Sol Stern passed away on July 11 at age 89. Sol was my good friend, and I mourn his loss.
Long before I met Sol, I reviewed one of his books, Breaking Free: Public School Lessons and the Imperative of School Choice. Years later, when we chanced to meet one another, he remembered that review and expressed his gratitude for its positive assessment of his book. Breaking Free, as I recall, was framed as a story of his encounter with the New York City Public School. Being a man of limited means, he had had no choice but to send his son to public school. But being a man of sharp intellectual standards, he had paid close attention to what the school taught and how it went about its business.
The disenchantment of parents with American public education is an old story, but Sol told his version of it with both crackling wit and the keenest eye for detail. So in a sense, I knew the man before I met him. And when we did meet, our friendship was immediate.
It took some time, however, for Sol to open up about his past. He grew up in New York City and attended City College when it was a haven for radicals of every possible camp. He was a Trotskyite, and he retained his Marxist convictions into the 1960s when he began writing for Ramparts, the showcase for the New Left. The magazine agitated against the war in Vietnam; denounced America for racism, and became the hub for every young writer intent on overthrowing “the establishment.” On short order, Sol became one of its editors and friends with almost every notable American figure engaged in that countercultural struggle.
His colleague David Horowitz recalled, “In 1966, Sol would write the New York Times Magazine profile that would make the Black Panthers a household name.” But he was as much an activist as a reporter. In 1968—again according to Horowitz’s memoir—Sol was part of a small delegation that included members of the Students for a Democratic Society that made a secret trip to the former Czechoslovakia to meet with leaders of the—Vietnamese communist—National Liberation Front to learn how to conduct a “psychological warfare campaign against the United States.” Those were Sol’s words, not David’s. Sol was not part of that campaign, but he agreed not to report on the discussions.
The story of how Sol broke free from his immersion in the New Left is for another time. It might have been a chapter in Second Thoughts: Former Radicals Look Back at the Sixties, that famous collection of self-recriminations by twenty-some public figures. I know he eventually had falling-outs with some of them. Even the ex-60s radicals kept to their factionalized ways.
Perhaps Sol and I could be friends because I was a generation younger and the radical politics of the sixties never touched me in a serious way. It was something I knew about but didn’t experience firsthand. As part of my high school debate club, I subscribed to Ramparts for a while and quite possibly read some of Sol’s work. I have a vague memory of a riveting account of the 1969 Hells Angels killing of a concert goer at the Altamont Speedway Free Festival. Was that Sol’s “Altamont: Pearl Harbor to the Woodstock Nation?” Maybe. Sol regarded his writing about that event as among his best works of “long-form” journalism.
Listening to Sol tell his stories of those times was an education. He was Odysseus explaining the war to those who had heard about but never seen Troy, and then trying to account for his long way home.
Sol and I often disagreed, and that, too, gave him great pleasure. We debated each other on stage on the question of whether the Common Core State Standards were good for the nation’s students, and Encounter Books—founded by Peter Collier, Sol’s old colleague and fellow-traveler at Ramparts—published a little book Common Core Yea and Nay, in which Sol argued the affirmative and I the negative.
Sol and Ruth held a Hanukkah party every year and invited a few of us gentile Upper West Side neighbors to partake of Ruthie’s latkes. We would catch up with Fred Siegel and his son, as well as Kay Hymowitz. On one of these occasions, Fred’s granddaughter slipped a copy of Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons off of Sol’s shelf, toddled over to us, and presented it. Sol graciously permitted us to take it home, and we dutifully read it. The novel incidentally concerns two young men who have been radicalized in college and whose nihilism estranges them from their liberal families and eventually each other.
In his last years, Sol and his wife, Ruthie, spent considerable time in Tel Aviv. Back here in the United States, Sol felt increasingly isolated from former friends and seemed almost surprised that my wife and I remained loyal to him. The Manhattan Institute’s City Journal ran a tribute, “Remembering Sol Stern,” by Brian Anderson. It is gracious and surfaces some details that I didn’t know, such as that he “played a central role in exposing the CIA’s covert funding of cultural organizations—a major moment in Cold War journalism.”
Sol was proud of his accomplishments but never boastful. Though often labeled a “conservative,” he didn’t define himself that way. He cared passionately about the fate of children consigned to schools that were careless about their education or lost in their social justice ideologies. He was a fierce supporter of Israel and, as Anderson puts it, a “relentless critic of anti-Semitism.” But he was always ready to break with an orthodoxy he found too confining, and he had no room in his life for those he felt were compromising principle for political advantage. I can’t say whether his decisive judgments were always right, but they were always soul-felt, and he stood ready to endure the consequences.
I will miss him greatly.
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