[People] felt good even though they didn't really know much about [Barack Obama] and may have had some doubts.

Nat Hentoff

Categorized in : People May Doubt

I went to the library as soon as I could walk. So the training came from reading all kinds of people, from fairy tales and later on to - I don't know why - Schweitz's "Life of Christ."

training reading people

The book that really, really shaped my politics and has forever is Arthur Koestler's "Darkness at Noon," which is a novel based on terrible fact about what it was like in Russia during Stalin's time when people actually believed that to get to the point where the Proletariat would triumph, anything that was necessary to be done should be done; the means didn't count.

russia mean book

If [Bill Shawn] liked the piece, then he would run it. But he wanted the magazine to be something that was more than just a weekly event. And as a result you could pick up a New Yorker under him, as I mentioned before, a year from then or 10 years or 20 years and there would always be something worth reading in it.

reading running years

I've - that I regret. That was stupid and ignorant on my part. I went to a party as a guest of a friend of mine, a lawyer. And he had a client who I didn't know, except - maybe I'm pretending I didn't know, but he was a big investor in The New Yorker. And as I found out later in a book about The New Yorker, this guy was very unhappy about [Bill] Shawn.He thought Shawn was spending out - spending too much money on writers.

regret party stupid

[Bill Shawn] had always been in The New Yorker immaculately dressed - quietly, immaculately dressed, very soft-spoken. On the phone I could hardly hear him sometimes.

bills phones sometimes

After [Bill Shawn] was fired, I was going to the YMHA [Young Men's Hebrew Association] on the Upper East Side to do a talk on free speech.I went into a coffee shop to get a piece of pie and a coffee, and I was reading a paper and I hear a voice. And it was -it was not a voice I was familiar with, but I looked across the table and I saw Lilian Ross.And sitting next to her was William Shawn - no tie, needed a shave. His voice was kind of coarse and rather loud. He wasn't drunk, but I was just stunned.

coffee reading men

Lilian Ross was a - veteran writer for The New Yorker. She, in fact, brought me to The New Yorker many years ago.

veteran facts years

There wasn't much said, but I was thinking, perhaps unkindly - not unkindly,but on - inaccurately of Theodore Dreiser's "Carrie," when the main character in "Carrie" has been brought down by Carrie and his - he - dress is disheveled and all that sort of thing. And that's the last I ever saw of [Will Shawn].

dresses character thinking

Carl Armstrong was one of those people in the anti-war years who had been so convinced of the righteousness of their cause that he and some friends decided they would blow up a building at the University of Wisconsin, in which they said research was being done to help the war against the Vietnamese. What they blew up at three or four in the morning was a young scientist, who was married and had a couple of kids, who wasn't working on war stuff at all. And he was killed.

couple morning war

I was less angry at [Carl] Armstrong, though I was angry at the people who came to his trial: Dan Ellsberg, who ordinarily I respected a lot; Philip Berrigan; the guy who teaches at Princeton still - I can't remember his name. And they were saying - well, they were saying, really, what Arthur Koestler had people saying on "Darkness at Noon." The means were unfortunate and, sadly, someone died, but the end is what is important and this was a great symbolic - something or other - sign against the war in Vietnam.

Fortunately most of the people who were involved in anti-Vietnam activity did not con themselves into being like the violent people they didn't want.

vietnam want people

I know [Arthur Koestler] fought in the Spanish Civil War. He was in prison, I think, in Spain and in Russia. He came to the United States; that's when I saw him in the mid-1940s.

russia war thinking

[Arthur Koestler] wrote some other very interesting books, but that book - I mean, if I were teaching, I don't care what the course is, I would say you really have to read "Darkness at Noon".

teaching mean book

I was writing - at least beginning to write Boston Boy and there were a lot of holes in my so-called research. I didn't know the towns my mother and father came from in Russia. I didn't know the name of the clothing store I went to work for when I was 11 years old. I didn't know a lot of things. So I called for my FBI files, not expecting to have that stuff there, but I wanted to know what they had on me.But they did have the towns my mother and father lived in in Russia. They had the grocery store I worked in when I was 11 years old.

mother writing father

They [FBI] had a lot of clippings, a lot of articles I'd written. And to me the - the funniest one was - I had done a piece for Playboy about J. Edgar Hoover.

j-edgar-hoover pieces done

I had not been very kind to J. Edgar Hoover. And the field agent had written on - it was sent directly to Hoover - that - the director should see this - `And, besides, Hentoff is a lousy writer.' And I thought that went a bit far.

agents fields directors

I'm working on "Living the Bill of Rights," and it's about people - well, it starts with Brennan and Douglas as people who not only live the Bill of Rights, but try to shape the reason for that.

rights trying people

[Bill Shawn] didn't edit the writers very strongly, but he knew w... by Nat Hentoff

[Bill Shawn] didn't edit the writers very strongly, but he knew what he wanted.

edits bills wanted

Inside that quietude there was the firmest of wills. [Bill Shawn]... by Nat Hentoff

Inside that quietude there was the firmest of wills. [Bill Shawn] knew exactly what he wanted to do.

I've never met anybody quite like [Bill Shawn]. He created - and I'm sure it was conscious - an aura about him of quietude.

auras bills conscious