Mr. Newfield Interviews Himself

I am facing major surgery later this week. Such a prospect can both focus the mind on big thoughts and make the mind race from topic to topic. To cope with this circumstance, I have chosen to make this last column for a month a self-interview, with honest answers to gently probing questions.Q: Do you have a philosophy of journalism, or do you just wing it each time based on what grabs your attention?A: I do have an underlying set of principles. Tell the truth no matter what. I try not to have any sacred cows. Mark Green, Tom DeLay, and Don King are all fair game.Also, I tend to defend underdogs and the powerless. I often find the official version of events is not the true story.I have never wanted to be a stenographer for those in power, who expect you to just quote what they say and not do any reporting that tests their veracity.What book are you taking into the hospital with you?Bob Dylan’s “Chronicle.” I have read about a third of it already, and the sections on the musicians he admires are breathtaking: Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, Woody Guthrie, Harry Belafonte, Sam Cooke, and Robert Johnson.The book also shows how Dylan experienced fame as a noose around his throat. I still plan to write a book about fame and its consequences.You have written a lot about the 1960s. What was so special about that decade?What was unique is that we had change in the direction of more freedom going on at the same time in the realms of politics, music, religion, sexual mores, popular culture, and journalism.So what went wrong?What we called The Movement went nuts from frustration by 1968. The Black Panthers and the Weathermen began to glorify violence. Anti-Americanism became a kind of mass madness. Leaders of The Movement became agnostic about democracy, or downright hostile to it. And then two clowns tried to lead a revolution, Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman. So The Movement became a clown show.How come you have always been anti-communist?I learned to loathe Stalinism from my early mentors Irving Howe and Mike Harrington. And by reading George Orwell, Ignazio Silone, and Richard Wright in “The God that Failed.”Why are you anti-Bush?Incompetence. He has been incompetent about the war, flu shots, gas prices, creating jobs, and preventing 9/11.You have always written about race. Why is that?I grew up in a predominantly poor, black community, Bedford-Stuyvesant, and attended a predominantly black high school, Boys High. That was a positive – not negative – experience for me. I learned lifetime lessons that don’t come from civics classes, but from having deep friendships with blacks in high school. I saw how unfair life could be.Maybe that is why I was upset in 2001 when so much of the media distorted Freddy Ferrer’s campaign theme of “two New Yorks” and racialized it. New York does have two school systems and two health-care systems. When John Edwards elaborated on that idea with his “two Americas” theme, it was not racialized. That class-based idea goes back to Mike Harrington’s “The Other America” and Jacob Riis’s “How the Other Half Lives.”Do you actually like boxing?No. It is a guilty pleasure. I hate it most of the time because of all the corruption, the monopoly, and the lack of health and safety precautions for the fighters. And because of all the former fighters I know who have memory loss and brain damage.The only particles of integrity in the sport are the fighters themselves. And I now find that the 40 years I have spent around fighters, and in gyms, are helping me prepare mentally for my surgery. Fighters are the embodiment of courage and stoicism. I draw inspiration as much from Muhammad Ali and Carmen Basilio as from Robert Kennedy, Dr. King, and John McCain.These days I think a lot about what the old trainer Cus D’Amato once told me:“The hero and the coward both exactly feel the same emotion of fear. The only difference is that the hero masters that emotion, while the coward capitulates to it and loses his manhood.”

Mr. Newfield Interviews Himself

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