Muckraker in the Haight
A guy in a black suit that looked like he slept in it showed up on Haight Street in 1967, smack dab in the middle of the Summer of Love. He fit in with all the other costumed characters of the street at the time, and the notebook always at hand completed his outfit -- a Muckraker among Che Guevaras, Crazy Horses, Kit Carsons, Pocahontases, Custers, Wild Bills, Calamity Janes, Nasrudins, Midsummer's Night folk, gentlemen from outer space, and assorted nymphs, nixies, and fairy queens.
He worked the streets hard, day and night, while other visitors from Planet New York got distracted. One of the more notable, about whom his editors held out great hopes due to his war correspondence, was found clad in one blanket on a bench in Golden Gate Park one foggy morning by police and was shipped home with a chemical hole burned into his memory of recent events.
While local journalists, hoping to worm their way into the Big Apple, calculated what New York editors would accept about the Haight as carefully as they did the prejudices of their former English professors, the guy in the rumpled black suit became fascinated with marijuana street dealers.
The result, illustrated by a series of photos of hippie families in full regalia on their front porches, balconies and living rooms produced by Elaine Mayes, was the realistic assessment of the Haight, erotically deflationary, as a free market in marijuana, produced and distributed in abundance but in so varied and haphazard a manner that it could not be effectively controlled by organized crime, busy plying its trade in hard drugs side-by-side the ubiquitous pot peddlers.
A few months later, still in the same suit, the reporter invited several of us to attend a musical event in Oakland featuring a vocal group made up of members of the Southside Chicago gang, the Blackstone Rangers. It turned out the guy in the rumpled suit had worked with the Rangers for years along with Saul Alinsky's Industrial Areas Foundation.1.
He appeared again that winter and we went out to San Francisco State together to observe the occupation of President Sam Hayakawa's office.2. but the demonstration deteriorated. Stepping slightly out of range on the village green we observed a large, angry African-American man with a spear chasing a TV cameraman as the huge plate-glass window of the bookstore shattered, while a group of longhaired hippies sat in a circle in the middle of the melee beating on bongo drums and singing "All you really need is love."
Nicholas von Hoffman in his rumpled black suit stared at that drum circle in disbelief. He thought perhaps a little more would be required.
I have had von Hoffman's biography of Roy Cohn, The Life and Times of Citizen Cohn, at my elbow for the last two weeks and have followed with intense interest this paradigmatic guidance to Trump White House behavior whenever commercials interrupt the flood of political sewage on the tube. This afternoon I thought I'd try to find his email address to express my appreciation for that invaluable book. I was a couple of days late.
--wmh
Obituaries
2-1-18
Washington Post
Nicholas von Hoffman, Post reporter and columnist with a literary flair, dies at 88
Harrison Smith https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/nicholas-von-hoffman-pos...
When reporter Nicholas von Hoffman joined The Washington Post in 1966, he brought with him a flair for controversy that eventually triggered a resignation threat from a top editor, a boycott from advertisers and, according to Post historian Chalmers M. Roberts, “produced more angry letters to the editor than the work of any other single reporter in the paper’s history.”
The son of a professional explorer who once walked from Cape Town, South Africa, to Cairo, Mr. von Hoffman had worked for community organizer Saul Alinsky in Chicago before reporting on the civil rights movement in the South while sporting an elegant suit and a prematurely white shock of hair.
He had such a good ear for dialogue that some colleagues believed he was simply fabricating his stories, and he was handpicked by The Post’s ambitious new managing editor, Ben Bradlee, to enliven a newspaper known for dull prose.
Mr. von Hoffman, who was 88 when he died Feb. 1 at a hospital in Rockport, Maine, was “an irreverent intellectual who wrote like a dream,” Bradlee observed in his memoir, “A Good Life.” He injected wit, verve and a striking left-leaning point of view into his stories and columns at The Post, where he worked for 10 years and became one of the first writers and editors at Style, the paper’s innovative new features section.
At the typewriter of Mr. von Hoffman, used-car dealers became crooks — a comparison that spurred an advertiser boycott of The Post — and Democratic presidential candidate and evangelical Christian Jimmy Carter became “Jimmy Peanut,” “the gleamy-toothed, bushy-tailed anointed chipmunk of the lord.”
“My life would have been a lot simpler had Nicholas von Hoffman not appeared in the paper,” former Post publisher Katharine Graham wrote in her autobiography, “Personal History.” “But he also had a gifted voice and represented a certain segment of the population that needed to be heard. Almost alone among American journalists at the time, von Hoffman was telling us what was in the minds of the young who felt dispossessed and unrepresented by the so-called establishment press.”
Mr. von Hoffman was among the first reporters to focus on the hippie community of San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district, spending an entire summer there in 1967. His reporting so intrigued Bradlee that the editor flew to San Francisco to spend three days with Mr. von Hoffman, whose interviews with drugged-out residents — conducted in his usual work attire, a suit — led some people to ask if he was an undercover “narc,” his son Alexander von Hoffman said in an interview.
All 16 of Mr. von Hoffman’s Haight-Ashbury stories were syndicated and ran on the front page of the San Francisco Chronicle, and formed the basis of Mr. von Hoffman’s 1968 book “We Are the People Our Parents Warned Us Against.” A Newsweek reviewer described the book as “a rare example of journalism that approaches art in one direction and the best of social science in another.”
Mr. von Hoffman’s tenure at The Post was often fraught, generating conflict between editors who argued over whether his writing was powerful and vivid — or editorializing and lacking any semblance of objectivity.
One of his most contentious stories, a piece about a funeral, began this way: “The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. led his last march today. He was in a cherrywood coffin, carried in an old farm wagon hitched to a pair of down-home mules.”
Ben Gilbert, a senior editor at the paper, “had a fit,” Mr. von Hoffman later said according to “Power, Privilege, and the Post,” a biography of Graham by journalist Carol Felsenthal.
“ ‘There’s no way that you’re going to lead The Washington Post with this piece of garbage,’ ” Gilbert said, according to Mr. von Hoffman. Another editor threatened to resign if the story didn’t appear on the paper’s front page, where it eventually ran at Bradlee’s direction.
Mr. von Hoffman wrote plays and more than a dozen books, including “Citizen Cohn” (1988), a best-selling biography of Roy Cohn, Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy’s chief counsel during the 1950s Red Scare. After leaving The Post in 1976, he contributed to publications including the New Republic, Esquire, Architectural Digest and the New York Observer.
But he also ranged far beyond print journalism, commenting on public affairs on “Byline,” a Cato Institute-sponsored radio show, and battling with conservative columnist James J. Kilpatrick on “Point/Counterpoint,” a segment of the CBS program “60 Minutes” that the two writers inaugurated in 1971.
Mr. von Hoffman’s best-known comment on the show was also his last, resulting in his firing by “60 Minutes” creator Don Hewitt.
“The President is like a dead mouse on the American family kitchen floor,” he said in July 1974, in the waning days of the Richard M. Nixon administration. “The question is: Who is going to pick it up by the tail and drop it in the trash?”
Nicholas von Hoffman was born in Manhattan on Oct. 16, 1929. His mother was a dentist, and his father, Russian-born explorer Carl von Hoffman, brought the family a pet chimpanzee, Jo-Jo Boy, that he “rescued” from Africa.
Mr. von Hoffman’s parents divorced when he was a child, and after graduating from a Catholic prep school in the Bronx he attended Loyola University Chicago. He dropped out within a week to work odd jobs at a slaughterhouse and hotel.
Mr. von Hoffman was introduced to Alinsky and was offered a job on the condition he cut his hair and wear a suit. He went on to become a leader of the Woodlawn Organization, which led voter-registration drives and other civil rights efforts on Chicago’s South Side. He left in 1963 to join the Chicago Daily News as a reporter.
His marriages to Ann Byrne and Patricia Bennett ended in divorce. Survivors include three sons from his first marriage, Alexander von Hoffman of Cambridge, Mass., Aristodemus von Hoffman of Quantico, Va., and Constantine von Hoffman of Boston; and two grandchildren.
Mr. von Hoffman died of renal failure, his family said.
While he was sometimes cited as an early exemplar of “New Journalism,” the literary movement that melded fact-based reporting with novelistic techniques, Mr. von Hoffman insisted that his approach to the craft was “nothing new.”
His reporting style, he told Newsweek in 1969, was “no different than the methods used by people like Hearst, Pulitzer or Mencken. They certainly didn’t adhere to strict news objectivity. I think you’re mad if you come into journalism with the idea that you’re going to change things for the better. I write because I enjoy it. I sincerely believe in what I write, and I get a kick out of getting those Washington mossbacks angry.”
NOTES:
(1) 9-6-96
The Comm-org
Sender: H-Net/H-Urban Seminar on History of Community Organizing & Community-Based Development
Subject: Alinsky/TWO: 1960s Organizing in an African-American Community
Wendy Plotkin
comm-org.wisc.edu/papers96/alinsky/woodlawn.html
May 1969
The Atlantic
Chicago's Blackstone Rangers (I)
James Alan McPherson
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1969/05/...blackstone-rangers.
June 1969
Chicago's Blackstone Rangers (II) -
James Alan McPherson
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1969/06/...blackstone-range......
1.
2
(2) S. I. Hayakawa
Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S._I._Hayakawa
(3) 8-17
Vanity Fair
How Donald Trump And Roy Cohn’s Ruthless Symbiosis Changed America
Marie Brenner
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/06/donald-trump-roy-cohn-relationship