CAN I SAY THAT?

 

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the pernicious nature of censorship. That’s not unusual for a writer and former journalist. Actually, there’s no such thing as a “former journalist”. It’s like “when you’re a Jet you’re a Jet all the way…” Once you’re initiated into the gang, once you have ink running in your veins, you’re addicted for life. But what I mean is that people in my craft and trade are probably more aware of the dangers of censorship than a lot of other people who aren’t constantly dealing with it are. That said, however, it’s an issue that affects us all to a greater or lesser degree, whether we’re aware of it or not.

I remember the first time I heard the word. It was in a cartoon of World War II vintage, black and white. Can’t recall now exactly what the cartoon was about or which cartoon characters were in it, but at one point, one of them was furious, face flushed and steam coming out of his ears, and all of the sudden, the cartoonist slapped a sign over his mouth—black background, white letters—that read “CENSORED”. I asked my mother, Reba Mae, what censored meant and she explained that it was like, during the war, when there were certain things that were secret and the government marked them as “censored” and covered them up (good choice of words).

I didn’t really get it. I’m sure my mother did, because she worked in a defense plant that built Army tanks throughout the war, and for part of that time she was a supervisor. It was a hard concept to explain, though, especially to a grade-schooler. But at least I now had a vague idea of what it meant. Namely, it was somebody else, some authority, telling you what you could and couldn’t say or know.

It was also Reba Mae, however, who first imbued in me the right to know. She didn’t do this in any aggressive, hands-on way, but mostly by introducing us kids to the public library and always leaving the many books she bought and read—besides the ones she regularly checked out of the library—at the disposal of my sister, brother and me. I remember being ten, perhaps, and finding a new book on her bookshelf that she had just received from one of several book clubs she belonged to.

The hardback book by Noel B. Gerson was titled The Conqueror’s Wife, which seemed intriguing. And the illustration on the dustcover was even more so for a boy of my age, since it depicted a dashing soldier in breastplate and chain mail, the dragon of St. George emblazoned on his vest, holding his broadsword high. A lovely damsel all cloaked in white stood just behind him, while all around, battle scenes raged.

I recall carefully taking the book down from the living room bookcase and thumbing through the front matter to the first page of the story. I can still see the print of the first line on the page which read, “Father, I will not marry a bastard.” I was galvanized for a second. I mean Whitie, my dad, said bastard all the time—to describe a rusty bolt that refused to budge, or a door that was swollen shut or open, or the car when it refused to start on cold mornings, or even some other man whose behavior he disdained. But we kids weren’t allowed to use it anywhere within earshot of our mother, and I certainly had no idea you could actually write the word in a book. It was a revelation. And The Conqueror’s Wife was the first adult literature I ever read.

Turned out “bastard” was actually the main character’s middle name, so to speak.  He was William the Bastard, Duke of Normandy. And the lady in question was the fair and clever Lady Matilda, daughter of the richest nobleman in Christendom. When they do indeed marry, it is a marriage fraught with will, passion and unbridled dual ambition in which each tries to control both the kingdom and each other.

In all the years that I was growing up, Reba Mae never asked me where such-and-such a book of hers was, never told me not to touch them, never tried to set rules for which ones were off-limits. So, I was quite often reading well beyond my age group. By my high school years, I’d read books by Conrad, Michener, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Harold Robbins, Pearl Buck, Grace Metalious, Harper Lee, Jacqueline Susann, Salinger, Orwell, Pasternak, Graham Greene, James Baldwin, Tennessee Williams and many more books and authors for adult readers. And, as soon as I was making a little money, I was buying books of my own as well, including among other titles, the entire series if Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels. I read these and others in addition to voraciously delving into the “outside reading” lists that hopeful English teachers gave us in school, and whatever the Auglaize County Library’s chief librarian—and my mother’s friend—Louise Miller recommended.

It seemed natural to me to read whatever I wanted. Which was why my first experience with censorship was shocking and hurtful. It happened in my senior English class. The teacher, one of the older ones on the faculty, was someone I admired and who was teaching whoever wanted to listen a great deal about journaling, essays, literature and good writing in general. I suspected that she was a frustrated writer herself, who was teaching school more to make a living than anything else. But no matter what her motives were, she knew what she was talking about and how to teach it.

Henry Miller with muse Brenda Venus

If I had gone through school up to then with the nagging thought that “if they ever find out what an idiot I really am, I’m toast,” in her class I felt for the first time a kind of confidence I’d seldom had before, and I was basking in the sensation that, finally, I was beginning to really grasp the art of writing that I could develop from here on. So I had no qualms, when discussing some point or other in one of her classes, about quoting what I considered to be a legitimate example of what I was talking about, and that just happened to be written by Henry Miller.

I should hasten to say that whatever passage I was quoting from wasn’t one of the more lascivious ones that Miller was wont to write—and which he wrote so incredibly well—but one of the ones in which the writer waxes philosophical and sometimes floors the reader with the unfettered truth of his observations. But I had no more than gotten the name of whom I was quoting out when the teacher interrupted me, said, “I wouldn’t know, Dan, because my mother doesn’t think I’m old enough to read Henry Miller,” and called on someone else, thereby managing to insult not only me, but also my mother and one of my favorite writers, besides basically telling me to shut up.

In all fairness to her, I should have known better. Miller had been banned in the United States until six or seven years before, which was why the New York-born author first published his books in Paris. And a lot of people in small-town Ohio figured he should have stayed banned. But I just didn’t understand it. I found censorship not only offensive and invasive but also just plain stupid.

Were people so ignorant, malleable and impressionable that reading a book was going to corrupt their minds forever? Was listening to an idea that challenged “what they’d always believed” going to brainwash them? Didn’t they possess the critical thinking to discern between what they agreed with and what they didn’t, or were they like weather vanes that just turned whichever way the wind was blowing? More to the point, wasn’t banning books and burning them precisely what Hitler had done in Germany in order to impose the stances of the Third Reich as the one and only truth, while supporting a Hitlerian philosophy known as The Big Lie?  And wasn’t that exactly the sort of authoritarianism our fathers had sacrificed so much to defeat in the war that had just ended less than twenty-five years before?

What were people afraid of? Other than maybe learning something they’d never known before, vicariously visiting places they’d otherwise never see, finding out about other lifestyles, or hearing ideas and even just words that challenged them to think about their own, what did anybody have to lose from someone else telling their stories? Moreover, if you were afraid to read something, afraid it might shock you, afraid it might corrupt you, or afraid it might change your mind about things you’d already decided you didn’t want to change your mind about, why read it? Nobody was forcing you to. But who were you to say what I could and couldn’t read? What authority had the right to “protect me from myself” according to its own subjective criteria regarding what was “acceptable” and what wasn’t?

So, these questions have plagued and inspired me since high school. And, as a journalist starting in my mid-twenties, anti-censorship became a major principle of my professional credo.

These beliefs were, parallel to my own in the late-1960s and 1970s, also a main trend in the revolutionary pop movement that took shape around the world. My generation, the baby boomers (born 1946 to 1964), emerging in the wake of World War II, struggled, in reality, to uphold the lessons that the war preached but didn’t always practice. We questioned government intervention in our private lives, societal strictures that ostracized rugged individualism, repressive laws that were legal but not legitimate, and religious judgments that infringed on secular rights and freedoms. We rebelled, in short, against “how things had always been” and demanded the sea-change that the horrors of the worst war in history had promised—including world peace—but was failing to deliver.

The war wasn’t supposed to be simply about defeating the Axis powers led by Nazi Germany. It was about defeating authoritarianism, or in other words, about defending not only the rights of European and other nations to self-determination, but also about defending the liberty espoused in democratic philosophy—the rights of the individual and the freedom of each to choose his or her own beliefs and destiny. It was about being able to express your thoughts and ideas freely and openly, to ascribe to whatever political beliefs and creed you chose without fear of repression, and to be able to debate those thoughts and ideas in an atmosphere of mutual curiosity and understanding. It was also about every race, creed and ethnicity being held in equal respect and esteem.

The boomers were, then, the generation that bucked the system, refused to do what we had to do, wear what we had to wear, think what we had to think and believe what we had to believe. Some more than others—certainly many more than myself—had the courage to take that cultural revolution to its ultimate consequences, to burn their draft cards and brassieres, to challenge puritanical dictates, to demonstrate by the thousands, to fight for their rights and the rights of others, to oppose round two of political witch-hunts following the tragedies of the McCarthy Era, and to resurrect writers, cultures and philosophers from the past who spoke to their current concerns. It was the era of flower power, of free love, of hippy culture, as well as of underground revolutionary movements bent on claiming the civil rights and individual freedoms espoused in theory but all too often ignored in practice by the Establishment. It was a time in which the cultural shift was truly toward the life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, as promised in our Constitution. And it was the era in which many writers previously banned in my native United States came into their own.      

At some point, however, we became fat, middle-aged and middle-class. We started caring more about “our things” than about our beliefs, and one day, in our thirties or forties or fifties, most of us looked into the mirror and realized that we were the Establishment. Or perhaps we didn’t, but if not, we were wrong.

I’ve been thinking about these things, as I say because the mess the world is in right now, and hardly anywhere more than in my own country, keeps me awake nights. The natural environment that we became so aware of in the sixties and seventies is in crisis—the world is on fire and melting fast. Worse still, we are less united than ever before, with political extremism and social tribalism wreaking havoc and with democracy falling out of style, while authoritarianism is becoming as popular as it was in the run-up to World War II but in totally new and surprising places like the United States. And this includes attempts to suppress ideas and thought, to disguise the truth and to censor dissent. Books are being banned and burned once more, but again, not just in the worst dictatorships on earth, but in my own native land, which was once thought of as a shining example of democracy and the rule of law.

Perhaps it would be easier to ignore all of this and carry on with life as if nothing alarming were happening. It would be, that is, if it weren’t for the advantage, or disadvantage, depending on how you look at it, of my having lived it all in my own flesh. The fact is, that I made my bones as a writer and journalist under a harsh and bloody authoritarian regime. And I had the good luck of being part of something remarkable: the resistance of one editor and one newspaper and one small staff that refused to accept the devastating reality of a tyrannical regime as being inevitable and unchallengeable.

I possess the direct practical knowledge, then, that each voice can make a difference, change minds, alter outcomes, even if only a tiny bit at a time. That developing unity of purpose among many can change a negative tide fueled by an autocratic elite. I know how vitally important it is to defend, far beyond your own comfort zone, the rights of others, to resist oppression, to ignore threats, to tell the story of what’s going on when no one else is telling it or paying attention, to contravene censorship by any and all means. Because censorship (and the big lies that it enables), violence, the suspension of the rule of law, and the restriction of individual rights and freedoms are the primary tools of authoritarianism, which always comes disguised as the solution to “a failing democracy.”

That also means that I have the sad advantage of knowing first-hand the results of accepting the notion that “democracy isn’t working” and that it is no longer worth defending, that it is—in theory and eventually in fact—in need of overthrow. I know what the tragic outcome is when a free society embraces that idea. Believe me, you don’t want to know…but if you value your freedom, you should.

The Book Bob Never Wrote

In the forward to David Cox’s powerful portrait of a violent time, his father, journalist Robert J. Cox, writes:

“This is the book that I could not write…A quarter of a century has passed since the end of the aptly named “Dirty War” in Argentina, yet I still find it too painful to relive those malevolent times by writing about them. So I am deeply indebted to my son David for telling the story of a small English-language newspaper…which saved lives by refusing to be silenced…”

The title of the book is Dirty Secrets, Dirty War (©2008 by David Cox, published by the Evening Post Publishing Co., Charleston, S.C. with Joggling Board Press) and a new edition has just been launched on the market in Spanish (Guerra sucia, secretos sucios, ©2010 by Sudamericana S.A., Buenos Aires, with translation by Teresa Arijón). Both books are listed on Amazon.

While the story is indeed that of the Buenos Aires Herald, where the author’s father worked from 1959 until 1979, and where he was editor-in-chief for well over a decade, it is more the story of the author’s hero: also his father, Robert J. Cox.

David was barely a teenager when, after suffering years of threats, intimidation, arrest and several close calls, his father finally and reluctantly chose to leave Argentina in order to take his family out of harm’s way. But David has since followed in his father’s footsteps, becoming a journalist and writer in his own right, and having worked for publications including the Buenos Aires Herald, the International Herald Tribune, the Miami Herald, the Sunday Times, Clarín, La Nación and Perfil. He is currently a journalist with CNN in Atlanta.    

From May 1974 until December 1979—precisely the violent years that David Cox focuses on in his book—I had the privilege of learning my craft as a writer and journalist from Bob Cox. In fact, in my early days as a newsman, back when it still embarrassed me that I had never managed to find the time or money to complete a college education, when somebody asked where I had gone to “J-school”,  I would say, “Cox-Herald.” And when they said, “Huh, never heard of it,” I would just shrug and raise my eyebrows knowingly, as if to say, “Your loss!”

I recall that when I had worked for the paper for a little over a year and began to feel I was becoming a real newsman, we received a high-flying intern who was placed with me on the night desk editing international news. I immediately felt threatened since the guy had a degree (from the Columbia School of Journalism, if memory serves) and his father was a ranking editor at a major U.S. paper, as well as being a personal friend of Bob’s. To make matters worse, we were kind of left to our own devices, to sort out who was going to run the show on the international desk.

In the end, that part of it seemed to work out brilliantly. Since Bob refused to discuss the matter with either of us, (“It doesn’t really matter, does it? Just get to work and turn the bloody paper out!”) we reached a truce and simply shared the desk. I benefited from his superior education (significantly improving my technical knowledge of news-handling), and he benefited from my greater knowledge of the local scene, the local language and the workings of the printshop. Moreover, left to work things out on our own, we began to get quite bold and creative with layout and headlines, like two rival soda jerks, seeing who could out-do the other making the most elaborate of ice-cream sundaes. Granted, at times, we carried this to extremes: The ever conservative, ever droll Basil Thomson—the Herald’s brilliant humorist and then-chairman of the board—once quipped when we arrogantly asked what he thought of the changes we were making in the front-page layout: “Sometimes it’s difficult to finish breakfast after seeing it.”

Anyway, one night this fellow and I were having one of our frequent arguments over idiotic issues. This time it was about which knowledge was more useful to a newsman, classroom hours or hours wearing out shoe-leather on the street. I had some good defensive arguments and was sort of getting the upper hand when Bob walked into our cubicle, absorbed, as usual, in making final penciled corrections to his editorial as he walked. So this guy decides to engage Bob in our discussion and shut me up.

“I’ll bet Bob has a journalism degree, don’t you, Bob?” he says. “Uh, Bob…don’t you?”

Bob was holding a page against the wall with his left hand while he wrote in a correction with his right, and now he looked away from his work at us as if we had just awakened him from a sound sleep and said, “What?”

“J-school,” says the intern.

“What about it?”

“You went, right?”

Bob looked at him, then at me, then back at him and, handing me his editorial to put into the out-basket for the shop, said: “Most places I’ve worked, if you had a journalism degree, you didn’t talk about it.”

The discussion ended there and neither of us ever brought it up again. And from then on, we were almost chummy.      

I’ve talked here before about how Bob and I met, about how I almost literally besieged him for months on end until he finally hired me to work for the Herald. What I neglected to say was that about ten years ago, when he and I spent an evening reminiscing at his home in Charleston, South Carolina, after not seeing each other for two decades, I reminded him of this and asked if he remembered how obnoxious I had been. To my surprise, he told me that he had sometimes used me and my hounding him as an example of the dogged persistence a journalist needed to have. I felt honored, since before that, I had frequently thought back to that time with a certain chagrin, always feeling that I had simply worn him down when he had no real interest in hiring me.

A lot of what I learned from Bob Cox came as much from what he didn’t tell me to do as from what he did. From the outset he explained that I would often find myself on my own when I felt like there should be someone to hold my hand and walk me through the procedures. If I wanted to be a reporter, it was up to me to get out and do it. But that wouldn’t keep me from having to do what I might feel was more than my share of the hard daily grind of getting the news into print and onto the street. Writing and reporting would be done on my own time, since from 6pm until midnight, or until we were done, I would be expected to be at my desk helping do whatever it took to create a daily edition. During those hours, I would have to make decisions that I probably didn’t have the experience or expertise to make and I would have to be responsible for their outcome. No excuses. So it would behoove me to make those decisions logically and ethically. All of this was simply the nature of working for a small, under-funded, community newspaper and if I could live with that and pass my thirty-day trial, I had a job.

In other words, from the beginning, I was treated like a professional, like somebody who should know what he was doing, even though I clearly didn’t. But that kind of responsibility tended to make you learn fast. And not having the boss breathing down your neck all the time meant that when he did tell you something, it was memorable and it changed and molded you.



Author David Cox



One of the greatest lessons I learned from Bob was that a newsman’s first loyalty should not be to the advertising department, to the Board of Directors, to the boss or even to the paper’s editorial line, but to the reader and to his or her own sense of honesty. This was, perhaps, the greatest lesson I ever learned, not only about authentic journalism, but also about writing in general. And a second lesson he taught me was that neither journalism nor writing was like any other job in the world. It wasn’t something that could be done without full commitment. If what you were looking for was simply a steady job where you could just show up and that would be enough, then you should be a bureaucrat. If you were going to be a journalist or a writer or both, however, you needed to be the job. Nothing less would do.

Perhaps the ultimate lesson that Bob Cox taught me, however, more through his actions than his words, was that there were severe consequences to publicly telling the truth, and that you had to be willing to accept those consequences and live (or die) with them. Otherwise you needed to look for something less risky to do with your life, because painting a portrait of your times, telling what you saw exactly as you saw it, was one of the riskiest occupations on earth. A morning newspaper was, in the end, not merely a selected assembly of the previous day’s events, but a—hopefully objective—reflection of the times, a daily snapshot of the era, history in real time. As such, it had to be as true as you could get it. And wherever there was truth, there were people who wanted to silence it…at any cost.

This kind of commitment is what David Cox’s book is about. In this highly inspired portrait of his father, David demonstrates himself to be an accomplished writer, stepping back somewhat from his more intimate role as Bob’s son and observing his father as the subject of a probing and detailed biography. Interestingly enough, the author doesn’t merely talk about the years of the bloody military regime in Argentina that turned his father into an internationally renowned journalist, but starts, instead, at the beginning, when his father was a boy, growing up in war-torn England and forming his first ideals in the face of the Nazi and Fascist threats to world peace and freedom. He talks about Bob’s precociously early first steps in journalism and his first job as a reporter. He then goes on to tell about the hand of fate that took Bob to Buenos Aires, of how Basil Thomson traveled to Britain in search of new talent for the Herald and how, like in a writer’s fantasy, Bob became his choice and was taken away on a voyage to a new adventure in a strange land.

This is the story too of how that adventure became a lifetime commitment—to an editor he admired, to the woman he met, loved and married, to the family they formed, and to the newspaper that became his mission and his life as a journalist, writer and editor.

But despite the distance he takes to tell his father’s story as an objective narrator, David Cox skillfully manages to weave intimacy into the story as well, since we also see the effects of those “malevolent times”—as Bob refers to them in his forward—on the entire family, on David’s mother, Maud Daverio de Cox, and on David himself and his four siblings, Robert Andrew, Victoria, Peter and Ruth. He carefully paints a portrait not only of Robert J. Cox, journalist and editor, but also of Bob Cox, husband and father, and of the strength that the family members drew from each other and from friends and supporters in the midst of critical and life-changing times.

In the end, the story that David Cox tells—and that I highly recommend, even if you don’t know anything about, or have the slightest interest in Argentina—is a universal one. It is a story about the true value of staunch idealism and provides proof that determined individuals can make a difference, and in doing so, both change and save lives.