This is a story about two publishers–an old-fashioned socialist and a Silicon Valley techno-millionaire–and one proud but obscure magazine. It is set in Chicago and Berkeley, Calif. It involves a leap of faith.
The magazine is called In These Times. It was founded 25 years ago by the old-fashioned socialist, James Weinstein. You have likely never heard of this left-wing political journal or its founder. Weinstein was never very good at promotion.
In These Times is assembled in a converted watch factory at 2040 N. Milwaukee Ave. It is known for its feisty “We’ll write about it if you won’t” approach to all things political. It was the magazine that made a point of covering the labor movement in the 1970s when everyone else–Time, Newsweek, The Nation, Mother Jones–was chasing other, sexier stories. It is the magazine that almost died a half-dozen times for lack of money and readers; the magazine that looked like a newspaper; the publication that somehow goads established journalists such as G. Pascal Zachary of The Wall Street Journal to write for 10 cents a word when they could be earning 25 times that somewhere else; the publication that started out socialist and became progressive.
Mayor Harold Washington read In These Times. Folk singer Pete Seeger still reads it and sends in quirky handwritten notes with banjo doodles. Matt Groening, creator of “The Simpsons,” reads it, as do author-intellectuals Noam Chomsky and Barbara Ehrenreich, and the 20,000 or so public-affairs junkies who think In These Times is the finest, most unfettered source of news analysis America’s got. According to one contributor, “In These Times is the antidote to the somnambulism and genuflecting dreck that comprise national magazines.” That is how devotees talk when they talk about In These Times.
But there are not enough subscribers to pay the cost of producing the magazine (more than half of revenue comes from donations) and their numbers are down to 20,000 from a peak of 50,000 in the mid-1980s, when the magazine was hot on the Iran-contra trail and Jesse Jackson seemed like someone to watch.
Enter Bob Burnett, the techno-millionaire, who took over In These Times last September as an “opportunity to help rebuild the progressive movement, something I believe to be of vital importance.” Burnett thinks it’s abysmal that so few Americans have heard of the magazine. He believes something should be done. So he’s whipping up a miracle right now to make things right. As a co-founder of Cisco Systems, the industry leader in computer networking products with $23.8 billion in revenue, Burnett is quite capable of a miracle.
Since taking over the magazine, the 60-year-old retiree has been working out a grand circulation scheme that will spread In These Times’ gospel from Silicon Valley to Cicero and beyond. It’s called–here comes the leap of faith–“Secret Plan X.” That is the name magazine staffers have given it. Burnett prefers “The Plan” or “The Program.”
Burnett will not reveal the who and how of Secret Plan X. Not yet. The players aren’t in place, he says, or the parts have not arrived. He is so tight-lipped that not even the magazine’s staff, suspicious by their lefty natures, know what he is planning.
Not to worry, Burnett says. He doesn’t want to change Jim Weinstein’s vision for the magazine, he just wants to update it. Among other things, that means changing the look, publishing more frequently, paying for more investigative stories and appealing to new readers. Hundreds of thousands of them. The left is bigger than we think, Burnett says; we just have to find its silent members. And when he finds them, when Burnett can get Secret Plan X off the ground, he promises, the country will be talking about In These Times.
Burnett wants the new magazine, now published biweekly on newsprint and buried in periodical oblivion at the back of Barnes & Noble newsstands, to be the vehicle that changes left-wing politics forever, just as Weinstein hoped it would when he started In These Times 25 years ago. It will spell the end of sectarian infighting; it will shore up the left’s splintered platform. Burnett has already begun talking to pollsters and analyzing Voter News Service data to figure out why white males are fleeing the Democratic Party. In his grand scheme–the part Burnett will talk about–the magazine will not just disseminate news from the progressive camps but also develop and reflect an updated vision for the left. When defining the left, there should be a better answer than “not the right,” he says.
“When we talk about the left, we talk about an antiquated vision,” Burnett says. “There’s nothing wrong with updating that vision, but no one has done it yet.”
Jim Weinstein is not at the magazine’s office in Chicago much anymore. It’s Burnett’s show now, he says. But at 74, Weinstein is hardly retired; he is working on a book, “What Ever Happened to Socialism,” his fifth on the subject.
A few weeks ago, Weinstein agreed to meet at a restaurant on Ashland Avenue for an interview. He picked the place for its proximity to one of the early In These Times offices at 1300 W. Belmont Ave. A nearby billboard, he points out during a drive after lunch, once advertised: “In These Times–You Can’t Find It Anywhere Else.” He jokes that “Else” was always unnecessary.
Weinstein looks like a cross between Jason Robards in “All the President’s Men” and Mel Brooks in anything. He talks with the gotcha! irony of a Catskills comedian. He is the sort of person who will drive halfway across the country for his favorite dim sum because “America is the greatest country in the world, and I want to see it.”
Weinstein begins lunch with a few warm-up stories from his youth. He tells the one about the time he inadvertently gave Julius Rosenberg a lift in his car and how that led to more than a decade of FBI surveillance and Weinstein’s very own 2,400-page FBI file. And he told the one about the day at the television factory in New York when he lost his job as a shop steward because, according to the union agent, “James, we’ve had more trouble since you arrived than in all the 25 years before you got here.”
To keep up with Weinstein’s more germane anecdotes requires a quick review of American history. The year In These Times began, 1976, Alex Haley published “Roots” and South Vietnam had fallen the year before to its communist neighbors after a decade of American-led warfare to prevent the takeover. These milestones, as well as the election of Jimmy Carter, who espoused a peace-loving, human-rights agenda, seemed to indicate that the country was turning left and giving up its combative tendencies.
Weinstein was ready to leave academia and start a magazine devoted to politics, believing that the activists who had fought for civil rights and an end to the Vietnam War would need a place to come home, a place where all the disparate factions of the left (New Left, Old Left, Socialist Left, Radical Left, Marxist Left, SDS, NAM, SDOC, and on and on) could come together under one umbrella. By then he had studied under Richard Hofstadter at Columbia, arguably the best liberal historian of the Roosevelt-Eisenhower years, and begun his first book, “Ambiguous Legacy: The Left in American Politics.” He also had flipped from communist to socialist.
He envisioned In These Times as a magazine that championed new movements in keeping with the philosophy of left-wing American politics and culture and cut across a broad spectrum of issues: labor, gender, nuclear weapons, the environment. “I wanted to be accessible, not ‘a magazine for the rest of us,’ which was Mother Jones’ tagline then. They didn’t seem interested in influencing the mainstream left. We wouldn’t exclude people on the basis of ‘political correctness,’ ” Weinstein says. “People said I was crazy. For at least three years, I thought I was.”
He started the magazine in Chicago because, he says, “it’s hard to be in Chicago and not know what the American people are thinking.”
Turns out, Weinstein misread the signs and Chicagoans. What looked like the dawn of a new liberal era turned out to be just the opposite, “the Indian summer of liberalism,” according to former In These Times staff member John Judis, who was there in 1976 when the magazine began. Judis remembers the Republican electoral success four years later and how ill-prepared In These Times was to handle it.
Assigned to cover the GOP convention in Detroit in 1980, he went to a bar in Macomb County to sound out grass-roots opinion. “Several of the guys at the bar had been laid off from Chrysler,” he recalls. “They were classic proletarians, the kind of guys we imagined would be at the forefront of a new left-wing movement, but they were talking about welfare cheaters and how Carter was letting them down and how Reagan was the guy who was going to get things done.
“I wrote two stories, one about the convention and a sidebar about the scene at the bar. My editors snuffed the sidebar out. ‘All these guys sound like Archie Bunker,’ they said. . . . Folks on the left were reluctant to believe that their beloved working class was moving right, was becoming Reagan Democrats. . . . The magazine and history were at cross-purposes from the beginning.”
But Weinstein was stubborn. He didn’t pack up his ideology and head back to academia. Instead, he and his young staff dug in. David Moberg, on staff from the beginning and still going, became famous for his labor reporting. Judis, now a New Republic pundit, became the man to listen to on Capitol Hill. Salim Muwakkil, whose column now appears in the Tribune, continues to write about issues of race. Weinstein filled his magazine with powerful, freelance voices from the left: Lawrence Weschler, Nadine Gordimer, Alice Walker, Philip Gourevitch, Ehrenreich, Zachary. He hired young, energetic editors who wanted to learn and to write what they thought, editors who could handle a late paycheck now and then.
Headlines upbraided and pronounced: “Labor Movement–Stuck but Stirring.” “The FBI Campaign Against Women.” “Illegal Aliens: The New Scapegoat.” “Poverty in the Gilded Age.” Just enough money trickled in to keep the issues coming.
Though his approach was provocative, Weinstein insists that In These Times is not about hype. “Asking about our big stories misses the point of what the magazine is about,” he says. “We’re not a magazine of big moments.” After he says this a half-dozen times, one starts to wonder if Weinstein derives a measure of satisfaction from the obscurity of his magazine, if he considers it a mark of editorial integrity that he did not sully the solemnity of the content with circulation-building stunts.
The magazine’s design would support this pride-of-obscurity theory. Several contributors said a redesign needs to be on Burnett’s agenda. In These Times is about as polished and up-to-date in design as a voters manual, though the cover graphics are sometimes adventurous. A recent cover featured a photo of George W. Bush with grafted-on fangs and the headline “Bush II: The Return” written in bleeding horror-movie-style font.
Weinstein has this to say about putting his legacy into the hands of a big-bucks businessman: “My reaction to Bob was, ‘Thank God.’ I started this magazine an editor and ended up a beggar. For 23 years I thought: One of these days someone is going to come along with several million dollars and say, ‘This is what I want to spend it on.’ “
Bob Burnett began reading In These Times almost 20 years ago. He was an unconventional WASP, then as now, programming computers by day and volunteering by night, joining peace rallies or civic groups that promoted socially responsible business practices. He wrote an occasional letter to the editor of In These Times. About a year ago, after more formal introductions, he was invited to write a guest column, then another.
He attended last year’s Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles and wrote disapprovingly of nominee Al Gore and the centrists in charge of the party, asserting that the left degenerates the closer the party moves to the center.
“We on the left seem to revel in our pluralism,” he observed. “Witness the amazing number of causes on parade during the protests in L.A. (‘Make the minimum wage a living wage,’ ‘Don’t wear fur,’ ‘Sanction same-sex marriages’). Pluralism is a strength but also a weakness. It confuses those outside the left who fail to understand what we stand for. And as a result, the media tend to marginalize us.”
He also took stock of the Republican nominee, describing George W. Bush as having “the campaign of Clinton, the soul of Nixon and the mind of Quayle.”
The magazine’s board liked what it was reading. Burnett liked being a part of In These Times. An offer was made, and Burnett took over.
Burnett sees nothing odd in his big-business pedigree and his affinity for leftist politics and magazines like In These Times. “My general feeling is that Jim Weinstein and I were twins separated at birth . . . even though he’s a Jew from New York and I’m a WASP from Newport Beach.”
To be specific, Burnett is a Quaker. It is an important distinction, because much of his political conviction derives from his proud membership in the Religious Society of Friends. He refers to Quakers often when he speaks and writes.
“I don’t think that it is possible to understand why I do what I do, without understanding that I am a Quaker. The problem with saying this is that most people have never been to a Quaker meeting and don’t have a practical understanding of what it means to be a Quaker. For example, Quakers believe in deep equality–that there is “that of God” in every person–and that all life is sacred.
By extension, Quakers also believe in social activism. William Penn, founder of Pennsylvania, and Susan B. Anthony, the suffragist, were some of the more famous Quaker activists. They behaved as doctrine prescribed: “True godliness [doesn’t] turn men out of the world, but enables them to live better in it and excites their endeavors to mend it.”
Burnett works out of his home in Berkeley and has no plans to move to Chicago, though he occasionally puts in some face time with the staff on Milwaukee Avenue. “I have a lot of power and they don’t know me,” Burnett says.
Staff members may not know what to make of their new boss, but they are keenly aware of his “presence” day-to-day.
That was apparent during a recent visit to a Monday editorial meeting. The walk to the office from the Damen “L” stop follows a gritty stretch of Milwaukee Avenue strewn with empty liquor bottles and discarded McDonald’s cups stuffed in rusted-out mailboxes. Loitering is an occupation here. In These Times looks out over this scene in an almost too-neat juxtaposition: The intellectual fervor of a Bad News Bears team of journalists upstairs and the desperation they hope to one day remedy just outside.
The inside resembles a dance studio, open and light with exposed beams and worn wood floors. Framed covers of the magazine’s most popular issues herald the years gone by. . . Ronald Reagan dressed in Western gear with the headline, “Can This Man Be Stopped?”
The staff, fewer than 10 bodies, most under age 30, has gathered around a rectangular table to hammer out story ideas for the coming months. They are graduates of Berkeley, Northwestern, Brown and Oberlin. According to Zachary, it’s the best editorial team in more than a decade, and the magazine is exhibiting a new vitality. (Finding young talent has always been Jim Weinstein’s gift. His prize finds include Lee Aitken, who went to Time and, later, The New Yorker; Chris Lehmann, now book editor of The Washington Post; and Joan Walsh, senior editor at Salon).
Burnett is piped into the meeting on speaker phone. There is talk of hitting up liberal Sen. Paul Wellstone for a piece on campaign finance reform. Bob wants something on Russian President Vladimir Putin and geopolitics, or perhaps a think-piece on Republican Sen. John McCain as the Democrats’ cloaked savior. There is mumbling and arguing and pontificating. It is an impressive show.
After about an hour, Burnett raises the topic of faith-based politics. It is something he has been thinking about for a while. He’d like to do a special faith-based issue. He has already spoken to the Council of Churches, and he thinks they could provide 300,000 new readers. The staff starts to fidget. They’ve never printed 300,000 magazines at once. They wonder if members of the Council of Churches will stick with the magazine after the faith-based issue comes out. Burnett thinks so. These folks share In These Times’ concerns: a living wage, weapons build-ups, the growing power of multinational corporations.
At lunch after the meeting, the staff members make a confession: Bob makes them nervous. He has been their publisher only a short while. They have met him only a few times. True, he has raised their salaries 10 to 15 percent, and he says the magazine may soon go weekly and glossy, and that someday soon they could see their own pundits on the national stage. CNN even. Still, they have doubts.
Burnett is nothing like Jim Weinstein, they say. He seems so, well, California. By that they mean “warm and fuzzy, and unbelievably optimistic” while they and Weinstein remain “skeptical and jaded.” They admit they are skittish when editing his Publisher’s Notes. They wonder what would happen if they disagreed with something he wrote. Is he just a rich guy who thought saving a non-profit political rag would assuage his sense of white, liberal guilt? They’ve heard that story before. The minute the guilt is gone, the money is gone.
Mostly they wonder why Burnett picked them instead of The Nation or Mother Jones, the “popular” lefty magazines with 100,000-plus circulations. He’s just such a mystery.
Burnett is sitting in his living room overlooking San Francisco Bay when I ask him why a wealthy executive who spent his middle years wiring the world would take over a left-wing publication that claims fewer subscribers than most art-house theaters. He smiles at the suggestion that it couldn’t be successful, and offers an explanation that is pure In These Times: “Capitalism tends to drain meaning from life by substituting marketplace values for human values. A way to respond to this is to attack its mythic structure: the myth of the unregulated marketplace; the myth of corporations as a person, which is a particularly pernicious expression of materialism; the myth of the level playing field. I want to talk about what activists are doing at the grass-roots level, how working families are fighting back to preserve what is human and sacred in their lives.”
In his first column as publisher, Burnett said he acquired the magazine because of its “strong tradition of speaking the truth . . . whether through investigative reporting or merely talking about what lies in the shadows of American society.”
Burnett’s big Berkeley house is a montage of pinks and reds and yellows and greens, the colors of his Southwestern paintings and the tribal masks that hang on the walls like a Gauguin dream. It is a home that suggests a culturally curious, well-to-do family, the sort you always hoped to be invited to after school to stare at the framed comic strips (one of the largest collections in the country) and taste tofu for the first time.
Shelves along the walls are heavy with books that inform Burnett’s world. Works by Gandhi and Tolstoy. “Moral Politics” by George Lakoff. “Imagine: What America Could Be in the 21st Century,” edited by Marianne Williamson. Burnett reads several books each week in addition to The Economist, The New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, and all of In These Times’ competition.
Burnett’s wife, Kathy, is a psychotherapist. They met when he answered her personal ad in a newspaper. Before she agreed to marry him, Kathy made Bob take a Myers-Briggs personality test. He turned out to be an ENFJ: extroverted, intuitive, feeling and judging. It is a rare profile for a technologist, Kathy says. People with that profile often become ministers or politicians.
Born in Hollywood, Burnett grew up in a tract home in Newport Beach, near Los Angeles. He had his own room and his own surfboard, which he took to the beach nearly every day. Bob’s father owned a store and his mother worked as a nurse.
“Two things that you should know about,” he says. “When I was 34, my father had a severe heart attack and came within a whisper of death. I vowed that if he lived, I would make sure that he and I developed a close relationship. He survived and we became very close. When I was 36, my first wife left the family and I suddenly was the single parent responsible for raising three children, who were 6, 9 and 12 at the time. This also changed me.”
Burnett was a stellar student, not only scoring a perfect 800 on the math portion of the SAT, but also pointing out an error in the test that proctors later acknowledged. Stanford snapped him up. By age 19, he was married. He joined the anti-war movement. He introduced friends to the musical virtues of Janis Joplin, John Coltrane and Taj Mahal. “We were ’60s children, ingrained with values of equality, fair play and being in the moment,” says Burnett’s oldest friend, Marylu Dowling.
After Stanford, in 1962, Burnett considered going to law school and took a job as a probation officer to observe the legal profession in action. After a while, he started to notice patterns in the records of his delinquent parolees and took a data-processing class at night to see if computer technology could help him sort through the numbers. That got him hooked on computers. The year was 1964, long before the industry, as we know it, took off.
He put in six years at Burroughs (now Unisys), contributing to the first commercially viable, multi-tasking operating system. Later, at IBM and other companies, he helped build the first modern tester for semiconductors and the largest digital branch exchange.
He became known as the fix-it guy around Silicon Valley, the person to call when a project needed rescuing. He was Cisco’s founding vice president of engineering, but his role was not defined and he liked it that way. “I was not bound by a conventional job description,” he says, and that allowed him to free-associate about how Cisco might do business. He prophesied certain market behaviors, and his prophecies turned out to be right. Cisco and Burnett were generously rewarded. Burnett will not give a number for his net worth, but says he counts himself among the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans.
On paper, Burnett looked like a typical privileged corporate executive. Even Joel Yudken, one of his closest friends and a longtime liberal, admits being suspicious of Burnett when they met back in the ’70s in Palo Alto. Yudken had just quit his engineering job to become a radical activist, and Burnett was climbing the corporate ladder. They met at a better-business-practices meeting.
“Bob is a very unusual character,” says Yudken, echoing an often-heard assessment among Burnett’s friends and associates. “He knows how the world works. He has proven that in the business world. But Bob’s not threatened by personal exploration. He has a genuine concern about people and the human condition.”
In 1991, after eight years at Cisco, Burnett resigned over what the company termed differences in management style. Burnett is vague on this point. He was just “more a product of the anti-war movement than corporate America,” he wrote in his first Publisher’s Notes column for In These Times. At 50, after all those years of after-work activism, he could finally commit, full time, to the causes closest to him. He helped found Responsible Wealth, a group that addresses the growing economic divide in the United States. He became chairman of Berkeley Youth Alternatives, the most comprehensive children’s center in the Bay area.
Burnett discovered Berkeley Youth Alternatives while pursuing the top issue on his philanthropy list–the homeless–and In These Times staff members who worry about the depth of his commitment might view it as a case study.
He approached the task at the Berkeley center the way he approached his Silicon Valley career and everything else in life. Research. Legwork. Face-to-face contact. He interviewed homeless children and adults in his community, asking them what they needed to get off the streets and repair their emotional lives. Then he set about building the kind of shelters they described.
Ten years later, the recreation center, formerly a bakery warehouse, serves hundreds of mostly poor, mostly black kids in a neighborhood about 10 minutes from Burnett’s house in the Berkeley hills. He is still actively involved in the center, serving as chairman of the board.
“Bob is an extremely persistent problem solver,” says Jeffrey Klein, a founder of Mother Jones magazine and now head of a technology start-up firm in Berkeley that Burnett is advising. “He’s got the heart of an engineer. He derives pleasure out of solving obdurate problems and persisting.”
Klein has tracked Burnett’s business and philanthropic activities for years and is intrigued by his new role as publisher of In These Times. “There’s a delusion to all political magazines, you know. They want to think big and they believe that the power of exposing truth, as they see it, will cause the sky to open up and the political landscape to change. They are generally underfunded and have a tendency to preach to the converted instead of speaking to broader audiences.”
But, says Klein, Burnett is an unusual guy. “The delusion is just the shadow side of inspiration, and Bob is capable of preserving the inspiration while attending to the delusion with financial engineering and circulation outreach.”
That seems to be the essence of Secret Plan X, which, friends agree, Burnett will fight for until the deed is done, until In These Times has “caused the sky to open up.”
Burnett once remarked that sometimes he can’t believe he’s 60 years old and has been in the computer business half his life. “It doesn’t seem possible that I’ve seen every generation of computer. The same problems have existed the whole time,” he said. “Making it understandable to people is the fundamental issue.”
Just what Jim Weinstein said about politics.
