My unlikely bridge to the right

A few years ago, I worked for a struggling dot-com in Manhattan whose work force was almost uniformly liberal. Given my conservative orientation, I saw little sense in getting involved in workplace political discussions. My silence was interpreted as acquiescence until I could stand it no longer and fessed up. One co-worker, who had served on the committee that hired me, felt betrayed.

“But,” he stammered, remembering my resume, “You worked for NPR.”

Actually, I never worked directly for NPR, but rather for a production company whose program was carried on 100 NPR stations. It was a distinction without a difference — I had worked in public radio.

My colleague’s incredulity implied disappointment with public broadcasting’s ideological screening process: How had I gotten through? He would have been even more surprised if he had known the truth: I had arrived in public radio not as a conservative, but as a liberal, if an admittedly disaffected one. By the time I was through with public radio, I was through with liberalism, too.

I was a co-producer for one of the most unusual programs NPR ever carried, “Bridges: A Liberal/Conservative Dialogue.” The premise was a discussion between the liberal of the show’s title, Larry Josephson, and leading conservative thinkers.

Larry was a longtime public-radio host and producer. He had started out at New York’s always-loony WBAI, where he had hosted a legendary morning program in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. Since then, he had moved on to more sedate terrain. When the Gingrich revolution swept Washington, Larry conceived of “Bridges” as an answer to charges that public broadcasting shut out conservatives. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting approved the show and provided funding for a four-year run.

By the time I arrived in 1997 as a co-producer in charge of writing, research and booking guests, the program was in its third year. I had been a liberal since college, but the performance of New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani had shaken my old certainties. Crime was dropping precipitously all around the city. The drug dealers were gone from the street corners of my East Village neighborhood, and Grand Calcutta was becoming Grand Central again. Watching the city change before me, I was worried: Was I starting to like Giuliani? Would it pass?

Besides my having a graduate degree, the impulses for my liberalism were fairly common: anguish and guilt over the inequities of life; the conviction that only liberals wanted to alleviate suffering (a belief reinforced by professors, the mainstream media and most everyone I knew in New York); and a deep suspicion of capitalism, heightened by disgust at the behavior of so many successful people in American culture.

I had read a couple of books by Jonathan Kozol, “Savage Inequalities” and “Amazing Grace,” both about poor children. They were beautifully written, with the searing passion of an Old Testament prophet. Mr. Kozol demanded a moral accounting; he was the kind of writer who made readers question even the smallest life choices they made. In the real world, though, his prescriptions usually came down to more government spending. America was still a deeply racist society, he held. Perhaps tax dollars could redeem centuries of sin. I wasn’t sure anymore.

In my previous job, at Legal Aid in East Harlem, I had seen the office torn apart by the use of race in hiring. A cold war had broken out between blacks and whites over the hiring of a white candidate who happened to be significantly more qualified than a black candidate. The office seethed with mutual recriminations, and “race matters” consumed more time than official work.

Because everyone in the office was a committed liberal or outright leftist, no one condemned affirmative action. Still, I felt a simmering disgust for the entire enterprise. As with my feelings about Giuliani, I tried to reassure myself. True, I hated muggers and affirmative action. But I still opposed Newt Gingrich and supported the progressive income tax. Everything would be fine.

Then came “Bridges.”

Now I would have to read and hear what the conservatives were thinking.

Sure beats Foucault

My main responsibility was to distill guests’ books into a few single-spaced pages and write interview questions for Larry that he could accept or reject while adding his own. As part of my job, I read omnivorously in the conservative literature — books, periodicals and the Web sites that were coming online.

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