The man who saved the nation.

• Author: Rothschild, Matthew
• Position: A Matter of Opinion - Book Review

A Matter of Opinion By Victor S. Navasky Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 458 pages. $27.00.

There are editors. And there are editors. And then there s Victor Navasky, who's been at the helm of The Nation, our flagship for the past three decades. (And cut it out already, Dissent, you are not, as you claim to be, with your puny readership and low profile, "The Leading Magazine of the American Left." That distinction belongs to The Nation.) Navasky has taken The Nation from 23,000 subscribers to about 184,000. He's lifted the profile of the magazine by grabbing some of the most talented writers in the land and by pushing those who are telegenic (or egotistic or masochistic) onto the TV screens. And he's raised scads of money to stabilize the publication.

Oddly, it's the latter that he's most proud of. Odd because the business of running a magazine, to me anyway, is not where the joy lies. Oh, I get as excited as the next editor (maybe even a little more so) about the success of a direct mail package. And my pulse quickens when I see an unexpected big donation roll in. Lord knows, we need it.

But the joys of editing, for me, are in the editing: finding the ideal writer for a story, breaking a big investigative piece, overhauling an important but unwieldy story until it is wieldy, glazing the copy of the best writers, and then trying to present a whole issue that leavens urgency and truth with beauty and humor.

Navasky is a chef who doesn't seem to like to cook. This is not Max Perkins working with Thomas Wolfe. For the most part, Navasky removes himself from the editor-writer fray. Instead, he presides. He referees. With enormous patience, he endures this staff dispute or that sectarian debate. (My predecessor, Erwin Knoll, always marveled at this ability of Navasky's.) He takes martini lunches with prospective writers or donors. He goes to conferences. He moderates debates and participates in symposiums. He testifies in lawsuits or before Congress. In his off hours, he writes books and teaches journalism courses at universities.

And he schnores, as we say in Yiddish. He fundraises. Much of A Matter of Opinion revolves around the process of extracting The Nation from the clutches of one-time owner Arthur Carter and then finding, with the help of Ham Fish and others, including E. L. Doctorow and Paul Newman, the necessary cash to keep The Nation not only floating but cruising, and you'll have to excuse that pun.

He writes, with understandable pride, about the all but unimaginable: The Nation cleared a profit of $251,000 last year. And he offers two recurrent bits of advice. Run a political magazine "like a business or else you will be out of business," and leave the editor alone. Both are unassailable.

But I longed for the thrill of the big story and the dazzle of the great catch.

There are a few exceptions to this. One is his fascinating account of how he came to acquire an advance copy of Gerald Ford's memoirs, published by Harper & Row, which discussed the Nixon pardon. Navasky leaped the embargo, quoting a few hundred words from the book and commenting critically on Ford's stated reasons for the biggest get out of jail free card of all time. For this wise journalistic decision, Navasky was sued on the grounds of copyright infringement, and he lost.

Another is his abiding affection for Christopher Hitchens (whom I also respect, despite his apostasy). Navasky tells how he introduced...