Journal du Voyeur

On April 2, 1969, twenty-one Black Panthers were indicted in New York for having plotted to bomb the Botanical Gardens, a police station, and several retail stores, including Alexander’s and Abercrombie and Fitch. According to District Attorney Hogan, these bombings were to have occurred at the height of the Easter shopping season; in fact, he said, the bombs were to have gone off on the very day that the indictments were announced. Several Panthers went underground before the police could arrest them. One was held as a juvenile offender and thirteen others, of whom two were women, were imprisoned for want of bail that ranged from $25,000 in one case to $50,000 in two others, and $100,000 for each of the remaining ten.

The gravity of their conspiracy was such, according to the district attorney, that the city would not be safe if these thirteen remained at large pending their trial. Since Hogan is thought to be a cautious man, unlikely to make such claims on insufficient evidence, the courts ignored the arguments of defense counsel that such high bail was excessive in the case of defendants who had no record of serious crime, and the Panthers went to jail.

Shortly thereafter Murray Kempton undertook to write a book about the case, came to know the Panthers’ wives, friends, and attorneys, and soon became absorbed by his subjects. He also came to sympathize with them, as one might sympathize with anyone caught in the toils of criminal justice in New York.

From the start Kempton doubted that these Panthers were the menace that the district attorney had charged. For one thing, the Easter bomb plot seemed rather fanciful, more likely the product of inflamed imagination than the scheme of serious revolutionary terrorists. Was it possible that literalminded police spies had infiltrated the Panthers, mistaken their rhetoric for action, and convinced a credulous district attorney of a plot when there had been nothing more than fantasy and loose talk?

Furthermore, the Panthers, whatever their intentions may really have been, had not gone so far as a group of white terrorists who had actually exploded several bombs throughout the city and were arrested in the act of planting still another. But these white defendants had been granted lower bail than the Panthers, and one had already posted her bond and was free. It may therefore have seemed to Kempton, as it did to other liberals at the time, that perhaps the Panthers had been victimized for their revolutionary political views and because they were black.

In pleading for high bail, the assistant district attorney in charge of the case seemed to confirm the first of these suspicions when he said that “these defendants are not ordinary run of the mill criminals. They are terrorists.” The courts accepted this opinion and the Panthers were sent separately to various jails throughout the city. As Kempton later wrote, “For the first five months of their detention, their lawyers were permitted to confer with them as a group for a total of less than three hours.” But the indignity that most aroused the sympathies of liberals was the treatment of Lee Berry, an epileptic who had been taken from his hospital bed by the police and placed in an isolation cell. There he languished for four months until finally he was returned to the hospital, too ill, according to his doctors, even to appear in court, much less remain in jail.

Sometime in December, Kempton, at the suggestion of the Panthers’ lawyers, asked some well-connected and respectable friends who have a town house on the East Side whether they would arrange an evening at home to raise money for the Panthers’ defense. Not only were the defendants desperately poor, but Kempton felt it important that their situation be publicized; for, as he wrote at the time, “If they cannot be saved from being tried as strangers, they have no chance to be tried fairly at all.” Liberal New Yorkers are quick to respond to such appeals, especially where civil liberties appear to be in jeopardy. Furthermore, the Panthers had by this time gained a certain interest—not to say glamour—as the authentic voice of black misery and rage. One tended to hear in their violent language and the shallow Marxism that accompanied it not the sound of revolution but the cry of pain. What liberals found most interesting and hopeful about the Panthers were their efforts to supply dignity and political direction to black street people. Their talk of violent revolution, their identification with third world political leaders, and even the weapons they carried seemed, by contrast, largely rhetoric and theater.

To many liberals it also appeared that the Panthers were right to claim that federal and local officials were out to destroy them. Attorney General Mitchell had begun to talk of preventive detention. Fred Hampton, the Illinois Panther leader, had been shot in his bed by a posse of Chicago police, and Bobby Seale, the national chairman, had been bound and gagged by Judge Hoffman at the Chicago conspiracy trial for having repeatedly demanded no more than his constitutional right to defend himself. Moreover, evidence of the torture and murder of Alex Rackley in New Haven—a crime with which Seale had also been charged, to which two Panthers had already confessed, and for which a third was later to be found guilty—had not yet been made public; nor had any other evidence of Panther violence been produced, including whatever evidence Hogan might have had against the New York Panthers. In any case, what was on Kempton’s mind was not the guilt or innocence of the defendants but the need to raise money for their defense and to make them visible.

Thus Kempton’s friends sent out their invitations. About forty people came, including Felicia Bernstein, wife of the conductor. The Panthers who addressed these guests were articulate and calm. Their problems were obviously genuine. They talked about their breakfast program for ghetto children and said nothing to suggest that they were terrorists. They did, however, insist that they were revolutionaries, an admission that did not deter Mrs. Bernstein from agreeing to arrange a similar meeting at her own house some two weeks hence. Soon thereafter she sent elegantly engraved invitations, in her name but not in her husband’s, to perhaps a hundred people who might be interested in the case. Meanwhile, Charlotte Curtis, the society reporter for The New York Times, who had been in touch with Kempton on other matters, learned of his interest in the Panthers and said she would like to write a piece on their wives. Kempton thought this would be useful to the defendants and suggested that she come along to the Bernsteins’ party.

Tom Wolfe was another guest whom Mrs. Bernstein had not herself invited, but who came anyway. The present book is the result of his visit.

According to Wolfe the people who attended Mrs. Bernstein’s party for the Panthers were moved not by an innocent love of justice but by a snobbish infatuation with the unruly poor. It was, he says, “nostalgie de la boue“—what used to be called slumming—and not a quixotic interest in fair play that brought these rich, fashionable, and clever people together to hear Donald Cox, a Panther field marshal, describe the Panther program and the plight of the thirteen defendants.

Not only does Wolfe deny that the Bernsteins’ guests were genuinely concerned that such high bail might have been an injustice; what they actually wanted, in his opinion, was to distinguish themselves from what he calls the “hated middle class” by “taking on certain styles of the lower orders.” This, Wolfe says, is one of the two ways in which the new rich “certify” their arrival in society. The other is “by taking on the trappings of aristocracy.” In other words, they hire fashionable decorators and plenty of servants; then they go to Harlem where they learn the frug and eat corn pone, a recipe for which Wolfe supplies in the present book. When they go further and “integrate the fashionable new politics” of the wayward poor, they are guilty of Radical Chic.

This notion, though not the term itself, derives, according to Wolfe, from the sociological theories of Seymour Martin Lipset and Nathan Glazer, among others. Presumably it would also describe Edna St. Vincent Millay’s interest in Sacco and Vanzetti, Theodore Dreiser’s in the coal miners of Harlan County, and Robert Kennedy’s in Cesar Chavez.

With equal facility one might propose a theory in reply to the one that Wolfe offers: that his invidious generalization derives from resentment and envy of the rich and talented, fear of the alienated poor, and anxiety over his own precarious situation in between. It is this same resentment of effete snobs and fear of the undisciplined poor that Mr. Agnew, among others, imagines to be the main preoccupation of most Americans.

Two years ago the president of the New York City teachers’ union anticipated Wolfe’s hypothesis and its reflection in the political tactics of Mr. Agnew. He complained that the city’s bitter school strikes had nothing to do with failures within the school system itself, but resulted from a conspiracy between aristocrats at the Ford Foundation and Mayor Lindsay in league with ghetto revolutionaries. What they wanted, according to the teachers’ union, was to destroy the middle-class professionals who had devoted their lives to running the underfinanced schools overrun with “culturally deprived” children.

Two months ago an Ohio grand jury concluded that the trouble at Kent State was the fault of an elitist and permissive administration that had indulged an unruly minority of alienated campus radicals. Recently the editor of Commentary has complained that the present turmoil in America has nothing to do with the “urban crisis,” for in fact there is no such crisis except in the minds of treacherous intellectuals whose irresponsible criticisms of American society inspire naïve readers to despair of democratic values. (In the Soviet Union, to be sure, things are far worse. Andrei Amalrik will spend three years in a prison camp for having written critically of his country.) No wonder Wolfe’s essay reverberated so when it appeared in New York magazine last spring.

But Wolfe is different from these others: more voyeur than partisan and considerably less sure of who he himself is. For example, he is a considerable snob in his own right. When he accuses the rich of hating the middle class, he supplies as evidence only his own feelings toward these people, not those of the Bernsteins’ guests, of which he can have had no such intimate knowledge. He knows what

…it is like to be trapped in New York Saturday after Saturday in July or August, doomed to be a part of those fantastically dowdy herds roaming past Bonwit’s and Tiffany’s at dead noon in the sandstone broil, 92 degrees, daddies from Long Island in balloon seat Bermuda shorts….

He sympathizes with the rich who “must have a weekend place in the country or at the shore, all year round preferably, but certainly from the middle of May to the middle of September,” so as not to be in touch with these people.

But while Wolfe knows what it is like to despise the middle-class daddies from Long Island and describes the Billy Baldwin sofas of the rich with the avidity of a slit-eyed bumpkin, he admits also to a

…concern for the poor and underprivileged and an honest outrage against discrimination. One’s heart does cry out—quite spontaneously!—upon hearing how the police have dealt with the Panthers, dragging an epileptic like Lee Berry out of his hospital bed and throwing him into the Tombs.

Moreover, he is fascinated by Felicia Bernstein, from whose example his theory of Radical Chic mainly derives.

She is remarkable. She is beautiful with that rare burnished beauty that lasts through the years. She greets the Black Panthers with the same bend of the wrist, the same tilt of the head, the same perfect Mary Astor voice with which she greets people like Jason, Joan and D.D.…

Then why, when he left Mrs. Bernstein’s party, didn’t Wolfe simply thank his hostess, leave a small check for the bail fund, and depart, warm in the knowledge that these rich and clever people shared his concern for such unfortunates as Lee Berry and his fellow defendants? Two days after Charlotte Curtis’s account of the evening appeared in the Times, an editorial writer for that paper described the party as “elegant slumming” and an offense to people “who are seriously working for full equality.” Why did Wolfe not reply as Mrs. Bernstein did, that she had merely

…asked a number of people to her house…to discuss the problem of civil liberties as applicable to the men now awaiting trial and to help raise funds for their legal expenses…. [That] it was for this deeply serious purpose that our meeting was called. The frivolous way in which it was reported as a “fashionable” event is unworthy of the Times, and offensive to all people who are committed to humanitarian principles of justice.

Why did Wolfe choose instead to offend his hostess further by writing his own frivolous account of her efforts? And why, since his heart cries out so spontaneously when he hears how the police have dealt with the Panthers, did he not add his name to Miss Curtis’s among the sponsors of a recent benefit for the defendants?

Wolfe, who is the least self-conscious of writers, supplies no direct answer to these questions, nor do such questions seem to have occurred to him. His failure to admit that the Bernsteins and their guests may have had serious and decent intentions—that they were not committing an injustice to a “hated middle class” but trying to serve the interest of justice generally—is purely reflexive. It is this unexamined response that lends Wolfe’s book its only genuine interest, for it is a response that Wolfe shares not only with Mr. Agnew and the hypothetical American majority to which he claims to speak, but with such other unlikely allies as the Times editorial writers and even with those socialist ideologues who agreed with Mr. Shanker that the teachers’ strike was in response to an aristocratic conspiracy to subvert the values and processes of the democratic center. Wolfe’s reflex can hardly be taken too seriously. What it echoes goes very deep and reaches very far indeed.

Clearly the fortuitous associations of the very rich with the revolutionary poor are, in one sense at least, offensive, especially in such opulent surroundings as the Bernsteins’ drawing room. Noblesse oblige has its limits and perhaps on this occasion they were exceeded. Surely these millionaries do not seriously intend to support a revolution of which they would be the first victims but which the Panthers insist is the only hope for the poor.

In such circumstances the rich must appear to be merely patronizing and the poor disingenuous: the one in search of justification or titillation, the other in search of money with which eventually to kill their hosts. No doubt there are less spectacular ways to defend civil liberties than by inviting ghetto revolutionaries to Park Avenue to raise money for their party treasury. That Wolfe seized on this absurdity and in his cruel and shallow way made fun of it is understandable. Nor is it difficult to understand the apprehension that he shares with the editors of the Times that for the rich to indulge the revolutionary fantasies of the alienated poor is an affront to the values and interests of nearly everyone else.

But from the evidence that Wolfe supplies in the present book, the purpose of the party and the behavior of the people who went to it do not support such criticisms. The guests did not salute the Panthers with clenched fists. Instead they asked them polite, sensible, and often penetrating questions. At one point in the evening Donald Cox attempts to explain what the Panthers mean by revolution. Barbara Walters, the television interviewer, interrupts to ask whether he sees “any chance at all for a peaceful solution to these problems—without violence?”

“Not in the present system,” Cox replies.

“I’m talking as a white woman who has a white husband, who is a capitalist or an agent of capitalists, and I want to know if you are going to have your freedom, does that mean we have to go?”

Cox answers evasively that “for one person to be free, everybody must be free….” But at this point he is interrupted by another guest and the thread of the exchange is lost. Miss Walters then turns to Mrs. Lee Berry and repeats her question. “I am not afraid of you,” she says, “but maybe I am about the idea of the death of my children. All I am asking is if we can work together to create justice without violence and destruction.” The guest interrupts once more, however, and the question goes unanswered.

Wolfe presents this dialogue as if it were a joke. The interruptions are meant to be comical. They are from Otto Preminger whose accent Wolfe finds it amusing to mock. “You dun’t read anyt’ing. Dat’s your tdrouble…. You dun’t eefen listen to de kvestion….” And so on. Someone looks sarcastically at another guest who “shrivels up like a slice of Oscar Mayer bacon,” and in this way Wolfe attempts to convey that Miss Walters’s questions are foolish.

He fails, for what is absurd about Miss Walters’s interrogation has nothing to do with Mr. Preminger’s accent or brands of bacon. It has to do with the terrible distance between herself and Mr. Cox. The proper tone in which to have conveyed the pathos of her attempt to negotiate this abyss is hardly the low comedy nastiness that Wolfe affects. But what is most offensive about this tone is that it attempts to make Miss Walters’s seriousness appear idiotic, when in fact it is Wolfe’s own perceptions that are at fault. Otto Preminger may be the buffoon that Wolfe makes him out to be, but neither his accent nor Miss Walters’s questions support the argument that the Bernsteins and their guests had frivolously indulged a band of black terrorists in defiance of the middle class and its values.

According to Wolfe the original Radical Chic event was held in Southampton a year earlier. This was a party given by Andrew Stein, a rich and ambitious young politician, for the California grape strikers. It was held at his father’s elaborate beach house, and Ethel Kennedy and the daughter of Henry Ford were sponsors of the event. The day was dull for the beach and so out of boredom and curiosity many people came, resplendent in their summer costumes, to mingle with the grape pickers in their denims.

Wolfe found much at this party to snicker at, for example that Stein’s father is called Finkelstein; but nothing in his account of the event—or in one’s own recollection—suggests that anyone came for reasons of “nostalgie de la boue.” Nor is it conceivable that these stock-brokers and bankers were interested in “integrating the fashionable new politics” of Cesar Chavez into their lives. If they were moved by anything more than curiosity, it was probably to pay their respects to Robert Kennedy who had supported the grape strike, while Mr. Stein’s own interest must have been to associate his political career with the memory of the late senator.

Unself-conscious as always, Wolfe missed what must be the heart of the matter. What he calls Radical Chic is, in fact, only the unhappy residue of the broken promises and defeated politics of the Kennedys, the still flickering desire of an impotent and aristocratic liberalism to restore citizenship to the poor—not, as Wolfe says, to “integrate” the politics of the poor with their own, but to engage the poor as citizens in the political life of the country.

Great expectations usually lead to much foolishness and end in terrible despair. Othello’s folly, like Don Quixote’s, was groundless optimism. So perhaps was Felicia Bernstein’s. Most men expect less of the world and they risk less. On the other hand, nothing comes from nothing. From everything Wolfe says about the Bernsteins and their guests, there is no reason to assume that their interest was anything less than justice, an attempt to make good the much abused promises of democracy. Their sin, if sin is the word, was in their optimism, though perhaps for some it was no more than that they had nothing better to do that evening and felt like stopping by for a drink.

Wolfe’s sin is a lack of compassion and his intellectual weakness a tendency to panic when he finds himself beyond his depth, frailties that commonly accompany moments of great personal or public stress. When the people of a country discover that their faith has been abused by leaders in whom they have placed more trust than was wise, and who have failed or abandoned them or who have simply been unable to cope, they typically respond in fear and anger. Often they turn against what they feel has hurt them. Some plant bombs in public buildings. Others, like Wolfe, attack those who remind them of the pretensions of their failed heroes. Some, like the editor of Commentary, imagine conspiracies. Most pretend that nothing has happened or that the pain is dialectical—that something good will come of it. Righteous tempers will agree with the editor of Commentary that our problem is the mischievous work of nihilistic intellectuals. Sanguine tempers will agree with Charles Reich that the symptoms of alienation foreshadow the spontaneous birth of a new and higher stability. Both views ignore an unpleasant, perhaps an unthinkable, possibility—that the crisis may be genuine and that its solution is not in sight.

Such was the temper of the early 1950s when the country, exhausted by depression and war, convinced itself that it had at last found a resting place, that its only enemies were communist armies abroad and communist devils at home, that peace of mind could be achieved through positive thinking and a little red-baiting. The present moment suggests a grotesque reenactment of those deluded times, in which fantasies of betrayal and bad faith are proposed to explain why our complacency is less than perfect. But does Tom Wolfe really believe that the ominous ghettos will be restored to democratic health if only Mrs. Bernstein restricts her interest in civil liberties to respectable cases? Does the editor of Commentary really suppose that civility will be restored to the alienated young and the poor if only we don’t admit that the technology may be out of phase with the needs of the people; that the people themselves have been dishonored by their leaders and have much reason to be frightened and unhappy; that we may all have lost our way?

“God!” Bernstein interrupts Cox at one point in the evening, “most of the people in this room have had a problem being wanted.” To Wolfe this statement is laughable. Bernstein, he says, “has steered the Black Panther movement into a 1955 Jules Feiffer cartoon. Rejection, Security, Anxiety, Oedipus, Electra, Neurosis…,” etc. This misses the point. To be wanted is hardly a psychoanalytic cliché. It is an absolute spiritual necessity—for the Panthers, for the Bernsteins, and for everyone in between. The point that Wolfe misses and that Bernstein spontaneously grasped is that what we all fear is to be abandoned not simply in an indifferent and purposeless universe, but in our indifferent, purposeless, and ungoverned cities.

The prospect is not bright. According to Gibbon, when the Romans of the second century learned that their empire was waning and that their familiar gods could no longer be trusted, only a few kept their heads. Most hastened to attach their faith to whichever substitutes came their way. The result eventually was Christianity. For Americans there appears to be no such likely replacement for the faith we once had in ourselves. Some take drugs, others call the police. For most there is nothing left to do but try to pretend that things are the same, and to blame their anxiety on the failures or conspiracies of others. Such paranoia is the common refuge of a frightened people. Crises of faith are hard to bear. As therapy, delusion may seem preferable to truth. On the other hand, reality cannot be denied for long, nor does a flag on the lapel restore our lost democracy.

Yet even in such times as these, there remains a choice of action. We may blame others for our misfortunes and confront our problems with benign neglect, hoping that they will go away by themselves, or, like Felicia Bernstein and Barbara Walters, we may ask, seriously and with compassion, if anything can still be done.

Tom Wolfe’s view of things to come is darker yet. At the end of his essay he has a vision. There is a concert. Bernstein is conducting. The audience consists of

…fools, boors, philistines, Birchers, B’nai Brithees, Defense Leaguers, theatre party piranhas, UJAviators, concert hall Irishmen, Wasp ignorati, toads, newspaper readers—they were booing him—Leonard Bernstein—Boooooooooo. That harebrained story in the Times had told how he and Felicia had given a party for the Black Panthers and how he had pledged a conducting fee for their defense fund, and now stretching out before him in New York, was a great, starched, white-throated audience of secret candy store bigots, greengrocers, Moshe Dayans with patches over both eyes. Booooooo Boooooooo it was unbelievable. But it was real—he was their whipping boy and a bunch of $14.50 cretins were booing him and it was an insomniac hallucination in the loneliness of 3 AM.

Of course Wolfe can only have imagined that this was Bernstein’s dream. Though such a concert did take place soon after the editorial appeared in the Times and Bernstein was, in fact, booed, the terrible vision, with all its hatred and violence, its fear and disgust, is Wolfe’s own and in his authentic voice. The terrified conductor, the howling mob, the forgotten music may indeed be our future, as Wolfe seems to be saying. Still, we may hope that his perception in this particular is as faulty as it is generally.