434 Book reviews

it seems that most of the strategic decision-making throughout her career came after huddling with longtime col-leagues and spinning through a fat Rolodex built up over years of working in the nation’s capital. That’s not science.It’s the game.

Sheila GibbonsCommunication Research Associates, Inc., 1220 Watergate South,

700 New Hampshire Ave. NW, Washington, DC 20037, USA

E-mail address: sheilagib@erols.com

15 August 2006

doi: 10.1016/j.pubrev.2006.09.014

The Language of Journalism, Vol. 1, Newspaper Culture, M.J. Lasky. Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick,NJ (2000). 478 pp., Price: $49.95Profanity, Obscenity & the Media, M.J. Lasky. The Language of Journalism, vol. 2, Transaction Publishers,New Brunswick, NJ (2005). 339 pp., Price: $44.95Media Warfare: The Americanization of Language, M.J. Lasky. The Language of Journalism, vol. 3, TransactionPublishers, New Brunswick, NJ (2005). 365 pp., Price: $39.95

The incoming freshman class of 2006 is the subject of an annual survey by an organization of educators. Thisyear’s “average” incoming freshman, age 18, remembers only two U.S. presidents and never knew a nation calledthe Soviet Union. Thus historically handicapped, the freshman would draw a blank about Melvin J. Lasky. The late,erudite Lasky–Troskyite, Cold Warrior, editor of the once hugely influential journal, Encounter, —is the author of athree-volume, 1000-page labor of love about the highs and lows (mostly lows) of journalistic writing in America andEngland. What freshmen do not know about Lasky is their loss.

Lasky cut a cosmopolitan figure. He was a member of that once-celebrated, if unofficial legislature of culture knownas the New York Jewish Intellectuals. In the mid-l960s, Time ran a full-color foldout of the NYJIs. Before the advent ofPeople and “American Idol,” they were celebrities in an era when Robert Frost himself was welcomed to read his versesat President John F. Kennedy’s inaugural. Their names, including “Norman Podhoretz,” were rhymes in Broadwayshow tunes. On matters aesthetic, cultural and political, the New York Jewish Intellectuals comprised the dominantcoalition.

Not that Jewishness was ever a requirement, despite the ethnicity of Saul Bellow, Irving Howe and Alfred Kazin.What got you membership was a certain culturally competitive sensibility, the willingness to throw a literate punch,a fascination with books, art, show business, politics and history. The ecumenical list of Anglo-Americans and Con-tinentals included Mary McCarthy, Dwight MacDonald, Lillian Hellman, Arthur Koestler, Norman Mailer, Jean-PaulSartre, Stephen Spender, as well as William Kristol, Sidney Hook and the aforementioned Mr. Podhoretz. Collectively,they formed the legacy of Susan Sontag and Woody Allen. Senior citizens, enfants terrible and borscht-belt comediansall.

Nor was membership limited to native New Yorkers (Bellow was born in Canada and flourished in Chicago), orAmericans (Stephen Spender was British, Hannah Arendt German). These were intellectual heavyweights almost asfamous for their feuds and affairs as they were for their books and plays. In the Cold War era, the Mother of All Fights– predating McCarthyism – was about where one stood on the question of Josef Stalin. Many of the NYJIs, howeverenamored of Soviet socialist idealism, rejected Stalin as a mass murderer who betrayed the ethos of internationalcommunitarianism. Others took their Marxism martini rather like James Bond—shaken with Stalin, but not stirredwith Trotsky. Lasky was a Trotskyite. Joining ranks with Irving Kristol, he bitterly opposed Stalinists as a threaten tothe security of America. You can draw a straight line from Lasky’s and Kristol’s political and cultural conservatismto the hawkish neocons who came to dominate American public opinion electoral politics since the last quarter of the20th century.

As Lasky observes in his three-volume masterwork, what united this cadre of uber intellectuals was their appetitefor newspapers. They did not read them; they devoured them. They clipped, cut, sorted, filed and stored them. They

Book reviews 435

were the last newspaper-culture generation, the end of the line of ink-stained literati. With the dawn of the InformationAge, their legion has been pixilated, Googled and blogged into submission by the emerging tribe of technorati: contentovercome by context.

When he died at 84 in 2004 at his adopted home in Berlin (he was a native New Yorker), Lasky was widelyremembered as an “outspoken anti-Communist” (Washington Post), a “brusque little guy from the Bronx” (Wall StreetJournal) and an anti-communist ancestor of today’s neoconservatism (Salon.com). Pipe-smoking and bearded, he wasdescribed by one wag as looking like Lenin and talking like Marx–Groucho, not Karl.

Pity the poor freshmen. Not only would they draw a blank on Lasky and his ilk. They had even be unable to catchthe reference to the Soviet Union in the Beatles’ “Back in the U.S.S.R.”

Permit me, if you will, to weigh you down with one more snippet of background: Lasky’s CIA scandal. To make along story short, at the end of the l960s came the ugly revelation that Encounter, the highly influential intellectual journalLasky edited for a decade, was covertly funded by the CIA. As the Washington Post reported, many of Encounter’sglittering contributors and editors, including Sartre, Lionel Trilling and Stephen Spender, took a powder. No damagecontrol or image restoration could have salvaged Lasky’s reputation.

All of this is a preface to my take on Lasky—which is that the real theme of his enormously entertaining andwitty collection is less about the decline of language than it is about sunset of the ravenously curious, competitive andliterately intellectual sensibility that fueled the “newspaper culture.”

The Language of Journalism is a frequently hilarious, engaging, virtuoso performance. With its trove of wonderfullyabsurd, demotic, vulgar, sophomoric, pseudo-intellectual and winkingly salacious quotations, it falls into the genre ofscholarly, opinionated, raucous, eccentric masterpieces that Lasky wished to emulate—particularly, H.L. Mencken’sThe American Language, and Robert Burton’s Renaissance classic, The Anatomy of Melancholy.

It is not terribly difficult for a good writer with a sense of humor to be amusing about profanity, obscenity and themedia—the subtitle of Lasky’s second volume. But it takes a special talent to write as engagingly as he does aboutasterisks, brackets, ellipses and dashes (“The Case of the Missing F**k–L****r Word”). Readers will also find Laskyin fine form on one-word euphemistic abbreviations—the f-word, n-word, c-word and p-word. (I will leave it to thereader’s imagination to fill in the blanks.)

While the final volume, published posthumously, is subtitled “the Americanization of Language,” Lasky does notreserve his barbs for inane, euphemistic, hyperbolic and meretricious American news writing. The Brits get theirs,too. Not only does he mock the blowsy tabloids on either side of the Atlantic; the self-important broadsheets come infor their fair share of deflating ridicule. Most rewardingly, he picks on guys his own size – or, at least those who arereputed to be his own size – Maureen Dowd, Frank Rich, Tom Friedman and others considered the best and brightest.With their writing and thinking Lasky is hugely unimpressed, having grown up feasting on the far more nutritiousreflections of Lippmann and Liebling and Mencken.

In the end, it is not the language in newspapers whose loss Lasky mourns. It is the ideas.

Robert E. Brown ∗Communications Department, Salem State College,

Salem, MA 01970, USA

∗ Tel.: +1 978 542 6463.E-mail address: rbrown@salemstate.edu

15 August 2006

doi: 10.1016/j.pubrev.2006.08.004

A Passion for Winning: Fifty Years of Promoting Legendary People and Products, Aaron D. Cushman. Light-house Point Press, Pittsburgh (2004). 261 pp., Hardcover, US$ 21.95

What is the difference between a very nimble press agent and an extraordinary public relations institution builder?The answer unfolds as Aaron Cushman tells the story of his 50-year rise from theater press agent following World

War II to building one of the 12 largest independently owned public relations agencies in the US as of 1991. As well,