One day some years ago, when I was raising capital for the Forward newspaper, I found myself seeking the wisdom of Victor Navasky, who had emerged as one of the owners of the Nation. I discovered that Mr. Navasky was not only an extraordinarily friendly, good-humored fellow but also tough as nails. When I said that my partners and I were prepared to accept but 50% of the ownership of the Forward, on the theory that even a minority owner who was unhappy would make a business untenable, Mr. Navasky grunted. He clearly thought it wasn’t wise.

Within a few years, my partners and I sold our interest in the Forward, while Mr. Navasky has led the Nation to a triumphant spot in our national journalism. Its circulation has outstripped its competitors on the left, and the magazine has at times come close to confounding those who insist a journal of opinion can never make a profit. It may not be my cup of tea politically, but that is, as Mr. Navasky has named his new memoir, “A Matter of Opinion” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 464 pages, $27). This lively memoir recounts Mr. Navasky’s wonderful and often hilarious life as a journalistic entrepreneur who has maintained his ideals and found success when so many others have fallen by the wayside or are still trying to figure out the business model.

He begins on a personal note, relating that he was the first member of his family to earn a college degree (from Swarthmore, in 1954). His father was a businessman in the garment trade who wanted to be a writer. After college Mr. Navasky was drafted, and, like so many of us, found there was a lot to learn in the Army, even in respect to journalism (he contributed to a unit paper in Alaska). His experience was similar to my own (I was on Pacific Stars and Stripes), but with one big difference: After the Army I was turned down by Yale Law School, while Mr. Navasky made the grade.

It was at Yale that Mr. Navasky founded a satirical quarterly called Monocle, a beautifully designed magazine I often saw because my mother subscribed. That was probably around the time when Monocle ran its hilarious “news managing editor,” Marvin Kitman, for president – a circulation-promoting stunt that would, today, probably be a criminal offense under the McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance Reform and Free Speech Abatement Act. Mr. Navasky has a chapter on his tenure at the New York Times, and he tells of managing the 1974 Senate campaign of Ramsey Clark, of whom he has, unless I missed it, nothing ill to say in this book.

His narrative of his years at the Nation begins with a marvelous chapter called “Looking Backward,” in which he quotes one of his favorite Nation editorials: “There is no force so potent in politics as a moral issue. Politicians may scorn it, ambitious men may despise it or fight shy of it, newspapers may caricature or misrepresent it; but it has a way of confounding the plans of those who pride themselves on their astuteness and rendering powerless the most formidable … party or boss.” This, I found myself thinking as I read it, may be why President Bush’s second inaugural caused such a sensation.

The Nation was founded in 1865, eventually started to sink, and rebounded under Oswald Garrison Villard. The editor whose story intrigued me the most was Freda Kirchwey, who, in contrast to others who guided the magazine over the years, seems to have been invested in the struggle for the Jewish state. She believed, Mr. Navasky writes, “that a Jewish ‘homeland’ was the best hope for democracy in the Middle East, and saw Jewish emigration to Palestine as a matter of ‘elementary justice.'” He sums up her general attitude as: “To my mind the effort to promote unity on the left will fail if it is predicated on a categorical declaration of faith in the virtues of the Soviet Union.”

It was Kirchwey who transferred ownership of the Nation to a nonprofit entity, Nation Associates, which, among other sidelines, ran conferences and conducted research – including, Mr. Navasky reports, documenting collaboration between the Nazis and the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. Reading this history made me wonder how Kirchwey would have reacted to the Nation’s abandonment of the Jewish struggle. In the recent years of peril, its editorials have been devoted to criticizing Israel. It has provided a platform for such writers as Professor Edward Said. And it published Gore Vidal’s notorious attack on Norman Podhoretz and Midge Decter.

Mr. Navasky devotes considerable space to rehashing the Nation’s notion that Alger Hiss was innocent, an account in which it seems possible to detect a certain softening. He concludes that “above and beyond the Hiss case, writing about espionage obviously has special problems” – meaning that the sorts of evidence one normally demands is neither provided nor expected. He recounts how, in the winter of 2003, a new book called “In Denial” listed him as among those who were “in denial” on the matter of Cold War espionage. He went on National Public Radio to deny it.

“Perhaps I am wrong about the Hiss case,” he concludes. “But I am certain I am right that the mystifications surrounding the subject of espionage, compounded by the emotional legacy of the Cold War, has interfered with a reasoned assessment of the evidence.” Which, I suppose, is why the founders of America established that in respect of espionage crimes, the facts – and guilt – would have to be sorted out beyond a reasonable doubt not by magazine editors but by those quaint institutions called juries.

Not that I don’t, myself, prefer newspapers and magazines, and I admire the fact that in the pantheon of publishing, the good-humored Mr. Navasky, for all his errors, has carved himself a happy place. And who knows what surprises lie ahead? The other day, the Nation issued a piece by Scott Sherman on the crisis over Middle East Studies at Columbia. It so upset one of the professors at the center of the fracas, Joseph Massad, that the professor fired off a letter to the Nation that concluded, “If Sherman and The Nation are the best that American left journalism has to offer, I will take my chances with the Sun.”