I like [John Cardinal O'Connor] a lot. He - I started a - to know him - when I asked William Shawn at The New Yorker, `Sh - can I do a profile of Cardinal O'Connor?' He said, `All right. Find out what he's like.' So I went to his office, and I heard somebody - and it turned out to be O'Connor - yelling outside, and I've never heard him since raise his voice.
Nat Hentoff[A.J. Muste] was from Michigan and he grew up in the Dutch Reform Church there, which is a fairly strict church. He later came to New York. He was the minister of a labor temple in the - on the East Side. Then he founded, to my knowledge, the first, maybe the only, labor school; that is, Cornell has a labor department and other schools. But this was a school for - entirely for labor organizers, and he was the - the chairman.
Nat HentoffWhen I speak to students, I tell them why we have a First Amendment. I tell them about the Committees of Correspondence. I tell them how in a secret meeting of the Raleigh Tavern in Virginia, Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry, who did not agree with each other, started a Committee of Correspondence.
Nat HentoffI was very much against the Vietnam War, and Max Askeli was visiting Lyndon Johnson in the White House cheering him on, writing editorials. And in The Voice one day I once referred to him as Commander Askeli. And I called in to The Reporter to go over the galleys of a music piece I had written, and the editor whispered to me, `It's not gonna run. You're not gonna run. Max Askeli has fired you because of what you said about him.'
Nat HentoffI went to the library as soon as I could walk. So the training came from reading all kinds of people, from fairy tales and later on to - I don't know why - Schweitz's "Life of Christ."
Nat HentoffI have I guess 3 passions. One is the Constitution. The other is jazz and the other is being an atheist prolifer which, of course, gets me in a lot of trouble - all of which combines into free expression.
Nat HentoffI got a letter one day from somebody saying, `You're always criticizing the press. Why don't you talk about what Clay Felker is doing to your own paper [The Voice]?' And my 10-year-old son Tom, now with Williams & Connelly, put in a legal opinion, not - an opinion from the back of the car saying, `You know why? What are you, afraid?' So I wrote the column. I - you know, - the column simply said that Felker is destroying this paper.
Nat Hentoff