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Jack Newfield: From the Radical Outpost By Eve Berliner |
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An intense, young Jack Newfield at work, 1973. By Eve Berliner An enemy of corruption, subjugation,
exploitation, a pugilistic street fighter for the abused, Jack Newfield is a
journalist of sacred rage. His constituency is the victims,
underdogs and rebels of this earth. He has taken on the likes of Don King,
Louis Farrakhan, Edward Koch and the judicial establishment of the City of That profound sense of injustice came
early to this child of Bedford-Stuyvesant, His mother struggled valiantly, never
quite recovering from the loss, never remarrying or ever having a date. Her
mandate was to work. By the time Jack entered Public School 54, she was slaving away five days a week in a department
store in downtown They were essentially the last white
family on the block, the suspicion of authority innate, the alliance with the
powerless forged. * * * It was to be Jackie Robinson who would
inflame and inspire him, Jackie Robinson who came up to the Dodgers in 1947
when Newfield was nine years of age, a fanatical Dodger fan, reading about
him day in and day out, Robinson who would prevail with daring and heroism
and pride in the face of vilification. "He was the first outsider/underdog
I identified with. "Eight years ahead of the Supreme
Court's ruling, baseball was integrated in a ballpark that was walking
distance from my house in 1947. And I read the Post. I read Jimmy
Cannon every day and saw the bigotry, the discrimination – bean balls,
exclusion -- that was all directed at Robinson. People resenting his
existence in the Major Leagues. "The first time I ever saw him play
was on "I had a deep identification with
him and with * * * The great journalistic influences came
early. "The best thing that ever happened
to me was discovering the Jimmy Cannon/Murray Kempton New York Post
when I was nine years old. They made me want to become a journalist. " "Cannon in the 40's was a great
liberal. He crusaded for Jackie Robinson even before he came up to the
Majors. He was able to humanize all these black athletes for me as a kid,
reading about Joe Louis and Sugar Ray Robinson. He was a poet of the city, of
Broadway, of "I.F. Stone was the first model of
investigative journalism. I discovered him in college. To me he was like
Sherlock Holmes. From him I learned you've got to read all the documents,
read all the transcripts, annoy the bureaucrats to give you the memos. Read,
read, read. That was the lesson I took from Stone. "Later it was Mailer. I was deeply
influenced by Norman Mailer's journalism. Mailer was a founder of the Village
Voice when I went to work there. I had read his fiction and knew that
Mailer went to Boys High, my own high school, and I was very aware of him. He
graduated in '41, I graduated in '55. When he started to write journalism, Advertisements
for Myself and The Presidential Papers and his famous Esquire
piece about the Democratic National Convention -- I still think that it's the
single greatest piece of magazine journalism I've ever read -- it was called
"Superman Comes to the Supermarket" about JFK's nomination in 1960. It was the first piece that
caught the * * * Mississippi -- the heart of darkness --
summer of 1963, Jack Newfield, part idealist, part anarchist, part innocent,
on the frontlines of struggle. "The summer of '63 was very scary.
Houses were getting firebombed. Blacks were afraid to drive in a car with
whites. This was the year in which Goodman, Cheney and Schwerner
were killed. " "By 1965 things were a little less
tense. I got chased a few times and filed a complaint with the FBI." * * * Newfield had been drawn in to the civil
rights movement by his best friend, Paul DuBrul.
They became involved in organizing the "Youth March for Integrated
Schools." He literally marched on "It was the first time I ever heard
King speak. And that day King spoke about voting rights. And King blew me
away. This was April, 1959." By February, 1960 he was involved in
sit-ins at Hunter College where he was studying journalism and working in a
little office on 125th Street organizing support demonstrations for sit-ins.
"Met Bob Moses there and Bayard Rustin."
In 1962, he began writing pamphlets for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating
Committee (SNCC]. By 1964 he was writing about these
matters on the pages of the Village Voice. Newfield returned to "I spent a lot of time in * * * The assassination of the dream -- John,
Martin and Bobby -- came hard to Jack Newfield who had come to love, to know
deeply as friend and biographer (then in progress) of Robert Francis Kennedy. June 5, 1968, Jack there in the ballroom
of the Ambassador Hotel when the moan rose like a wave across the room -- men
and women weeping and praying, wailing, pounding the floor -- and Bobby was
dead, the last hope of America gone. "Though it's really unknowable, I
think that if Bobby had lived to be President we would have ended the Vietnam
War much sooner, renewed the war on poverty; we would have had a totally
different policy toward blacks than Richard Nixon had. Kennedy was still a
work in progress when he was killed -- just 42 years of age, King 39 when he
was killed. Could have been around together another 30 years on parallel
tracks." The friendship was a great treasure. Lingering memories: "The joy in
people's eyes, particularly Mexicans and blacks when he came through their
neighborhoods. He used to let me ride in his car with him during the "I think it was the murder of his
brother that was the defining event of his life. After that he identified
with anybody who had a hurt, a loss, and when he got elected to the Senate he
became a moral witness to poverty." "With King I didn't quite grasp
that he was the greatest American of the 20th century when he was alive and
it's only through the course of time that I now have come to understand how
amazing King was in his capacity to grow and his ability to stay sane in the
late 60's when so many people around him were going nuts, becoming terrorists
or dropping out or getting into drugs or hating America or giving up on
integration. King never lost his commitment to an interracial society, to
democracy, to non-violence, to reason." * * * For Jack Newfield, the sport of boxing
has always been a kind of paradox of brutality and art. "I've always considered boxing a
guilty pleasure," he states. His explosive 1995 book Only in
America: The Life and Crimes of Don King is a scathing portrait of
the flamboyant, brutal and corrupt boxing promoter and the dark corrupt
underworld of boxing. "I now know a lot of fighters who
are almost all black and Latino who have been exploited. I view fighters as
exploited workers, uneducated, like the farm workers of the 1960's and the
miners of the 1930's. Fighters are the only athletes without a labor union. Baseball, football, basketball, hockey, all have a union.
They're victimized and exploited by the promoters and I view my writing about
boxing as another way to defend the working class against the rich
plutocrat." "Sugar Ray Robinson was the
greatest fighter who ever lived. When I met him late in life he talked to me
about how much he hated fighting. In 1947 he killed an opponent in the ring
in Of Ali: "Hurts my heart whenever I
see him. I see him pretty regularly at events and I give him a hug and he
taps me on the chin and my heart breaks because I know all the punches he
took in fighting and in the gym contributed to his condition."Sugar
Ray Robinson had Alzheimer's, Joe Louis had dementia
and Ali. The three greatest fighters who ever lived all ended up with tragic
medical conditions. It's like a curse. "I'm very ambivalent about
boxing." * * * Newfield pleads guilty to the suspicion
that he is on more than a few hit lists: slumlords, labor racketeers, nursing
home operators, arsonists, errant politicians. "Sued by Farrakhan for $44-billion.
Thrown out of court. "Koch [City for Sale: Ed Koch
and the Betrayal of New York City, 1989] is the one who really
tried to hurt me by trying to get me fired repeatedly when he was Mayor. Even
tried to buy the Voice to fire me. Sued me at the Post about
three years ago. "Don King screams and yells. Has a
lot of bluster, calls me bad names. "The judges -- they hate me. I've
written the Ten Worst Judges list eight different times. Four of them sued. All
dismissed before trial by other judges. "Never been sued successfully. I'm
very careful." * * * And so after a journalistic reign at the
Village Voice from 1964 to 1988 as a reporter, columnist and senior
editor, a brief but wonderful two and a half year stint as a columnist and
senior investigative editor at The Daily News, he resigned on
principle as a member of management to support the striking workers in 1990.
"In some ways that was much harder to do than going to As for life at the Post under
Rupert Murdoch [October '91 to present], "I only met him once in my
life. I'm forever grateful that I have the freedom to write columns that
dispute the whole editorial section. I can write ten columns knocking D'Amato
two years ago or criticizing Giuliani or Pataki or Newt Gingrich or Clarence
Thomas when the editorial page is supporting these people. And I'm very, very
grateful for that. To my amazement the Post gives me more freedom than
the Village Voice did at the end." Jack Newfield and his family have
resided in Jack Newfield, in the end, a muckraker,
a voice of conscience, a voice of sacred rage, in the tradition of Murray
Kempton, his guiding light. |
