The national publications taking a leftist look at world events are few. Essentially the views of "our" kind of people are confined to The Nation, The Progressive, and Mother Jones. Combine the circulation figures of all three and you'd probably not cause any worries for publishers of such mainstream, right-learning publications such as The New Republic, The National Review, and other titles marching to the tunes composed and played by Newt Gingrich, Trent Lott, and Orrin Hatch.
One of the great magazine editors was Erwin Knoll, whose guidance of The Progressive produced some of the most searing and invigorating journalism of the twentieth century. Knoll's death in November of 1994 silenced an editor in the old tradition: a man unafraid, completely devoted to truth, justice and the American way. (He and the fictional Superman really had a lot in common.)
Bill Lueders, a newspaper editor in Madison, Wis., which also is the home base of The Progressive, has written an admiring, occasionally awkward, but always fascinating biography of Knoll, An Enemy of the State: The Life of Erwin Knoll (Common Courage Press, $16.95 paperback).
Knoll edited The Progressive from 1973 until his death. An irascible bear of a man, Knoll believed totally in The Left. As Leuders writes, Knoll thought it had one great advantage. "It made sense, and thus was capable of winning people over. . . . Erwin Knoll's greatest lesson was that he never abandoned hope. His legacy is our challenge."
As a Jew born in Austria in 1931, Knoll knew first-hand the Austrians' full-blown hatred of his race. Leuders writes that Hitler had to tone down his anti-Semitic rhetoric in Germany, but in Austria, "the public could not get enough."
When Knoll arrived in the U.S., he had no idea of the impact his life would make on the Left. But he soon adopted the rule first offered by his hero, iconoclastic journalist I.F. Stone: "Every government is run by liars. Nothing they say should be believed."
As Washington correspondent for The Progressive, Knoll felt his crowning achievement came when he was included on Nixon's official enemies list. Leuders notes that Knoll felt that being among 200 of Nixon's prime enemies "was like winning a Pulitzer Prize, drawing a royal flush and beating the 30-to-1 odds at the track all on the same day."
The biography includes the most-detailed information ever published about The Progressive's battle with the federal government, which attempted to prevent publication of an article that purported to offer details on building an H-bomb. The piece actually contained only information in print elsewhere. But the feds -- spurred on by President Jimmy Carter -- attacked. Knoll prevailed. It was one of his proudest moments. The book points out that the Carter Administration "pulled out all the stops to prevent publication of speculations about H-bomb design it knew to be incorrect, and in the process publicly disclosed and authenticated much more accurate information."
A former U.S. attorney, Frank Tuerkheimer, said of Erwin Knoll, "He had a peculiar form of courage -- the greatest form of courage. In An Enemy of the People, Ibsen says that the strongest man in the world is the man who stands alone. That was Erwin. He stood alone."
Knoll was at the forefront when the U.S. government attempted to censor press coverage of the Gulf War in 1991, stating that the proposed regulations "amount to a military assault on the First Amendment." When the war ended, Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf praised the press for its "cooperation." Knoll said, "Most of the press didn't even have enough sensibility to be embarrassed." Knoll later wrote, "I've heard a lot of foolishness lately about this being a just war. There is no such thing as a just war. Never has been. Never will be."
In the last years of his life, Knoll saw the presidency of Bill Clinton -- "with his retreat on urban renewal, his crackdown on welfare, his abandonment of health-care reform, his preservation of massive military spending -- as being every bit of the disaster he predicted."
In a radio interview days before his death, Knoll said, "I have only two irreducible principles. One is non-violence. I am a pacifist. I believe violence is never a solution. And the other is freedom of speech, the First Amendment."
God bless Erwin Knoll.
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