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By Root 882 0

with a pro-Nazi book, and in general publishers have always tried to avoid books bearing unmistakably incendiary or subversive opinions, preferring to stay within the mainstream as much as possible. Those who had come of age in or before World War Two and who for the most part believed that you could trust the U.S. government and accepted the morality of the cold war (if not necessarily that of nuclear weapons) found it hard to adjust to the increasingly heated and partisan debate; in many publishing houses, the management hunkered down against the editors and vice versa. The confusion of the era was perhaps typified by the fact that at the same National Book Award ceremony (then in the midst of one of its many doomed attempts to make the giving of prizes to writers and poets seem glamorous and newsworthy) a streaker ran across the stage, followed shortly by a good third of the audience standing up and walking out of the hall in protest at the appearance of a member of the Johnson administration. Those who stayed were thus hit square between the eyes with both barrels of the counterculture—the sexual revolution and the antiwar movement—leaving many of them indignant and confused.

Neither at S&S nor at Random House was there any serious attempt on the part of management to throttle dissent, but that is not to say there was no friction as the war escalated. Before, there had always been plenty of young editors (more than there were jobs for, as a rule), but they tended to do much the same kind of books as other editors, perhaps on a less exalted plane, while waiting for their elders to die, retire, or change jobs. Now, for the first time, publishers actively sought out young editors who could bring them a different kind of book—for perhaps the first time since the invention of movable type it became an advantage to be young, and young editors with the right kind of hip and defiant attitude were briefly in demand. The years when S&S was to publish books by Jerry Rubin, Wavy Gravy, and Jill Johnston (among others) were still ahead, but already some of us were moving into uncharted waters. My small contribution was a book by the Venceremos Brigade—American college students who had volunteered to harvest sugar cane in Cuba—which caused a certain amount of heartburn at S&S.

Max had once turned down the memoirs of Albert Speer, when they were on offer to S&S. I had read much of the manuscript and thought that for all its evasions and self-deception, it was a unique and extraordinary book, one that provided a portrait of Hitler and the higher echelons of the Nazi leadership that nobody else could match, whatever one thought of Speer himself. I also thought it would be a huge success. Max listened intently to what I had to say, nodding his agreement. I was right, he told me, when I had finished. He had no doubt the book would be a big best-seller, and he, too, thought it was an extraordinary and valuable document and a major publishing opportunity. Then he leaned back in his chair and let out a sigh. “There is only one problem,” he said, “and it’s this: I do not want to see Albert Speer’s name and mine on the same book.”

You couldn’t argue with that, I thought then and still think now. Max was broad-minded, but there were limits to his tolerance, and who was I to argue with him? Besides, I agreed and used much the same argument many years later to argue against publishing a book by Louis Farrakhan. I didn’t think Max would have wanted his name on that book either. As Dick Snyder was later to say, “A publisher has an obligation to believe in the First Amendment but not to publish everything that’s sent to him.”

THE MID-SIXTIES changed publishing radically. Sex scenes in fiction became permissible almost overnight, as did the use of obscene expletives. Even the book clubs, which had long advocated a certain artificial purity in the fiction they chose for their readers, gave in to the relaxation of the old standards (all except the Reader’s Digest Condensed Book Club, which to this day does not take books in which the characters