Hidden in Plain Sight: Media Workers for Social Change, Chapter 7

In 2007, at the age of 70, Larry Bensky retired from KPFA and the national Pacifica network of listener-sponsored stations. Bensky was station manager of KPFA from 1974-1977, National Affairs Correspondent for Pacifica from 1987-1998 and host of the talk shows “Living Room” and its successor “Sunday Salon” from 1997-2007. He was one of a small number of radical broadcasters, and for thousands of listeners in a left-liberal to radical audience he was a voice of sanity. In a documentary that was broadcast on KPFA upon his retirement (archived on the Sunday Salon website, along with many other shows he hosted), he said that careerism drives mainstream journalists, while alternative journalists are driven by issues. Bensky, unusual in this regard, was a success on both counts. He achieved recognition, made a living, and promoted peace and social justice. We spoke in the living room of his Berkeley home—where he’s lived since 1979—after a photo session in his lush backyard garden.

Bensky wanted it to be known that he has taken on what he calls “a late life vocation”: creating a website about French novelist Marcel Proust (radioproust.org). When he was a student at Yale, in the apolitical 1950s, he became enamored of the French language and culture, as taught by a professor, Henri Peyre, who became his mentor and personal friend. On the first night he spent in Paris, at the age of 22, Bensky was amazed by the Place des Victoires. “I was just stunned. I had never seen anything so impressively proportional and artistic and beautiful and old. I just walked around Paris with my mouth open.” After graduate school and a stint as an editorial assistant at Random House, he returned to France and became Paris editor of The Paris Review, the literary magazine.

During his time in Paris, Bensky, a pacifist, acted on his opposition to the Vietnam War. “I was one of the founders of the Paris American Committee of Solidarity with the Vietnamese, and helped organize a lot of demonstrations, a lot of petition campaigns,” Bensky said. French public opinion was against the Vietnam War, and General de Gaulle, France’s otherwise conservative President, had also taken a position against it. Nevertheless, Bensky was questioned several times by the French police for his activism.

Bensky had three good reasons to leave France and return to the United States. He was lacking a residence or work permit in France. He was offered a job as an editor at The New York Times Book Review. And he felt he could be more effective in opposing the war from his own country.

In New York Bensky adopted an unusual lifestyle. “I would put on my coat and tie and go to work at The New York Times every day” he said, “and at night I would walk towards my tiny apartment in Greenwich Village, but I wouldn’t go home. I would take my tie off and I’d go to Union Square West, up to the fourth or fifth floor where the Vietnam Peace Parade and Moratorium Office was, and I‘d sit down at some grungy desk, or take a chair in some endless meeting, and work in the anti-war movement—five, six, seven days a week.” His boss and colleagues at The Times knew what he was doing. “It’s not like I was a secret cell member,” Bensky said. He must have been hoping that conflict would not develop between his political work and his job.

The Vietnam Moratorium was to put on huge demonstrations on both coasts, actions that would have a great deal to do with ending the war. Organizing was very different then from today. “It’s hard for young people to even understand this,” Bensky explained. “We didn’t send an email to anybody. There were no emails or faxes. If you called somebody you called from a rotary dial telephone, and if they weren’t home the phone rang. There were no answering machines.” In meetings they would address envelopes, insert mimeographed or offset-printed flyers, and affix stamps. Bensky became a coordinator of housing for demonstrators who traveled to protests in New York and Washington. His anti-war work wasn’t glamorous in the least. “I was a soldier in an army of anti-war workers,” he said.

Bensky wrote many book reviews and Sunday magazine pieces at The Times, but his reviews of books critical of the war, such as Bertrand Russell’s War Crimes in Viet Nam, were spiked, ostensibly for not offering a pro-war point of view for balance. Bensky had heated discussions with his superiors about this, and some of his co-workers confidentially suggested he wait years before writing about such sensitive subjects. Speaking to me about it he said, “The values of The New York Times were and are not my values politically and journalistically.” Frustrated, he left The Times.

Bensky had a reputation for keeping cool in the face of deadlines. He had been managing editor of the Yale newspaper, and he said that playing basketball in New York schoolyards and gyms gave him a sense of just-before-the-buzzer cool, as well as allowing him to develop as a team leader. Warren Hinckle and the others behind the San Francisco-based anti-war magazine Ramparts were looking for a managing editor, and they’d heard of Bensky. They offered him the job and stipulated he turn the monthly magazine into one that came out every two weeks. Bensky jumped at the chance. He arrived in San Francisco in April 1968, when the counter-culture was going strong and revolution was in the air.

“There was a tremendous division in the counter-culture at that time,” Bensky remembered, “between those of us who were politicized and wanted meaningful social change in the country and those who wanted to drop acid, smoke dope, and screw all night.” It was a split between the politicos on the one hand and the hippies and others in the movement on the other. Bensky did indulge in hippie behavior from time to time, as he characteristically admits. “But that was not what I was doing with my life,” he said. “I was somebody who was working hard for social change.”

On the other hand, Bensky was not a revolutionary. “I split company with the ‘movement’ revolutionaries, those who considered themselves revolutionaries.“ He had many arguments with the radicals his age who participated in the Weather Underground. “I knew what the historical circumstances for revolution around the world looked like” he told me, “and I didn’t think the United States looked like it was in a revolutionary circumstance at all.” Bensky, though, didn’t fashion himself a counter-revolutionary. He later worked closely with founders of The Black Panther Party Bobby Seale and Kathleen Cleaver, as well as Nicaraguans in the Mission District who were part of the Sandinista movement. “They were,” Bensky said, “very different from the white middle class kids playing ‘revolution’ in the streets of Chicago.”

In the end Ramparts proved to be unmanageable. The key staff was incapable of making deadlines. Bensky could barely get the magazine out once a month, not to mention every two weeks. He stayed there less than a year. For a while after that he had little paid work, and sometimes slept on friends’ floors. That was when he got involved in the cause of People’s Park.

There had been a dearth of parks in Berkeley, and many members of the community wanted one near Telegraph Avenue, so they took over some unused University of California land and built People’s Park, planting trees and flowers and putting up play equipment. The University and the City of Berkeley responded with violence, which escalated to include the Alameda County Sheriff’s Department and finally the National Guard.

Bensky had worked on the famous “Total Loss Farm” communes in Southern Vermont, and knew how to plant things and cultivate land. But his main role was as part of a collective that put out a four-page broadsheet called “Outcry from People’s Park.” It was produced at the offices of The Berkeley Barb, an alternative weekly (when alternative journalism really was an alternative). Each “Outcry” had a run of 100,000 copies, Bensky said, going out to the hundreds of alternative newspapers being published around the country at that time, to be distributed as inserts. “I helped produce it,” Bensky said. “Me, the former New York Times Book Review assistant editor, was editing the articles and doing the paste-up pages and all of that for this broadsheet of announcements from People’s Park, so people wouldn’t buy the establishment media’s treatment, which was that it was a bunch of rag-tag crazy hippies fighting with the cops, because that’s not what it was.” Bensky also did his first volunteer reporting for KPFA on the Park issue, lugging around a heavy tape machine. On campus one day, he came under live fire from sheriff’s deputies’ shotguns. Protesters to the right and left of him were hit and fell but luckily he emerged unscathed.

Realizing radio was a powerful medium, and that he had a talent for it, Bensky sought out a job at the underground rock station KSAN, whose commercial management was interested in the audience participating in the struggles of the day, and they hired him. They gave him a lot of leeway, but he was militant, and finally went too far, running a story about a group of young people fired by a major advertiser at his station, which led to his dismissal.

Bensky then went to KPFA for a job. He was hired as production director, but the manager who hired him was the target of a unanimous censure vote the next day by the staff. It was Bensky’s first taste of the dysfunction of the station, which would be around, in one way or another, for his entire career. Bensky used a metaphor from radio to explain the problem: “The place was full of some of the most unpleasant background noise you can imagine, and over the years one learned to dial down the crap and dial up what you could do.”

Many people remember the events of 1999, when loyal KPFA staff was kicked out of the station in an attempted takeover by a runaway Pacifica Board. Fewer remember the Third World Strike in the summer of 1974. At that time, protesting the lack of community participation at KPFA, particularly the lack of programming by and about people of color, staff and volunteers set up a picket line and closed the station down for a month. The strikers were victorious. Among the results were the creation of a Third World Department at the station, a Third World News Bureau situated in Oakland, a San Francisco Bureau, and much more airtime for political community groups. After the strike it was time for new leadership, and Bensky, although he did not put himself forward for the job, was elected as Station Manager.

“It was the hardest job I ever had,” Bensky said, “by far. Although I am who I am and I can speak to all kinds of people, and sometimes help people in a room talk sense, it was just impossible.” For example, he had to mediate conflicts between two exiled factions of the Chilean Revolution, the UP and the MIR; as well as competition between three lesbian collectives, all of whom said the others were racist. “Plus the fact that the place was broke and I had to fund raise and figure out how to get all the money, plus the fact that our license was in jeopardy in Washington, plus the fact that the rest of Pacifica was, as it always is, coming apart, in various ways, and other stations were failing. I had to deal with all of this with one administrative assistant, basically no staff, and no understanding from anybody in the Chilean factions, or the lesbian collectives, or the business office”.

In many ways Bensky had a successful turn as manager—he brought the station into the black financially and doubled the budget. But there were people who began to blame him for the station’s problems. It was also difficult for him that he was not on the air except to talk about the state of the station or raise funds. He was amazed to find he had become a conflict resolution administrator, and for only $9,000 a year. He gave six months notice, which turned into a year before a new manager was found.

Along with other commercial radio stations at that time, KSAN still felt a responsibility to present news and public affairs. They became interested in Bensky again and hired him back. There was a budget for a staff of five or six—including Bensky and the talented Dave McQueen—to produce multiple news shows on a daily basis. Bensky hosted a Sunday morning talk show, “The Talkies.”. There was even travel paid for by the station—Bensky went to political conventions and demonstrations around the country, and once to Cuba as well. The job lasted until the station was sold and changed to a Country and Western format, at which point the news and music staff all lost their jobs.

Bensky’s stint reporting for KSAN was marked by two tragedies, which occurred in 1978—one at Jonestown and one at San Francisco City Hall. Bensky spent time and effort trying to get the story of Jim Jones and the People’s Temple out to his listeners. Only because he missed a Friday afternoon phone call, Bensky didn’t make it onto the plane with Congressman Jim Ryan and a number of reporters that landed near Jonestown in Guyana to inspect the People’s Temple settlement there. They did not anticipate that their arrival would be the catalyst for a mass murder and suicide by Jones and his followers. Ryan and some of the reporters were shot dead on the tarmac.

A few weeks later, San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk was assassinated in City Hall, along with Mayor George Moscone. They were shot to death by ex-cop and ex-Supervisor Dan White. Milk had owned a photo shop in the Castro, and when Bensky lived in nearby Noe Valley he had his pictures developed there. The two became friends, and Bensky remembers happily the interview they did the night Milk was elected as the first gay Supervisor. The day of the killings Bensky got a call at KSAN, jumped in his car, and was on the scene so quickly that he saw Moscone’s body being wheeled out.

“Those two stories broke my heart,” Bensky said, slowly shaking his head. After KSAN was sold, he questioned his role in news reporting. He tried some other areas of work for a while. He managed a progressive record store, “Leopold’s” in Berkeley. Fluent in Spanish, he went to Nicaragua shortly after the revolution there and made a film for PBS called “These Same Hands.” It ran on television just before the Contras began their U.S.-funded war, and sympathy for the Sandinistas became taboo in the mainstream media. In 1981, he took a turn as news director at KRE/KBLX, a commercial station in Berkeley, and in 1982 he went to live in Spain, where he freelanced for National Public Radio. Then in the mid-1980s he turned again to KPFA, doing some programming on Central America and other issues. He anchored conventions and demonstrations and once again became known to the KPFA audience.

When asked about his strongest memories as a broadcaster, Bensky said there were several. “One was the three months I spent in Miami Beach in the summer of 1972, co-producing and doing street reporting about the Democratic and Republican conventions. It was genuine community radio, held together by a genius engineer who put together a string of coast-to-coast radio signal relays in the pre-satellite era. And we had all kinds of good reporters and editors from all the Pacifica stations there.” In retrospect, Bensky said, “the 1972 Presidential campaign was a major moment in progressive political history. The street radicals who tied up the convention and the liberals in the Democratic Party were unable to exchange energies and continue working for both electoral and non-electoral political change. As a result, Richard Nixon clobbered George McGovern. And within a few years the ‘movement’—that had begun first with Dr. King and gone on to massive anti-war organizing—began to fall apart.”

Another was an all-night broadcast in April 1992 outside the gates of San Quentin, where Robert Alton Harris was being executed. “The barbarity of the process—with stays of execution and the eventual torturing to death of the victim—was excruciating,” said Bensky, for whom opposition to the death penalty “in any form, for any reason” is a core belief. Then he made a point about something he resists today: “airborne death squads used by the Bush and Obama administrations to kill supposed ‘terrorists’. Labeling someone a ‘terrorist’ as an excuse for arbitrarily killing them is, in my mind, equivalent to labeling someone a Jew and then proceeding to extermination. It’s vicious, arbitrary, extra-judicial, and inhuman.”

The biggest story of his career turned out to be Iran-Contra. In a sinister development during President Reagan’s administration, government operatives engineered a swap with Iran—the Iranians would release some hostages held in Lebanon in exchange for the opportunity to buy some arms from the U.S. The purchase took place, and the money received by the U.S. for the arms was sent to fund the right-wing paramilitary Contras in Nicaragua, funding which had been banned by Congress, but which the operatives arranged covertly. The cat got out of the bag, and eventually congressional hearings were undertaken to find out what had happened, who did it, and why. Bensky, who knew the Nicaragua situation well, was asked by Pacifica to come on board as host for live broadcasts of the hearings. He thought it would last a few weeks. It lasted months, and it was big.

For Bensky, being on the story felt natural. “That hearing room in the Russell Office building where we were was the same one that I had seen on TV when I was a kid, when I first got interested, really interested, in politics. That was during the Army McCarthy hearings. They were held in that room and they were televised live. And here I was, 25 years later, in that same hearing room, broadcasting, nation-wide, a major political hearing, and that was, you know, very, very special for me.”

I asked him if he thought at the time that the hearings might have brought President Reagan down from office. “Yes,” he said. “I thought that if the Democrats had shown more spine, had more vigor and more initiative, they could have gone farther than they did.” They could have “rocked the boat until Reagan fell out of it,” he said.

During the hearings, Bensky sat in the far corner of the hearing room with his producer, Bill Wax. Bensky developed two innovations: an 800 number with a professional staff for donations (which raised twice what it cost to cover the hearings), and live call-ins. During breaks, he ran a talk show on the stories and issues being raised. Pacifica provided the only live coverage, “gavel to gavel,” or “grovel to grovel,” as Bensky put it. Partly because it was so inherently fascinating to so many (it was if a veil had been lifted), and partly because of Bensky’s unusually deep research and improvised train-of-thought delivery, the show was just electric.

One day, months after the hearings, Bensky got a phone call from New York, and a voice said, “Is this Larry Bensky of Pacifica Radio?” He said yes. “I want to congratulate you, you won a George Polk award.” “I won a what?” Bensky asked. He had heard of the award for excellence in broadcast reporting. “Who applied for that?” “You don’t apply for the Polk award,” said the caller. “A previous winner nominates you. Your tapes came in, they were listened to by the jury, and you won. And you’re the first alternative journalist to have ever won this.” Bensky managed to get airfare to New York to receive the award, along with Bill Wax and Pacifica Board Chair David Salniker. He was given one minute to speak at a luncheon where he was given a plaque. “Here I was in the Roosevelt Hotel looking down, and there’s Walter Cronkite, and there’s Dan Rather, it was like, whoa—all these people!” Never at a loss for words, he quickly told them a story drawn from his childhood, of being on the air for the first time, on WYNE in New York, in junior high. He had been chosen to talk about the schools with teachers and administrators on a program that, while supposedly impromptu, was in fact completely scripted. But it was radio. At the award ceremony he essentially shared his pride about coming back to New York, to stand, after all those years, at the top of the broadcasting world.

In 1999, all hell broke loose at KPFA and Pacifica. Bensky explained how the problem came out of the Pacifica Board: “There were some opportunists who got themselves in positions of power. We later learned they had a plan, that they wanted to sell one or two stations and use the money to buy more and establish a small chain of liberal African-American stations, music-based, with some talk show hosts. At the same time they would be able to enrich themselves by the profits from the sale of those one or two major signal stations, which at that point were worth hundreds of millions of dollars. “

Bensky criticized the Board during “Sunday Salon,” and soon after afterwards realized his door and phone codes had been taken away. His program was cancelled, and he was fired. He was soon on the front lines of the demonstration that brought 10,000 into the streets of Berkeley to support the station. Anonymously, he maintained and wrote the copy for the website representing the opposition to the board. He said, “Being a part of the movement that stopped this was the best political experience of my life.”

When the Board fell and the station went back to work, “Sunday Salon” was kept, but Bensky did it without pay for a year and a half, which was tough, as he and his wife were raising a young daughter. “Sunday Salon” stayed on the air for another seven years, and then Bensky retired, turning to teaching, writing and Proust.

Bensky said he might not have retired had KPFA and Pacifica shown greater strength in the post-conflict years. But instead, he said “there was an inordinate focus on internal governance issues, with people throwing around words like ‘democracy,’ ‘community,’ and ‘diversity’ while the opportunity to increase our national audience was completely lost. And this at a time when the Bush administration was engaged in murderous military action, and the domestic economy was falling apart.” In addition, Bensky says, “Pacifica completely missed the boat on the technological transformation of media: podcasting, webcasting, interaction with members, all were done poorly or not at all.” National broadcasting proved “almost impossible to do, because of a lack of leadership and consensus within Pacifica,” said Bensky, who co-anchored political convention coverage during that period, as well as coverage of the 9/11 Commission Hearings, and Congressional hearings into the Bush administration’s extra-legal military and paramilitary activities.

A college instructor since 1988, when he was asked to teach a course at Stanford based on his work on the Iran-Contra hearings, Bensky has taught numerous courses in communications and political science at Stanford, California State University East Bay, Berkeley City College, and the Osher Lifetime Learning Center at UC Berkeley. “I love teaching,” Bensky said, “for two reasons. First of all, in developing classes I always learn a lot of new stuff. And equally important, especially at minority-majority working class campuses like Cal State, I learn a lot about what students are thinking, wishing, wanting—the kind of personal contact that you don’t have in broadcasting.”

So how does someone with Bensky’s background and accomplishments introduce a reader to the world of Marcel Proust? “Pick up any book of Proust, at any page, and open it and start reading. Because that’s the way he wrote, he didn’t write sequentially plotted books. Most of his books are about philosophical and psychological dissections of society and the human brain and intercourse of people. If it’s interesting to you just keep reading, and if it isn’t, open the book somewhere else and start reading there. Then, if you’re interested you’ll go back and start reading other books. But don’t start at the beginning; it’s too daunting, you know? In a way, it’s like all human activity, including political activism. You do what you can, and wind up where you must. See if it’s for you. Do what you feel you can. And realize: it’s not for everybody.”

http://sundaysalon.org

http://radioproust.org