Salon.com > Jon Wiener

The accidental genius of “8 1/2″

Thu, 27 Jun 2013 16:57:00 +0000

IT IS THE 50th Anniversary of Fellini’s 8 1/2.

Fifty years ago — on June 25, 1963 — Federico Fellini's 8 1/2 had its US premiere in New York City. It’s a transparently autobiographical film about a world famous director unable to finish his next film, beset by doubts, anxieties, and nightmares. As the film opens, our hero Guido, Fellini's alter ego, played by Marcello Mastroianni, faces a dilemma that may be familiar to many: What if your deadline arrived, but you had written nothing? What if people came to hear you, but you had nothing to say? What would happen if you ran out of ideas?

Could you get away with creating something about the inability to create, something about your crisis of creativity? About your state of mind, your dreams of glory, your fantasies of perfection, and also about your middle-of-the-night dread? Could you turn your crisis of creativity into your subject?

Mailer, Styron and Auden, all in the same publication

Tue, 11 Jun 2013 18:17:00 +0000

IT’S THE FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY of the New York Review of Books, founded in 1963 and still an essential part of our reading lives. The editor since its inception has been Robert Silvers.

JON WIENER: When you started, did you have a time frame in mind? Did you think you could do this for 50 years?

ROBERT SILVERS: No. [laughs] What happened was this: there was a great newspaper strike in New York in the autumn of 1962, and my friend Jason Epstein, an editor at Random House, had the inspiration — which he imparted to the poet Robert Lowell and his wife Elizabeth Hardwick — that this was the one time in history that you could start a book review without a penny, since all the publishing houses had no place to advertise their new books. No New York Times Book Review. Jason and I knew that, if we started a plausible book review, then all the publishers would simply have to take a page. They had to show their authors that they were publishing books.

8 things I miss about the Cold War

Tue, 15 Jan 2013 15:05:00 +0000

At a book festival in Los Angeles recently, some writers (myself included) were making the usual arguments about the problems with American politics in the 1950s -- until one panelist shocked the audience by declaring, “God, I miss the Cold War.” His grandmother, he said, had come to California from Oklahoma with a grade-school education, but found a job in an aerospace factory in L.A. during World War II, joined the union, got healthcare and retirement benefits, and prospered in the Cold War years. She ended up owning a house in the suburbs and sending her kids to UCLA.

Several older people in the audience leaped to their feet shouting, “What about McCarthyism?” “The bomb?” “Vietnam?” “Nixon?”

All good points, of course. After all, during the Cold War the U.S. did threaten to destroy the world with nuclear weapons, supported brutal dictators globally because they were anti-communist, and was responsible for the deaths of several million people in Korea and Vietnam, all in the name of defending freedom. And yet it’s not hard to join that writer in feeling a certain nostalgia for the Cold War era. It couldn’t be a sadder thing to admit, given what happened in those years, but -- given what’s happened in these years -- who can doubt that the America of the 1950s and 1960s was, in some ways, simply a better place than the one we live in now? Here are eight things (from a prospectively longer list) we had then and don’t have now.

Whittaker Chambers relative: Farm need not be open to public

Thu, 18 Oct 2012 16:17:00 +0000

Dr. Jon Wiener needs to set some facts straight, at least in the excerpt from his new book, just published by Salon ("A visit to the right’s least popular museum").

First, the Whittaker Chambers Farm is no museum. In fact is neither a requirement nor even an implication that a property designated as a National Historic Landmark need open to the public at all. In "Protecting America: Cold War Defensive Sites (A National Historical Landmark Theme Study)," dated October 2011, the NPS clearly holds the Whittaker Chambers Farm "private property, not open to the public." Further, Whittaker Chambers (my grandfather) never claimed his farm meant much to the outside world. He described it as "a few hundred acres of dirt, some clusters of old barns and outbuildings… a few beeves and hogs or a flock of sheep." ("Witness," p. 517). It hasn't changed much over the years.

Second, Dr. Wiener either visited under cover, through a third person — or not at all. He claims that he saw only horses "where the landmark was supposed to be." He must have come to the wrong place: we have never owned or housed horses. According to John Chambers (my father), who lives and works on the Farm, Dr. Wiener never called on him.

A visit to the right’s least popular museum

Sat, 13 Oct 2012 19:00:00 +0000

The most popular National Park Service site is the Blue Ridge Parkway in Virginia, which has around 17 million visitors per year; the least popular seems to be the Whittaker Chambers pumpkin patch National Historic Landmark near Baltimore, which has around two visitors per year. I was one of them. One windy fall day, I set out from Baltimore with friends to search for the pumpkin patch. The Reagan administration designated it a National Historic Landmark (officially called “Whittaker Chambers Farm”) in 1988 over the unanimous objection of the National Park Service Advisory Board. The site, outside Westminster, Md., commemorates the spot where, in 1947, Whittaker Chambers reached into a hollowed-out pumpkin and pulled out some 35mm film. He said it showed that Alger Hiss, a pillar of the New Deal, had been a Soviet spy.

The “pumpkin papers” helped convict Hiss of perjury in 1950, which transformed public opinion, convincing Americans for the first time that communism posed a real danger to the country. The obscure congressman named Nixon who pushed the Hiss case won a Senate seat the year Hiss was convicted and got the vice-presidential nomination in 1952; a month after Hiss’s conviction, Sen. Joseph McCarthy gave the speech in Wheeling, W.Va., that launched his career and gave the new, virulent anticommunism its name. For the next 45 years, the Cold War served as the iron cage of American politics.