SHORT-SIGHTED.(boycott of Sidney Hook symposium)(Brief Article)

COMMENT

DEPT. OF CORRECTIONS

CHIANTI POSTCARD

THE CREATIVE LIFE

BIG NIGHT

On May 23, 1985, Sidney Hook received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Ronald Reagan, along with such distinguished Americans as Chuck Yeager, Frank Sinatra, and Jimmy Stewart. At the time, Hook was eighty-two, and one of the most prominent public intellectuals of his generation. He had spent most of the early part of his career studying Karl Marx, attempting--somewhat quixotically--a fusion of revolutionary theory and American pragmatism, and was a self-described "fellow-traveller." In 1933, he served as the "ideological spokesman" for the American Workers Party, and the next year helped arrange its merger with the country's leading Trotskyist organization, the Communist League of America. In later life, however, Hook flipped, or at least appeared to flip, sides. Eventually, he would defend the rooting out of Communist Party members from government and academia, condemn the anti-democratic tactics of the anti-war movement, and announce his support for, of all people, Richard Nixon. When he was awarded the Medal of Freedom, Hook was a senior research fellow at the Hoover Institution, perhaps the country's most respected conservative think tank.

Hook, who died in 1989, would have been a hundred this year. To mark the occasion, a group of scholars and admirers decided to honor him in New York in the fall with a two-day symposium, "Sidney Hook Reconsidered." Prominent in the group were some of the country's leading neoconservative thinkers: Irving Kristol, a founding editor of The Public Interest; Gertrude Himmelfarb, the historian; and Hilton Kramer, the editor and publisher of The New Criterion. Recently, however, Kristol, Himmelfarb, and Kramer, along with John Patrick Diggins, a professor of history at the CUNY Graduate Center, told the organizers that they no longer wished to be associated with the event in any way. "I had never been presented with a list of participants," Kramer later told The Chronicle of Higher Education, explaining his decision not to attend. "When I saw that Cornel West was a participant, I decided that it wouldn't be appropriate."