Mr. Peretz Bids Farewell
Posted on March 1st, 2007 in Uncategorized | 7 Comments »
The New York Times reports today that Marty Peretz, the longtime owner of The New Republic, has sold his remaining share in the magazine to a Canadian company that no one has ever heard of. For the first time in three and a half decades, Marty, who got his Ph.D. from Harvard and taught there for many years, won’t own TNR.
Almost ten years ago I wrote a magazine article saying that it was time for Peretz to sell the magazine. Now that it’s actually happened, I’m sad to see him go.
Let me explain why.
Some of you may know Marty; some of you may hate him. He can be a real pain in the ass, and he has no shortage of enemies. I’ve certainly had my differences of opinion with him: TNR’s steadfast support of Joe Lieberman, for example, was probably the final sign that the magazine was no longer vital. And in the past few years, the magazine has been deadly bland and seemed to have lost its muckraking sensibilities. The times have changed; it did not.
Nonetheless, Marty gave me my first real job in journalism, and I’ll always be grateful to him for that.
There’s a good story about how I started work there. I applied for a position as what’s called a reporter-researcher, and Marty summoned me for an interview. I was very nervous. He sat me down in his office with its view of 19th Street in downtown Washington, looked at me and said, “So, Richard, tell me: Is there anything a WASP would die for?”
Like I said, I was nervous. I hemmed and hawed. No one had ever asked me a question like that before.
So, Marty, 20 years later, here’s the answer that I was too tongue-tied to produce at the time: “Yesâhis family and his country, but not his God.”
And as I look around the world today, I think that’s about right.
Marty must have seen other nervous candidates before, because I got the job. Okay, it wasn’t exactly a job; it was an internship. $200 a week from September till June, doing all the shit work that needed to be done. But I loved it. I was 22 and working closely with veteran journalists such as Fred Barnes, Michael Kinsley, Charles Krauthammer, Andrew Sullivan and Dorothy Wickenden. I learned something every day. Nor was the experience entirely intellectual. My fellow intern, Ari Posnerânow a screenwriter in Los Angelesâbecame one of my closest friends. It was a fantastic environment in which to learn, and Marty was the guy who created it, funded it, fostered it. All my subsequent work has been informed by the climate of rigor and debate that Marty loved and encouraged.
And the best thing about it was that he wanted you to write! Partly because having the interns write saved the magazine money, sureâwhen we wrote a piece, we didn’t get paid extra for it. But more important (I’m pretty sure) was the fact that Marty was truly egalitarian; he didn’t care if a great article came from his editor or from an intern six months out of college. And if it stirred up a fight, so much the better; Marty would back you all the way.
If I’d worked at a magazine in New York at that age, I’d have been fetching coffee for the male equivalent of Anna Wintour, if there is such a creature. At The New Republic, I was only limited by my own inexperience and immaturity, which was a wonderful incentive to start leaving those things behind.
Later on, after I left TNR, Marty would help me get accepted into Harvard for graduate school (I don’t know this, but I believe it), and welcomed me to the Cambridge community when I arrived. And when I was writing my book about Larry Summers’ presidency, Harvard Rules, Marty agreed to talk to me, even though he was a great defender of Summers and I was not. Marty did it to try to help two friendsâSummers and me. I think he was successful on both counts.
He’s 68 now and says it’s time for him to move on. Who am I to argue? Thirty-three years is a long time to own a magazine. Still, Marty has been important, and he will be missed. Let us hope that this departure, this passage, is just a prelude
7 Responses
3/1/2024 12:23 pm
I find your answer to the question Peretz posed odd, even somewhat shocking. Your family, your country - but not your God? I suppose that’s a way of saying that you abjure religious extremism, but why make family or country an absolute, if not religion? Is it that you are just not very religious — or that you think some kinds of absolutism are better than others? Elucidation appreciated.
3/1/2024 1:09 pm
I’m puzzled too. Were you speaking just for yourself or is that a way of saying that WASPs can be defined by their unwillingness to put religion on a level with other ideals worth dying for? Not sure I agree — but if you’re right, which way does that cut?
3/1/2024 1:14 pm
I mean that WASPs are not religious fanatics, yes. And though WASPs have many flaws, that is something I find underappreciated about them.
3/1/2024 4:04 pm
Fanatics come in all shapes and sizes.
3/1/2024 4:28 pm
I was another reporter/researcher at TNR in the 80s and it was a golden age for political magazines. But that era is as far gone as the days of the American Mercury and Mencken or TNR and Walter Lippman. And his brand of politics — neocon on foreign policy, kibbutznik socialist domestic policy — is quaint at best, dangerous at worst. So the real tragedy in this is that Marty is staying on as editor in chief, and continue to have leverage in a virtually irrelevant magazine that has little hope of regaining revelance.
3/1/2024 5:18 pm
Honestly, I think that’s a meaningless title here. Do you really think that Marty’s going to fly down every week for an edit meeting when he can no longer tell people what to do because he owns the thing? They’ve thrown him a bone.
3/4/2024 8:02 pm
In your tribute, Mr. Peretz’s should find satisfaction that his legacy lives in you and many others, as you are also the type of teacher who inspired such glasnost despite age and title. — A former intern