Arnold Beichman, Political Analyst, Dies at 96
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/04/us/04beichman.html?hpw Arnold Beichman, Political Analyst, Dies at 96 By DENNIS HEVESI Arnold Beichman, a prominent political analyst, author and newspaper columnist known for being ardently anti-Communist, died Feb. 17 in Pasadena, Calif. He was 96 and lived in Naramata, British Columbia.
His son Charles confirmed the death.
Mr. Beichman (pronounced BYSH-man) wrote five books, the best known of which was “Nine Lies About America” (Library Press, 1972), a repudiation of New Left assertions in the 1960s that the United States was a racist, materialistic, imperialist nation. He was also a research fellow at the conservative-leaning Hoover Institution at Stanford and, since 1986, a columnist for the similarly inclined Washington Times.
Mr. Beichman’s articles also appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, The Christian Science Monitor, The Weekly Standard, Commentary and National Review, among many other publications.
He had been an editor at the left-leaning New York daily newspaper PM in the 1940s, but, like many friends and colleagues, turned from pro-labor, anti-Communist liberalism to neoconservatism.
Communism, Mr. Beichman wrote in a 1982 Op-Ed article for The New York Times, is “a system that prohibits personal freedom and punishes citizens who insist on such freedom — a system run by a single party, the sole repository of truth, which brooks no dissent from that truth.”
It rules, he said, “by terror, secret police and the midnight knock on the door.”
John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, said in an interview Thursday: “Arnold was a leading figure in the world of American anti-Communism. He was a tireless advocate of the notion that in no way, shape or form could Communist regimes be negotiated with effectively, be accommodated, humored or brought into the community of nations.”
Born on the Lower East Side of Manhattan on May 17, 1913, Arnold Beichman was one of three children of Solomon and Mary Beichman, immigrants from what is now Ukraine. His father owned a cotton goods store. Besides his son Charles, Mr. Beichman is survived by his wife, the former Carroll Aikins; another son, John; a daughter, Janine; six grandchildren; and one great-grandson.
By his own assessment, Mr. Beichman was “a centrist, and felt that the left left him,” his son Charles said, adding that his father “never lost his concern for the plight of workers, racism, anti-Semitism.”
Freedom of speech was also a constant cause. In 1934, Mr. Beichman graduated from Columbia, where he had been editor of The Columbia Spectator. That year, when the ambassador from Nazi Germany was invited to speak on campus, Communist students demanded that the newspaper run an editorial calling for the speech to be canceled.
“Beichman said innocently that he wouldn’t do it, on free speech grounds, and also because the ambassador from the Soviet Union had recently been given a Columbia podium,” David Brooks, now a New York Times columnist, wrote in The Weekly Standard in 2003. “The Communists exploded and called Beichman a red-baiter, the first but not the last time that charge would be thrown at him.”
The Stalinist purge trials of the ’30s awoke Mr. Beichman to the reality of Soviet dictatorship. In the United States, he began to see a cynical effort by Communist front organizations to infiltrate labor unions and promote worldwide Communism.
Mr. Beichman wrote for Newsday in the early 1940s and was then hired by PM. He rose to assistant managing editor, but was fired in 1946 in a struggle over the paper’s turn toward the radical left. (PM lasted until 1948.) As a freelance reporter, he covered civil wars in Algeria, Nigeria, Congo and Yemen, as well as the Vietnam War. He also became close to Irving Kristol and other intellectuals who would become leaders of the neoconservative movement.
When he was 48, Mr. Beichman returned to Columbia, earning a master’s degree in political science in 1967 and a Ph.D. in 1973. He went on to teach at the University of Massachusetts, the University of British Columbia, the University of Calgary and Georgetown University.
Socialism is dictatorship, he told Columbia College Today, the alumni magazine, in 2005. “The control of wealth is the control over human life,” he said. “So if a centrally planned economy decides how wealth is to be created and how it is to be distributed, then they really have a control over human life.”
Jim Farmelant http://independent.academia.edu/JimFarmelant
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