America Under Barack Obama

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An Interview with Nat Hentoff
By John W. Whitehead
December 11, 2009
"I try to avoid hyperbole, but I think Obama is possibly the most
dangerous and destructive president we have ever had."—Nat Hentoff
(Embedded image moved to file: pic19066.jpg)Nat Hentoff
Nat Hentoff has had a life well spent, one chock full of controversy
fueled by his passion for the protection of civil liberties and human
rights. Hentoff is known as a civil libertarian, free speech activist,
anti-death penalty advocate, pro-lifer and not uncommon critic of the
ideological left.
At 84, Nat Hentoff is an American classic who has never shied away from an
issue. For example, he defended a woman rejected from law school because
she was Caucasian; called into a talk show hosted by Oliver North to agree
with him on liberal intolerance for free speech; was a friend to the late
Malcolm X; and wrote the liner notes for Bob Dylan's second album.
A self-described uncategorizable libertarian, Hentoff adds he is also a
“Jewish atheist, civil libertarian, pro-lifer.” Accordingly, he has
angered nearly every political faction and remains one of a few who has
stuck to his principles through his many years of work, regardless of the
trouble it stirred up. For instance, when he announced his opposition to
abortion he alienated numerous colleagues, and his outspoken denunciation
of President Bill Clinton only increased his isolation in liberal circles
(He said that Clinton had "done more harm to the Constitution than any
president in American history," and called him "a serial violator of our
liberties.").
Born in Boston on June 10, 1925, Hentoff received a B.A. with honors from
Northeastern University and did graduate work at Harvard. From 1953 to
1957, he was associate editor of Down Beat magazine. He has written many
books on jazz, biographies and novels, including children's books. His
articles have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times,
Commonwealth, the New Republic, the Atlantic and the New Yorker, where he
was a staff writer for more than 25 years. In 1980, he was awarded a
Guggenheim Fellowship in Education and an American Bar Association Silver
Gavel Award for his coverage of the law and criminal justice in his
columns. In 1985, he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Laws by
Northeastern University. For 50 years, Hentoff wrote a weekly column for
the Village Voice. But that publication announced that he had been
terminated on December 31, 2008. In February 2009, Hentoff joined the Cato
Institute as a Senior Fellow.
Hentoff's views on the rights of Americans to write, think and speak
freely are expressed in his columns. He is also an authority on First
Amendment defense, the Bill of Rights, the Supreme Court, students' rights
and education. Friends and critics alike describe him as the kind of
writer, and citizen, that all should aspire to be—"less interested in
'exclusives' than in 'making a difference.'" Critiquing Hentoff's
autobiography, Speaking Freely, Nicholas von Hoffman refers to him as "a
trusting man, a gentle man, just and undeviatingly consistent."
Hentoff took to heart the words from his mentor, I. F. "Izzy" Stone, the
renowned investigative journalist who died in 1989: "If you're in this
business because you want to change the world, get another day job. If you
are able to make a difference, it will come incrementally, and you might
not even know about it. You have to get the story and keep on it because
it has to be told."
Nat Hentoff has earned the well-deserved reputation of being one of our
nation's most respected, controversial and uncompromising writers. He
began his career at the Village Voice because he wanted a place to write
freely on anything he cared about. And his departure from the publication
has neither dampened his zeal nor tempered his voice.
Hentoff, whose new book, At the Jazz Band Ball—Sixty Years on the Jazz
Scene (University of California Press), is due out in 2010, took some time
to speak with me about Barack Obama, the danger of his health care plan,
the peril of civil liberties, and a host of other issues.
John W. Whitehead: When Barack Obama was a U.S. Senator in 2005, he
introduced a bill to limit the Patriot Act. Now that he is president, he
has endorsed the Patriot Act as is. What do you think happened with Obama?
Nat Hentoff: I try to avoid hyperbole, but I think Obama is possibly the
most dangerous and destructive president we have ever had. An example is
ObamaCare, which is now embattled in the Senate. If that goes through the
way Obama wants, we will have something very much like the British system.
If the American people have their health care paid for by the government,
depending on their age and their condition, they will be subject to a
health commission just like in England which will decide if their lives
are worth living much longer.
In terms of the Patriot Act, and all the other things he has pledged he
would do, such as transparency in government, Obama has reneged on his
promises. He pledged to end torture, but he has continued the CIA
renditions where you kidnap people and send them to another country to be
interrogated. Why is Obama doing that if he doesn't want torture anymore?
Throughout Obama's career, he promised to limit the state secrets doctrine
which the Bush-Cheney administration had abused enormously. The Bush
administration would go into court on any kind of a case that they thought
might embarrass them and would argue that it was a state secret and the
case should not be continued. Obama is doing the same thing, even though
he promised not to.
So in answer to your question, I am beginning to think that this guy is a
phony. Obama seems to have no firm principles that I can discern that he
will adhere to. His only principle is his own aggrandizement. This is a
very dangerous mindset for a president to have.
JW: Do you consider Obama to be worse than George W. Bush?
NH: Oh, much worse. Bush essentially came in with very little
qualifications for presidency, not only in terms of his background but he
lacked a certain amount of curiosity, and he depended entirely too much on
people like Rumsfeld, Cheney and others. Bush was led astray and we were
led astray. However, I never thought that Bush himself was, in any sense,
"evil." I am hesitant to say this about Obama. Obama is a bad man in terms
of the Constitution. The irony is that Obama was a law professor at the
University of Chicago. He would, most of all, know that what he is doing
weakens the Constitution.
In fact, we have never had more invasions of privacy than we have now. The
Fourth Amendment is on life support and the chief agent of that is the
National Security Agency. The NSA has the capacity to keep track of
everything we do on the phone and on the internet. Obama has done nothing
about that. In fact, he has perpetuated it. He has absolutely no judicial
supervision of all of this. So all in all, Obama is a disaster.
JW: Obama is not reversing the Bush policies as he promised. But even in
light of this, many on the Left are very, very quiet about Obama. Why is
that?
NH: I am an atheist, although I very much admire and have been influenced
by many traditionally religious people. I say this because the Left has
taken what passes for their principles as an absolute religion. They don't
think anymore. They just react. When they have somebody like Obama whom
they put into office, they believed in the religious sense and, of course,
that is a large part of the reason for their silence on these issues. They
are very hesitant to criticize Obama, but that is beginning to change.
Even on the cable network MSNBC, some of the strongest proponents of Obama
are now beginning to question, if I may use their words, their "deity."
JW: Is the so-called health commission that you referred to earlier what
some people are referring to as death panels? Is that too strong a word?
NH: That term was used with hyperbole about the parts of the health care
bill where doctors are mandated, if people are on Medicare and of a
certain age or in serious physical condition, to counsel them on their
end-of-life alternatives. I don't believe that was a death panel. It was
done to get the Medicare doctors to not spend too much money on them. The
death panel issue arose with Tom Daschle, who was originally going to be
the Health Czar. Daschle became enamored with the British system and wrote
a book about health care, which influenced President Obama.
In England, you have what I would call government-imposed euthanasia.
Under the British healthcare system, there is a commission that decides
whether or not, based on your age and physical condition, the government
should continue to pay for your health. That leads to the government not
doing it and you gradually or suddenly die. The present Stimulus Bill sets
up the equivalent commission in the United States similar to that which is
in England. The tipoff was months ago on the ABC network. President Obama
was given a full hour to describe and endorse his health plan. A woman in
the audience asked Obama about her mother. Her mother was, I believe, 101
years old and was in need of a certain kind of procedure. Her doctor
didn't want to do it because of her age. However, another doctor did and
told this woman there is a joy of life in this person. The woman asked
President Obama how he would deal with this sort of thing, and Obama said
we cannot consider the joy of life in this situation. He said I would
advise her to take a pain killer. That is the essence of the President of
the United States.
JW: Do you think Obama is shallow?
NH: It's much worse than that. Obama has little, if any, principles except
to aggrandize and make himself more and more important. You see that in
his foreign policy. Obama lacks a backbone—both a constitutional backbone
and a personal backbone. This is a man who is causing us and will cause us
a great deal of harm constitutionally and personally. I say personally
because I am 84 years old, and this is the first administration that has
scared me in terms of my lifespan.
JW: But he is praised for his charisma and great smile. He can make people
believe things just by his personality.
NH: That was a positive factor in his election. A good many people voted
for Obama, and I'm not only talking about the black vote. A lot of people
voted for Obama because of our history of racial discrimination in this
country. They felt good even though they didn't really know much about him
and may have had some doubts. But at least they showed the world we could
elect a black president. And that is still part of what he is riding on.
Except that, too, is diminishing. In the recent Virginia election, the
black vote diminished. Now why was that? I think a lot of black folks are
wondering what this guy is really going to do, not only for them but for
the country. If the country is injured, they will be injured. That may be
sinking in.
JW: One of the highest unemployment rates in the country is among
African-Americans.
NH: Not only that, the general unemployment rate is going to continue for
a long time and for all of us. I have never heard so many heart-wrenching
stories of all kinds of people all across the economic spectrum. As usual,
the people who are poorest—the blacks, Hispanics and disabled people—are
going to suffer more than anyone else under the Obama administration. This
is a dishonest administration, because it is becoming clear that the
unemployment statistics of the Obama administration are not believable. I
can't think of a single area where Obama is not destructive.
JW: A lot of people we represent and I talk to feel that their government
does not hear them, that their representatives do not listen to them
anymore. As a result, you have these Tea Party protests which the Left has
criticized. What do you think of the Tea Party protests?
NH: I spent a lot of time studying our Founders and people like Samuel
Adams and the original Tea Party. What Adams and the Sons of Liberty did
in Boston was spread the word about the abuses of the British. They had
Committees of Correspondence that got the word out to the colonies. We
need Committees of Correspondence now, and we are getting them. That is
what is happening with the Tea Parties. I wrote a column called "The
Second American Revolution" about the fact that people are acting for
themselves as it happened with the Sons of Liberty which spread throughout
the colonies. That was a very important awakening in this country. A lot
of people in the adult population have a very limited idea as to why they
are Americans, why we have a First Amendment or a Bill of Rights.
JW: Less than 3% of high school students can pass the immigration test
while over 90% of people from foreign countries can pass it. The questions
are simple—such as, "What is the supreme law of the land?" or "Who wrote
the Declaration of Independence?" Civic education in the United States is
basically dead.
NH: I have been in schools around the country, and I have written on
education for years. Once, I was once doing a profile on Justice William
Brennan and I was in his chambers, and Brennan asked, "How do we get the
words of the Bill of Rights into the lives of the students?" Well, it is
not difficult. You tell them stories. When I speak to students, I tell
them why we have a First Amendment. I tell them about the Committees of
Correspondence. I tell them how in a secret meeting of the Raleigh Tavern
in Virginia, Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry, who did not agree with
each other, started a Committee of Correspondence.
Young people get very excited when they hear why they are Americans. It is
not hard to do. We hear talk now about reforming public education. There
are billions of dollars at stake for such a reform. But I have not heard
Arne Duncan, who is the U.S. Education Secretary, mention once the civic
illiteracy in the country.
JW: Adults are constitutionally illiterate as well.
NH: A few years ago, I was lecturing at the Columbia Journalism School of
Education. I asked them about what was happening to the Fourth Amendment.
I said, "By the way, do you know what is in the Fourth Amendment?" One
student responded, "Is that the right to bear arms?" It's hard to believe
these are bright students.
JW: I ask law students who attend our Summer Internship Program to name
the five freedoms in the First Amendment. I have yet to find one who can.
NH: That is a stunner.
JW: You lived through the McCarthy era in the 1950s. Is it worse now than
it was then?
NH: McCarthy's regime was ended by Senators who realized that he had gone
too far. What we have now may be more insidious. What we have now in
America is a surveillance society. We have no idea how much the government
knows and how much the CIA even knows about average citizens. The
government is not supposed to be doing this in this country. They listen
in on our phone calls. I am not exaggerating because I have studied this a
long time. You have to be careful about what you do, about what you say,
and that is more dangerous than what was happening with McCarthy, but the
technology the government now possesses is so much more insidious.
JW: You don't sound very optimistic.
NH: If James Madison or Thomas Jefferson were brought back to life and
they looked at television and read the papers, they would not recognize
the country.
The media has been very bad about informing us about what is going on.
They focus on surface things. They do not focus enough on the fact that
the Fourth Amendment is on life support and that we need a return to
transparency in government. The media ignores what is really going on. But
I am optimistic. I have to be optimistic, as I know you are. That is why
you keep writing and keep doing what you do. You have to do this because
we have been through very dark periods before. There are enough people who
are starting to be actively involved that we can turn things around. And
we need to encourage others to become involved.