California Governor Gavin Newsom may be an empty suit and Corporate Liberalism personified, but those trying to recall him are much worse. A prospective Republican challenger is Caitlin Jenner, the Olympic decathlon champ formerly known…
Posts published by “Fred Gardner”
After he made New York City his base in 1970, Alex Cockburn and I became friends. We were in political sync about many things but not about the Civil War in Spain, where Claud Cockburn…
Alexander Cockburn, in a piece he recycled for publication the year he died, wrote that he “learned to loathe Animal Farm” while at prep school because “any arguments for socialism would be met with brays of…
In his autobiography, I, Claud…, Cockburn describes being recruited by the Daily Worker in late 1936: “It was about this time that Mr. Pollitt, Secretary of the Communist Party of Great Britain, whom I had never met, was…
As the stock market was rising to ever-higher heights in the summer of 1929, Claud Cockburn got assigned by The Times to its New York office. (Whereas The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times,…
Claud Cockburn —father of Alexander, Andrew, and Patrick, three brilliant journalists— was the original model. In 1967 his three volumes of autobiography were consolidated and published by Penguin as I Claud... It's hard to find a copy,…
After watching Judas and the Black Messiah, I called John Woodford for a reality check. In the summer of 1968 Woodford, then 27, was a staff writer at Ebony magazine in Chicago. His proposals for…
March 3, 2021 — When Ferlinghetti died I thought maybe I should write what I knew about Shig’s accusation. But maybe I shouldn’t. Why tarnish the reputation of a man everybody respected (including me)? I…