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Friday, April 26, 1985

THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS

guilty of a form of unconscious racism, ac-
cording to Zion. New York Times colmnist
Anthony Lewis, he said, "never writes
about how terrible it is when Arabs kill
Arabs or blacks kill blacks because he ex-
pects them to, and that's racism.
E'veryone blamed Israel for the Sabra and
Shatilla massacres because people felt
Lebanon is a zoo and the Israelis are the
caretakers and hey, you let the animals kill
each other, you let it happen. But that's
not the point. If you care about human
rights, you've got to care about everyone
and you've got to scrutinize everyone.
Believe me, the double standard is alive
and well."
Zion applies those same standards to
Israel. If it is wrong to mix church and
state in the U.S., he said, it's wrong in
Israel as well. "The set-up over there is a
fake," he says. "Israel is a theocracy run
by atheists."
He has much harsher words for Ameri-
can Jewish leaders, believing that the
myriad U.S. Jewish organizations are not
only useless: they are dangerous. "The
organizations don't do us any good," he
said. "I resent them because they only get
us in trouble" with the concept of "spokes-
men" for the Jewish community. He calls
the members of the Conference of Presi-
dents of Major American Jewish Organi-
zations "court Jews" who stand "hat in
hand" in the corridors of power.
Quoting Ben Hecht, Zion adds that the
trouble with American Jewish leaders is
that they always salute those who do not
deign to return their salute.
Zion has a visceral dislike of FDR, Harry
Truman and Adlai Stevenson, all of whom
he regards as anti-Jewish. He cannot
tolerate those who defend them by citing
their attributes or accomplishments. "I
hate it when people say, 'Yes, Roosevelt
didn't save the Jews of Europe, but on the
other hand he did this or he did that,' "
says Zion, his voice rising. "To me, there
is no other hand. What other hand? Would
people say, 'Well, Huey Long was a racist
but he built nice highways.' That's in-
tolerable."
Zion's interests clearly put Jews first.
He has no problem acknowledging that
fact. "Dual loyalty is not a false issue," he
says, "because there is dual loyalty among
American Jews and we shouldn't be afraid
of it. I love America more than I love
Israel, but I love Jews more than anything
else."

e also loves the work he
does, and it's hard to
believe that he wasn't born
to be a journalist, having
chanced upon his writing
career at the age of 29. Let
Zion explain how he got in
to the newspaper business because he tells
it best.
"When I tried criminal cases as a hid

lawyer in New Jersey," he writes in his
long introduction to Read All About It!,
a collection of some of his best reporting,
"I noticed that my clients had certain
things in common. All of them were broke,
all of them were innocent, and when asked
how come the cops put the grab on them,
they all said, 'I dunno, I wasn't doin'
nothin' — I was just standin' around.'
"I give the same answer to people who
wonder how I got to be a newspaperman."
A native of Passaic, New Jersey with a
strong Jewish identity that he calls the
flip-side of Philip Roth — "the idea of

"Jews always worry
about anti-Semitism
and what the goyim
will think of them.
Maybe Jews really
believe they're not
as good as the next
guy. But I sure as
hell don't feel that
way. Jews shouldn't
be scared anymore.
Never scared. They
should be mad:'

being ashamed of one's Jewish heritage
was beyond the pale" — Zion graduated
from Yale Law School and became a crim-
inal attorney, with plans to become a trial
lawyer. But his life changed late on a
December night in 1962, only a few days
before his wedding, when journalist Victor
Navasky, a buddy of his from Yale Law
School, asked Zion to write a parody of
columnist Murray Kempton for a special
parody of the New York Post which at the
time was closed by a newspaper strike, as
were the other dailies in New York.
A newspaper buff and admirer of Kemp-
ton, Zion agreed. His piece was such a big
hit that the Post's managing editor, Al
Davis, offered him a job.
Zion was stunned.
"Of course, I dismissed the idea" he
later wrote. "Of course, ten minutes later
I called Al Davis. The secret Navasky
spotted was that I wanted to be Ben
Hecht long before I wanted to be Clarence
Darrow."
Zion hooked up with the Post, which he
describes as right , out of Ben Hecht's
Front Page, and was soon exposed to "the
dirtiest secret of journalism: Self-Cen-
sorship." Some of Zion's best work for the
Post ended up "on the spike" (unpublish-

ed), like his expose on the 1964 New York
World's Fair, proving it would be a finan-
cial disaster. Everything he'd predicted
came true but his series never ran because
the Fair's organizers advertised heavily in
the Post .
A year later, Zion was hired by "the up-
town Lady," the New York Times, where
he worked for almost five years, loving
every minute of it. ("I never worked for the
Times," he wrote, "I was a kid on a car-
ousel.") But Zion grew restless. He re-
signed from the Times in 1969, on his 36th
birthday, to start his own magazine, Scan-
lan's Monthly, now best remembered for
how it ended a little more than a year later.
Zion and his partner, Warren Hinckle,
whom he describes as "the eye-patched,
bad-boy editor of Ramparts," a left-wing
magazine, had decided to launch a big,
brassy muckraking monthly that would
set the journalism world on its ear. But
Scanlan's had troubles from day one.
Printers refused to print it, distributors
wouldn't distribute it. Only later did Zion
find out, courtesy. of John Dean's mem-
oirs, that Richard Nixon himself had or-
dered Dean, then counsel to the President,
to go after Scanlan's in part because it had
published a memo from Vice President
Agnew that referred to Rand Corporation
studies to cancel the 1972 national elec-
tions and repeal the Bill of Rights.
Scanlan's continued to go after the
Nixon Administration — the magazine ran
an "Impeach Nixon" cover long before
Watergate — and the Administration con-
tinued to go after Scanlan's, putting the
IRS on the backs of the magazine's pro-
moters.
The Administration won.
Scanlan's lasted only eight issues, but
Zion says he is proud of them and he's
never looked back.
The next chapter of Zion's life is one of
the most unpleasant for him, but it's part
he's best remembered for. Indeed, as Zion
notes, his obituary will probably label him
as the man who "fingered" Daniel Ellsberg
in the Pentagon Papers. It all came about
because of a gentleman's bet Zion made
with his newspaper colleagues.
In June 1971, soon after Scanlan's fold-
ed, Zion was working on a piece for the
Sunday New York Times Magazine and,
while in the newsroom, word came that a
federal judge had issued a temporary order
restraining the Times from continuing
publication of the Pentagon Papers, which
had begun two days earlier. Zion, with
typical bravado, told his buddies he'd find
out by the next day what everyone wanted
to know: namely, who leaked the Papers
to the Times.
After only a few well-placed calls the
next morning, Zion came up with the name
"Daniel Ellsberg" and he confirmed it with
two sources. Realizing he had a hot story
and no one to sell it to — he was free-
lancing at the time — Zion went on a

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