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I 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 Hentoff

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Nat Hentoff
Age: 91 †
Born: 1925
Born: June 10
Died: 2017
Died: January 7
Columnist
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Historian
Journalist
Music Critic
Music Historian
Music Journalist
Novelist
Record Producer
Boston
Massachusetts
Nat
Nathan Irving Hentoff
Nathan Hentoff
People
Walk
Walks
Fairy
Went
Tales
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Library
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Christ
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Life
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I was in the back of the book [in the The Reporter] doing music.
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[Barack Obama to be] much worse [than George W. Bush].
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I knew A.J. Muste very well. I tried for a while to be like he was, and that is a total pacifist. But then Margot [my wife] hit me hard in the stomach one day to prove to me that I wasn't as perfect a pacifist as I thought I was.
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I think one thing we share [with my wife] is a complete bottomless disdain for Bill Clinton.
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Malcolm X made it very clear that if somebody goes after you - whether it's cops or not - you have to defend yourself. But he was not an advocate for violence the way the Black Panthers were.
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This book, Speaking Freely, starts when I came to New York. And the first chapter is about a man who became a friend of mine, much to our mutual surprise, Malcolm X.
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I met [my wife Margot] on Fire Island when I had a house there many years ago.
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[My father] was very impressed when he saw Death of a Salesman, I must say. He recognized himself to some extent.
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If [Bill Shawn] liked the piece, then he would run it. But he wanted the magazine to be something that was more than just a weekly event. And as a result you could pick up a New Yorker under him, as I mentioned before, a year from then or 10 years or 20 years and there would always be something worth reading in it.
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I've been reading since I could read, which was about four or five years old.
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I don't think [Bill Clinton] does anything - I don't think it's ill will. I don't think he's evil in the sense that he hates the Bill of Rights. He does what he figures will help him politically.
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Inside that quietude there was the firmest of wills. [Bill Shawn] knew exactly what he wanted to do.
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That [race] is still part of what [Barack Obama] is riding on. Except that, too, is diminishing.
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Bob Dylan was uncomfortable being known as just a protest singer. He wanted to go back into himself and do what he wanted to do when he wanted to do it.
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When I was a kid in Boston, it was one of the most anti-Semitic cities in the country. If you were living in the ghetto as I was, the Jewish ghetto part of Roxbury, and you went out alone at night, you might be subject to having people attacking you for being a Christ killer.
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The habeas corpus business, that's to show that he [Bill Clinton] is not tough on crime.
Nat Hentoff
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The second wife [Trudi Bernstein] - the best part of that union, our two daughters, and that lasted about five years.
Nat Hentoff
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I grew up in a household in which we had a clock that we won at Revere Beach during the Depression - one of those brass clocks that didn't work - but it showed Franklin D. Roosevelt standing at the wheel of the New Deal.
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We are going to have a long period where people are accustomed or conditioned to what's going on now with the raping of the Fourth Amendment.
Nat Hentoff
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However, I never thought that [George W.] Bush himself was, in any sense, evil.
Nat Hentoff