Bernstein’s radical chic storm was whipped up by the FBI
NewsLeonard and Felicia Bernstein’s daughter Jamie has made a remarkable assertion to Joseph Horowitz in his NPR More than Music show. Talking about the aftermath of Tom Wolfe’s inflammatory expose of the Bernstein’s party for the Black Panthers, she says:
And then, after that, there was an editorial! In the New York Times! An editorial, lambasting Leonard Bernstein and his wife for hosting that event. And the subtext was that the Black Panthers were considered by Jewish people to be ‘anti-Zionist.’. . . Friends of my parents and relations of my family were furious at my mother . . . The blowback went on and on. The hate mail started to arrive. The Jewish Defense League was picketing outside our building. . . . And it was only decades later, in the 1980s, that through the Freedom of Information Act my father was able to view his own FBI file, which turned out to be 800 pages long. . . . It was in those pages that we discovered that all that hate mail had been generated by the FBI, and all those JDL protests outside our building were bristling with FBI plants. And this all came sstraight out of J. Edgar Hoover’s playbook – it was his dream come true to pit Jews against Blacks. . . . My mother and father were just sitting ducks.”
More here.
Tom Wolfe’s “Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flake Catchers” is a great read more than 50 years later. Comparison with today’s political battles is inevitable. History repeats itself as farce.
I still have an original copy of that article in magazine form. Tom Wolfe’s writing was an exercise in exaggeration, making it entertaining, sometimes, tongue-in-cheek.
I knew nothing about the NYT and FBI until now. Nasty kind of journalism (sic).
Having read the book “Black Against Empire” by Joshua Bloom and Waldo Martin Jr., I’m not even a little surprised by this. The book is a well-researched, well-written book into the Black Panthers movement and the FBI’s efforts to quell citizen activities on the left for racial and social justice. Certainly the revelation of the FBI’s COINTELPRO, as revealed by the FBI’s own documents that saw the light of day after the break-in at the FBI’s Media PA office by the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI, made it clear that the FBI was doing all it can to pit everyone against each other on the left, to sow as much mutual fear and distrust as possible, and in essence to divide and conquer.
Thank you NL for posting this.
Nothing very new here — we have all known about such FBI efforts for decades. Not surprising the Bernsteins were caught up in it.
Hoover was a disgrace, but so was the succession of administrations that either encouraged him or were so afraid of him that they dared not rein him in.
LB was hardly apolitical, but for the FBI to have an 800 page file on him is preposterous.
I’m sure Hoover’s FBI exploited the situation. But the pile-up between Bernstein’s politics and Wolfe’s didn’t need much assistance. To paraphrase F. Scott Fitzgerald, when one impetuous driver meets another. . . .
Hard to believe that 19 people consider Tom Wolfe’s savage attack on the Bernsteins a “great read.” Jamie, in her memoir, believes it contributed to her mother’s early death. I’ve filed a follow-up blog: https://www.artsjournal.com/uq/2024/08/the-bernstein-story-not-told-in-maestro-take-two.html
It’s a bit of a bore now, and, with the benefit of hindsight, we can see how wrong-headed the whole caper was. But even then it was symbolic of the wish to be thought of as the the vanguard of social change, in the know, hip…and probably guilty of everything Wolfe implied. Well-intentioned people? Maybe, but well-to-do first and foremost. People who could write cheques, but not people who would actually get out and DO something.
And the Panthers did not escape, and some of their spokesmen just look silly in retrospect.
The racial problems in America remain. This sort of mésalliance solved nothing. The Panthers wanted the money. (They didn’t care that the Bernsteins and some of their guests were Jewish and had no more animus toward them than to any other whitey, or honky, as they used to say in those days). The glitterati were seeking to adopt a mantle of white guilt, and to atone for it. They didn’t, but they managed to sow the seeds of a wokery that are going to afflict us all for longer than we deserve.
Nice attempt to clean up the image of image of Bernstein.
Darn it Sue, you’re taking time away from your Jordan Peterson studies again! It’s so important for you to keep yourself immersed in Jordan Peterson 24/7. Please be a little more selfish and don’t disadvantage yourself any further by spending time with us when it could be better spent with Jordan Peterson instead.
Typical non-argument and ad hom. According to Humphrey Burton’s tome on Bernstein he was a very unpleasant man. Just like the Left to try and revive his dodgy political actions as somehow justifiable and, even, honorable. The Left is into so much tosh it’s hard to know where to start.