Jack Newfield, 66, Proud Muckraker, Dies
By DOUGLAS MARTIN
Published: December 22, 2004
Jack Newfield, a journalist and author who brought Brooklyn moxie, sassy cynicism and often zealous partisanship to muckraking reporting on subjects from New York politics to boxing, died on Monday night at New York-Presbyterian Medical Center. He was 66. The cause was kidney cancer that spread to his lungs, said Howard J. Rubenstein, a spokesman for the family.
For many people, he came to embody The Voice during a golden period, the mid-1960's to the early 1970's, when it solidified its position as the exemplar of the alternative press, championing subjectivity and personal journalism.
For example, he was a leader in the movement to depose President Lyndon B. Johnson while he wrote political commentary in The Voice, which he gratefully noted made "no pretense of objectivity."
His fame grew as he periodically wrote articles about the city's "10 worst judges" and "10 worst landlords" for The Voice and other publications.
His books dug deeper still, as he and his co-authors uncovered the deals made with clubhouse barons while other journalists focused on the mayor. "The Abuse of Power: The Permanent Government and the Fall of New York" (Viking, 1977), written with Paul Du Brul, is considered a classic in urban muckraking. A revised edition of the book, "The Permanent Government: Who Really Rules New York?" was published by Pilgrim in 1981.
Just as influential was "City for Sale: Ed Koch and the Betrayal of New York" (Harper, 1988), written with Wayne Barrett.
But Mr. Newfield's methods attracted criticism from those who felt that he put crusading zeal ahead of the journalistic precept of impartiality, treating sources who cooperated with him better than those who did not. Some remarked on his deep participation in political issues, campaigns and movements that he also wrote about.
"There is no middle way to approach Jack Newfield," Martin F. Nolan, then chief of the Washington bureau of The Boston Globe, wrote in The New York Times Book Review in 1971. "A reader either blisters, grits his teeth and curses, or he nods, murmurs 'right on' and again curses, but not at Jack Newfield."
As he grew powerful among liberals, Mr. Newfield sometimes appeared to wield his power like the kingmakers he excoriated in print. His words were weapons to promote friends like Governor Cuomo and castigate enemies like Mayor Edward I. Koch. For many years, people running or thinking of running for state or city office dined with him in the hope of passing his inspection.
Mr. Newfield himself suggested that facts should be subservient to larger understandings. "The point is not to confuse objectivity with truth," he wrote in his autobiography, "Somebody's Gotta Tell It: The Upbeat Memoir of a Working-Class Journalist" (St. Martin's, 2002).
His own life reverberated with the vigor and color of his hometown and his generation. He grew up on the streets of Bedford-Stuyvesant as a maniacal Dodgers fan, enlisted early on in the civil rights movement, and was an original member of the Students for a Democratic Society. He was so involved in Senator Robert F. Kennedy's campaign for the presidential nomination, he wrote, that he often considered himself part of it.
Mr. Newfield became friends with many prizefighters and often wrote about boxing, but this, too fell neatly into his leftist world view. Boxers, he wrote in his autobiography, are best seen as "exploited workers" and boxing promoters as "robber barons."
Jack Abraham Newfield was born on Feb. 18, 1938, into the Brooklyn of "open fire hydrants, spaldeens, the double-movie theaters, the comic books in candy stores, the egg creams, the stickball games with a broomstick handle," he wrote in his autobiography. He worshiped Jackie Robinson and other Dodgers, feeling "cold betrayal" when the team left for Los Angeles.
His campaign to commemorate the historic moment when Pee Wee Reese embraced Robinson in front of jeering racists with a statue of the scene was finally successful. It will be unveiled next summer at the Brooklyn Cyclones ballpark in Coney Island, Mr. Newfield wrote in a New York Sun column in October.
Mr. Newfield was 4 when his father died, and his mother struggled to raise her only child by working as a saleswoman in a department store. He graduated from Hunter College, which he called both "useless" and "priceless" in a short speech acknowledging his election to that school's alumni hall of fame in 1972.
His first journalism jobs were as a copy boy for The New York Daily Mirror and as editor of the weekly West Side News. In 1964, Dan Wolf, editor of The Voice, hired him as a $100-a-week staff writer. He wrote about anything he wanted, including a valiant defense of Bob Dylan's switch to an electric guitar.
But his thrust was as a crusader, from shedding light on abuse of the elderly and fraud in nursing homes to corrupt union leaders to lead-poisoning. He used what he called the "Joe Frazier method," referring to the daunting straight-ahead style of the heavyweight champion, to force reforms.
"Combine activism with writing," he wrote in a description of the approach. "Create a constituency for reform. And don't stop until you have achieved some progress or positive results."
When he went after bad nursing homes in the 1970's, he lobbied for Charles J. Hynes, then a Brooklyn prosecutor, to be appointed special prosecutor for nursing home abuses. He worked with civil liberties lawyers and others to win the release in 1986 of Bobby McLaughlin, a convicted murderer who new evidence showed was innocent.
During the riotous Democratic convention in Chicago in 1968, an exasperated Mr. Newfield threw a typewriter from a hotel window at police officers beating demonstrators.
Because he saw himself as a participant in politics, not just a chronicler, he developed close friendships with politicians. Most prominent was former Gov. Mario M. Cuomo, for whom his wife worked as a driver in his losing 1977 campaign for mayor against Mr. Koch.
That partisanship sometimes backfired. Mr. Cuomo wrote in his diary that Mr. Koch said he could not support him because of his close relationship with Mr. Newfield.
Mr. Newfield's 10 books include a biography of Don King, the boxing promoter. His Robert F. Kennedy biography, reissued in 2003 on the 35th anniversary of the senator's murder, received excellent reviews both times around.
Mr. Newfield, who worked for The News and The Post after leaving The Voice in 1988, is survived by his wife, Janie Eisenberg; a son, Joey; and a daughter, Rebecca.
Mr. Newfield, who was helping to produce two sports documentary films at the time of his death, wrote many of his later columns about the arts, including a series celebrating "The Sopranos" television show. He explained in his memoirs that, for him, politics had grown "more empty."
"I discovered I liked writing positive columns more than negative ones," he wrote.
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