Journalism: Born into a family of FDR Democrats, I got to know the Nation, America's oldest weekly, and leading left/liberal magazine, from an annual gift subscription my aunt gave my mother.
But I'm not sure any of us knew the Nation had been founded, with backing from the abolitionist movement, by the great Anglo-Irish journalist EL Godkin in New York City in 1865, who named his new journal after Thomas Davis's eponymous Young Irelander periodical.
Godkin is only one instance of the history, argument, memoir, and anecdote that wonderfully inform A Matter of Opinion and its story of an extraordinary magazine by current publisher and former editor, Victor Navasky. Grandson of a Russian Jew who established a small clothing business in the New York garment district, Navasky was the first in his family to get a college degree, at Swarthmore in 1954, after which he enrolled for two years as a journalist in the peacetime US Army, followed by three years at Yale Law School, where he helped to start up Monocle, a political satire magazine.
After law school, Navasky managed to make a business of sorts out of Monocle, which ceased publishing in 1965. By then an established freelance journalist, he contributed articles to the Saturday Evening Post, Atlantic Monthly, Esquire and the New York Times Magazine, which he joined as an editor in 1970, then left two years later to teach college journalism until he became editor of the Nation in 1978.
A potted history of the Nation follows, and here Navasky's story truly takes off. Adamant that his journal should avoid identification with any party or cause (unlike the New Statesman's special relationship with the British Labour party), founding editor Godkin signed up to write for it what reads like a roll call of 19th century American literati - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, William Dean Howells, James Russell Lowell, Henry Adams, Henry James and William James.
Zigzagging politically, as Navasky puts it, through the decades, the Nation has consistently challenged the official line, whether decrying the "theft of the Panama Canal", deploring the Spanish-American war, calling for self-determination for Ireland and a new trial for the convicted anarchists Sacco and Vanezetti, or opposing Cold War politics, Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon, and the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Navasky, author of Naming Names, a study of the 1950s Hollywood blacklisting, is also especially good on the sorry legacy of the HUAC witch hunt and subsequent split within America's liberal community over the degree of threat posed by American communists, a bitter division that saw Kennedy historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr label Nation editor Carey McWilliams "a typhoid Mary of the left", to which McWilliams replied that Schlesinger spoke "the language of McCarthyism with a Harvard accent".
Navasky contends throughout that democracy depends upon a spirited public discourse that actually informs its citizens, a kind of national conversation best served by independent journals of opinion, whether of the left or right. Aligned to this thesis is his critique of how so-called journalist objectivity too often serves the status quo, while the commercial interests of the six corporate-conglomerates that control most of the major US media ensure various news stories are either missed, distorted or suppressed.
An avowed ideologue, yet consummately fair-minded, Navasky declines to trash the conservative National Review, and eschews any cheap shots in describing how columnist Christopher Hitchens and the Nation parted company in a profound disagreement over the post 9/11 geo-political landscape.
This steadfast champion of public conversation also entertains us with dinner party chat, wherein actor Paul Newman coughs up a cool million to the Nation before dessert, and Henry Kissinger mildly complains to Navasky about the airport protesters he encountered in Copenhagen after a Nation story on his dealings with the Argentinian military junta that "disappeared" nearly 30,000 of their own.
There is much more too, from German theorist Jürgen Habermas's views on "the public sphere" to the "no diddling clause" which prevents Nation editors from changing as much as a comma in copy without consulting the journalist. All recounted by a man determined "to break through the mass-media fog" and "communicate the terrible truth".
Anthony Glavin is a fiction writer, freelance journalist and former magazine editor
Matter of Opinion by Victor S Navasky. The New Press, 458pp. £16.95