Victor Saul Navasky (July 5, 1932 – January 23, 2023) was an American journalist, editor, and author. From 1978 to 1995, he edited the progressive weekly magazine The Nation. From 1995 to 2005, he was the magazine's publisher and editorial director, before stepping down to become publisher emeritus. He then went on to direct the George T. Delacorte Center for Magazine Journalism at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, and to chair the Columbia Journalism Review.
Navasky also authored several critically praised books, including Naming Names (1980), which is considered a definitive take on the Hollywood blacklist. Its paperback reprint won him a 1982 National Book Award for Nonfiction.
Early life and education
Victor Saul Navasky was born in July 1932 on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, the son of Esther (Goldberg) and Macy Navasky. Macy ran a small clothing-manufacturing business in the Garment District. For high school, he attended the Little Red School House, which was founded on the progressive education principles of John Dewey. Navasky recruited numerous contributors and illustrators for the magazine who went on to noteworthy careers. Nora Ephron, a Monocle contributor, remembered Navasky as a man "who knew important people, and he knew people he made you think were important simply because he knew them." Eventually, Navasky realized his greatest passion was for journalism, and he chose it as his profession ahead of law. He worked as a manuscript editor and staff writer for The New York Times Magazine and was a frequent book reviewer. He also wrote a New York Times Book Review monthly column, "In Cold Print", about the publishing business.
In one of his most controversial editorial stances, Navasky was a longtime defender of alleged Soviet spy Alger Hiss. Beginning with a critical review of Allen Weinstein's book Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case in an April 1978 issue of The Nation, Navasky maintained that Hiss's guilt had not been proven beyond a reasonable doubt. Kai Bird wrote, "Navasky quite simply thought Chambers made an unreliable witness. Navasky was not a Hiss believer but an agnostic. As late as 2007, he wrote in The Nation, 'This is a case that will not die. It will not go away. The Cold War is over but this, among other Cold War ghosts, lingers on.' For Victor, it was important and interesting to ask why."
Throughout his journalistic career, Navasky worked on various academic pursuits. He researched and wrote several non-fiction books of biography and history. In 1971, he published Kennedy Justice, described as "a scholarly account of the Justice Department under Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy". Kennedy Justice was a finalist for a National Book Award.
Navasky then embarked on an eight-year effort to study the Hollywood blacklist. In the course of his research, he pored through House Un-American Activities Committee testimony and interviewed over 150 actors, writers, directors, and producers. The resulting book, Naming Names, was a huge critical success. Daniel Aaron praised Navasky's achievement in The New York Review of Books: "One can only applaud the adroitness with which he has put together a lucid and persuasive narrative from such a mare's nest of fact and supposition". The 1980 hardback was a finalist for a National Book Award in the General Nonfiction category, and the paperback reprint won the award in 1982.
In 1994, while on a year's leave of absence from The Nation, Navasky served as a fellow at the Institute of Politics at Harvard Kennedy School, and a senior fellow at the Freedom Forum Media Studies Center at Columbia University. Upon returning to The Nation in 1995, he led a group of investors (including Paul Newman and E.L. Doctorow) in a $1 million purchase of The Nation from Arthur L. Carter. To fulfill his expanded leadership duties at the magazine, Navasky sought to better educate himself in business fundamentals. To that end, he enrolled in the Owner/President Management (OPM) program at Harvard Business School, where he was remembered as an unlikely political progressive among mostly conservative classmates. He served on the boards of the Authors Guild, International PEN, and the Committee to Protect Journalists.
In 2005, he was named chairman of the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR), which engendered controversy when Navasky's name was not listed on the magazine's masthead. This omission, critics on the political right claimed, hid the fact that—despite CJRs purported lack of political bias—a "major left-wing polemicist is calling the shots at CJR without any mention on the masthead."
In 2005, Navasky received the George Polk Book Award given annually by Long Island University to honor contributions to journalistic integrity and investigative reporting. In that same year, he published his memoir, A Matter of Opinion. In the book, he summarized his political views as follows: