Lowell Bergman, a correspondent for PBS's Frontline and a frequent contributor to The New York Times, was played by Al Pacino in The Insider, the 1999 film about Bergman's battle as a producer for 60 Minutes to tell the story of tobacco industry whistle-blower Jeffrey Wigand. In the 1960s Bergman studied under the philosopher Herbert Marcuse. In this August 2000 interview with Danny Postel, Bergman discusses the influence of Marcuse on his worldview and his approach to journalism.
Britannica.com
August 22, 2000
Interview | Philosophy and The Insider
The name Lowell Bergman might not ring a bell—unless you saw the movie The Insider (1999), which starred Russell Crowe as tobacco industry whistle-blower Jeffrey Wigand and Al Pacino as Bergman, the 60 Minutes producer who fought to get Wigand's story out. Though the film was nominated for seven Academy Awards—including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor (Crowe), and Best Original Screenplay—and enjoyed critical success, it was scarcely marketed and did poorly at the box office. Some suspect that the Disney Company held back in promoting the film because of its controversial political implications—its raising of tough questions about the relationship between the media and corporate power and the ethical responsibility of journalists when confronted by the contradictions that often arise from that relationship.
There's a passing allusion in The Insider to Bergman's having been a student of the philosopher Herbert Marcuse, a seminal influence on the international student movement of the 1960s and the generation of writers and intellectuals that came to be known as the New Left. It's not often that a philosopher's name comes up in a Hollywood movie. Naturally curious, Britannica.com's Danny Postel decided to ask the real Lowell Bergman about his apprenticeship under Marcuse and how it influenced his now-famous career as a journalist.
Britannica: Tell me about your relationship with Marcuse. What led you to him and what did you study with him?
Bergman: I studied with him as a graduate fellow in philosophy at the University of California at San Diego (UCSD) from 1966 to 1969. It was a Ph.D. program in the history of philosophy. I completed the written exams but never finished, although I did stay in touch with him until his death a decade later. Marcuse conducted a lecture for upper division and graduate students in German philosophy and a regular seminar on Kant and Hegel. I participated in the seminar and audited the lecture.
I had studied at the University of Wisconsin with the sociologist Hans Gerth and with the historian George Mosse. They both recommended Marcuse as a scholar of Hegel and Marx and as an unusual person in terms of his background (his association with the Frankfurt School) and his insights.
My own involvement in political activity in the '60s sent me on an intellectual search for a viable "social theory"—what Marcuse called a "new political theory that could guide practice." The assumption was that everything from liberal theory to Marxism was nonfunctional or obsolete. Gerth had introduced me to the work of the radical Hungarian philosopher György Lukács. Mosse had introduced me to 19th-century utopian and anarcho-socialist thought. It was this quest for a humanist socialism that attracted me to Marcuse. I read his book One-Dimensional Man early in 1966 and some of his other essays before heading to San Diego that summer.
Oh, and the graduate school paid me to show up. It also helped with changing my 1-A classification. The fellowship, ironically, was under the National Defense Education Act. It was left over from those given to the many Nobel Laureates in physics at UCSD.
Britannica: You refer to your "own involvement in political activity in the '60s." What did this consist of?
Bergman: I was involved in the early '60s in both the nascent peace movement and student groups at the University of Wisconsin, supplying primarily logistical support to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). We did runs from Madison [Wis.] and Chicago with everything from books to blankets leading up to the Mississippi summer [1964]. After that I became very active in the anti-Vietnam War movement while I was doing work on the Selma [Ala.] march.
Britannica: What did you get out of reading One-Dimensional Man in '66? How did it, and the essays you refer to, influence you?
Bergman: My first real contact with Marcuse came [when] reading his book Reason and Revolution, which remains one of the best, if not the best, expositions of Hegel in English. It was—maybe there are others now—the only coherent presentation of his philosophical insights in relation to the development of Marx's thought.
That book led me to read some of his writings from his time in Frankfurt [Ger.], especially a seminal essay on liberalism, which Gerth found very impressive. I was reading Marcuse while I was wading into Lukács. Gerth had me working on an unpublished translation manuscript he had of Lukács's (now classic) History and Class Consciousness back in 1965-66.
Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, Lukács, Antonio Gramsci, and Rosa Luxemburg became my obsession as I explored the possibility of a social theory of change and a philosophy of history that was neither mechanistic (orthodox Marxism) nor ahistorical (Platonism).
One-Dimensional Man provided a unique way of looking at the rise of the authoritarian state in advanced industrial society. The suppleness of the analysis provided a way of thinking that ran counter to the dominant notion of "progress" and "Nature" that permeated thinking on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Marcuse began to articulate ideas about the way in which the culture and mass media were no longer presenting information except for the sake of presenting it. There was no depth, no history, no analysis. Information for information's sake without any attempt to help people understand.
Britannica: Speaking of the media, how did you go from studying critical theory to doing journalism?
Bergman: I already had a background in political organizing at the University of Wisconsin—SNCC (1964) and the National Coordinating Committee to End the War (1965). Combined with a short stint working for the university newspaper and an earlier high school experience working in a typography shop in New York, and the jump to journalism was not so big in 1969.
The spark was the incessant appearance of editorials in the San Diego Union-Tribune demanding that the University of California regents fire Marcuse. This came after students in Europe ran around in 1968 chanting "Marx, Mao, Marcuse!" When Herbert went back to Germany that summer he was feted not just at universities but at outdoor rallies.
Back in San Diego the very conservative community reacted at first with virulent publicity and then physical harassment. Marcuse's telephone lines at home were cut. Someone drove by and fired at his garage door. There were phone threats. The tension was mounting. San Diego had an active right-wing vigilante movement, which I encountered later when I got into journalism.
So his graduate students decided to start escorting him to school every morning, a 15-minute walk. This was in the time when UCSD was a small campus with a small undergraduate college and as many graduate students.
This experience led the students to discuss the idea of putting out an alternative newspaper in what was and is a monopoly newspaper town. San Diego was not only the largest staging area for the Vietnam War; it was also home to a large military retirement community and politics that made parts of the deep South look liberal. Thus was born the San Diego Free Press, which a year later was renamed the San Diego Street Journal.
Before the change of names I left San Diego for Canada to work as a lecturer in sociology and political philosophy at the University of Saskatchewan. A group of Marcuse's students (five of us) were hired en masse to augment their faculty. In our group was Robbie Conal, the political poster artist now in Los Angeles—he's remained a good friend.
Saskatchewan? Turns out it had the first socialist government in North America (1944) and a very progressive faculty. But a year of the cold and isolation sent me back to San Diego where I gave up the third year of my fellowship and joined the staff of the fledgling paper.
We began upon my return with a series of stories on who ran the town. With Gerth I had studied the "power elite" analysis of the sociologist C. Wright Mills (who had been Gerth's student), as well as the work of Max Weber and the other German sociologists. So our focus became the wealthiest and most powerful members of the community. And so it was that number one was a gentleman by the name of C. Arnholt Smith—Mr. San Diego of the Century. Number two was one John Alessio—Mr. San Diego for 1969.
In the tightly controlled world of San Diego, they reigned with undisputed power. We told the story of how Alessio used his political clout (in the Democratic Party) to get the Navy to give into building a bridge to nearby Coronado Island and his new renovated hotel, the Del Coronado. This despite the Navy's objection that for all kinds of reasons they wanted a tunnel—security, aircraft carriers, etc. Alessio made a bundle because he owned the approaches on both sides and of course the world famous hotel.
Then Smith, Alessio's mentor and partner, used his own political clout (in the Republican Party) to garner all kinds of favors from his favorite politician, Richard Nixon. Smith was his first big contributor back in 1946 and was alone with him on election night in 1968. Suffice it to say that Smith and his bank and conglomerate were heavily involved in dealing with and influencing city politicians and the police bureaucracy.
All this started appearing in detail in our pages, which resulted in all kinds of vigilante attacks, harassment, and fire bombs, with a few arrests sprinkled in. We survived; the two gentlemen—and a cast of other characters—wound up going to jail. It just took a couple of years and a lot of harassment.
Good triumphs! I was hooked.
Britannica: I want to go back to Marcuse for a moment. You refer to the hostility and harassment to which he was subjected in San Diego. Why such vicious attacks on a philosophy professor, and an old man at that? What was it about him that inspired such extreme measures?
Bergman: The publicity in Europe—and it was then repeated in the U.S. press—that he was an ideological leader came to the attention of the anticommunist ideologues associated with the Copley Press (the San Diego Union-Tribune). In those days the paper, now a conservative but civilized rag, was to the right of Barry Goldwater. Richard Nixon called San Diego his "favorite city." And when the then mayor got indicted—as part of the scandal we covered during our tenure putting out the paper—Nixon called personally to console him, saying, "We in public life take a lot of knocks." It did not matter that the mayor was a Democrat, or at least he passed for one in San Diego. The mayor was convicted.
Marcuse was a symbol, which became even more threatening when one of his students, a veteran of the Hegel seminar and before that a student of Marcuse's at Brandeis, went to work at UCLA. That was Angela Davis. The ensuing row brought in [then] governor Ronald Reagan and more action to terminate her appointment. His own reputation, enhanced by hers, made him a central target of the anticommunists of the Reagan right in the late '60s.
Britannica: I guess what I'm getting at is that one doesn't normally associate political upheaval and mass mobilization with philosophy professors—at least not in the United States. Moreover, the figure of Marcuse doesn't exactly square with the style and tone of the '60s counterculture. There was something of a baroque quality about him: By that time he was fairly ancient, wore nice suits, spoke with a heavy German accent. There's a striking scene in the documentary film Herbert's Hippopotamus in which a group of student activists are holding a demonstration of some sort on the UCSD campus. They're running around, banging on drums, singing—and then Marcuse steps up to speak, using language right out of 19th-century German philosophy. Yet he captivated them. They fell silent and listened to his every word. This struck me. What was it about him—because I think he was fairly unique in this sense—that so many young people revered and were inspired by?
Bergman: Despite his Germanic professorial bearings and his old world roots, Marcuse was a captivating orator. His lectures on Hegel were phenomenal. The best way to describe them is to read Reason and Revolution. Few, if any, books on Hegelian philosophy and its aftermath are so cogent and to the point.
In the world of UCSD at the time, Marcuse was an intellectual superstar. It was a little surreal, in the midst of San Diego county, high on a plateau, within sight of the largest military complex in the world.
Britannica: OK, back to journalism. It sounds as if C. Wright Mills not only influenced your thinking about the world but specifically informed the way you approached journalism. Can you talk about that? And could this be said of Marcuse as well?
Bergman: Mills used a Weberian model for describing the social and power structure of the country. It provided a lot more depth and dimension than, for example, traditional Marxist class analysis. Similarly, Marcuse provided a supple, dialectical view of how culture and economics work. Together they gave me ways of thinking about how political and economic power are exercised and where to look for stories. At the same time they provided a contextual base for assessing a story.
When I started out in the "underground" press in San Diego, we decided to focus our attention, as I mentioned, on profiles of the "power elite" à la Mills. In a time (1969) when public information about the people who ran the town was scarce at best, our stories turned out to be not only explosive but also newsworthy.
Marcuse's dialectical analysis did not depend on heavy-handed "conspiracy" theories or mechanistic economic determinism. That would save me from falling into some of the simplistic traps that lure many people looking for tidy explanations.
And the "sociology of knowledge" provides intellectual tools for putting journalistic work in perspective. In my case it was Gerth who engaged me in conversations about legality and illegality—both in terms of social movements and what we call organized crime. You can formulate a functional explanation of organized criminal activity (i.e., the Mob is really just a business that cannot collect its debts in court).
Britannica: There's a scene in The Insider between you and your wife in which you express doubts about whether "it was all worth it" in the end. "What have I been doing all this time?" you ask. Did you get to a point like that, where you questioned whether your battle was worth fighting after all? And how do you feel about that now?
Bergman: I have always "doubted" the value of what I was doing. I remember doing the first in-depth story about the Super Max prison at Pelican Bay, Calif. It raised issues about putting the mentally ill into solitary confinement. The audience reaction to the piece was—if you believed the mail—build more prisons!
But there is no question that for a while I started to see myself and what I was doing on 60 Minutes, after 12 years, as being a "token effort." In simplistic terms I was the "repressive tolerance" that Marcuse wrote about. There were—and are—limits to what can be reported on, and I knew this early in my career in television and before that in print. I had discovered what I call the "crime story model" of doing stories, which can get at the real nexus of power while appearing to be nothing more than applying the principles of law and order to not just the streets but the suites.
At the same time there is no question that the tobacco story and the decisions made around the Jeffrey Wigand story brought into focus my doubts about what I had been doing. Until then I felt that while I had to compromise to get stories done and on the air, I had not done anything that I found hard to justify to myself or anyone else. I liked to say that "my name has not been on any story that in hindsight I would take it off of." I thought I was at least keeping my rep clean. But the choices set up by CBS in the Wigand case—and the failure of my bosses in the news division to vigorously protest—made things very clear.
If I continued and accepted it, then I was complicit. I had asked others to come forward or to do something about their situation—make it public, for instance. Here I was in a similar situation and there did not seem to be any choice other than to act if I was going to live with myself.
I thought long and hard before I acted. I "exhausted all legal means" and, although everyone else asked why I was bothering, I called the president of the news division early one morning in October and said: "The lawyer, the general counsel, is just an advisor. What does CBS management say?" He replied: "The corporation will not risk its assets on this story." It was done. I knew that once I set the ball in motion there was no turning back.
At that point I no longer doubted the value of what I had done. I was only concerned with accomplishing two things: one, making sure that the people I had given my word to were protected; and two, getting the substance of the story out. I accepted the idea that I would lose my job and probably get destroyed professionally. My kids were through college. My mortgage was affordable. I had no excuse not to take the risks involved. To this day I still find it amazing that others who had a lot less to lose refused to act until they realized that the whole story was going to come out with or without their involvement.
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