Labor Spotlight

Remembering Jack Newfield

by Jim Callaghan

Jan 20, 2005 3:44 PM

A personal look at the legendary New York City journalist

Almost everything you need to know about Jack Newfield could be found at his memorial service in December. One of the speakers was a former FBI agent who put crooked politicians in jail.

One of the attendees was a crooked politician who had been sent to jail for accepting bribes, a man relentlessly criticized by Newfield in the Village Voice and in his book, co-authored with Wayne Barrett, called “City for Sale.”

That was how people all over this city reacted to Jack, with few exceptions; one of those exceptions was Ed Koch, the former lawyer for the Voice and a former friend of Jack’s. “They should burn down the Village Voice — with Jack Newfield in it,” Koch once bellowed. That was the visceral reaction that Jack’s rapier-like journalism had on bullies.

Besides the Voice, Jack also had stints at the Daily News, New York Observer and New York Post. Until cancer killed him at age 66, he was working as a columnist for the New York Sun. He won numerous awards, including the George Polk Award and an Emmy.

But there is more to Jack’s story than places and prizes, and educators and their students should know that story because, beyond everything else, he was a teacher: about life, politics, journalism and the importance of mentoring younger writers like me when I was starting out.

Jack was pro-union — unabashedly so — writing in a New York media environment that has become increasingly anti-union. Jack, who wrote a monthly column for the New York Teacher, understood one thing instinctively: It’s not the teachers’ fault for the state of education today; it’s politicians who starve our mainly nonwhite kids of the money they need to succeed. End of story.

Every student in every one of our schools should have such a mentoring relationship.

I met Jack at City Hall in 1974, when I was a special assistant to City Council President Paul O’Dwyer — a working-class kid from Staten Island who, like Jack, went to CUNY for free before the bankers imposed tuition in 1976 to pay off city bonds on time.

O’Dwyer introduced me to Jack, who had attended anti-Vietnam War “Dump Lyndon Johnson” meetings in O’Dwyer’s Wall Street law office in 1966. “You two should get to know each other,” Paul said.

I was drawn to Jack’s writing because I shared his view, as journalist Mark Jacobsen reminded us at the service, of “an eye and an ear for an eye.” Jack’s middle name should have been “relentless.” He despised tyrants with every fiber of his being.

You want to know about the fallacy of the death penalty? Jack hounded lazy Brooklyn prosecutors who convicted an innocent man of murder and would not admit their mistake. The man was set free.

You want to know about moxie? Jack traveled to Mississippi in 1964, was arrested and shared a jail cell with Michael Schwerner, the civil rights worker later murdered with James Chaney and Andrew Goodman. Last week, a former KKK member was charged with the crime.

Despite his often searing criticism of politicians, Jack thought public service was honorable and became enraged when people abused that trust, especially in cases that he covered, when powerful elected officials took legal bribes in the form of attorney’s fees to represent smarmy nursing home operators who were dealing in death, not life, in their Dickensian dens.

When Jack died, The New York Times couldn’t resist a dig, mentioning the fact that he “attracted criticism from those who felt that he put crusading zeal ahead of the journalistic precept of impartiality.”

I can just hear Jack’s answer to such a scurrilous charge: “Reporters tend to be reduced to stenographers by the powerful. The formulas and conventions of newspapers require reporters to write down and quote whatever presidents, important politicians and corporate executives say, even if it’s not true.”

Those words, written in 1984, resonate with anyone working in a New York City public school today as they read the Bloomberg/Klein pronouncements about “improving the schools.”

Jack Newfield trusted the intelligence of his readers and understood they would be outraged if they knew how well-born millionaire developers had stymied a lead paint bill for 30 years with hefty campaign contributions to City Council members. That was an easy call for an “unobjective” reporter; poor black and Hispanic kids were getting sick and dying. Whose side are you on?

When I was at the Village Voice, Jack shared his Rolodex and bulging file folders with younger writers, gave us story ideas, pleaded our case with editors and introduced us “to people we should know.” He did the same for dozens of others, including bus drivers, film makers, and community activists who spent their days raking the muck beneath wired development deals. All of them remembered that they had met through Jack. It was this cross-pollination of New Yorkers that was Jack’s way of networking for the common good.

Carl Bromley, the editor of Nation Books, said he always admired Jack’s wit; his ability to instantly come up with unscripted one-liners to hilariously describe people or events. (Jack did much of his best investigative work over the last two years for the Nation Institute and had it published in The Nation).

Did he have faults? A few maybe, but whatever they were, they are insignificant in comparison to the importance of his life.

I have lost a friend and someone who often seemed like an older brother. But my loss is not as important as what our city and country lost: a chronicler of wrongdoing that we need now more than ever.

Jack once wrote about the autobiography of Lincoln Steffens in which Steffens described his mentor, Jacob Riis. He said, “I hope that when I’m 90, someone will write this about me:

“He [Jacob Riis] not only got the news, he cared about the news. He hated passionately all tyrannies, abuses, miseries and he fought them. He was a terror to the officials and landlords responsible, as he saw it, for the desperate condition of the tenements, where the poor lived. He had exposed them in articles, books, and public speeches, with results.”

Jack missed his goal to live in New York until he was 90, but he gave the place some optimism and idealism and laughs; not bad for a working-class kid from Bedford Stuyvesant.

BOOKS BY JACK NEWFIELD

“A Prophetic Minority”
“A Populist Manifesto” (with Jeff Greenfield)
“Bread and Roses, Too”
“Cruel and Unusual Justice”
“The Permanent Government” (with Paul DuBrul)
“City for Sale” (with Wayne Barrett)
“Only in America: The Life and Times of Don King”
“Somebody’s Gotta Tell it: The Upbeat Memoirs of a Working Class Journalist”
“The Full Rudy: The Man, the Myth and the Mania”
“RFK: A Memoir”
“American Rebels” (Editor)
“American Monsters” (Editor)