, where you only have one or two newspapers, mainly surviving in a state of. And so the, the, the article started out was Nicholas Hentoff, 14 years old, 13 years old, son of journalist Nat Hentoff, bought a $2,200 autograph designed by George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. And that was when I was 13, 14. And it continued up until I went to my reunion recently at Cornell University. And a friend of mine, Tom Allen, and I ran into the editor of the Cornell Daily sun, which we both worked for, and he said, frances, do you remember Nick? And she said, oh yeah. Nat Hentoff's kid.
- [07:29]
Nico Perino
Nat famously was described by the editor of the Washington Post as someone who would walk into a garden party and put on a skunk suit. You know, he had some controversial opinions. He wasn't afraid to speak his mind. As the Associated Press put in its lead to its to his obituary. Was any of that kind of baked into the conversations you were having with your peers who recognized his name?
- [07:52]
Nick Hentoff
Yeah, it was never really negative. It only, it was always people With a great, people approached it with a great deal of respect. They were very impressed when, when they would learn that my father was Nat Hentoff. You know, I got to use a stock line after a while where people would ask me, are you related to Nat Hintoff? And my response was only by paternity. And you know, it changed a little bit in the 1980s, late 80s, the, the 90s, when he started to take on a little bit more controversial subjects that weren't exactly part of the liberal orthodoxy that, you know, that, that developed during the 1960s. But for the most, he was, he.
- [08:33]
Nico Perino
Was pro life, famously, right?
- [08:35]
Nick Hentoff
He was very, he was very pro life and it all, you know, and, and he was a believer, although he was not a Catholic. And he, although he did do a book length profile for the New Yorker that actually became a book on Cardinal o' Connor of the New York Diocese. He believed in the seamless garment and he believed in the sanctity of life from birth to death. And he was against the death penalty, actually.
- [09:01]
David Lewis
You said from, from conception to death.
- [09:03]
Nick Hentoff
I think from conception to death. And it was very important to him. And it became an issue when, when people started to talk about reproductive rights.
- [09:12]
David Lewis
I'm just thinking here, you know, he didn't, he wasn't the skunk at the Garden party in his jazz career. He rarely wrote about musicians that he didn't like and rarely criticized musicians. So it's interesting to think about that way that when he, when he went to the Voice and he started writing about other things, that's when he really started to speak freely.
- [09:31]
Nico Perino
But, but didn't he, David, didn't he lose a friendship with. Wasn't it Miles Davis for his review of Bitches Brew? I don't know if you guys recall that.
- [09:39]
David Lewis
It's possible. It's possible. But, but Amiri Baraka, the famous activist and poet and got his start as a writer and then hired him to write about jazz. And he tells the story in the film about going up to Miles and asking Miles for an interview. And Miles says no. And Baraka says to him, I bet if I was not Hendoff, you would do it.
- [09:59]
Nick Hentoff
I just wanted to, I wanted to put it into context. The skunk in the Garden Party comment had to do with his willingness to be unpopular if he felt that it was right to be unpopular. And he learned that at a very early age. He went to Boston Latin School, which was one of the, which was the leading public school in, in secondary school in, in Boston at the time in Massachusetts. And during that time, he worked for an activist and journalist named Francis Sweeney. And Francis Sweeney was an Irish immigrant Catholic who spent most of her time fighting against other Catholics who were anti Semitic. She fought against anti Semitism. She fought against church leaders like Father Coughlin and cardinals and who would support his virulently anti Semitic and right wing views. Coughlin was an active supporter of Hitler during the 1930s and of Mussolini. And she was the prototypical skunk at the garden party. She would walk into Catholic gatherings and tell them that what they were talking about was wrong. And he worked for her as, as a very young student in middle school and going forward. And he was, he had an affinity for labor leaders who would go in and disrupt the status quo at workplaces. He famously organized the candy shop that he worked at when he was, when he was a young boy. And that's the kind of context that you want to understand the stuck in the garden party comment because it wasn't going in like Gart. Like, you know, we have politicians today that are skunks at garden parties all the time and they stink things up just to be controversial or just to offend people. That's not what we're talking about here. What we're talking about here is going in and being willing to speak truth to power, even when that's going to be unpopular and put you at odds with the people in the room that you're speaking with.
- [12:07]
Nico Perino
David Nick brings up Francis Sweeney, who is someone that you also discuss in your film. I'm wondering if you can tell us about how those early years of Nat life helped shape him. He was born in 1925. As I had mentioned at the top, this would have been his hundredth birthday. He grew up in Roxbury, which is a neighborhood of Boston. He spent his first 28 years in the city and he said he had managed to grow up unmaimed in the most anti Semitic city in the nation. How did anti Semitism, his parents, immigrant background and just the environment in Boston in those early years help shape who he would become in his later years?
- [12:45]
David Lewis
Well, he often told me how his father loved to listen to Father Coughlin's radio show to hear all the anti Semitism being spewed and would pull over the car to the side of the road when they were driving and Father Coughlin came on the radio. But I think that he did experience anti Semitism, there's no doubt about that. He tells the story of being accosted by a gang of young toughs. I guess we would call them. And they asked him, are you Jewish? Are you Jewish? And he thought, and he responded, no, I'm Greek. And he was always ashamed of that. In later years, he still talked about it. And as far as Francis Sweeney goes, I can tell you that when I showed him the film for the first time and there are photos of Francis Sweeney in it, he said to me afterwards, he said, you know, I've written two or three volumes of memoirs, but nothing has brought it back home to, to me than this film. And being able to see Frances Sweeney in real life all those years later, just seeing her photo triggered that in him. So that's how important that experience was to him.
- [13:55]
Nico Perino
Nick, your dad was culturally Jewish, right? I mean, he wasn't religious. He tells a story in one of his memoirs about eating a salami sandwich on one of the holy days as his neighbors were walking to synagogue. And he sort of reveled in the experience of being a heretic. And he was even excommunicated by some rabbis at some synagogue, I guess in Massachusetts. And he didn't have the opportunity to defend himself, I believe is how he described it. How did his Jewish background, although he always associated himself with Judaism, I believe he writes in one of his memoirs that so long as Jews are persecuted, he will be associated with Judaism. How did that shape his early life and the years to come?
- [14:42]
Nick Hentoff
I think the excommunication occurred during the first war in Lebanon. Yes, when, when he opposed the invasion of Lebanon by Israel. I wrote against the invasion of Lebanon by Israel in 1982.
- [14:59]
Matt Henshoff
Never received so many letters inviting me.
- [15:02]
Nick Hentoff
Showing me various ways to communicate, commit suicide expeditiously on anything I've ever written. And I think it was in a motel on Long island. And they weren't serious rabbis who excommunicated him, but just another example of him willing to take a unpopular position with a core group of people that he felt comfortable with initially. And. Well, that came from an immigrant community in Boston. And there were, it was segregated by neighborhoods. So you had Jewish neighborhoods, you had Irish neighborhoods, you had Italian neighborhoods, something that you don't see very much anymore. But back then it was the way that, that all the different communities, immigrant communities, interacted with each other. They had their own turfs. But in, in that house, for instance, his father immigrated to Boston from a town called Volkovich, and it's pronounced, it's spelled various ways, but essentially exists today in Belarus. And it was, it was a small to mid sized city with a Jewish community. And his father, it was, it was part of the Pale, of the. Of the Imperial Russia. And he came here at 15 by himself, and his brothers were already here. And this is a town that was decimated during World War II. It was basically eliminated in the Holocaust. I have found a newspaper article from the New York Times that actually mentions the town and said there are 1,000 Jews left in the town. And it became a railroad hub that was used to deport all of the surrounding Jewish communities to Auschwitz. And so from his father's perspective, his father, everyone he knew growing up was destroyed in the Holocaust. And all of the extended family, his brothers and his father, survived because they came to the United States. But everybody else with that surname was gone. And when he arrived, when his father, Simon Hentoff, arrived in the United States, he immediately, when he turned 18, joined the army and was sent over to Europe in World War I and was injured in a gas attack during one of the attacks. And he became a United States citizen when he was commissioned out of the army on the army base, and then he was released from the army after becoming a US Citizen.
- [17:33]
David Lewis
Nat always described himself as a Jewish atheist, so I think that your characterization is spot on. Culturally, he identified as Jewish, but not religiously.
- [17:42]
Nico Perino
There was this great story or anecdote in one of his memoirs where he described how his father, if he was reading the newspaper and saw some sort of injustice brought upon a group or an individual, he would kind of mutter to himself, very un Jewish, very un Jewish. The idea being that the Jews were on the sites of the rights, the righteous, the oppressed people. And, you know, that's the story of Nat Hentoff's career, is that he's always kind of on the side of the little guy, of the oppressed, of those who have brought injustice or have had injustice done unto them. Nick, his dad, though, was worried about Nat growing up, right? He was a. Nat spent time in jazz clubs. He was interested in civil rights. Didn't he approach Nat's doctor about this as sort of an ailment?
- [18:31]
Nick Hentoff
Yeah, it's, it's. It's really interesting because it's sort of like a jazz singer phenomenon. The old film with Al Jolson where you had a cantor, a rabbi, and his son wanted to sing the blues. His son wanted to sing a different tune from the religious songs that his father sang. And in that case, he was interested in things that his father really didn't understand. And. And I think it concerned him because he wanted him to be traditionally a success. He wanted him to go into a career that would provide A good life for him. And he just didn't see how any of this jazz stuff was going to produce anything that would allow him to make a living or to raise a family. And it was just, you know, he was hanging out with jazz musicians and, you know, he was just not interested in the things that good Jewish boys should be interested in. And so he asked him. He asked him to go into, to the family physician to check him out to make sure that he was okay. And it's a hilarious letter that the physician wrote back, a very polite letter to the father saying, I've talked to your son. And the fact that he's interested in civil rights and he's interested in jazz music is absolutely nothing to worry about. He's going to do just fine. And of course he did.
- [19:47]
David Lewis
And he saw. He saw a connection between Jewish cantorial music and jazz. He kept a collection of Jewish cantorial music of LPs. And he always talked about how the. The singing, the cantor singing had had the same cry as. As he heard in the jazz.
- [20:09]
Matt Henshoff
Jazz hit me hard when I was 11 years old. The first music that really got inside me, I was so excited by it. My family belonged to an Orthodox synagogue, a shul in Roxbury. And the shul had cantors, cousins, and they were partially improvisatory. And they sang largely improvisations based on, of course, religious texts. And the first time I heard music that made me feel inside that way, I was walking down Boston's Main street and I heard a sound that got to me and I rushed into the record store. What was that? It was Artie Shore, a clarinet playing nightmare.
- [21:08]
David Lewis
And he said, he told his friend Charles Mingus, the jazz bassist and composer, this is the Jewish blues. He would play the cantorial music for Mingus and say, this is the Jewish blues.
- [21:20]
Nick Hentoff
That's the music I played for him as he was dying. I alternated between Billie Holiday and the cantorial music.
- [21:27]
Nico Perino
When I think of Nat Hentoft, I often associate him with New York City. He just seems like this quintessential New York character. He did spend his first 28 years in Boston, however. How does he end up in New York City?
- [21:42]
David Lewis
He got a job. He got a better job. Nat was a hustler in the good sense of the word. He likes to work and he needed to work, and he went where the jobs were. And so he got a job writing, writing for a magazine in New York. Picked up the family and moved.
- [22:02]
Nico Perino
Yeah, and it was downbeat, right? He was. He got a job as a jazz Journalist. But he wanted to break into, you know, more popular journalism, opinion journalism about broader political and social issues of the day. He had made him a name for himself, of course, in jazz. Right, Nick? But how did he find his way into, you know, more popular writing?
- [22:24]
Nick Hentoff
When he was a kid, as he and his father used to go to all the different synagogues in the neighborhood and listen to the cantorial music and they would appreciate that music together. And that led to Nat, once he discovered the local jazz clubs, to hanging outside of the jazz clubs, and he would hang out religiously and get in just to listen to the music. And finally, when he was a very young man, he got. He spoke very well, he was extremely articulate, he knew everything about jazz. He started doing what. What was a. What was essentially the first jazz blog. And it was a newsletter that they would type out in a typewriter, he and his partner in Boston, and they would write gossip about the local jazz community. That got him a radio gig. And he started broadcasting live from the various jazz clubs. And, you know, he, you, you. Some of these recordings still exist. And eventually he got offered a job on Downbeat in New York and he moved to New York and that was a very rich environment for him. And, you know, the, the beat scene and eventually the folk scene and eventually rock and roll was all boiling up out of Greenwich Village in New York. And that's where he lived. And he knew everybody and everybody knew him. And he was one of the few people in the 60s who not only was right, I mean, like, there are certain things that are important in people's lives. One is music, another is politics. And he agreed to write for free from the village voice in 57:58. And his only condition was that he wouldn't write about music, he wouldn't write about jazz, he wanted to write about politics, but he continued to write about jazz for the rest of his life, and he continued to write about politics for the rest of his life. So here are the two things that matter most to people. Politics and jazz. And he's writing about it constantly. He's doing 30,000 word profiles regularly for the New Yorker. I mean, think about. They talk about long reads nowadays, but that was a long read. 30,000 words in two parts in the New Yorker, part one and part two. At the same time, he's doing the Playboy interview of Bob Dylan. At the same time, he might do. He was writing for every magazine that was published out of New York that dealt with progressive politics and a lot having to do with music. And so he became widely known in New York City. And as I said at the beginning of the, of the. Of the program, you know, everybody always used to ask me, are you related to Nat Hentoff? And it wasn't until I was graduating from college and I moved out to St. John's Arizona, to work as a newspaper reporter an hour south of the Navajo Indian reservation that I ran into my first people who had no idea who he was.
- [25:12]
Nico Perino
David, what was Nat's approach to writing? You kind of see some of his unique peculiarities come through in your film. He's surrounded by books. He's still writing on a typewriter. How did he approach his craft, and what were the sort of stories that he gravitated to and that you found most interesting in your research for the film?
- [25:35]
David Lewis
Well, his. He wasn't a stylist. He wasn't a high stylist. His voice was very straightforward and plain spoken. He's. He said that he always had to have the lead, the first sentence of the article first, and then everything else flowed from that. You know, I was mostly interested in the historical stuff, is his famous early profile of Malcolm X. Meeting him in a diner up in Harlem. And they, they, they. He respected Malcolm. He respected his intellect. And they became, I wouldn't say friends, but it wasn't the last time that he interviewed him and communicated with him. And, you know, the Dylan stuff, in addition to the liner notes, there was a profile, a very early profile in the New Yorker where that sat in on a recording session and profiled him. And that's really where the Dylan myth started to take shape, was in that article, because Dylan told all these wild stories as part of his biography. And the New Yorker fact checkers, the famous fact checkers.
- [26:45]
Nick Hentoff
Missed a lot of.
- [26:46]
David Lewis
It or had a lot of it to get through. But, you know, I remember as early as. I mean, as late as the Obama administration, him writing articles critical of President Obama's practice of using drones to kill Americans abroad who he felt were terrorists or enemies of the state. And he did a famous cover for the Village Voice, George W. Obama. And they had a profile head where George W. Bush's head morphed into Obama's head. So all through his career, you know, it's just exciting to pick it up and read. I started the film when a friend of mine, the great journalist Tom Robbins, we were talking, know what might be a good project for me? And he called me up when he got home that night, and he said, you know, I was just on the subway and there was a College kid and he's sitting there cross legged on the subway platform reading the Village Voice. And he was reading that. And here's this guy in his mid-80s and the college kids are still reading him.
- [27:49]
Nico Perino
The tenure at Downbeat ended kind of on a sour note, didn't it, Nick?
- [27:53]
Nick Hentoff
Yeah, I believe so. It had to do with the hiring of a woman that the owners perceived, I believe, to be African American. And it turns out that she was actually Egyptian. Am I completely incorrect about that, David?
- [28:09]
David Lewis
No, you're correct. That's right.
- [28:11]
Nick Hentoff
And he just wouldn't, he wouldn't tolerate that. And he found it particularly absurd at a, at a, at a publication that was writing about people that were creating music who were, you know, the majority of the jazz musicians at the time were black, African American.
- [28:30]
David Lewis
And it's important, you know, when we talk about Nat as a jazz writer, you know, he wasn't just writing about it as popular music. You know, he was writing about it as an art form. And he treated these musicians with the respect that they deserved. And he respected the amount of work that they put into it. He expected that. He respected that their knowledge of the music. He respected the history of the music. And that really gave him entree into the community and the jazz community. And to the musicians who are famously not very good interviews usually and don't like to talk to journalists that much. But Nat was, was a charter member of the community. You know, he came up at Downey when jazz was really changing from popular music to, to, to a more art, art forms and different styles of jazz. And Nat was really at the forefront of writing about that and recognizing it.
- [29:26]
Nick Hentoff
And, you know, it's interesting because one of the things that I found interesting is that when you're a jazz critic, it's sometimes difficult to have close relationships with the jazz musicians because you're going to have to review their work critically. And so that doesn't really foster close personal relationships if you're going to be honest about what you're doing. And yet he had some very close relationships with jazz musicians like Mingus, who just felt very close to him. And he was a colorblind person. I mean, just absolutely, literally, he was a colorblind person when he did. And he didn't like pigeonholing people and believing that the only thing you can talk to about with a black person is jazz. And one of my favorite stories about him that he had in his memoirs is the time that he was able to meet a former slave. He was a young man in Boston. He had A black friend who's grandfather was. Had been a slave and was in his 80s or 90s and who loved to read. And he spent his days, the former slave, in the Boston Public Library, reading everything that he could lay his hands on. And when. When Nat went over to meet him, he wanted to talk to him about the origins of music and jazz. And the guy only wanted to talk to him about reading the classics because he learned that he was. Went to Boston Latin School with his grandson, and he wanted to know what he thought about the various classical poets and playwrights. And Nat was asking him about, and the guy just. He realized that the guy was dismissing him as an unserious person because all he wanted. All Nat wanted to talk to him about was jazz. And it really. I think that was an important event for him, and it changed the way that I think he dealt with people.
- [31:12]
David Lewis
One of my favorite moments in the film, it's a. It's a very quiet moment where he's interviewing Mingus and he happens to be recording it, but they were old friends, and they were sitting in Mingus's living room, and Mingus starts talking about a song that he was working on, and he starts singing it to Nat and he's. You know, it's just a very quiet sort of intimate moment between these two friends that really has always stayed with me.
- [31:36]
Nico Perino
David, what motivated Nat's interest in free speech? You talk about how in your documentary, free speech for Nat Hentoff is sort of a way of life, a way of being. How did that become a way of being for Nat? What were those early motivations?
- [31:52]
David Lewis
Well, I think. I think that anti Semitism and the war had a lot to do with it. He equated American democracy with free speech. And he always talked about how jazz was kind of like the American democracy with everybody playing. They're expressing themselves with their own voices. But to get. When it all came together, it was a full composition like the American democracy. So I think that he loved this country and loved its history. For all the criticism that he gave it, probably because of all the criticism that he had for the country.
- [32:42]
Nick Hentoff
Well, you know, the American Civil Liberties Union was born out of the Espionage act, and it was born out of the imprisonment of Eugene Debs and other anti war activists during World War I. And the. The Red Scare of the 1950s had a deep impact on that. I was talking to my mother just a couple of weeks ago. My mother's 95 years old, and we were talking about. She said, you had no idea. Just. Just the Kind of atmosphere that existed in the 1950s where you walked into a store and people had certain books that were under the Hunter and that people, you know, if you read a certain book or if a certain book was found on your bookshelf or in your academic office, you faced your life being ruined, being fired. And a little bit why fire was created as well. It started out as an academic defender of free speech. And for Nat, that had a deep impact on him. And for the rest of his life, he was a proselytizer of free speech. He didn't just write about it. He didn't sit at home and talk about it. He. He went out on the road like a preacher preaching about it. And he would speak at hundreds of different college campuses and different little community groups. And I actually found this on. I found this on ebay. And this one is a poster that's from a college campus in the 1960s, and it says Nat Hentoff. And the topic that he's speaking of on is Radical Alternatives After College. Right. And so this one is a poster of his talk that he was giving in 1996 in West Virginia, of all places, Charleston, West Virginia, talking about free speech. And, you know, up until he got into his 80s, he was just traveling all the time to different college campuses and different little community groups, particularly in. In communities where they've had problems with censorship and people wanting to ban books. And he was a big defender of librarians. He always defended librarians, and it didn't mean just in the United States. He controversially was very critical of the old left for defending Castro's oppression of librarians in Cuba.
- [35:15]
David Lewis
The way that Floyd Abrams, the prominent First Amendment attorney, put it to me was, Nat didn't just talk about free speech or write about free speech. He used it. That's what his career was based on.
- [35:27]
Matt Henshoff
The American Nazi Party, which was doing reasonably well, decided to march and organize in Skokie, a part of Illinois. And there was a lot of controversy about that. Should they have the right to speech? These Nazis and the ACLU leadership agreed with that, but not all the members or the chapter heads. And I wrote about it as if I were all of a Wendell Holmes saying, of course they have a right to speak. That was one of the times when I learned how to become very unpopular.
- [36:04]
Nico Perino
And he was also, though, the subject of censorship in a couple of instances. So in reading his memoirs, I was struck by how, when he was primarily interested in jazz, he taught a course at the Samuel Adams School in Boston. And this was a school that was associated with some communists. That really wasn't why he was there or what he was interested in, but they asked him to teach a jazz course, and so he did. And because of that, I guess he became under the watchful eye of some of the McCarthyite folks in the legislature there and maybe even the FBI. Nick, you would know better than I would, but I know that when he left Boston, he was worried that going to New York and leaving Boston might be complicated because of his class at the Samuel Adams School.
- [36:54]
Nick Hentoff
That was a communist school. I mean, it was, it was at least a deeply socialist school. And it was in the late 40s that he started teaching there. And he was called before a local UN American Activities Committee. And he felt that he had cooperated to the extent that he got cooperated and gave names, that he cooperated too much. And I think he felt deep shame about that. And he vowed that he would never do that again. And so when he, in the, in the 60s started to draw the attention when he was writing more and more about racial justice and about the civil rights movement, which he was very involved in, he was backstage at the March on Washington doing interviews. And those reel to reel tapes exist in, in a university library. They've never been published or, or transcripts haven't been prepared of them or they haven't been digitized, but I bet that would be very interesting. But he, he drew the attention of the FBI and the FBI. Two FBI agents came to his office in New York City and it wasn't in the voice. He had a private office and they questioned his janitor in the building and the janitor told him. And then they came back. And instead of being cowed by that experience and of not talking about it and not writing about what they were questioning him about, he did the exact opposite. He started on a tour of campuses, not only talking about his interview by the FBI, but talking about everything that they didn't want him to talk to.
- [38:18]
Nico Perino
Was the FBI interested in him because they thought he was a communist? Or was it because his civil rights advocacy, or is it just because he was associated with radical ideas? I mean, what caught their eye it.
- [38:26]
Nick Hentoff
Was they were afraid of radical communism. And they believed that at the time that the civil rights movement was infiltrated by communists and they believed that anybody who supported it had communist leanings. So it really was a vestige of the Red Scare.
- [38:43]
David Lewis
And by the time we got into the later 60s and the early 70s and a lot of the FBI abuses of civil liberties were, were becoming exposed, Nat wrote About that a lot. There was a. A famous incident where a group of activists broke into an FBI office in I think, I believe it's Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Is that right? And stole all their files and started mailing them out to journalists. And that was the proud recipient of one of those, one of those packages. And that got him another visit from the FBI.
- [39:13]
Nick Hentoff
Yeah, I remember, I remember him interviewing Daniel Ellsberg in our living room for.
- [39:19]
Nico Perino
For our listeners who aren't familiar with Daniel Ellsberg, that is the guy who was responsible for the Pentagon Papers.
- [39:24]
Nick Hentoff
And that would. That, that really drew the, the, the interest of the FBI because those were some of the. The country's most sensitive. Not only war secrets in the Vietnam War, but also nuclear secrets. Ellsberg released a great deal of. He used to be a nuclear planner and he released a lot of secret documents about nuclear planning and with the idea of really opposing the proliferation of nuclear weapons and trying to prevent a nuclear war from ever taking place.
- [39:57]
David Lewis
And that was. Was an early critic of the Vietnam war. And by 67, 68 he was already saying we're committ war crimes in that country.
- [40:06]
Nico Perino
So he was a defender of librarians. He wrote a book the Day They Came. The rest of the book. It's some undertones that might speak to what's happening today. He fought against McCarthyism, but he also fought for press freedom going back to his early days as a student journalist at Northeastern University in Boston. He was an editor at that publication and it was really became a muckraking publication under his leadership. They were investigating the board of directors, I guess at the school. And he was fired for this. And he said, ever since the day of my defenestration by the administration, Carl L. The President, everyone's free speech rights have been my business. He said I should be grateful to Carl L. For having given me a life's work. He said his obsession with the First Amendment is due to Carl L. James Madison came later.
- [41:01]
Nick Hentoff
You know, I recently had an opportunity to look at his senior yearbook and it describes in the individual photographs what the person was involved in throughout their career at college. And everything that, everything that he was involved in, a lot of it involved the newspaper. It shows him starting out as a writer for the newspaper, becoming the editor. But then if you flip to the page for the newspaper that year, he's nowhere to be found. It's. He's not in the editorial board. And that's the reason why is because in his senior year he was kicked off of the editorial board by the president of the university.
- [41:39]
Nico Perino
And the university, though, didn't they give him a honorary degree later in life? And he thought it was kind of funny?
- [41:46]
Nick Hentoff
I think they did. You know, he was, he was always an excellent student. He got, he was very smart and always got excellent, excellent grades.
- [41:55]
Nico Perino
Yeah, it might not have been an honorary degree. I know he also received an award while he was a student because he got excellent grades. And the president, Carl L. Refused to shake his hand or give him the award, which I guess was the tradition at the time. But, Nick, I want to ask you what you think Nat would make of the current climate for free speech. You know, in my mind, he, again, he's the quintessential civil libertarian. And so I'm always asking myself, what would Nat Hentoff say about this controversy or this issue?
- [42:23]
Nick Hentoff
Somebody once asked him what was the principal motivating motivation that he used to do the kind of work that he did. And he had a one word answer, and that was rage. He got angry. And the one thing that really made him angry, and it makes me angry too, is cruelty. And we're seeing a lot of unbridled cruelty. And it's just breaking my heart. And it would have broken his heart too. He would have been very upset about it. I mean, every day I. It's hard to. You want to avoid the news because every day it's not just about policy differences anymore. It's about destroying people for no good reason. Innocent people who haven't done anything wrong and they're just being torn apart by this administration, current administration. And he would have been very angry about that. And it would have, it would have surpassed any, any political issues or policy disagreements for him. It's just not the way that you treat people.
- [43:24]
Nico Perino
David, would you. Did you see that rage in Nat Hentoff when you were profiling him in his 80s? Was it still there, into his latest years?
- [43:32]
David Lewis
Well, yes, for sure. I just want to say, Nick, that that was beautifully said. I couldn't say it any better myself, but I can. I can tell you that the one time I wanted to. He didn't get out of the, out of the apartment that much at that, at that age when I was making the film and I, I wanted to film him going to the barber shop down the street because I thought it would be a nice scene and have him talk to the barber who'd been doing his hair for 40 years or so. And we set it all up and I booked the camera crews and called him the night before, or he called me the night before and said, I'm not going to do it, I don't want to do this. And he got really mad at me and he started yelling at me. And so I started yelling back at him and I finally convinced him to do it. And afterwards he said, I'm really glad we did that. So, yeah, he still had that rage in Little Things and Large.
- [44:23]
Nico Perino
You had a hard time actually getting a hold of him to do the documentary, right? He wouldn't return any. You had to find his phone number or something.
- [44:31]
David Lewis
I kept calling him up and saying, I want to do. I'm doing a documentary. I want to do a documentary. And he said, that's great, that's great. I'm really busy now. Can you call me in a couple of weeks? And I'd hang up and call him later and same, same story like two or three times. And finally I just wrote him a letter and I put, as Nick mentioned earlier, he doesn't use email. So I put it in the snail mail, walked up to the corner and put it in the mailbox. And a week later he called me. He said now he was ready to do it.
- [44:56]
Nick Hentoff
He was also reluctant to go to the movie premiere. Do you remember that, David?
- [45:00]
David Lewis
Yeah, yeah.
- [45:01]
Nico Perino
Why is that?
- [45:02]
Nick Hentoff
Yeah, well, because he was, he was, you know, towards the end he had a very hard time walking. He had severe osteoporosis and it took him. He took very short steps and he didn't like using a wheelchair. He didn't like being put in a wheelchair and wheeled around. In fact, he refused it. And so if you were trying to help him walk, you'd go. It would go at as a snail's pace. And so it probably took us a half an hour to get from the car down to the theater and into the seat. But he was really happy that he went. He saw a lot of old friends and he really enjoyed the movie and it was just beautiful. And, and you know, he was very grateful, David, that you were able to make that movie. And it was a beautiful movie and it really affected him. And I wanted to mention to you about the rage thing. And I'll tell you, we. For the last year, about, about the last year of his life, maybe the. But the first year of 18 months, he. I started writing co writing the column for him because it became much too difficult for him to read easily. And we were still writing about Obama even during the 2016 campaign. And you know, we came up with a title for one of the columns and it, the title of the column was pretty provocative. It was why is Obama still killing children? And it had to do with drone attacks in Afghanistan.
- [46:29]
Nico Perino
How did his liberal peers at the Village Voice and some of these other publications see that sort of criticism of a liberal icon, in this case President Barack Obama, but, or even as going back to the 80s, his pro life writings, was he ostracized for that or was it just people kind of assumed that Nat Hentoff was going to march to his own beat or be out of step?
- [46:52]
Nick Hentoff
Yeah, I think it was generational by that point. He, you know, by the, by the time that he started writing about pro life issues and also about issues involving disabled children and the disabled, because that's also part of the seamless garment. And there were some children that had severe developmental disabilities at birth, and the question was whether they should be allowed to die or not. And there were some epic court battles at the time between parents and hospitals and individual parents involving babies with spina bifida. And he started to delve into medical research deeply. He would do his own research, and he knew more about the subject than many doctors. And he, you know, he did the research, he read the research that talked about at what point preborn babies, babies, fetuses feel pain. And he, he did the research about what the life expectancy was and what the quality of life was for people who suffered from spina bifida. And, and, and he just followed the seamless garment into believing that nobody should be deprived of their life. And he especially didn't like it when they were deprived of their fundamental rights without due process, which is what was happening in a lot of these situations.
- [48:11]
Nico Perino
Did he have a politics, like, if you asked him what his politics were, did he have a way to describe it?
- [48:15]
Nick Hentoff
I, I think he felt most comfortable in a libertarian ideology.
- [48:19]
David Lewis
Okay, that's, that's the way he described himself. He would, he would never vote for or support the nominee for president of a major political party, that's for sure. I think he told me that in 1968, he voted for Dizzy Gillespie, who was running for, for president at the time.
- [48:40]
Nick Hentoff
His affinity for libertarian ideology was more of an individual rights affinity and not an economic affinity. He believed in the social safety net. He believed in the rights of labor unions to organize very, very deeply since he organized the labor union at his Gandhi store he worked at when he was a pre, you know, preteen. And, and, and so he was, he was an iconoclast and he was somebody who was, you know, and anybody else would have been deeply conflicted and suffering from cognitive dissonance. But it was a beautiful mix in Nat Hentoff because he believed in individual rights, he believed in treating people fairly, he believed in caring for the poor and the sick. And he wouldn't stand for it when people didn't do that.
- [49:32]
David Lewis
He called himself a lowercase libertarian. A lowercase l to disassociate himself from the organized political party.
- [49:41]
Nico Perino
Nick, your brother Tom mentioned that Nat was a line drawer, not a balancer. I had never heard that phrase before, but it really captures something about a lot of civil libertarians. And I want to see if you might be able to unpack what that means. What does that say about your father's approach to the issues?
- [50:05]
Nick Hentoff
Tom and I are both lawyers, and balancing act is a legal term that they use in constitutional litigation. And courts are always wanting to balance the rights of people. And they make, you know, they try and do their best in resolving difficult concepts by balancing the rights. And there are different tests for what should happen in any given situation. And that was a line drawer in the sense that he had principles, he was uncompromising about them. And so that's why he was a free speech absolutist. You couldn't get him to admit that there was any form of free speech that didn't, you know, if it didn't involve violence against other people, then everybody had a right to say it.
- [50:44]
Nico Perino
And he didn't believe in defamation law, right, David?
- [50:47]
David Lewis
He didn't believe in defamation law, libel suits. I don't think he really believed in copyright either. And Nick's brother Tom is a copyright lawyer.
- [50:58]
Nick Hentoff
I think that, well, it's interesting. I think the majority of people want to be liked and they, they, they care very deeply about what other, other people think about them and that, so that results in a form of self censorship and people will censor themselves in order to be accepted in any given community. To. People tend to want to avoid conflict if they're going to be. They don't want it. And also they, they tend to be in jobs where you can get in a lot of trouble by not being a team player. Easiest way for somebody to get fired in a business is by not being a team player or not being successful and, you know, being relegated to a desk in an obscure office somewhere for most of your life. And one of the typical examples of that is people who grew up in the Soviet Union.
- [51:42]
Nico Perino
Yeah, he wrote, he wrote that he loved his job. He said, to get paid for your opinions, the more controversial the better. Must be the best of all possible jobs. Citizens sit down to Breakfast and open the paper to applaud you. Or he says, better yet, to roar at you and spill their coffee all over their pants. What a life. He concludes, so it was quite a life, David. I mean, yeah, if you want to speak to that. But I'm also curious to hear what you think his most important legacy is.
- [52:12]
David Lewis
Well, let me just say this first. We spoke earlier about Frances Sweeney, published the newsletter in Boston, Muckraking Newsletter. And he wrote about her in the same book he wrote. She was the one who taught me the pleasures of being out of step. And that's where I got the title for the film. And I really do think that there is a certain joy for him in being out of step. And that's. That's where that came from. His legacy. Who. I mean, we have jazz as we know it today. We probably wouldn't know it the way we know it today without. Without Nat's understanding of it and his ability to communicate it to us. We have a whole era of speaking truth to power through the 60s and 70s that Nat was instrumental in creating change the course of this country. We haven't really talked about alternative journalism and what alternative journalism is, but he was there at the creation and helped create it. And it's a. It's a form that is. Endures today.
- [53:27]
Nick Hentoff
It's the dominant form of journalism today, I think. I mean, it's, you know, you have Jim. Jim Acosta, who's. Who has a very successful substack. How many people can we talk about right now who have very successful substacks, which is basically alternative journalism? You do what you want to do and you. And people support you for it. The first person to really do that successfully was I, of Stone. He was the first person to really make a living out of publishing a newsletter that was mimeographed and mailed to people. And you know, the first real. You know, there were. What was that newspaper? There was a folk newspaper that was. That published all of Dylan's first songs, but it was mimeographed and mailed out to people. And some of the musicians that got it when they were kids was like Janice Ian, who had a different name back then and was pub. Her first songs were published in. In. In that particular publication. And. And so we've gone from many people mimeographing their own newsletters, like the first blogs, to corporate media. And you can only really get on television or you can only get into the papers if you worked for a corporate news organization, to now we're back to. To people are really finding themselves and getting real followings, doing their own thing on Substack and other alternative platforms.
- [54:50]
David Lewis
It's really about dissent. Right. It's all dissent. And it's very easy for dissenters to become the establishment over a period of time. But Nat was always at the forefront of dissent all through his career.
- [55:05]
Nick Hentoff
Yeah. I think his legacy is simply that if you see something that's wrong, you've got to stand up and you've got to talk about it for as long as you can, as loudly as you can and as eloquently as you can. And I think that that is something that he accomplished very well in life and was very successful at it.
- [55:25]
David Lewis
His. His response to speech that he didn't. Didn't like was always more speech.
- [55:31]
Nico Perino
Well, David Lewis, Nick Hentoff, I think that's a beautiful place to end this conversation. I thank you both for joining us today.
- [55:39]
David Lewis
Thank you for having us.
- [55:40]
Nico Perino
And, David, before we sign off, how can folks watch your documentary? It's not available on any of the streaming platforms, is it?
- [55:46]
David Lewis
Well, you can now get it on Ovid tv, ov Ovid, which is a streaming platform that is devoted exclusively to documentaries. And they came to me last year and asked if they could have it. And I'm very happy that people could find it there.
- [56:06]
Nico Perino
And I think I have some ways that we might be able to get it on some other streaming platforms. So maybe you and I can connect about that offline. But in the meantime, for folks who are looking for more about Nat Hentoff, and I'm telling you, you got to learn more about this guy. He's brilliant, he's interesting, he's funny, he's got a beautiful voice, one of the most beautiful voices I've ever heard.
- [56:29]
David Lewis
A radio voice.
- [56:30]
Nico Perino
A radio voice for sure. But you can and should watch the documentary that David made, the Pleasures of Being out as Steph. But you should also read his books. I think he published something like 30 books, nonfiction and fiction, throughout his lifetime. I've got a couple of them sitting right here next to me. Speaking Freely and Boston Boy are two of their more prominent memoirs, Speaking Freely. The poster for it is sitting behind Nick right now for those watching on video. But also, if you're big into the free speech world, Free speech for me but not for thee. I think the book was published in 1992 as a classic, and the title has become a meme in the free speech world.
- [57:11]
David Lewis
And some. Some classics on jazz as well. Books on books on jazz devoted exclusively to the voice of the musicians themselves. He kept his own voice out of it.
- [57:20]
Nick Hentoff
You know, it's, it's interesting. He was, he was nominated a couple of times for a Pulitzer, for a Pulitzer Prize, and he would always submit that his editors would always submit his political work for the Pulitzer. And my mother believes that if they had submitted his jazz criticism, he would have won a Pulitzer. And jazz in criticism. And they never, they didn't do that.
- [57:46]
Nico Perino
The Path not Taken well, folks, I am Nico Perino and this podcast is recorded and edited by a rotating roster of my Fire colleagues, including Bruce Jones, Ronald Baez, Jackson Fleagle, and Scott Rogers. The podcast is produced by Emily Beaman. To learn more about so to Speak, you can subscribe to our YouTube channel or substack page Speaking of Substack, both of which feature video versions of this conversation. You can follow us on X by searching for the handle Free Speech Talk, and you can send us feedback at sotospeak@the fire.org Again, that is so to speak at the fire.org every other week. I asked you if if you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Reviews help us attract new listeners to the show, and until next time, I thank you all again for listening.