Middle-Aged Rebel

The phone rings at the Washington Post. "Hello? Yes, this is Nicholas von Hoffman. You want to do a story about me? Hey, great! Every time somebody does one, I hit the paper for another raise. I tell them, 'Look at that. I'm getting famous.' "

The conversation is the essential Von Hoffman. Irreverent, breezy, arrogant, selfconscious, Nicholas von Hoffman has deliberately established himself as a completely subjective reporter. The Post has given him carte blanche to go anywhere and write anything, and three times a week the results go off resoundingly. For Von Hoffman has style; his literate wit and uncompromising outlook make him a sort of William F. Buckley of the New Left.

Teeny Judge. Von Hoffman is many things. He is the only really radical reporter working regularly for a major American newspaper. His writing is compelling, and although he often gets carried away by his own black sense of humor, his thinking is lucid. He is attuned to what is going on among the young, the black and the poor today. Almost by definition (and certainly by self-admission), he is biased about everything. His pieces slash away at Viet Nam, complacent politicians, the medical profession, radio journalism, big companies, the pretensions of the "Now People."

President Nixon is rarely referred to by name; instead, he is "what's-his-face," "whosis," and "the Great Kiwani." The kidnaping of the U.S. Ambassador to Brazil is interpreted as "a unique opportunity for a diplomat to get out of the embassy compound and rub elbows with the common people, cultural exchange, that kind of thing." A congressional committee meeting in its ornate chambers to investigate a student uprising is like "chasing S.D.S. across America in an 1890 Pullman car." Judge Julius Hoffman of the Chicago conspiracy trial is "the teeny judge, who bounces up and down on his bench so that he looks like a small girl in an oversized dress playing in her father's chair." Says Von Hoffman: "I don't want people to think I'm an affable eccentric, so from time to time I get vicious."

Sometimes he gets so vicious that even the gamely liberal management of the Post has to wince. "They're very admirable about it," Von Hoffman says. "They just grit their teeth and look a little doe-eyed when I take on their friends, like John Gardner." Gardner, head of the Urban Coalition and something of a saint to the liberal press, became a Hoffman target after he wrote an article criticizing young demonstrators. Von Hoffman called the Gardner article a "lawnorder pep talk."

Fustian Soirees. The answer to the most commonly asked question about Von Hoffman is that he is 40. Only his writing has faded bell-bottoms and beads. His faint-striped suits are from Brooks Brothers (with cuffs). With his almost white hair combed straight back and struggling to edge down over his shirt collar and his delicately pale skin, he more resembles an aristocratic Prussian officer than a commune leader. Something of a bon vivant, he swings with more of an old-fashioned zest for good wine, women, song and conversation than with any new lifestyle. He used to be a regular guest, for instance, at the elegant Establishment soirees of fustian Columnist Joseph Alsop, once even offering to wear a dinner jacket if Alsop would invite Stokely Carmichael. (Neither ever happened.)

Von Hoffman was a late arrival in the swagger set, and though amused by his new milieu, he was unshakably radicalized before he got there. Born and raised in the U.S., he finished high school in Manhattan, then drifted to Chicago. He married at 19 (three children, divorced) and worked for nine years as a low-paid assistant to Sociologist Saul Alinsky, organizing community action groups in poor neighborhoods. "In a sense, Saul brought me up," he says, "and I finally had to leave home." Starting at the Chicago Daily News, he earned a reputation as a first-class, if distressingly partisan reporter. Out of two assignments, the universities and the civil rights movement in the South, Von Hoffman wrote perceptive books and landed a job on the Post in 1966. "But there was always a question," he says, "of what to do with this idiot who seemed incapable of writing what fit into their definition of straight news."

The solution came a year ago when the Post decided to create its "Style" section to cover fashion, features, fads and entertainment news. Von Hoffman's articles are defensively labeled "a commentary," but he boasts that "all the fine print in the world isn't going to save them." As things now stand, the Post is not in a saving mood. Von Hoffman adds zing to the paper and provides a point of view its readers would not ordinarily see.

The phone rings at the Post. "Hey, man," says Von Hoffman gleefully. "The Today show just called and the Dick Cavett Show wants me. I'm getting famouser, and I can be just as cheap a celebrity as everyone else. Believe me, if I can do it, there isn't a kid in America who can't." And he laughs.

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