Packer: "Nixon, because of what he did to Stevenson and others, was my father’s most hated enemy."

Blood of the Liberals

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2000; 405 pages; $26

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY: From Booklist: “Family saga and the history of a political idea blend in this thoughtful, gracefully written reflection. Journalist and novelist Packer traces three generations of his own family and the shifting meaning of liberalism over the past century. Packer’s maternal grandfather, George Huddleston, represented Birmingham, Alabama, in Congress from 1915 to 1937. A Southern Progressive, a “Thomas Jefferson Democrat,” he started out arguing for universal suffrage and unions; he quickly learned to avoid race and gender, but his class-based radicalism was firm until the New Deal’s elitist tinkering made him a “state’s rights” conservative. Nancy Huddleston married Herbert Packer, a Yale-educated Jewish lawyer who taught at Stanford University; both were “Adlai Stevenson Democrats” and “New Deal liberals.”

But Packer took on administrative duties at Stanford just as a new generation challenged the rational liberalism he championed; he suffered a stroke and, three years later, committed suicide. Twelve when his father died in 1972, George Packer pursued his own vision of liberalism: at Yale, in the Peace Corps in voluntarism, and political activism. A fascinating, thought-provoking narrative.” From the Buffalo News: “George Packer found himself and his politics somewhere between Palo Alto and Birmingham, with side trips to Boston and Africa. Along the way, he answered the question: What happened to liberalism?”

From the Sunday New York Times Book Review: “Liberals, who haven’t had a good day since sometime in late 1965, won’t be having another one this morning. Their “ism” is now the subject of America’s favorite funereal genre, the memoir. What poverty was to Frank McCourt, what alcoholism was to Mary Karr, what death was to Dave Eggers, liberalism is to George Packer. It’s the dysfunction that serves as the larger-than-life force that shapes the people in his book as they wretchedly press up against a thing they can never quite comprehend. Liberals can take some comfort: Packer shows how liberalism occasionally succeeds by failing frequently.”

From the Washington Post: “It is difficult to imagine a more precise and pointed summary of the current state of American liberalism.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: George Packer was born in Stanford, California, in 1960. On the afternoon that we talked, he said, “I spent my first 18 years there. I went off to college at Yale. After that, I led what Jonathan Yardley [in his Washington Post review] called ‘an erratic life.’ Pursuing some ‘strange and blind alleys,’ I think is what he said. I went into the Peace Corps in Togo in West Africa. I ended up in Boston for 16 years, from 1984 to just three months ago.” As to what he did in Boston, Packer offered, “I worked as a carpenter for a few years. I began writing. I wrote a book about my time in Africa—that came out in 1988 — called The Village of Waiting.

It’s now out of print, but Farrar, Straus is going to reissue it next year. I wrote two novels. And I’ve made part of my living by doing magazine writing, articles and essays and reviews for Harper's, for the New York Times Magazine, and others. I taught undergraduates at Harvard, graduate students at Emerson College in Boston, at Bennington, and now I will be teaching at Sarah Lawrence. I moved to Brooklyn three months ago. And that’s,” Packer said, “the bare bones of my life.”

I asked Packer, “If you were in a bookstore and saw someone looking at your book, what might you say to introduce the book to someone to make them want to buy it?”

“I would say that this book you’re looking at is about politics and about history. It’s a kind of crypto-history of America in the 20th Century, but from a very idiosyncratic objective angle, namely, three generations of my family. And I hope it reads as much like a novel as like a work of history. I hope it tells a story that involves you and that you want to know the outcome of. It introduces you to characters that are complex and interest you. There’s some comedy in it and there’s some tragedy in it. And on the whole it’s something of a story, I suppose, of loss.

"But there’s so much life in these people and in their actions and in their times, and there’s so much of the times as well as of the life, that I don’t think it’s a downer. I think it has a rich appeal of people who are living very intensely, and it has a political point of view, not something I could reduce to a sentence, and it doesn’t advocate a blueprint for the future. It’s an account of how we got to be where we are, and it does it in the most personal way I could. Not by being encyclopedic and rigorously theoretical at all, but by telling stories that I find interesting, and finding all the details and the scenes to bring it to life.”

When Packer returned from his time in Africa in the Peace Corps and moved to Boston, he spent many evenings visiting with and helping to feed residents and would-be residents of homeless shelters. I asked him about that time.

“That was a particular moment in my life, when having been a kind of insider all my life, having been raised in some privilege — at least, intellectual privilege — on a college campus with a fairly unquestioned world view, I extracted myself and threw myself into a totally alien place — namely, a village in Africa. There in Africa, I had lost my bearing for a while and questioned everything, the whole basis of my life and what I was doing. And when I got back to the U.S., it was the mid-1980s, homelessness was glaringly evident, and I found myself instinctively drawn toward homeless people, not because I wanted necessarily to find housing for them — although I certainly did — but because I just identified with their being outside. I felt outside, I felt quite — this is an over-used word — ‘alienated’ and angry, really, quite angry at America. And these people seemed the closest to expressions to my own state of mind that I could find.”

“They were,” I said, “almost embodied expressions of your state of mind.”

“Exactly. To that extent, I used them. I was certainly interested in the individuals, and I spent hours sitting with them and hearing their stories. Most of them were all too willing to tell me everything. A few of them recoiled and told me not to interview them. But most had a lot of time on their hands and were pleased by someone’s attention. I filled notebooks with the details. Not really knowing what I would do with the results, but I was interested in their lives and how they’d gotten to be where they were. But mostly I just felt at ease with them. I felt more relaxed around homeless people than I felt around my old friends and my family, for a while.

“When I got back from Africa, I had this sense of having cut myself off from the life I’d lived before. And it was upsetting to be in the presence of my life. It reminded me of how cut off I felt. Whereas, with the homeless I felt like I could talk to them and be undisturbed in myself.”

I said, “It seemed to me that you felt homeless in a sense.” “That would describe it in a metaphorical way. I was homeless. I did not feel attached to my old society. I was quite suspicious of anyone who was getting ahead. In a simplistic way I thought, ‘If you’re getting ahead, it means you’re screwing somebody over.’ I couldn’t get the African villagers out of my head. I kept thinking, ‘What would they think of this? What would they think of parking tickets, what would they think of automatic teller machines?’ To think through those eyes means you’re going to feel like an outsider.” “And,” I said, “when you went to Africa and when you came back, you were still very young.”

“I was too young, in a way — I went to Africa at 21 — and not just young in years, but young in experience. I had been a student all my life. I’d been a good student, really. I went from Stanford to Yale. I had all the privileges of an academic life. And that was what I was destined for. I had really never done badly.” Packer writes in his book about John Stuart Mill and Mill’s fall, as a youth, into depression. I suggested to Packer that his own story was not all that different than that of Mill’s.

“The story of a young man who fulfills all the expectations of him and finds out that he’s miserable. Not that I was miserable. When I went off to Africa, I had known nothing but academic success. And then I had some familial tragedy that I didn’t know how to deal with and had pretty much locked in the closet. So I was ripe for a nervous breakdown.”

Packer talked about an event he described in his first book. “One night while I was in the village in Africa, I thought I was going to have a stroke, which makes perfect sense given what happened to my father [who suffered a massive stroke from which he never fully recovered]. I convinced myself I really was about to have a stroke. I would die because I was in Africa, where no one could help me, and somehow my father had caught up with me here.

"And it was this chilling sense of fate having finally made a move on me. I got myself to a hospital quickly, through a local driver. And this German doctor took one look at me and said, ‘These are very subjective reactions. You’re not going to have a stroke.’ When he discharged me from the hospital, he wrote down on my little discharge booklet, ‘Beginning nervous breakdown.’ Which stunned me. So then I ~ thought I had narrowly averted a stroke. I had no idea that this was a psychological event that had just occurred.”

“You weren’t,” I said, “at that age, particularly psychologically sophisticated.”

“No, I wasn’t. I was smart, but I didn’t really know myself. I knew books. And as I described [in Blood of the Liberals], I tried to solve these psychological problems by reading philosophy.”

Packer writes in this latest book that one of the authors to whom he, in this near nervous breakdown, turned, was Kierkegaard — specifically, to Sickness unto Death. I said that I had laughed, bleakly, when I read about Packer’s reading, because as a teenager, I too had turned to this particular book in hopes of finding answers to my problems.

“It should be banned,” Packer said, “for people who are in serious trouble. It’s too dangerous, really. It’s a brilliant, profound book. I’d read it now, I’m sure, with a lot of pleasure. But at that time, it was like watching a horror film. But if you’re also an over-educated sort — as you probably were, as I was — you think that thinking it will change it. If you get the right thoughts in your head and figure it out conceptually, you’ll be able to get yourself out of the

“This German doctor took one look at me and said, ‘These are very subjective reactions. You are not going to have a stroke” mess you’re in. And, of course, it only worsens the mess. It doesn’t get you out. So Kierkegaard was the wrong direction.”

When a young person is in a troubled state of being like that, I said, he or she reads these books “as if they were prescriptions.”

“Exactly. And you feel inadequate because you’re not living up to Kierkegaard or Jung or whoever. You know that you’re lapsing back into yourself. Ironically, that’s what Kierkegaard wants from you. He wants you to be yourself, but you don’t know how to.”

I suggested that in one’s early 20s, there’s not “historically, an awful lot of self there.”

“That’s so true. That’s so true. And, if you’re isolated as I was, what you really need is another human being. Whether it’s a shrink, or a lover, or a parent, or a friend; you need another human being. I was alone. I was really isolated. So I had these books, and it was impossible to solve my problems. That German doctor said to me, ‘Don’t you have anyone you can talk to?’ I mentioned the woman next door, this peasant woman, who was my closest friend. He said, ‘Aw, you cannot solve your problems by talking to an African peasant.’ ”

Reading Blood of the Liberals, I was once again reminded of how important the Alger Hiss trials and Hiss’s incarceration and his lifelong attempt to prove his innocence were for people of Packer’s and my parents’ generations. Packer said he didn’t know how much most Americans nowadays cared about the Hiss story. “My guess is, very, very few, but those who do care, care intensely and always will. It’s very hard for people to resolve that case. It’s become too symbolic. It’s too many other things. The whole McCarthy era. The rise of Nixon. That’s all wrapped up with the history. And also the personal tragedies of the McCarthy era. So that the Hiss case is braided with all of that other political and cultural baggage. And so it will never be resolved.”

Packer suggested that it was Adlai Stevenson more than Alger Hiss who, for his parents, was the “one who was martyred” by the rise of the conservative movement. “And Nixon,” he said, “because of what he did to Stevenson and others, was my father’s most hated enemy. My generation hated Reagan, but not with the same intensity that my parents’ generation hated Nixon. Reagan didn’t merit hatred. Nixon had all the evil qualities that merited it. Reagan was too empty to deserve to be hated in that way. I’ve never heard anyone speak about any politician with as much personal enmity as my parents spoke about Nixon. Nixon was a full-bodied politician, the kind you could get your feelings around. There was something human about Nixon. His defects were so glaring. But so many of them [politicians today] have been so thoroughly produced and air-brushed. . .they’re not living enough to hate.”

I asked Packer if he would talk to me about the title.

“In a way, that’s one of the main ideas in the book, that the differences between the generations of my mother’s father and my father was the difference between two kinds of liberalism. In the first case, it came, really, out of the 18th Century, out of Jeffersonian democracy, and it essentially put its faith in the ability of ordinary people to run their own affairs, to govern themselves well. And that’s how the Democratic Party came to identify itself, as the party of the people, which it still does, but it just doesn’t do it as convincingly anymore. But my grandfather, as he said, threw back to 1820. His ideal was a republic of small farmers who each had enough property to have a stake in society, but no one had too much. And it was an egalitarian idea that to have a democracy you couldn’t have too much money and power in too few hands, or else liberty and self-government were threatened.

“So when the New Deal came along, it would have seemed as if a politician like my maternal grandfather—from Alabama, represented Birmingham in Congress — might have seen the New Deal as just the thing he had been waiting for, because all his career he had been denouncing corporate power. But, in fact, I think he was true to himself. The New Deal was not what he had been waiting for, because the New Deal looked too much like another monopoly. It was just the monopoly of the federal government. And I think the Southerner in him and the poor boy was suspicious of Washington telling farmers, not what crops to grow, but how to live, which is what, for instance, the Tennessee Valley Authority tried to do. So, my grandfather was defeated by the New Deal. And, in the generational shift, it’s ironic that his daughter married my father, who is, as I said, a man who took the New Deal for granted. In other words, who believed in large organizational control, in government. And, to a certain extent, in corporations, although he wasn’t uncritical of them. But he just accepted that we lived in a complex society of big organizations that needed central control and expertise. Not the wisdom of the common man, but the expertise of the intellectual. And that was the liberalism that came to flower in the ’60s and then came to ruin.”

To conclude, Packer said, “Liberalism went from being populist to being corporate, from being Jeffersonian to being New Deal. And it had its greatest successes, and it also had its greatest defeat, as a result of that change. I think today we still haven’t come out of the debris. It’s a better moment than we’ve seen for a very long time for liberalism, but what it might look like in the 21st Century, I don’t know. I hope my book at least raises that question. I don’t think I answer it.”