WILLIAM MANDEL
Saying no to power: Autobiography of a 20th century activist and thinker by William Mandel, Berkeley, CA. Creative Arts Book Co., 651 pp., $18.50 paper. ISBN 0-88739-286-5."Bill Mandel gives a good example to us all. Stay involved. Don't give up. Will we make mistakes? Of course. Grin and Learn." --Pete Seeger
The author, William Mandel, has had a US Supreme Court Justice, a Vice-President of the United States, a future head of the CIA, a former ambassador to the Soviet Union, and the commanding admirals of the North Pacific fleet in his lecture audiences, and was a Fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and United Press Expert on Russia during World War II, as a good part of his childhood was spent growing up in Soviet Russia. His father, an engineer, had volunteered to work there in support of World Socialism.
His book Saying No to Power is the story of a life of activism. Mandel was born into a socialist household and raised in New York City at a time in the early years of the last century, when communism and socialism were rising in popularity due to the hardships encountered by the huge numbers of immigrants arriving daily. William Marx Mandel was born in a Brooklyn hospital on June 4th, 1917, registration day for the World War I Draft, despised by all reformers of the day. He spent his early years in the era of the roaring twenties, which was ripe for the early labor organizers and social reformers in New York City. The depression that came in 1929 saw the dramatic increase of membership in the Communist Party. The threat of revolution is what led President Roosevelt to start the New Deal.
Mr. Mandel has also been a defiant witness before Sen. Joe McCarthy and, later, the House Un-American Activities Committee. This made him a favorite of the rebellious students of the 1960s. In consequence, they named him to the Executive Committee of the Free Speech Movement at the University of California. Later, he taught there, although he has no degree, due to his refusal to apologize after expulsion from college in his teens for opposition to ROTC on campus.
He conducted a radio show about the Soviet Union for nearly 40 years on Pacifica Network stations, based on a longer period of firsthand knowledge of that country than anyone in the 500 years of recorded foreign writing on Russia. As an activist citizen, he was in the South seeking to prevent unfair executions a decade before the Freedom Rides.
In that same period, he was the first person reported in the press to demand the firing of Gen. Douglas MacArthur for conduct threatening a world nuclear holocaust. MacArthur was, in fact, dismissed.
When Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were executed, hear Mr. Mandel tell of how he led a spontaneous protest parade of thousands through New York's Lower East Side which the police found it wiser not to disperse, although it had no permit.
When Mr. Mandel's radio show on Pacifica Network's KPFA was ultimately cancelled, listeners picketed the studios en masse, and a galaxy of national names protested.
Despite the seriousness of the matters with which he has concerned himself, Saying No to Power has been described by the author of a history of Pacifica Radio as "irresistibly human."
During the Cuban Missile Crisis, the closest the world has ever come to nuclear war, Mr. Mandel wired Pres. Kennedy and Soviet leader Khrushchev a proposed solution for that confrontation, corresponding extremely closely to that which they adopted within days. Saying No To Power is full of personal vignettes about individuals the author has known, ranging from world names, such as Paul Robeson and Dr. W.E.B. DuBois, to an unknown participant in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade which fought in Spain as volunteers in its civil war to stop the rise of fascism, and Black and Latino prisoners in California who listened to his broadcasts and whom he visited.
Mr. Mandel takes pride in his role in winning the initiation of women's programming at his station, convincing it to launch broadcasts by people of color, bringing college-age youth onto the air, and personally being the first to conduct what became known as talk radio.
I heartily recommend Saying No to Power to anyone really interested in knowing the undistorted truth about the twentieth century. Mr. Mandel is not trying to shroud anything or deceive. His politic is freedom, and nothing else. Saying No To Power should be the bible of anyone thinking of going to a demonstration, or planning to organize one. Here, along with a dramatic telling of a very eventful life, are facts about the intrigues of the red scare and the real Soviet Union-including a first-hand, first-person account of dealing with the infamous Joe McCarthy. Do yourself a favor and order this book right now. You will be very glad you did!
It is available from <www.BillMandel.net>.
-Reprinted with permission from Greenwich Village Gazette, <http://www.nycny.com>