In 1970 I wrote an article for Dissent on The New York Review in which I criticized its association with the New Left. I recall that Irving Howe, the editor of Dissent, suggested that I title the essay “The New York Review and Radical Chic.” I demurred, because I thought it a possibly unfair characterization of the motives of the journal. Howe and I settled on the evasive and less vivid title: “The New York Review: A Close Look.” It was difficult to know at the time just how much of the NYR's politics was genuine conviction and how much a fashionable flirtation with radical attitudes.

Jerry Rubin, Tom Hayden, and Andrew Kopkind were hardly writers one had come to expect in the NYR given its high-brow concern for quality in thought and expression. “Given the open commitment of the NYR to critical writing and thinking,” I wrote, “the presence of articles by Rubin, Kopkind, and Hayden invites suspicion about the political seriousness of its editors.” And I wondered what would happen when the New Left lost its cachet for intellectuals. Would the NYR turn to the next new thing? Clearly, I shared Howe's suspicions about radical chic, but I also felt that the bond between the NYR and the New Left expressed a significant political reality of the time.