I first met Marty Peretz in Cambridge at the Coffee Connection — a Starbucks before the Starbucks era — when I was starting my graduate studies at Harvard. He’d been invited to the Oxford Union to debate the Israel/Palestine question, and the Union president of the time, Larry Grafstein, had called me up and asked me, as a former president, to give this man a briefing on what to expect.
I didn’t know what to expect with “Marty” either, and was still a bit baffled by him not being known at least as Mr Peretz. And when he showed up, he looked like someone I’d only ever seen in a Woody Allen movie: a huge rabbinical beard, a blousy shirt unbuttoned to near his navel, a Star of David necklace buried in chest hair, a gravelly voice and a mischievous grin. When he told me he was defending Israel at Oxford, I told him he was fucked, but not to worry. He’d lose the vote, but he should go down blazing anyway. Go for it, I advised. Fuck ‘em. (And in the end, in fact, his side won.)
There I was, this tiny, obliviously pretty, Catholic, Thatcherite gay boy from a small English town, just off the boat in a way, and here was this cosmopolitan macher of machers, son of a family slaughtered by the Nazis, Harvard impresario and elite networker, Civil Rights Movement hero, and magazine mogul, convening over a latte … as equals. Or that’s how it felt.
He never taught me social studies, but I saw instantly why he was prized by his students (many of whom went on to run the country in one way or another): he didn’t patronize, he didn’t rest on authority, and he actually seemed interested in you. And though culturally light years apart, it was instantly clear we had something in common: we loved an argument. And by argument, I don’t merely mean merely the activities of the mind, but of the heart and the soul. I mean passion, fun, and occasionally fury. I mean the occasional willingness to go down fighting.
And I have to say I was a little nervous about his new memoir, The Controversialist: Arguments with Everyone, Left Right and Center, as anyone who knows they’ll be written about in someone’s memoir might be, but I soon forgot about that as I started reading. The story is a deeply, fascinatingly American one. A parvenu, Brooklyn-born, Brandeis-educated Jew who became a “Harvard patriot” in his words, Marty bought The New Republic in 1974, and he turned it, for three decades, into essential reading.
His earliest influences were Herbert Marcuse, believe it or not, and Max Lerner, whose Jewish Americanism provided a kind of template for his life: “I was Jewish and American at all times, and there was no contradiction between those inheritances.” Marty is that rare combination: a tribal anti-tribalist, without qualms. Here is how he describes his Jewishness: “It’s a force in me — not a belief, a force — so strong, so roughly and deeply sensed, that it obviates contradictions with which other people grapple.” That’s as honest and revealing as the rest of the book.
Although the far left regards him now as some kind of reactionary, his liberal credentials, as you’re reminded here, are hard to impeach: working with Bayard Rustin preparing for the 1963 March of Washington, and then, with his second wife’s large fortune, financing and organizing the anti-Vietnam movement, pioneering the Eugene McCarthy campaign that caused LBJ to drop out of the race after New Hampshire, and trying to forge a synthesis of the civil rights and the anti-war movements by organizing the ill-fated National Conference for New Politics in 1968.
That year, of course, was the critical moment when the old Jewish-black Democratic coalition fell apart, and Marty’s world shifted. Planning for the conference was held at Marty’s rented place in Wellfleet:
