Andrew Kopkind's Wars

The Thirty Years' Wars: Dispatches and
Diversions of a Radical Jounalist, 1965-1994
By Andrew Kopkind (Verso)

Andy had a lot of questions. This was my initial perception of him in the fall of 1992, when I was filling in for the classified ad director at The Nation and Andrew Kopkind strolled into my office, settled into a chair and in a couple of minutes determined that I was 23, had recently lived in Austin, and was professionally adrift to say the least. He had just finished a Generation X essay for Grand Street, and I think he was pleased to discover an apparent slacker to share his latest zeitgeist readings with. I was pleased that, while he kept asking me questions during my year at The Nation and after, he also told so many stories. Sometimes these were about things he had written or was writing, but more often they were about living on “used bananas” during his commune years, about movies I ought to see, about his battles with the magazine's editor and its accounting staff, about the tacky thing that so-and-so had said about so-and-so at a party ten years ago. He was an entertaining storyteller and an indefatigable one: He paid no attention to my frequent glances at the conspicuous pile of work on my desk, confident that whatever he had to say was infinitely more important than whatever was in my in-box.

In retrospect, of course, he was absolutely right. Andy was the sort of person who makes a lasting impression even on people who knew him only casually, like me. My only regret is that I didn't ask more questions myself. Kopkind's words — and the unflagging passion that must have inspired them — had offered me solace for years before I arrived in New York. But it was easy to forget who this charming guy making mischievous (but accurate) observations about Drew Barrymore really was. The Thirty Years Wars: Dispatches and Diversions of a Radical Journalist 1965-1994, a bittersweet reminder. Bitter because Andy died this past September of cancer; sweet because, as Alexander Cockburn puts it in his introduction, “students in American Studies these days have had the wrong maps and untrustworthy interpreters.”

This is on the money: Kopkind's writing is the kind that sets you straight, puts you back on the right path when you didn't even know you'd left it. It's not a complete tour of the past three decades, but it is an invaluable and highly entertaining one, starting in Alabama in '65, but winding through places and times both obvious and not so obvious, from the Dominican Republic in 1966 to Des Moines in 1987; from Bensenvillle, Illinois, in 1977 to Kingston, Jamaica, in 1980; from Hanoi in 1968 to Prague in 1968. Andy had a lot of questions, but he also had a lot to say.

* * * * *

The Thirty Years' Wars begins in 1965, a peculiar moment in the history of, among many other things, reporting. The New Journalism was just in the offing, and it would be another decade before All The President's Men would briefly lend so-called investigative reporter the sheen of heroism. After a few years of straight journalism for The Washington Post and Time, Kopkind went south to cover the Civil Rights movement. He would remain a journalist, but in a very short amount of time the young man from New Haven would also become a radical. He would amass credentials within “the movement” that I don't imagine the left's many more celebrated pundits could begin to match. At the time, his radicalism is what gave such credibility to his journalistic accounts of the rises and falls of the SNCC, SDS, the Black Panther Party, the Weatherpeople. Kopkind himself must have considered his writing from those initial ten years crucial: the first 291 pages of the book consist almost entirely of pieces dated July 1976 or earlier.

At times, frankly, this chunk of the book gets a little cumbersome. As a result, the drawn-out ruminations on The Left for Ramparts, etc., are outshone by his pithy dispatches for London's New Statesman, which managed to summarize the importance or irrelevance of various American Moments in a few sometimes-prescient and always-crystalline paragraphs, about LBJ's Great Society or a Republican gubernatorial candidate in California named Ronald Reagan (whose “philosophical line is an entirely incomprehensible jumble of every myth and cliché of American life”).

Then again, a few of the longer reports and essays from this section of The Thirty Years War are extraordinary. His coverage of the trial of the Chicago Seven is one example, and another is an essay written in the summer of 1967 for The New York Review of Books. Called “Soul Power,” it is a wonderful summation of radical politics at that crucial moment: “The movement is dead; the revolution is unborn,” it begins, “The streets are bloody and ablaze, but it is difficult to see why and impossible to know for what end. Government on every level is ineffectual, helpless to act either in the short term or the long. The force of army and police seems not to suppress violence but to incite it. Mediators have no space to work; they command neither resources nor respect, and their rhetoric is discredited in all councils, by all classes. The old words are meaningless, the old expressions irrelevant, the old remedies useless. It is the worst of times.

“It is the best of times.The wretched of this American earth are together as they have never been before, in motion if not in movement. No march, no sit-in, no boycott ever touched so many. The social cloth that binds and suffocates them is tearing at its seamiest places. The subtle methods of co-optation work no better to keep it intact than the brutal methods of repression; if it is any comfort, liberalism proves hardly more effective than fascism. Above all, there is a sense that the continuity of an age has been cut, that we have arrived at an infrequent fulcrum of history, and that what comes now will be vastly different from what went before.”

* * * * *

Probably half the job of the radical journalist is the ability to sustain outrage over time. Kopkind did not write shrilly or angrily — he seemed more bemused or amazed than anything else — but I think it's hard to miss the urgency in so many of his words, or that this urgency was borne of a profound dissatisfaction with the way things are.

Most of the sixties radicals, of course, simply changed. They mellowed, became more “pragmatic.” Kopkind had stopped marching by the mid-seventies, and begun writing about new things like David Bowie and the film Nashville and the rise of disco, for alternative weeklies like The Boston Phoenix and The Village Voice. But he had not really mellowed in any ideological sense, nor had he stopped writing about politics. Instead, his ideology simply found its way into new contexts, from those mentioned above to drugs to urban planning to the changing ground rules of gay and lesbian life in America (he had come out himself by this time). And really his writing always recognized that the cultural and the political cannot be separated convincingly. What's remarkable is the consistency of his vision over these years, his refusal to concede any ground to the center whatsoever. In 1980 he wrote a piece for The Voice that even dared to praise certain things about the Soviet Union.

That year, of course, ushered in a new era of strangling conservatism is national politics. By 1983 Kopkind had found a new perch from which to observe and explain this troubling zeitgeist. At The Nation, both his longer pieces and his short, often unsigned, editorials made the magazine a sort of weekly reality check on Nicaragua, Iraq, Rambo, or Nancy Reagan for readers like me. Now those hard-fought radical credentials gave his journalism its unique wisdom. Even when the headlines produced nothing of particular outrage, Kopkind could extract some fundamental historical lesson — like America's weakness for heroes — from the week's banalities. I especially like one of his short editorials from 1985: “The baseball-and-drugs 'scandal' is a cautionary tale in the heroic saga of the sport. Pete Rose (this month) expressed the positive lesson but it was incomplete without its negative counterpart, the fallen idol. After all, the Book of Genesis would never have sold without the part about the Expulsion.”

* * * * *

The other half of the radical journalist's job is the ability to sustain hope over time. On one level, I'm sure Andy would have preferred to have received greater recognition for his work. Two of the longer pieces in the book's final section show just how far he had progressed as a journalist, “From Russia With Love and Squalor,” an incredibly ambitious and insightful report from many points in the former Soviet Union, and “The Gay Moment,” an essay that was the centerpiece to a special “Queer” Nation issue that he guest edited. Andrew Kopkind was clearly a better writer than many of his peers, and a clearer thinker as well, and I think it bothered him that not enough people really gave him credit for it. Speaking of a more celebrated member of the left-liberal establishment who he didn't think respected his work, Andy once said to me, “I'm probably his oldest friend;” he sounded not so much bitter as hurt.

But at the same time, Andy avoided the easy shelter of cynicism in both his writing and his conversation, probably because he simply enjoyed his life a great deal. This was obvious when he called up to gossip a bit, but it's also obvious in some of his journalism from the past dozen years — a dark time indeed for radicals on the left. This was obvious in his still-persuasive writing on Jesse Jackson's 1988 presidential campaign (words I remember; that was the first primary I voted in — for Jackson). But it's still there even after Bill Clinton's ascendancy, which was in many ways more of a problem for the left than Reagan's. Kopkind never wore rose-colored glasses, but he could still see glimmers of hope in the Chiapas rebellion (which “allows untold millions around the world to see that it's still possible to put up a fight.”), in the anniversary of Stonewall, even in the reality that was replacing the rhetoric on how the post-communist world would shape up.

This last example is the book's penultimate entry, from early summer 1994. I remember reading it probably within a month of the last time I saw Andy, when we sat through a lousy independent movie called My Life's In Turnaround — more slacker fare. He did not look like his old self, but his eyes were as full of life as ever, especially when he glanced over and rolled them during the movie's more unforgivably stupid moments. Walking home after dinner, I of course assumed that I would see him again when he got back from his usual summer stay in Vermont.

This was Andy's second bout with cancer, and I find it absolutely amazing that his ability to sustain both outrage and hope could weather such a thing. I suppose it's what made him such an extraordinary person, and secondarily such an extraordinary journalist. That summer 1994 piece on the post-communist world, was titled “Starting Over,” and in it Kopkind does was does what he does best, which is to survey the chaotic scene and make sense of it all. There would be no cake walk to free markets, he wrote, and there would be no return to Leninism.:

“Skeptics who refrained from expressing unconfined joy at the death of socialism a few years back pointed out that people will always have a need to join in collective efforts to secure a better life for the many against the greedy predations of the few. That struggle goes hand in hand with the attempt to free individuals from the tyranny of unaccountable authority. But just as the struggle had been blocked in the nominally communist countries of Eastern Europe, so it is under the reckless and unresponsive regimes that emerged from the wreckage of the old order. But there is always another chance to bring a better system to birth, which is what history means, after all.”

A version of this story appeared in the July 14, 1995, issue
of The Texas Observer.