Profiles
The woman who runs the nation
> BY JACK FREEMAN
Copyright © 2002 by The Earth Times. All rights reserved

She has also edited and co-authored several books, including "A Just Response: The Nation on Terrorism, Democracy and September 11, 2001," a collection of pieces from the magazine that is coming out next month. In her foreword she writes that one of her roles as editor "has been to figure out the bridge from personal to political. How do you balance individual grief and anger at the attacks with proportionality, justice, and wisdom in response? How do we move from legitimate fear of anthrax and future attacks to protection of civil liberties, and on to a political debate that doesn't ignore concerns of economic and social justice?"

Vanden Heuvel notes that The Nation has always "marched to a different drummer," opposing US involvement in the Spanish American War, World War I and the Vietnam War. "This collection," she writes, "is designed to inform honest debate by citizens on key questions that confront us and enable us to ask hard questions of policymakers and the media. And my hope is that this book will guide and enrich the debates that will--and must--come."

Interviewed in January by Gwen Ifill on the influential PBS show The Lehrer Newshour, vanden Heuvel said she thinks that "the United Nations needs to be brought in now at every stage of what we call the campaign against terrorism. It is the world body we have, it is a body that was created after other wars, and it speaks to the collective will of the world--and [it] will be sorely needed in terms of reconstruction and rebuilding."

She told The Earth Times that The Nation has seen a dramatic surge in readership in the post-9/11 atmosphere, at one point receiving as many as 100 new subscriptions each day. Circulation now, she said, is "the highest it's ever been,"--over 112,000--and the magazine's Web site is getting almost one million "hits" per month.

"The magazine is thriving," she said, "in the context of too few independent voices." She added that "we are on the threshold of a permanent war economy which has little to do with fighting terror. Where is the concern in the mainstream media--especially on TV- about the administration's attempt to fight a war without end?" "Of course," she continues, "The Nation's stand on the war and criticism of what we called 'policy profiteering' by conservative Republicans in Congress (who sought to use the war as a pretext to push through their own lobbying agenda) drew virulent attacks by those on the Right who questioned our patriotism. But what is a truly democratic vision of patriotism? As Bill Moyers wrote in our pages soon after September 11, if the mercenaries and the politicians-for-rent in Washington try to exploit the emergency and America's good faith to grab what they couldn't get through open debate in peacetime, the disloyalty will not be in our dissent but in our subservience. The greatest sedition would be our silence."

But vanden Heuvel and her magazine's viewpoint is not the only thing that makes people sit up and take notice. There's also her interesting gene pool. Her father, William vanden Heuvel, worked for President John F. Kennedy and Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and served as the US ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva. Her mother, Jean Stein, is an author and editor of Grand Street, the literary quarterly. She also turns heads because she's married to Stephen Cohen, the celebrated New York University professor and specialist in Russian affairs, who's often seen with her at gatherings at the Council on Foreign Relations and other meeting places of New York's most distinguished figures.

Let it be said that Katrina vanden Heuvel turns heads because she possesses a widely recognizable face. That's because she appears frequently on CNN, CNBC and PBS to comment on current affairs. She's expected to be snappy, savvy and insightful, and she delivers without fail. That makes her a TV producer's delight. It also contributes to her growing celebrity status.

On Election Night 2000, ABC News anchor Peter Jennings asked vanden Heuvel to appear on his show. It may be arguable whether vanden Heuvel drove up ABC's ratings, but her spirited appearance certainly generated buzz, even among viewers weary of political punditry.

It isn't uncommon for her to be recognized by passers-by on the streets of New York. Not long ago, one veteran journalist saw her on Manhattan's Park Avenue outside the Council on Foreign Relations, of which vanden Heuvel is a member. He went up to her as she chatted with her husband, Professor Cohen, and told her warmly how much he had enjoyed her appearances on PBS's Charlie Rose Show. The journalist recalled--without quite telling her in so many words--how the PBS cameras had nicely caught vanden Heuvel's succession of expressions, from grave to smiling to concerned to attentive.

But she doesn't need a camera to treat her with any special kindness. Her angular face, deep eyes and wide forehead ensure that what you get on the screen is what you encounter in real life. The woman who meets with a reporter for an interview does not attempt to impress, no exuding of celebrity pheromones here. There are no references to her public appearances, no hints of her privileged lineage, no name dropping, just a gracious welcome and then on to the business at hand.

She's an editor right out of central casting--deadlines to meet, articles to assign, major writers such as William Greider to contact (he's The Nation's national correspondent, a man vanden Heuvel calls "one of the great political reporters of our country"). Her office on Manhattan's Irving Place has the requisite computer, the stacks of papers and the rows of books, and the distinct aura of a place where work is a labor of love.

So what's it like to edit one of America's most important political journals? "Aaaah," comes the answer. Then, "A weekly is a brutal beast. There is a deadline every hour. I am involved in almost every facet of the magazine, from drafting editorials to deciding the weekly lineup and vetting manuscripts, deciding on covers and cover lines. I identify new writers and cultivate regulars and valued ones; I handle more than 100 e-mails a day; I keep an eye out for what is happening in the week's news, reading four papers by 8 AM and then looking at some international papers and Web sites later in the morning. I am always looking ahead to larger themes and issues."

Vanden Heuvel recalls that in the days immediately after Sept. 11, "our communication links to the outside world were severed--our phone lines had run under World Trade Center 7."

Vanden Heuvel has edited The Nation since 1995. She started as an intern with the magazine and has been connected with it for 20 years. It bills itself as "the independent magazine of politics and culture." Founded in 1865 by E. L. Godkin, an Anglo-Irish abolitionist, it has provided a forum for hundreds of the most famous names in American letters and politics and has helped set the Progressive agenda for the last 138 years, more than half the lifetime of the United States. Gore Vidal, a frequent contributor, says of The Nation that it "has acted as a journalistic alert system, warning of dangers too often invisible to even the most alert coastal dweller."

Vanden Heuvel the journalist will never claim to be as eloquent as Vidal the novelist, but her views are no less vocal. "We live at a time," she says, "when what used to be called liberal is now called radical; what used to be called radical is now called insane, what used to be called reactionary is now called moderate--or compassionate--and what used to be called insane is now called solid conservative thinking."

One of The Nation's missions, she says, is to put ideas and issues on the national agenda--ones that are too often ignored or derided in the mainstream media. "In the last years, we have called for the abolition of nuclear weapons, and investigated what it means that America has the widest gap between rich and poor in any industrialized country, and editorialized for universal health care."

And what specific role does she see for the magazine right now? What issues are troubling her? Vanden Heuvel answers without hesitation: "The danger of a world in which we are warned that this is a war without end. At home, the collateral damage means the weakening of our democracy and the rebirth of a new and powerful national security state. Since Sept. 11, the Bush team has begun building a homeland security machine that is more extensive than needed to meet the terrorist threat by combining police, law enforcement, intelligence and military powers. I worry that the country will not follow its traditional pattern of rebounding from periods of restricted expression, of repression. One major reason is the open-ended nature of the crisis and how it is being used. Yet, beneath the tremors of war and recession, a sea change is taking place in American opinion. Confidence in affirmative government has increased--and this despite the years of government-bashing by well-funded right-wing think tanks. Americans seek bold creative public initiatives--on affordable health care, investments in education, environmental regulation. But our leadership seems inadequate to the moment."

She continues: "Where, for example, are the bold non-military initiatives, the 21st-century versions of a Marshall Plan to combat the poverty and disease that afflicts millions? Instead, we see a return to increased militarization and an arrogant unilateralist foreign policy by this administration. Our children deserve a world without end. Not a war without end. A world free of the terror of hunger, free of the terror of poor health care, of hopelessness, of ignorance. What we need is a true national debate about what security means in the 21st century."

Which brings up another of vanden Heuvel's concerns: "The militarization of the way the US thinks about foreign relations--and how that's a bipartisan problem. Our priorities are irrational. We should be spending far, far less on defense against nonexistent enemies and investing far, far more on economic development abroad--as well as at home," she says. Months before Sept. 11, The Nation published a lead editorial called "Rogue Nation, USA." "We chose that headline because it is distressing that, as shown in the vote to kick the US off the UN Human Rights Commission- and in the headlines of papers across Europe and the world--there is a growing view that America is a rogue nation willing to ignore international law and morality to enforce its will. And this is not a role most Americans support," she says. After all, "the United States was founded on a decent respect for the opinions of mankind. Can we please keep it that way?"

"I also worry about restrictions on information. We have an administration that is obsessed with secrecy and we live in a "conglomeratized world," with few people willing (as The Nation is, clearly) "to challenge corporate power." (The Nation, along with a group of civil liberties, human rights and public access organizations, has filed a Freedom of Information Act suit demanding information from the FBI, the Justice Department and the INS on the names and citizenship of the hundreds arrested or detained since Sept. 11.)

And what about the developing Enron scandal? "Of course, the Enron scandal is an important story for us," vanden Heuvel says. "It is a window on the nexus of money and politics in Washington that is revealing our corrupted electoral, legislative and regulatory infrastructure. We published a piece called 'Enron Conservatives' arguing that this scandal lays bare the hypocrisy of modern conservatives, who fly the flag of free markets but actually use political and financial clout to free themselves of accountability, rig the market and then use their position to ravage consumers, investors and employees. I believe Enron is a political scandal--but it may also be a turning point as Americans understand the need for regulation as a countervailing weight to the huge power of transnational corporations. Is our democracy strong enough to ensure that prosperity will be widely shared, or will the US decline into a corrupted oligopoly of money and power, a country by and for Enron conservatives?"

But when it comes to the media, vanden Heuvel argues, we still live with a "kind of suffocating consensus," brought about, in part, by the corporate ownership of the news media which is set to increase as recent court decisions presage even more consolidation. "We live at a time when the line between entertainment and news has been forever blurred," she says. "There is woefully little attention paid to public policy and too much to celebrities and petty scandals. The need is acute for independent perspectives, constructive ideas and radical rethinking of the assumptions underlying mainstream politics."

That, she adds, is why there is more of a role for The Nation today. "As the mainstream media grow more homogenized and timid, The Nation is the only weekly magazine in America that reports and interprets the news and culture from a progressive perspective. The irony is that we now have a media landscape and an administration [in Washington] that are bad for the country but good for The Nation. I take no pleasure in saying that, but a magazine like The Nation does better commercially when the government is in the hands of the other side." Which is to say that, with a Republican in the White House, the magazine's economic prospects may have brightened. Translation: George W. Bush's ascension to the Presidency has meant an increase of The Nation's subscription base from 95,000 in 2000 to more than 112,000 now. (The magazine's total print run is 112,360 according to Teresa Stack, The Nation's president; its annual budget is $7 million.)

Vanden Heuvel's ability to get big names into her magazine has been remarkable. Salman Rushdie, Susan Faludi, Arthur Miller, Cornel West, Gore Vidal (a contributing editor), E. L. Doctorow (a longtime contributor) and Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison (who's a member of The Nation's editorial board) are some of her authors. So is the novelist John Le Carré. Why Le Carré? "I saw that he had published a scathing indictment of the big pharmaceutical companies in a British magazine," vanden Heuvel says. "So I tracked down his British agent and, for two months, I called every other day and asked if we could publish a substantially adapted version of the piece. In the end she agreed, and Le Carré gave us a considerably revised piece, which we were thrilled to publish."

Le Carré's essay--and his latest novel, "The Gardener"--deal with economic and power issues. And such issues clearly enthrall vanden Heuvel. In this context, what she finds truly heartening is the resurgence of student activism in the country, of young people interested in "economic and power issues, an engagement with corporate power and economic justice. There used to be more disengagement, some even called it navel-gazing, but no more."

Editors of major publications can do more than just hold such strong views. They can assign investigative pieces, which, vanden Heuvel says, "are central to the magazine's mandate." "We are at work right now on several investigative projects, ranging from an investigation of what the Pentagon is up to with its new Office of Public (dis)Information, the revival of domestic surveillance and intelligence gathering. A report on Vice President Cheney's Enron ties, the oil grab in Africa and the Caspian, international tobacco smuggling" are also receiving attention, she says. "And it is always exhilarating to match a great novelist like E. L. Doctorow with a subject for which he feels a passion--most recently, the corrosion of our democracy by money." Vanden Heuvel adds, "I also feel that in the country there is a general disgust with corporate power and its overbearing influence on public policy," articulating a theme that her right-wing critics sometimes attribute to the loony Left. "This is mixed with a fragile desire for a new and more humane internationalism and a growing--though unfocused- anger at government's failure to act on the country's large problems."

That gives The Nation an opportunity to expose and propose--to address these discontents. After all, she added, "there are millions of progressives in this country--the problem is they've never met each other--and our media basically ignore them." The Nation, vanden Heuvel said, can become even more of a forum, a meeting place for many progressives at this time of Republican rollback on specific issues such as social investment, the environment and development assistance.

What explains all this volcanic opinion? "I grew up in a politically minded New York family," vanden Heuvel said. "My father worked for Jack Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy. As someone who is both pragmatic and visionary, he was--and remains--an enormous influence on my political thinking. Another influence was my godfather, Roger Baldwin, the founder of the ACLU, who gave me a sense of how to effect political change outside the electoral political process through the media and nonprofit world. My mother was the radical spirit--who made me see the link between culture and politics. Maybe it was something in the water, or the dinner table talks, or being exposed to writers and politicians, but I got roots and wings and good values from my parents. So I'm guided by some basic values--a belief in social justice and fairness and the promise of American democracy."

Then there's Russia, about which she has written, seminared and spoken extensively for two decades. An authority on Russian politics and society, vanden Heuvel first went to the Soviet Union in 1978. She and Stephen Cohen went to Russia on their honeymoon. Their 10-year-old daughter Nicola (a.k.a Nika), will make her 30th trip to Russia this spring. "My interest evolved from my fascination with the history of the McCarthy period and a desire to see the country that had enthralled and appalled so many Americans," vanden Heuvel said. On meeting her, Cohen asked vanden Heuvel if she would smuggle dissident journals out of Moscow. He thought that she had a diplomatic passport because her father was then the US ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva; she didn't enjoy diplomatic immunity, however. (Vanden Heuvel was on her way to see her father in Geneva in 1978 when her plane was hijacked by a man--a former low ranking Nazi--who demanded the release of Sirhan Sirhan and Rudolf Hess. The hijacker was later arrested in a chess club in Manhattan. "And I am cured of my fear of hijackings," vanden Heuvel says. "In fact, I fly with no fear. When I go, it will not be on a plane!")

Vanden Heuvel went to the Soviet Union several times a year from 1985 to 1988; she lived there for four months each year between 1989 and 1992. Neither she nor her husband could get a visa between 1981 and 1984--largely because of the Soviet authorities' unhappiness with Professor Cohen's work on Bukharin, who remained a suppressed historical figure, and because of his involvement with some in the dissident movement. "That attached itself to me," said vanden Heuvel. She was in the Soviet Union during the heady years of perestroika and glasnost, certainly an extraordinary time for anyone interested in political change and radical reform. Vanden Heuvel--who speaks Russian--worked as a reporter at Moscow News, one of the leading glasnost-era newspapers, and wrote dispatches from the front lines of perestroika. She covered the first Congress of Peoples' Deputies election in 1989 and followed Boris Yeltsin on his barnstorming tour of Moscow. She reported on--and supported--the emerging women's movement, and she succeeded in getting one of Russia's leading publishing houses to issue a series of Western feminist classics in Russian. These included Simone de Beauvoir's "The Second Sex" and Betty Friedan's "The Feminine Mystique."

Also published in Russian as part of the series was the classic women's health manual, "Our Bodies, Our Selves." She co founded a feminist quarterly, "You and We." Published initially in the US, it was considered the underground publication of the Russian women's movement. She remains a contributor to it, even though it is now published in Moscow. "It remains an important part of a stronger movement," vanden Heuvel said. "Voices of Glasnost," which she wrote with her husband, is a personal and political exploration of Gorbachev's extraordinary reforms.

Vanden Heuvel has co-edited two other anthologies of articles from The Nation with Victor Navasky, the former New York Times gadfly who is widely credited with having rescued The Nation from economic despair. Navasky--who is the magazine's editorial director and publisher--mentored vanden Heuvel. Navasky, of course, is a giant figure in journalism and letters because of his own prose. He's a brilliant editor himself--which must surely put some intellectual pressure on vanden Heuvel. They enjoy a professional relationship that is often cited as a model for publishers and editors.

If Navasky took important steps--such as wooing investors--to ensure The Nation's survival, vanden Heuvel could be said to be crafting the direction of the magazine, which employs 35 editorial and business people at its office at 33 Irving Place in Manhattan. Although the bottom line, according to vanden Heuvel, has been consistently in the red--"138 years out of 138 years"--the financial situation at The Nation has improved somewhat in the last couple of years.

Editing a political journal means not simply wielding the metaphorical blue pencil. It means, perhaps most of all, smart, timely thinking on cutting-edge issues. One of the most significant--and divisive--of such issues is globalization. "In my view," vanden Heuvel said, "one of the central questions for the 21st century is not whether globalization will continue, but globalization by whom, for whom and under whose control." That is a question The Nation will continue grappling with in the coming years. Too often, vanden Heuvel said, the mainstream press mocks the demonstrators protesting corporate globalization in Seattle (where there were large-scale protests at a ministerial meeting of the World Trade Organization in November 1999), in Quebec at a summit of Western Hemisphere leaders and, more recently, in New York at the meeting of the World Economic Forum. "We've tried to be a forum for key thinkers who understand the choice is not between global engagement defined by multinationals and right-wing nationalism," vanden Heuvel said. "We've tried to convey the view that there are sophisticated ideas and demands for democratic accountability in the global system that should be heard, but they are too often ignored by the mainstream media who think engagement with the world means dominating it with our marketplace." She continued, "We are a magazine for those who seek intelligent criticism of prevailing attitudes and dogmas. And we are a seedbed for ideas which eventually make it into larger society. In that sense, we traffic in ideas, not hype. We take seriously the power of ideas, of conviction, of conscience. Our readers expect that we will fight for causes lost and found, and do so in good spirits and with passion."

Tough words from a tough editor. But there's more: "Readers expect The Nation to investigate, expose, criticize, but also to propose our vision of a society that is both plausible and visionary." Vanden Heuvel said her political and philosophical sensibilities--not to mention editorial determination--were influenced by reading the dissenting and muckraking journalists such as I. F. Stone, Thorstein Veblen, Lincoln Steffens and Ida Tarbell. At Princeton University, she majored in--what else?- political science, graduating summa cum laude. Even then, The Nation was required reading for her.

The conversation now turns to a discussion of the United Nations. It is a familiar topic for her--vanden Heuvel's father, William, has long been publicly advocating American support for UN-related issues. "The UN is a great institution," she says, "but like any institution created at a different time and in a different world, it needs reform." The Nation has consistently been supportive of the UN. "It is what we have by way of some form of global governance." The Nation has been especially critical of the US' refusal to pay its back dues of more than $1 billion. "Come on, there is widespread popular backing in this country for the UN and for paying our dues," says vanden Heuvel. "Where's the leadership on this issue?"

Our conversation also moved toward the question of development assistance. Among the American Left, international development assistance may not be as central an issue as it is to the European Left, vanden Heuvel believes. But it has emerged as an important one since Sept. 11. "And," she adds quickly, "The Nation has consistently covered and spoken out about debt relief, global poverty and the miserly US levels of assistance." (The 30 richest countries of the world annually give some $40 billion to the 135 poor countries; the US gives around $9 billion of this figure, but that includes military aid to Egypt and Israel.) "Think about a world in which the United States would commit to leading a global development initiative. Yet this administration not only remains unmoved by calls to increase aid, it torpedoes any minor increase. The necessary US contribution to a $50 billion Marshall Plan would be a fraction of the 65 billion of corporate tax breaks that Republican Washington has been trying to force through Congress. The Nation doesn't forget that some basic, radical and common-sensical paths were not taken at the end of World War II," vanden Heuvel says.

"Most Americans have no memory of the designs Franklin Roosevelt's New Dealers had for postwar American foreign policy. Human rights, self-determination and an end to European colonization in the developing world, nuclear disarmament, international law, the world court and, yes, the United Nations- these were all ideas of the progressive Left." In some sense then, she continues, "The Nation seems more a part of the European political discourse, although it remains primarily an American publication, a Social Democratic paper in a country that has moved so far to the right."

"Today," vanden Heuvel says, "it saddens me that the administration has returned to a kind of defiant unilateralism as the leitmotif of American foreign policy. But the experience of terrorist horror and the fragile victory against the Taliban would seem to require a different, and wiser, response. War and bombing are not the solution. Vast inequalities; the need for a development strategy; the imperative of Mideast peace; the onset of environmental self-destruction; the fundamentals of democracy and human rights: these are the concerns of a wise power--they should be America's."

What does Katrina vanden Heuvel think the future holds for her? "I want to make sure The Nation is a vital part of the political life and conversation in this country," she replies. "And I want to be involved in building the Progressive movement--so that in 10 or so years, the Progressive Left will have an infrastructure that matches what the Right did over the last half century. And, all the while, I want to keep fighting and editing and writing in good spirits--with some humor and hope and passion."