The Thirty Years' Wars: Dispatches and Diversions of a Radical Journalist, 1965-1994

Many of today's paradigm political journalists spend much of their time in Washington, D.C., covering fellow members of the power elite, doing as much television and paid speechmaking as they can, all the while trying not to mess up the suit or miss the kids' field hockey game at Sidwell Friends. There once was another paradigm, though, and Andrew Kopkind fit it to a T: go on the road, talk to the powerless, give a damn. Kopkind, who died of cancer in 1994, started at Time magazine in the early '60s, but he couldn't keep his leftism to himself, so he soon moved to the likes of the New Republic, New York Review of Books, and The Nation to cover such Zeitgeist stories as the free speech movement at Berkeley, the civil rights movement in Selma, the black ferment in Newark and Watts, and the war in Vietnam. Many of those fine pieces are collected here. Kopkind's sharp pen and sharp eye (in 1966, right after Ronald Reagan won his first California gubernatorial primary, Kopkind tagged him as a formidable presidential contender, largely because "he affects a manner somewhere between a TV doctor's and a Methodist minister's") stand the test of time.