Happy Birthday Nat Hentoff!

Cato Senior Fellow Nat Hentoff turns 88 today. 


John Whitehead, president of the Rutherford Institute, recently had some high praise for our colleague:

I’ve had the privilege of working with some remarkable individuals in my lifetime—celebrities, politicians, writers, artists, musicians, journalists, people whose names are legendary and others whose impact, no less significant, was only felt by a small few—yet for sheer nerve, integrity, tenacity, vision and a love of America that has weathered the best and worst this nation has had to offer, no one can match Nat Hentoff.


Even at the ripe age of 88, Hentoff is a radical in the best sense of the word, a feisty, fiercely loyal, inveterate freedom fighter and warrior journalist with a deep‐​seated intolerance of injustice and a well‐​deserved reputation for being one of the nation’s most respected, controversial and uncompromising writers.


Armed with a keen understanding of the law and an enviable way with words, brandishing a rapier wit and teeming with moral outrage, Nat has never been one to back down from a fight, and there have been many over the course of his lifetime—one marked by controversy and fueled by his passion for the protection of civil liberties and human rights. …


A self‐​described uncategorizable libertarian, Hentoff adds he is also a “Jewish atheist, civil libertarian, pro‐​lifer.” Born in Boston on June 10, 1925, Hentoff received a B.A. with honors from Northeastern University and did graduate work at Harvard. From 1953 to 1957, he was associate editor of Down Beat magazine. He went on to write many books on jazz, biographies and novels, including children’s books. His articles have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Commonwealth, the New Republic, the Atlantic and the New Yorker, where he was a staff writer for more than 25 years. In 1980, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Education and an American Bar Association Silver Gavel Award for his coverage of the law and criminal justice in his columns. In 1985, he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Laws by Northeastern University. For 50 years, Hentoff wrote a weekly column for the Village Voice. When that position was terminated on December 31, 2008, Hentoff joined the Cato Institute as a Senior Fellow.

Read the whole thing.


Just a few days before Glenn Greenwald broke the explosive story about NSA surveillance, Hentoff was already complimenting Greenwald for his work defending free speech and a free press:

What all of this comes down to, as it may affect future administrations as well as generations of Americans, has been precisely underlined by Glenn Greenwald, an incisive journalist who would have given James Madison hope for the First Amendment’s future.


Writing about how “media outlets and journalists have finally awakened to the serious threat posed by the Obama administration to press freedoms, whistle blowing and transparency,” the question now, Greenwald demands, is:


“What, if anything, will they (journalists) do to defend the press freedoms they claim to value? … Thwarting government attacks like these … requires a real adversary posture, renouncing their subservience to government interests and fear of alienating official sources.

Hentoff discusses the NSA story here.


And beyond his work on civil liberties, Hentoff still finds time to review jazz music for the Wall Street Journal. Last month, Hentoff had this article about Joe Alterman.