Remembering Victor Navasky, longtime editor and publisher of 'The Nation'

DAVID BIANCULLI, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm David Bianculli, in for Terry Gross. Novelist Julie Otsuka has just been awarded the Carnegie Medal for Excellence for her book "The Swimmers." It's about a group of people who go to the local pool to escape from their problems. Vogue magazine and Kirkus Review listed the book as one of the year's best of 2022. It's now out in paperback. Otsuka's two previous novels were acclaimed, as well. "When The Emperor Was Divine" is based on the experiences of her mother and grandparents when they were forced into Japanese internment camps during World War II. Her book "The Buddha In The Attic," which won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, is an historical novel about the women known as picture brides. These were women in the early 20th century who emigrated to America from Japan the only way they legally could, by marrying a man who already was living here. In Otsuka's latest novel, "The Swimmers," one of the swimmers is in the early stages of dementia. Terry Gross spoke with Julie Otsuka last year when her novel was first published.

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TERRY GROSS: Julie Otsuka, welcome to FRESH AIR. I love your writing, so I'm very glad you're here. I want to start with a reading from the first page of "The Swimmers," your new novel, because I want our listeners to hear your style of writing and how the accumulation of detail just kind of keeps building through the book. So would you read the opening for us?

JULIE OTSUKA: Sure, I'd be happy to. (Reading) The pool is located deep underground in a large, cavernous chamber many feet beneath the streets of our town. Some of us come here because we are injured and need to heal. We suffer from bad backs, fallen arches, shattered dreams, broken hearts, anxiety, melancholia, anhedonia, the usual above-ground afflictions. Others of us are employed at the college nearby and prefer to take our lunch breaks down below, in the waters far away from the harsh glares of our colleagues and screens. Some of us come here to escape, if only for an hour, our disappointing marriages on land. Many of us live in the neighborhood and simply love to swim. One of us, Alice, a retired lab technician now in the early stages of dementia, comes here because she always has.

GROSS: So as we heard in the reading, one of the swimmers, Alice, is in the early stages of dementia. And as the novel progresses, she loses more and more of her memory until she's moved to a facility. Your mother died of dementia-related causes. Was it frontotemporal dementia like in the book?

OTSUKA: It was. And it was Pick's disease, which is a form of frontotemporal dementia.

GROSS: Yeah. In the book, you describe it as being very rare. What is it? How does it compare to Alzheimer's, just so we understand what's going on?

OTSUKA: Well, for one thing, the onset can be much, much earlier. So I think for my mother, she might have even manifested symptoms in her 50s, definitely in her 60s, although I think it was hard for us to realize what was her and what was her disease, especially in the early years before she was even diagnosed. But with Pick's disease, you often get changes in personality. And the decline can be - for my mother, it was much, much slower. I think her decline took place over at least 20 years. But I think the personality change is probably the main difference from people with Alzheimer's.

GROSS: Could you tell that it was happening? Because that's one of the questions in the book. You know, like, for example, like, a crack appears in the pool that the swimmers go to. And the people wonder, you know, many of us remain anxious because the truth is we don't know what it is or what it means or if it has any meaning at all. Maybe the crack is just a crack, nothing more, nothing less. Maybe it's a rupture, a chasm. How deep is it? Who's to blame for it? Can we reverse it? And most importantly, why us? It's no coincidence, I'm sure, that those questions are the questions we ask when symptoms begin to appear. Like, does this have any meaning? Is it serious? Is it nothing? Am I exaggerating? If it's a problem, like, what or who is to blame for it? And, you know, and why me? Why us? Why is this happening to us?

OTSUKA: I think it's sometimes hardest for the people closest to the person who's suffering from dementia to see what is happening. I think there's a lot of denial going on, probably in the early years. But I remember, actually, the first time that I realized something was slightly off is I think I went home when you're - for Christmas. And my mother was always very, very good with her hands. And we were baking these crescent cookies, and they just didn't look right on the baking sheet. You know, they were not neat, little crescent rolls, which is what she would've made before. So that was, like, a very clear visual representation that something was not right.

But I don't think we really questioned her repeating herself early on. It just seemed like one of her quirks or something that maybe she was even doing intentionally. And I wish, actually, that we'd realized earlier that the way she was behaving - it wasn't something that she, you know, had any real control over. But, you know, it took us a long time to - I think before we even brought her into a neurologist to get a diagnosis. I think it took many, many years.

GROSS: What would have been different had you gotten an earlier diagnosis? It's not like it's a reversable...

OTSUKA: Nothing, probably. Nothing. Although I guess the one thing that could have been different is that we might have had a little bit more compassion for her early on.

GROSS: That's a big difference.

OTSUKA: It's a huge difference. It's difficult to live with somebody whose personality is changing and is - you know, to a certain point, they're not the person that you remember. But they can't help it. But I think it took us a long time to realize that.

GROSS: You know, in the novel, when so many memories are starting to disappear, one of the things the mother remembers is being sent to a Japanese American incarceration camp when she was young, when she was a child. Did your mother hang on to that memory when others were disappearing?

OTSUKA: She did. Those memories for her were very strong. They they remained with her till - you know, till close to the end of her life. You know, I remember one day she just began to tell a story about her last day of school at Lincoln Elementary in Berkeley.

GROSS: Before being forced into the camp?

OTSUKA: The day before they had to leave, yeah. And she just began to tell that story over and over and over again. And I hadn't heard that story before. I mean, perhaps my father had. I'm not sure.

GROSS: What was the story?

OTSUKA: That her teacher asked her to stand up and then told everyone in the class that Haruko - was my mother's Japanese name - would be leaving the next day, and would they please tell her goodbye? So the entire class said goodbye to her, which I think was probably an act of kindness, but she felt very singled out and very ashamed and embarrassed.

GROSS: Did the teacher explain why she was going away?

OTSUKA: You know, I don't know. It's a really good question. I wish that I'd asked my mother that when she was still lucid. I don't know. I mean, I often wonder, what did that teacher say to her students? Do they wonder why their Japanese classmates were suddenly disappeared? And, you know, I've traveled a lot for - especially for my first novel. And I've spoken to people who were alive in World War II. And I remember one woman - a white woman - who had been, I think, in junior high during World War II. And she just said, you know, one day, her classmate, who was a good friend of hers, was there, and the next day, she was gone. And she didn't know what had happened to her. So I don't know what was told to the children back then. I don't know what their parents told to them, either. It's a good question.

GROSS: In the novel, you write, she remembers to warn her daughter at the end of every phone call that the FBI will check up on you soon.

OTSUKA: Yes.

GROSS: How does the FBI figure into your family's story?

OTSUKA: My grandfather was arrested by the FBI on December 8, 1941, so the day after Pearl Harbor was bombed. He went to work. He worked for a Japanese-owned mercantile company. And he never came home. So he was sent to a series of detention camps run by the Department of Justice. These were different from the regular camps where, you know - the camp where my mother was sent was a different kind of camp. And he was considered a dangerous enemy alien. And my mother didn't see him for about 2 1/2 years.

GROSS: Was he considered a serious enemy alien because he worked for a Japanese company?

OTSUKA: He was a leader in the Japanese American community, a business leader. So he was fairly prominent. So those were the men who were rounded up first, you know, just as a way, really, of - I mean, all the leaders of the community were taken away. So the Japanese American community was really kind of emasculated and left leaderless. So he was one of many who were taken away in that first roundup.

GROSS: Did you get to meet him or your grandmother?

OTSUKA: You know, he died when I was 8. And my grandmother - she lived to be almost 101, so I knew her for many, many years. And my memories of him are as a very, very gentle man. He never talked about what had happened to himself during the war. But I think I was too young to even know what my mother had gone through at the age of 8. So I remember he was always reading. He was always - he had these Japanese English dictionaries, and he would just underline words in red pencil. He was always learning.

And my grandmother - she had - you know, she had more stories to tell, but I couldn't - her English was all right, but as she got older, it degraded. So she was a tough lady. She went through so much. I mean, she really kept the family together after the war when they came home to Berkeley. And she just went through a lot. She's just - she's a survivor.

GROSS: Was your grandfather able to work after being called a traitor?

OTSUKA: No.

GROSS: Is traitor the right word? And an enemy alien, I think, is what you said.

OTSUKA: Yeah. No. They're synonymous, I think, or at least in the eye of the government. Well, he was not - the reason that he was not able to work after the war was not necessarily because of what he'd been labeled, but it was because he really lost his health. We don't know exactly what happened to him in the camps where he was imprisoned, but he had three strokes when he came home. So he was just - he was not in good health, so he was unable to support the family. So my grandmother went to work as a maid for wealthy white families up in the Berkeley Hills and supported the family. And she - up until then, up until right before the war, had been, you know, a fairly well-off, middle-class housewife. She didn't have to work, so - but they lost all their money, so they really had to start all over again.

GROSS: Let me reintroduce you here. If you're just joining us, my guest is novelist Julie Otsuka. Her new novel is called "The Swimmers." We'll be right back after a short break. This is FRESH AIR.

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GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to my interview with Julie Otsuka, author of the novels "The Buddha In The Attic," "When The Emperor Was Divine" and the new novel "The Swimmers."

So there wasn't much you were able to learn from your grandparents. What about your mother? How old was she when she was incarcerated? And what stories did she tell?

OTSUKA: Actually, I want to say one thing I did learn from my grandfather but years later, after he died - was that we found this cache of letters that he'd written to his wife and children during the first year of the war in my grandmother's fireplace that she wanted to burn the day before we were moving her out of her house and into a residence for the elderly. And so that was the first time that I learned a little bit about what it was that he'd gone through during his experience of imprisonment during the war.

But my mother, she would occasionally mention camp, but when I was very young, I didn't know what kind of camp she was talking about. I actually thought she was describing some sort of summer camp because that was really my only point of reference. But there were objects around the house from camp. So I remember we had these old forks that we kept in the back of the silverware drawer. And on each handle, there was my family's government-issued ID number. And so we only used those forks when all the good forks were dirty and in the dishwasher. And we never used those forks with company. And it wasn't till I was a little bit older that I began to want to know more about what it was that my mother had gone through. And when I actually began to write my first novel, she was in the early stages of her dementia. And because her childhood memories were fairly accurate for a while, I could ask her a lot of questions, and then at a certain point, I could not.

GROSS: So why did your grandmother want to burn her husband's letters?

OTSUKA: I think that she might have felt that they were dangerous to have around. She might have felt shame that he had been labeled a spy, basically a dangerous enemy alien. Or she could have treasured them because he was her husband. I mean, the other things that we found - actually, it was my aunt and uncle who found these things in the fireplace. Shoved up into the flue of the fireplace, they found my mother's white wedding veil and a pair of white silk gloves that she'd probably worn on her wedding day. And she was going to burn all these things. So it could have also been an act of rage, that she was being forced to leave the house that she had lived in very happily for many, many years. So she had a temper. So I don't really know what was going on in her mind.

GROSS: What do these artifacts mean to you - the letters, the bridal veil?

OTSUKA: I mean, the letters, to me, they were like gold. It was like opening a window into my grandfather's past and just seeing a side of him that I'd never seen before. And I used them when I began to write my first novel, but my mother had also not read the letters before, and she read them first, and she told me afterwards it was like reading a story. And I could read the letters because they were written in English. His English was actually quite good. And I think he knew that if he wrote in English that it'd be easier to get past the censors because all the letters were censored by the government. So I remember my grandmother once making the snipping motion and laughing, so some of the letters that she had received while she was in camp had been just, you know, cut to shreds by the censors, so she couldn't read them. But if you wrote in Japanese, they would - the letters would have to be translated when it - it would just take much longer, the whole process.

And, you know, he was just a good man. I think he was such a good man, very patient, very kind. I later also learned that he - because his English was very good, he helped translate some of the Geneva Convention rules for the prisoners that he was with in the camps, so they could assert their rights. But I'm sorry that I didn't know him better.

GROSS: When your family came back after the war was over, did they still have their home?

OTSUKA: They did. They were very fortunate because most Japanese could not own property by law. So - but my grandfather - I think he bought his home in his children's name, and they were American born and, therefore, U.S. citizens. So I think the deed was in their name, and then maybe when they turned 18, they could pass it over to him. And the house had been paid for, so they actually had - unlike most families, they had a home to return to. I mean, there was a - you know, there was a housing shortage after the war, so many Japanese Americans who returned from the camps just had no place to live. So they would live in hostels, or there were these makeshift trailer camps. It was just - it was very, very difficult. But they had their home. But it had just been completely trashed. Many things had been stripped from that house. But it was theirs.

GROSS: People had broken in and stolen things?

OTSUKA: There was a kindly reverend (laughter) who had promised to rent out the house for them while they were away, but he was a crook, and so they never saw any of the rent money. Many people lived there, obviously, while they were gone. So the place was just - I think it was just a mess.

GROSS: What do you know about how your grandparents first came to the U.S.?

OTSUKA: Well, my grandmother - her father was a Methodist minister in Japan. So he came to America in, I think, 1927 for the World Sunday School Conference. And my grandmother was one of, I think, six daughters, but she was the youngest. So she was expected to stay home, never marry and take care of her father. And she wanted no part of that.

So she asked if she could come with him to America to give a talk about education. She somehow got a visa to come to America. I think that she might have bribed the, you know, government officials. I think I remember her saying that she sent them a bag of brown sugar, which was very valuable back then. But she got a visa to travel with her father. And then at a certain point, she bolted and knew that she did not want to go back with her father, but she had to find a husband.

So she gave a talk in a Japanese American Methodist church. And I think it was about education. She was a teacher back in Japan, and then she put the word out on the QT to some of the women in the audience that she was looking for a husband. And she was introduced to my grandfather. And they had, I think, a very whirlwind courtship and were married shortly thereafter. He'd come over years earlier, first to study. I think he studied English and law at UC Berkeley, but he never was able to finish because he - I think at a certain point, he had to go to work to send money back home, I think, to his family.

But so she - her father was enraged that she would not go back to Japan with him. So she was really estranged from her family. She never went back to Japan again. You know, even years later, when she could've returned to Japan, she just refused to. She would always say till the end of her life that America is the best, you know? I mean, she was able to carve out a life for herself in America, not always a happy life, but it was - you know, it was her own life. She didn't have to stay home and take care of her father.

GROSS: And then, of course, like we said, you know, she spends - what? - three years in a Japanese American incarceration camp. But she still appreciated America after that.

OTSUKA: She did, much to, you know, our surprise. She - you know, she didn't sound bitter. I mean, she was just tough. You know, life was - I mean, life - I mean, she was born in 1900, right? So, you know, life was not expected to be easy back then. I mean, so I don't think she expected life to be easy. And in America, she just kind of met, you know, whatever obstacles were put in her way. And - you know, and I think she was also - people really liked her. I remember one story that she told - like, every day, the bus driver would drop her off when she was coming home from her house-cleaning jobs. And her house was not a stop on his route, but he would make a special stop in front of her house so she could get off there, you know? You know, she had pride in what she did, I think. Even if she was, you know, scrubbing people's floors, I think she had a very, very strong sense of self.

GROSS: Julie Otsuka, thank you so much. It's been a pleasure talking with you.

OTSUKA: Thank you so much, Terry. It's been wonderful speaking with you.

BIANCULLI: Julie Otsuka speaking to Terry Gross in 2022. The author's latest novel, "The Swimmers," is now out in paperback. After a break, we remember author, editor and publisher Victor Navasky, who died recently at age 90. And I'll review a new mockumentary comedy series from Charlie Brooker, the co-creater of "Black Mirror." I'm David Bianculli, and this is FRESH AIR.

(SOUNDBITE OF FRANK WOESTE, RYAN KEBERLE AND VINCENT COURTOIS' "ABSINTHE")

DAVID BIANCULLI, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm David Bianculli, professor of television studies at Rowan University, in for Terry Gross. Victor Navasky, the longtime editor and eventual publisher of the liberal magazine The Nation, died last week at the age of 90. He was known for his geniality and equanimity. As editor, he was credited with bringing in varied voices and perspectives including writers Alexander Cockburn, the British writer Christopher Hitchens, historian Eric Foner, novelist Toni Morrison, humorist Calvin Trillin, and feminists Katha (ph) Pollitt and Katrina vanden Heuvel, who took over as editor in 1995 when Navasky became publisher. Under his tenure as publisher, the magazine doubled in circulation and turned a profit after years of unprofitability. He went on to teach at Columbia University and chaired the Columbia Journalism Review.

Besides writing a memoir, Navasky wrote two well-received books. "Kennedy Justice" was about the Justice Department under Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. And his book "Naming Names" is considered a classic and was awarded a National Book Award. It's about the investigation of so-called Hollywood radicals by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Those brought before the committee were under the threat of jail and being blacklisted for refusing to answer questions about their alleged participation in communist activities. Terry Gross spoke to Victor Navasky in 1982, and they talked about "Naming Names."

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TERRY GROSS: Well, what was it in your personal history that made you that interested in not only the climate of McCarthyism, but what motivated the people who did testify before HUAC to name names?

VICTOR NAVASKY: Well, I don't know that it's a matter of personal history other than that I did have friends whose parents had been victims of the Hollywood blacklist. And I did - actually, now that you mention it, I worked in a summer resort in 1951 or '52 where - in the Adirondacks in New York State, where one of the guests was a man named J. Edward Bromberg, who was an actor in the old Group Theatre. And he had been subpoenaed by the Un-American Activities Committee, and his doctor had given a certificate saying that he couldn't appear because he had some kind of heart disease. And he came up to the mountains to - after he didn't appear.

And while he was there, two FBI men appeared, and their purpose was to see whether he was engaging in watersports and doing other things that would prove that he was - could appear. And they - and indeed, he was swimming, and he was - eventually, he did a little bit of summer stock. And they went back, and he was re-subpoenaed. And his doctor gave another certificate saying, hey, just a minute. There's a difference between frolicking in the water and playing chess and appearing in summer stock on the one hand and appearing before a committee of the Congress where the stakes are your ability to earn a livelihood if you don't cooperate or the necessity of betraying your friend because the litmus test, at that point, of your ability to work in Hollywood, if you were accused of having been a communist, was your willingness to go before one of these committees.

And first of all, if you had been to say you were and that you're sorry - and then, they would ask you who else, and you would have to name who else. And if you didn't, you were declared in contempt of Congress. Or you could refuse to do that and take the Fifth Amendment, in which case you would be blacklisted and couldn't work again. Or you could take the First Amendment, in which case you would be cited for contempt of Congress and, like the Hollywood Ten, perhaps be sent to prison. So it was an awful dilemma.

And they re-subpoenaed J. Edward Bromberg. He went back and this time did testify, took the Fifth Amendment. A few months later he went to England, and he died and - of his heart disease. And I went that winter to the memorial service for him. And I was very moved by what had happened. But I - one of the speakers was Clifford Odets, the great playwright of the Group Theatre, who wrote "Waiting For Lefty" and "Awake And Sing!" and other plays of the '30s. And there was all kinds of muttering and crying, and I understood part of what was going - and yet there was an undercurrent that I didn't understand.

I mean, I understood why there should be such great sorrow and that Bromberg was perceived as some kind of political martyr. And yet I really didn't know what was - what - there was something else happening there. And it wasn't until years later that I discovered that Clifford Odets, who gave the eulogy at J. Edward Bromberg's funeral service, also named J. Edward Bromberg before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. So there was that set of unanswered questions that I was interested in.

I had done a lot of reading about the - I'd always been interested in the McCarthy period, I should say. And I went to Swarthmore College as an undergraduate and got out in 1954, which was the year of the Army-McCarthy hearings. And instead of studying for my honors exams, I remember sitting and watching, riveted to my television set, and taping the actual summary speeches of the Army-McCarthy hearings.

I had read a lot about what happened in Hollywood and the blacklist. And there was one thing I couldn't understand, which was how so many decent, honorable, smart, talented people who also had a strong streak of idealism, which had gotten them involved with the Communist Party in the first place - I understood they later - a lot of them got disillusioned and - but nevertheless, they cared enough to join something, whatever their misunderstandings of it were - how those people could end up what, on the surface, looked like an act that - doing something that was unconscionable and indecent, which was to betray their friends, to save their own careers at the price of their friends.

And the odd thing was that in all of the literature about that period, there's a big gap. There were books, very good books, about the blacklist. There were memoirs by various people who came through it. But no one had ever gone to the informers, the people and entities, and ask, why did you do it? And how do you feel about it now? So I was interested in doing that.

GROSS: I should think that most of the people who did name names did it mostly out of fear of, like, losing their job, not being able to support their family. Were those mostly the reasons?

NAVASKY: Well, it's hard to know. I mean, I - of those I spoke to, there were four different kind of themes that emerged in the conversations. And one of the themes was, yes, I was a victim of the terror. A second theme was - also shared in this thing of, I don't want my family to suffer. It was that I had a set of higher obligations than the obligation not to betray a friend. Either my obligation was not to let down my family - I was the sole source of support for my family.

Or in some cases - in the case of Budd Schulberg, he said, you know, it's - you think you're a civil libertarian for fighting the blacklist. I was fighting something worse. I was fighting Joseph Stalin's death list. And I discovered that all these people that I had revered as a young communist and - he had gone to the Soviet Union to a meeting of the Writers' League over there, or a meeting of an International Writers' Congress - had become nonpersons, and they had been sent to the salt mines of Siberia. And I would prefer not to have got called up before the Un-American Activities Committee. But in terms of who is the greater evil, Stalin was a greater evil than McCarthy.

Well, my answer to that - to Budd Schulberg is, well, Budd, yeah, but you can denounce Stalin without doing it - without strengthening the forces of domestic reaction, which goes back to the Sontag debate a little bit, that you - someone in your position could write books about it. You can make speeches about it. You can give money to organizations that are fighting and exposing the nature of Stalinism. You do not have to betray your friends in order to make that point. And you do not - you know, it's a different - they're different issues, it seemed to me. So that was a second kind of thing. One, I was a victim of the terror of the times and, second, that I was operating in accordance with some higher principle.

Third thing people said was, you know, they deserved it. Maybe I shouldn't have done it, but I'll tell you something, they were so much worse than what I did. What they did to me, when I was in the party, was so much worse than what I did to them by naming them before this committee that it's not a serious question you're asking me.

And Kazan, the director who directed Arthur Miller in "Death Of A Salesman" - his plays "Death Of A Salesman" and "All My Sons" and who directed, interestingly, "On The Waterfront," which is this movie where, as you remember, Marlon Brando comes to maturity when he realizes his obligation to fink on his fellow hoodlums on the waterfront, which is written by Budd Schulberg, who named names and starred Lee J. Cobb, who named names - he says as one of his - although he says he doesn't want to talk about it. He then always talks about it a little bit.

And one of the reasons he gives for doing what he did - or one of the things he says, whether he calls it a reason or not, is that they betrayed him when he was in the party, and they betrayed the ideals that they were supposed to stand for. And he gives as an example that in the Group Theatre itself, which the party had a caucus, and that they would take - the Theatre would vote on who should control the selection of plays, and all the Communists would vote as a bloc. And they would vote in the interests of the Communist Party, rather than the interests of the Group Theatre. And that that kind of thing - and eventually they kicked him out of the party. And so he felt personally embittered and wounded, and he gives that rather than he wasn't trying to save his career. He could have worked on Broadway and he understood that and all that. It's his reason for doing it. And again, I mean, it seems to me revenge is a - well, it's a dubious social motive. You can't tell someone they're not entitled to their revenge. And yet you do not have to do it through the agency of a committee like the Un-American Activities Committee, which wrecked so many lives. So that was a third reason that they got their justice there.

And then finally, they would say something which wasn't really a reason as to why they did it, but almost without exception, everybody I spoke to threw in. And by the way, you know, they already had the names, so I wasn't hurting anybody. Well, on the one hand, that - if that's - it turned out to be true. And then they understood because the committee and the hearings began in '47, in 1955, they called as a witness a man who testified that he had been simultaneously the membership chairman of the Communist Party in the Los Angeles area and a police spy for the Los Angeles Police Department. At the end of every year, he would turn over a thousand names to the LAPD, which would share them with the FBI, which would chair them with the Un-American Activities Committee. So they did have all the names.

But the fact was that until your name was mentioned out loud, you didn't lose your job. And by naming the names out loud and going through that ritual, I call it, in naming names - a degradation ceremony, but by doing that, what you ended up doing was reinforcing their right to ask and making it that much more difficult for the next person to refuse and conceding that it was OK for our state, which is supposed to be a democratic state, to have as its test of virtue your willingness to betray your friends. And that test is one which totalitarian societies are - is characteristic of totalitarian societies. Indeed, in the Soviet Union, we learned that the first two questions they asked in the purge was, who recruited you and whom did you recruit? And - but we're not supposed to do that. And so that was the fourth kind of theme.

So I didn't find any of the justifications given adequate to the circumstance. And one of the problems in writing about this is that people say, oh, so what you're saying is that these are bad people and they're evil and all that. Then I quickly say, well, look. I'm not saying - I'm saying something different. I tried to ask, what is the right thing to do under the circumstances? Now there are some very good people who did the wrong thing, and there were some awful people who did the right thing. And I think that's a meaningful distinction, but it gets lost.

BIANCULLI: Victor Navasky speaking to Terry Gross in 1982. More after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

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BIANCULLI: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to Terry's 1982 interview with Victor Navasky, editor and eventual publisher of the liberal magazine The Nation. He died last week at age 90. He was also the author of "Naming Names," the classic account of the House Un-American Activities Committee accusing Hollywood figures of being Communists in the 1950s. When we left off, Navasky was talking about the people who were brought before the committee. He said in his book he tried to ask what was the right thing to do under the circumstances. He said, there were some very good people who did the wrong thing and some awful people who did the right thing.

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GROSS: What does it mean?

NAVASKY: Well, I'll tell you a way that it came out years later. Dalton Trumbo made a speech when he received the Laurel Award, which is the highest award that writers in Hollywood can bestow on their peers. And this is after - and he said on that occasion in 1960, in the late 1960s. Blacklist presumably died by 1960. He said, those of you who are too young to remember the blacklist should study it because there's a lot to learn. But when you do so, don't look for heroes and villains, because none of us was without sin. There are only victims.

And he - it was received at the time as a very healing and generous statement. But when I went out there to do research on - first for an article and then my book - and talk to Albert Maltz, who was another one of the Hollywood Ten, he greeted me with a statement denouncing Dalton Trumbo, saying, you know, to say that there were only victims, that we're equally victims of the people who named us, is to take away the meaning of our lives. What did we go to prison for? It's like saying the guard and the prisoner at the concentration camp are both equally victims.

And I took Maltz's statement to Trumbo for comment. And Trumbo said, you know, Lillian Hellman says that forgiveness isn't my job. That's for the man upstairs. He said, well, I feel the same way about vengeance, that it's an unhealthy thing and it corrodes, he said. And I can't say that a man who named names because the committee was going to reveal his homosexuality at a time when that was the greatest social stigma one could have, that I could tell him to do otherwise. I can't say that the woman who named names because she was the sole support of an infant and whose husband was in prison and who had herself been abandoned as a child, I can't say that that woman should have risked abandoning her child by taking the course of action that we took, which was to go to prison. So what it means is that you have to look at each circumstance in and of itself and that you have to be a little humble in the face of, what would you do if called up there?

GROSS: I guess life is a lot more complicated than it's - you'd like to think some time when you just try to neatly sort things out and come up with theories to explain things that happened.

NAVASKY: Yeah. But - and then - but having - once you get finished going through all this and showing these shades of gray and pink and orange and all that, I think it - or I felt that was important for me anyway to not shy away from the business of saying what I thought was the right and the wrong thing to do. Because the most important thing may be that there were people who knew how to behave when it counted. And, you know, Hellman is a very controversial woman - and on the left, as well as in the larger community.

And I guess feel - I agree with Murray Kempton (ph) about it, who wrote that, you know, she knew what to do when it counted. That was her summit. You know, she got up there, and she said, I will - I would be happy to tell you about myself, but I will not bring trouble to innocent people. I cannot cut my conscience to fit the fashions of the day or howerver she put it - more eloquently than that. But - and she did do what was right when it counted at personal sacrifice and risk. And in that - those actions may be important not just as learning experiences if you study them, but because they make it difficult for it to happen again in quite the same way, because these people function as exemplars, as moral exemplars.

BIANCULLI: Victor Navasky speaking to Terry Gross in 1982. The author of "Naming Names" was editor and eventual publisher of the liberal magazine The Nation. He died last week at age 90. Coming up, I review "Cunk On Earth," a new Netflix comedy mockumentary series from Charlie Brooker, the co-creator of "Black Mirror." This is FRESH AIR.
Diane Morgan stars in the new five-part Netflix mockumentary series Cunk on Earth, but viewers in the U.S. might not recognize her — unless they saw her as one of the supporting players in the Ricky Gervais comedy series After Life. But in Great Britain, Morgan's been on TV for years, especially playing one recurring character.

Ten years ago, Black Mirror co-creator Charlie Brooker wrote and hosted a British comedy series, Charlie Brooker's Weekly Wipe. It was a satirical review of the week's news — part The Daily Show, and part, if you want to go way, way back, That Was the Week That Was. Morgan was one of the featured players on Weekly Wipe, playing a TV correspondent named Philomena Cunk. Cunk isn't very well-informed, and she's prone to mispronunciations and malapropisms, but she says what she thinks — and what she thinks is often very, very funny.

In the U.K., the character was then spun off into several sequels, either limited series or one-shot specials: Cunk on Shakespeare, Cunk on Britain, Cunk and Other Humans. They all have the same winning formula: Philomena is sent to real exotic locations around the world, to offer her observations and interview actual experts — all of whom are polite and befuddled in equal measure.

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Cunk on Earth is in the same sweeping, visually stunning tradition of such historical documentaries as Civilisation or Connections – except the correspondent and interviewer is less Kenneth Clark or James Burke, and more Borat or Jiminy Glick. That's the setup — and you don't have to have any prior exposure to Philomena Cunk to get up to speed instantly.

The opening of Cunk on Earth cuts between scenes of Philomena standing amid quiet nature and loud city streets, establishing the premise of her newest TV show. Over the show's five episodes, she travels from Pompeii to Russia to the Pyramids in Egypt. Philomena shoots one segment in front of the Mona Lisa, and, for another, descends into a cave to look at ancient cave paintings, just as Werner Herzog did in one of his documentaries. But he was in awe. Philomena, shining her flashlight onto the crude drawings of animals and people, is so unimpressed, she turns her flashlight off.

Despite her lack of enthusiasm and perspective, Cunk on Earth does contain a lot of actual information — thanks to the endlessly patient experts, who gently correct her misconceptions. Morgan's delivery is deliciously dry, and her improv skills, reacting to what historians say in their interviews with her, are formidable. She gets a writing credit for additional material, and absolutely deserves it.

Black Mirror came over from England as an oddball series and an acquired taste, and quickly grew into a cult hit. This new, wider Netflix platform for Cunk on Earth may accomplish the same thing. It's a terrible title — but it's a really funny show.

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