Jack Newfield


Jack Abraham Newfield was an American journalist, columnist, author, documentary filmmaker and activist. Newfield wrote for the Village Voice, New York Daily News, New York Post, New York Sun, New York Magazine, Parade Magazine, Tikkun, Mother Jones, and The Nation and monthly columns for several labor union newspapers. In his autobiography, Somebody's Gotta Tell It: The Upbeat Memoir of a Working-Class Journalist, Newfield said, "The point is not to confuse objectivity with truth."
A career beat reporter, Newfield wrote prolifically about modern society, culture, and politics, on a range of topics relevant to urban life, such as municipal corruption, the police, and labor unions, and also professional sports, especially baseball and boxing, as well as contemporary music. He wrote numerous books about modern social and political subjects, including A Prophetic Minority and Robert Kennedy : A Memoir.. He received the American Book Award for The Full Rudy: The Man, the Myth, the Mania about New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani. Newfield was a senior fellow at The Nation Institute, and an Emmy-award winning documentary filmmaker.

Early life and education

Newfield was born and grew up in Bedford–Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, New York, raised by his mother, Ethel Newfield. When he was four years old, his father, Phillip Newfield, died of a heart attack. An only child, Newfield was a latchkey kid. The ethos of his upbringing led him to establish a professional approach he identified as "advocacy journalism."
Newfield attended Boys High School and then Hunter College of City University of New York, where he wrote pamphlets the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, articles for the student paper, the Hunter Arrow, and studied journalism. He was drawn to the Civil Rights Movement and the Students for a Democratic Society, under the tutelage of Michael Harrington. In his youth, Newfield was a supporter of antiwar New Left politics in the 1960s. He was arrested in the South at a sit-in in 1963 and spent two days in a Mississippi jail with Michael Schwerner, who was murdered in that state in June 1964 with James Chaney and Andrew Goodman.
Identifying as a populist, Newfield was from the outset a politically active journalist and author. In 1968, he signed the "Writers and Editors War Tax Protest" pledge, vowing to refuse to pay tax to protest against the Vietnam War, and later became a sponsor of the War Tax Resistance project, which practiced and advocated tax resistance as a form of protest against the war. By 1971, Newfield had begun to question the ideology of the New Left, writing that "in its Weathermen, Panther and Yippee incarnations, seems anti-democratic, terroristic, dogmatic, stoned on rhetoric and badly disconnected from everyday reality".
Newfield's first journalism job was "copy boy" for The New York Daily Mirror and editor of the weekly West Side News. He lived most of his adult life on historic Charlton Street in Greenwich Village.

Career in journalism

Newfield considered himself a "participatory journalist," involved in politics and advocacy. Inspired by Lincoln Steffens, Jacob Riis, and IF Stone, Newfield held himself to a professional standard of moral emotionalism. On this he wrote, "Compassion without anger can become merely sentiment or pity. Knowledge without anger can stagnate into mere cynicism and apathy. Anger improves lucidity, persistence, audacity, and memory."
In 1964, he was hired by the editor, Dan Wolf, to write for The Village Voice in Greenwich Village. Newfield said he set out to "combine activism with writing" and advised like-minded journalists to "create a constituency for reform and don't stop until you have made some progress or positive results." In 1968, Newfield covered the Chicago Democratic Convention, where he famously threw a typewriter from the window of his Chicago hotel at police that he saw beating demonstrators. By 1988, Newfield had contributed 700 articles to The Voice, over 24 years on staff as columnist, reporter and senior editor. From 1988, Newfield was editor and writer in an investigative reporting unit at the New York Daily News. Ardently pro-labor, he made a principled choice to support the striking newspaper pressmen. He refused to cross their picket line during the 1990 labor strike, and instead quit the paper. Quickly thereafter joined the New York Post as a columnist. Subsequently, Newfield wrote columns and investigative articles for the New York Sun, the New York Observer, and The Nation.
In 1980, the Center for Investigative Reporting awarded Newfield the George Polk Award for Political Reporting, and he received a New York State Bar Association Special Award in 1986 for his series of articles on wrongfully convicted Bobby McLaughlin. In 2000, he was honored with the 25-Year News Achievement Award from the Society of the Silurians. Since 2006, Hunter College awards the Jack Newfield Professorship each spring to a distinguished journalist representative of his legacy of investigative journalism.

Author and filmmaker

Newfield authored books about contemporary political and social phenomena. Newfield wrote "A Prophetic Minority", his account of the early 1960s civil rights movement, the formation of the SNCC, the voter registration initiative in Mississippi, the expansion of the SNCC to include white students, and the rise of SDS. A year later, The New York Times called Newfield's book Robert Kennedy: A Memoir a "a perceptive and moving book," and it was received again when it was reissued in 2003, on the 35th anniversary of Kennedy's murder. Newfield was traveling with Kennedy and his campaign when the senator from New York was assassinated by Sirhan Sirhan in Los Angeles on in June 1968. He endeavors to separate "the man from the myth" in his first-hand accounted of the assassinated politician. He wrote about Kennedy, "Part of him was soldier, priest, radical, and football coach. But he was none of these. He was a politician; His enemies said he was consumed with selfish ambition, a ruthless opportunist exploiting his brother's legend. But he was too passionate and too vulnerable ever to be the cool and confident operator his brother was."
Newfield and Jeff Greenfield co-authored "A Populist Manifesto : The Making Of A New Minority", an elaboration on their ideas about civic reform, relevant to the banking and insurance industries, utilities, regulatory agencies, land reform, the media, crime, health care, labor unions, and foreign. He cowrote with Paul Du Brul, "The Abuse of Power: The Permanent Government and the Fall of New York" and the revised edition, "The Permanent Government: Who Really Rules New York?", considered classics in urban muckraking.
In "City for Sale", Newfield collaborated with investigative journalist Wayne Barrett to reveal the patronage of municipal corruption in New York during Ed Koch's administration. In 2003, Newfield's acerbic critique of the mayoralty of Rudy Giuliani, "The Full Rudy: The Man, The Myth, The Mania" won the American Book Award. "City of Rich and Poor: Jack Newfield on New York" was a documentary based on Newfield's article, How the Other Half Still Lives: in the shadow of wealth, New York's poor increases. In 1988, "Robert Kennedy : A Memoir" was adapted into an acclaimed documentary, which Newfield wrote and co-directed. He was writer and reporter of "JFK, Hoffa and the Mob".
Newfield advocated for professional prize fighters to be viewed as members of the "exploited working class." He wrote and produced documentaries about professional boxing, including Fallen Champ: The Untold Story of Mike Tyson, Sugar Ray Robinson: Bright Lights, Dark Shadows,, The Making of Bamboozled and Ring of Fire: The Emile Griffith Story. In 1991, he was a contributing reporter and writer to the documentary Don King Unauthorized, which aired on PBS. Shortly thereafter, he authored "Only in America The Life and Crimes of Don King " in 1995, a story serialized in Penthouse Magazine and then adapted it into a 1997 Emmy Award-winning HBO biopic, Don King: Only in America, directed by John Herzfeld, starring Ving Rhames.

Activist

Newfield was an investigative reporter who wrote openly about social reform. His articles often influenced the media and public policy. Notable examples include the creation of a law banning the use of lead paint in apartments, changes in campaign finance laws, the prosecution of corruption and enforcement of regulations to protect the elderly in nursing homes. His series of articles on wrongly convicted and imprisoned Brooklyn resident Bobby McLoughlin helped to exonerate and release him from prison in 1986.
Historians of the political movement against lead poisoning in the U.S. trace its origins to the American civil rights and environmental movements, and acknowledge Newfield's series of newspaper articles in New York City about the tragic consequences of lead poisoning, beginning in 1969, for exposing the lead scandal, and then-Mayor John Lindsay's initiation of the first lead poison prevention program, a model for other urban areas.
From 1999 to 2004, Newfield wrote a series of columns advocating for the idea of a memorial honoring Jackie Robinson, legendary for his role as the first black professional baseball player in the major leagues, and Brooklyn Dodgers baseball team captain Pee Wee Reese, who together made history. In 2005, a commemorative sculpture by William Behrends was installed at the center of a circular lawn and perimeter walkway designed by Ken Smith, inscribed with commentary related to the lives and achievements of the athletes, in front of a Brooklyn ball field, Key Span Park.
Still working until the end of his life, Jack Newfield died in New York City, succumbing to kidney cancer on December 21, 2004, at the age of 66.

Awards and recognition

Newfield received the American journalism George Polk Award in 1979 for reporting on politics at the Village Voice.

Selected bibliography

Books