Victor S. Navasky, a Leading Liberal Voice in Journalism, Dies at 90

Victor S. Navasky, a witty and contrarian journalist who for 27 years as both editor or writer commanded The Nation, the left-leaning journal that’s America’s oldest weekly, and who additionally wrote the e book “Naming Names,” a breakthrough chronicle of the Hollywood blacklisting period, died on Monday in Manhattan. He was 90.

His dying, in a hospital, was attributable to pneumonia, his son, Bruno, mentioned. Mr. Navasky had houses on the Higher West Aspect of Manhattan and in Hillsdale, N.Y.

The Nation, primarily based in New York, was based in 1865 by abolitionists and had lengthy been an influential voice for civil rights, free expression, progressive labor laws and criticism of the Vietnam Conflict. When he was named editor in 1978, Mr. Navasky launched a droll sensibility that leavened the journal’s typically too-earnest prose.

Along with adopting an irreverent tone in his personal articles, he inspired idiosyncratic writers like Alexander Cockburn, Christopher Hitchens and Calvin Trillin, who in his “Uncivil Liberties” column referred to his boss as “the wily and parsimonious Victor S. Navasky.”

Mr. Navasky additionally supplied a discussion board for feminist voices, like these of Katha Pollitt and Katrina vanden Heuvel, who succeeded him as editor in 1995 when he led a bunch of traders in shopping for the journal and have become its writer. He stepped down as writer in 2005, succeeded by Ms. vanden Heuvel.

Mr. Navasky provided a way of his editorial method in an interview with The Brooklyn Rail in 2002.

“I feel it was Walter Cronkite who used to finish his nightly newscasts by saying, ‘That’s the way in which it’s.’ Effectively, I wished to place out {a magazine} which might say: ‘That’s not the way in which it’s in any respect. Let’s take one other look.’”

Circulation rose from 20,000 when Mr. Navasky took the editorial helm to 132,000, not together with 15,000 on-line subscriptions, in 2019, when Ms. vanden Heuvel stepped down as editor (although she remained the writer). However such numbers understate the journal’s affect on liberal policymakers — teachers, pundits, progressive activists, authorities officers and congressional workers members — individuals who have been “focused on concepts,” as Mr. Navasky mentioned.

He was identified for his ardent steadiness as a Chilly Conflict warrior. He wrote items defending Alger Hiss, a excessive State Division official within the Thirties, in opposition to costs that he had been a Soviet spy, and assailing the federal government’s dealing with of the prosecution and sentencing of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who have been additionally charged with spying for the Soviets and have been executed.

As new revelations over the many years appeared to again up costs in each circumstances, Mr. Navasky questioned the reliability of the proof, and at his dying the guilt of Alger Hiss and, at the very least, Ethel Rosenberg was nonetheless open to query.

Mr. Navasky’s wry iconoclasm began early. Whereas at Yale Regulation College, he and a pal based a satirical journal, Monocle, and some years later tried to make a go of publishing it in New York Metropolis as a free-standing “leisurely quarterly,” which Mr. Navasky mentioned meant it got here out twice a yr.

An early version gave readers a style of its method to humor. It featured a model of the Gettysburg handle as orated by the president on the time, Dwight D. Eisenhower. It started: “I haven’t checked these figures but, however 87 years in the past, I feel it was …”

Distributed by Simon and Schuster, the journal treaded water for half a decade, drawing such writers as Nora Ephron, Sidney Zion, C.D.B. Bryan, Ralph Nader, Dan Greenburg and Marvin Kitman. Throughout the 1963 newspaper strike in New York Metropolis, Monocle put out parody problems with The New York Put up and The Each day Information, referred to as The Pest and The Each day Noose.

Monocle made an occasional massive splash with its publication of the e book “Report From Iron Mountain: On the Chance and Desirability of Peace” (1966), a satire of think-tank suppose by Leonard Lewin. Predicting that the American financial system would collapse if preparations for warfare ought to finish, the e book was taken significantly by many regardless of statements by its creators that it was a hoax; its afterlife amongst conspiracy theorists continues.

For a time after Monocle’s demise, Mr. Navasky turned to writing well-reported and considerate, typically provocative journal articles. For The New York Occasions Journal, he profiled Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey, former Supreme Court docket Justice Abe Fortas and the protection lawyer William Kunstler.

A number of of his items had a Monocle-like bemusement to them, like his portrait of the clubby world of New York intellectuals, even when by some measures he would have match proper in.

“That you could be by no means have heard of a majority of those folks is no surprise,” he wrote, “as a result of members of this institution historically speak solely to one another and publish in journals that are ready primarily for one another’s consumption.”

Mr. Navasky went on to publish two extensively praised works of historical past. The columnist Joseph Kraft referred to as Mr. Navasky’s “Kennedy Justice,” a 1971 research of the Justice Division beneath Legal professional Basic Robert F. Kennedy, “most likely the perfect e book ever accomplished on the workings of an amazing division of American authorities.”

Virtually a decade later, Mr. Navasky printed “Naming Names” (1980), thought of by many the definitive account of the Hollywood blacklisting period. The e book centered on the ex-Communist writers, administrators and producers who testified earlier than the Home Un-American Actions Committee and selected to tell on colleagues.

Critics praised the e book for its equity and its compassion for folks grappling with wrenching selections. Nevertheless, some conservative critics mentioned it was extra inclined to denigrate the so-called informers, just like the novelist Budd Schulberg and the director Elia Kazan, whose tortured explanations for his or her selections Mr. Navasky discovered illogical.

“His sympathies are clearly with those that refused to call names,” Richard Sennett wrote in The New York Occasions E-book Evaluate. “However he refuses to prejudge the informers, to deal with them merely as cowards or monsters.”

The e book obtained the Nationwide E-book Award in 1982 for basic nonfiction-paperback.

Victor Saul Navasky was born on July 5, 1932, on the Higher West Aspect, the second youngster of Macy and Esther (Goldberg) Navasky. His father was the half proprietor of a clothes manufacturing enterprise, and his mom was her husband’s secretary and bookkeeper.

Victor attended the Rudolph Steiner College, then the Little Purple Schoolhouse and Elizabeth Irwin Excessive College in Greenwich Village, each common with households on the bohemian left. He obtained a bachelor’s diploma in 1954 from Swarthmore School and served two years within the Military, working as a medic outdoors Anchorage and writing for and enhancing his regimental publication. Afterward, he attended Yale Regulation College on the G.I. Invoice, graduating in 1959.

He married Annie Strongin, a stockbroker, in 1966. Along with his son, she survives him, together with two daughters, Miri and Jenny Navasky, and 5 grandchildren.

Mr. Navasky joined The Occasions in 1970 as a manuscript editor and workers author for The Occasions Journal and was a frequent e book reviewer. His admiring overview of a group of articles by The New Yorker author and editor Roger Angell was written within the “we” voice then used then for a number of the journal’s chatty Speak of the City items. It closed with a line about “a woman we all know” who could be delighted with a present of the e book and is “totally able to debating what number of Angells can dance on the pinnacle of a pin.”

Shortly earlier than he left the paper in 1972, Mr. Navasky started writing “In Chilly Print,” a month-to-month column on the publishing world for The Occasions E-book Evaluate. It appeared till 1976.

He took an uncharacteristic profession detour in 1974, managing the quixotic Democratic marketing campaign of former U.S. Legal professional Basic Ramsey Clark to unseat New York’s common Sen. Jacob Ok. Javits, a Republican. When Mr. Navasky volunteered that he had no expertise in this sort of work, Mr. Clark responded, “That makes two of us.’’

Mr. Clark was candid to a fault, endorsing the creation of a Palestinian state in “co-union with Jordan” at a time when that place would value him Jewish voters, and defending a visit he took to Hanoi, the North Vietnamese capital, on the top of the Vietnam Conflict. Mr. Navasky didn’t attempt to dissuade him from taking such positions, and Senator Javits received handily regardless of an anti-Republican tide that yr spurred by the Watergate scandal.

After stepping down in 2005 to grow to be The Nation’s writer emeritus, Mr. Navasky taught journal writing and enhancing on the Columbia College Graduate College of Journalism, directed its George T. Delacorte Heart for Journal Journalism and chaired The Columbia Journalism Evaluate. The final place drew complaints from conservative media that he was a partisan holding a management place with a watchdog journal that was imagined to impartially assess the standard and ethics of newspapers, magazines and different media.

Mr. Navasky utilized his leftist outlook in at the very least one nook of his private life — his trip dwelling, in Hillsdale, in Columbia County close to the Connecticut border. In 1971, he, a pal and their wives bought a 130-acre property there that they divvied up amongst 13 folks and their households — together with a painter, a poet, a violinist, an astrophysicist, an N.A.A.C.P. lawyer, a psychotherapist and a number of other writers.

It appeared to a Occasions reporter describing the association in a 2009 article the equal of a Sixties commune, minus the medication and group intercourse. Ever the impartial thinker, Mr. Navasky rejected that description.

“Actually,” he mentioned, “it’s extra of a middle-class comfort than a ’60s commune.” It was additionally, he added, “weirdly nonpolitical.”

Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, a longtime e book critic for The Occasions who died in 2018, and Alex Traub contributed reporting.