An Apprenticeship

Commentary Magazine 1945-1959

by Nathan Abrams

Vallentine Mitchell, 221 pp., $75

The story of Commentary, one of the most influential opinion magazines in American history, is fascinating in itself. After its surprising turn from early anti-Communist liberalism (1945-60) to a turbulent decade of New Left radicalism (1960s), it even more unpredictably helped give birth to neoconservatism (1970s-present), and to ideas that helped remake America's political landscape.

Regrettably, however, Commentary has not yet had its Boswell--or even its Gay Talese, whose biography of the New York Times masterfully reported on a journalistic institution in transition. This new book by a young British historian aims to fill the gap.

Yet Nathan Abrams's study, rich in research but anemic in interpretation, stops short of the magazine's most exciting years. It chooses, instead, to focus on the man who founded the magazine and edited it until his suicide in 1959. Elliot E. Cohen, a child prodigy from Mobile, Alabama, who entered Yale at 14, emerges here as a talkative polymath who felt intensely protective of his writers even as he bullied them. "Himself badly blocked as a writer," Diana Trilling said, "he tried to turn his more productive friends into his literary spokesmen."

Abrams finds Cohen's politics as troubling as his editorial ventriloquism. Disappointed by Commentary's record on McCarthyism, he says that, by 1952, Cohen "had achieved a complete whitewash" of American anti-Communist hysteria and the accompanying "steady erosion" of civil liberties. He seconds Irving Howe's judgment that Cohen's anti-communism became "a crippling rigidity."

Then he calls into question the motives of that stance itself. After mentioning CIA funding for anti-Communist organizations such as the Committee for Cultural Freedom, Abrams writes: