Old Left, New Broom

Fresh out of Carleton College and fortified with a letter of introduction from one of his professors, Thomas B. Morgan came to New York City in 1949 for an interview at an earnest little journal of ideas called Politics. "You've got a job," said Editor Dwight Macdonald, handing Morgan a broom. "Sweep out the room. We just folded."

This week Morgan will buy his own journal of ideas, The Nation, America's oldest continuously published weekly (founded in 1865). The magazine has always been slightly to the left of American journalism, and often out in front. The Nation blew the whistle five months before the event on CIA preparations for the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion--to little avail--and published the first article on automobile safety by a young lawyer named Ralph Nader. Publisher James J. Storrow Jr., who has owned the magazine since 1965, put it on the block early this year, after the retirement of longtime Editor Carey McWilliams. "It was time to turn it over to someone who is younger and has more energy," says Storrow, now 60.

Morgan, 50, is married to a Rockefeller (Nelson's younger daughter, Mary), has worked at Esquire and New York and, until last month, was editor of the Village Voice. Morgan says he will retain Editor Blair Clark, 59, to write the paper's editorials. He intends to raise freelance rates, attract more big-name political writers, and try to give The Nation something it has lacked for all but a handful of its 111 years: a profit. "My goal is to run it in the black," says Morgan. "It has always been an independent journal of ideas, and it will continue to be. I have been thinking about this for 25 years."

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