Beichman's Ideas Trump Communism; An ardent America supporter, Arnold Beichman battled communist ideas as an editor of a left-wing newspaper and still is working as a lecturer and prolific author

0 Comments | Insight on the News, April 13, 2004

Arnold Beichman is 90 years old, but you'd hardly know it, and he will turn 91 in May. During his nine decades he's met all-time baseball greats Babe Ruth and Joe DiMaggio, and talked with presidents such as Harry S Truman and John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

Beichman speaks eloquently about life in New York City in the 1930s and 1940s, where he was a 1934 graduate of Columbia University and editor of its student newspaper. Later, as city editor for Marshall Fields' now defunct (but once highly regarded) daily, PM, he came into contact with many of the town's movers and shakers.

But Beichman's experience stretches far beyond the environs of Manhattan. While World War II still raged, he published the first American reports on the Warsaw Uprising. In the 1950s, Beichman traveled as a journalist to Algeria when that country was racked by the terror war against France, of which it then was part. He was in the Congo, Vietnam and other major trouble spots,filing firsthand reports.

A longtime outspoken anticommunist, Beichman fought against communist influence as a Columbia student (and editor of the student newspaper), as an editor at the left-wing PM, and as an associate of labor leader George Meany and other American labor leaders whose anticommunism Beichman deeply admired. "I stuck with labor so long because they were very reliable anticommunists," he tells Insight.

What ultimately may be most noticeable about Beichman, however, is not his anticommunism but the deep love and admiration he has for this country his unabashed, exuberant pro-Americanism.

It's not that he's blind to this country's shortcomings. He's not. It's that he's aware of its achievements and thinks what this country does right doesn't get talked about nearly enough. His pro-Americanism is apparent in works such as his Nine Lies About America, reprinted as Anti-American Myths.

Nothing reveals what kind of a man Beichman is better than the career change he made in his 50s. Beichman went back to school, earning a Ph.D. at Columbia among graduate students half his age and younger. He became a professor of political science, working at schools such as the University of Massachusetts at Boston and the University of British Columbia.

Since 1982, Beichman has been at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. Insight talked with him after the Politics & Pizza lunch at Hoover. Politics & Pizza is a weekly get-together for the editors and writers of the Stanford Review, a campus alternative biweekly newspaper.

Not only do these lucky young conservatives get the very generous Arnold Beichman as their sponsor, each week they hear a Hoover Institution fellow (Thomas Sowell had visited them the week before and flat-tax advocate Alvin Rabushka was there that week) speak about his or her ideas, experiences and ways of looking at the world.

Beichman was in his element, debating the guest speaker and challenging the 25 or so students assembled for the event. He regularly writes for the Washington Times, the Claremont Review of Books and other publications. He's now at work on a book about Henry Wallace, FDR's agriculture secretary and vice president who ran on a left-wing Progressive Party ticket for president against Truman in 1948.

Insight: One of the great pleasures of reading your articles and books and of listening to you talk is your unabashed love for America. You have a lot of good to say about this country.

Arnold Beichman: Where else do you move as fast as you do in this country? My parents were immigrant Jews from the Ukraine who never really learned to speak English. My father could speak Ukrainian, Polish, Russian, Yiddish. He had to learn Italian because he was a peddler selling goods in Little Italy on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. He never had to learn English because he lived in the shtetl [small Jewish community]. His little cotton-goods store was there, the synagogue was a block away, and we lived a block away from that, so why did he need English?

Q: And from that background you a Jew and without a fraternity affiliation become editor of the Spectator at Columbia and then a city editor of a famous New York City newspaper.

A: Oh, yes, and then came here to the Hoover Institution. I have a daughter who is a professor of Japanese literature in Japan. I have two sons. One is a millionaire by doing something with computers I don't understand. The other is chief scientist of the Albert Michelson Laboratory at Caltech [California Institute of Technology].

Q: I gather you don't think we have lost the kind of America epitomized by Abraham Lincoln when he called us "the last, best hope of mankind"?

A: I don't think we have. But let's keep in mind that this is a divided country. Half the people voted against the incumbent president. And it looks like that could happen again.

Meanwhile, we must bear in mind that the power of ideas is greater than we ever thought. Ideas almost destroyed the 20th century. Take Marx and Lenin. Leninism really created fascism, in my opinion. Scholars such as Hannah Arendt showed the similarity of the two Leninism and fascism.