Stewart has been a friend for 50 years. We last saw each other in the early 90s when we had a 20th anniversary of the Point Foundation founding. At my home. Our reunion was not joyful.
The whole former board of five men had gone in different ways and had little in common in our respective lives.
I was on the Board of Portola Institute in Menlo Park for many years starting about 1967; Portola was the parent organization for most of Stewart’s projects for more than a decade. Stewart and I ran into each other regularly.
We worked closely because of the quarterly board meeting of the Point Foundation from 1971 to 1974. Stewart made me President of Point in 1973. I ran the Point office in my Glide building during that time. I supervised the only staffer who had been a previous bank employee of mine.
We also saw each other regularly when we played outdoor handball in Golden Gate Park in the following year.
I am very grateful to Stewart. He encouraged me to write a dozen or more articles for his magazines and encouraged me to do illustrations. Several of those articles were quite consequential. One was about my original idea for a lottery legislature which led to a book and an entire political movement. Another was about the anti-whaling movement and my problems with it. That led to the end of the anti-whaling movement in the U.S. as described in the blog here.
I was always a great admirer of Stewart and loved the time we spent together. He is an original person in every way and a genius by any standards. He had a big influence on my life, my thinking and my circle of friends. We had many common friends and many of them are mentioned in the book.
Because of my strong feelings for Stewart I am a little saddened by the recent biography. I’ve dealt with the author John Markoff, on several occasions and helped him write several earlier books. He took copious notes, used many of my ideas but never gave me a shred of credit. The worst thing about John is that he is 100% a NYTimes journalist in his values. (Not something nice I would say about anyone.) Consequently his biography of Stewart represents the worst of the NYTimes view of the world (though John lives near me in San Francisco.). John has a Lefty distorted view of the world, of history, and is New York-centric.
That means he never describes the people he mentions as fully developed people. For example, Dick Raymond, Huey Johnson, Mike Murphy, Paul Krassner and Dick Baker Roshi are important and fascinating figures in Stewart's life but they are all treated as 2- dimensional cardboard cutouts, like everyone else in the book. The powerful fascinating qualities of these people are totally ignored. A very shallow way to write a biography.
Markoff uses the book to simply make lists of prominent people Stewart knew or worked with. Because he lacks a realistic sense of history, he can never put Stewart’s actions in their important context. Much of what Stewart has done is historically important. But not to a dyed-in-the wool Lefty who is New York-centric.
The saddest part of John's biography is that he exaggerates Stewart’s falling out with people he worked with. Early on he worked with Zack Stewart and they had a falling out. But nearly everyone who ever worked with Zack had a falling out with him. It needs to be balanced with reality.
Stewart also gave John access to his personal diary which records the many self-doubts and emotional turmoil in his life. Most of this is entirely internal in Stewart’s mind and is contrary to the very strong, bold and confident man that the world around him knows of him. It does a great disservice to him much like getting a biographical account from a person's angry ex-wife days after a tumultuous divorce. Stewart is very open and in this case naive in letting Markoff use the diaries. Unfortunately Stewart put the diaries in the library of his own accord.
Of the many things left out of the book, the two most frustrating that I know about are (1) the many important and interesting grants made by the Point Foundation and (2) many of the original and fascinating articles in the Whole Earth Catalogs and the follow-on magazines.
One of the private conversations I had with Stewart was about life choices we had already made by 1970. I had chosen to be largely invisible to the media because I knew that a good community organizer never takes credit for what he does, he gives credit to all the people around him. Stewart felt the opposite. Being in the bright light of the media would give him access to many of the people he wanted to deal with and a way to promote his ideas. This biography shows the consequences of that position. The good and the bad of it.
One regret I have is that in the mid-1980s Stewart and I became interested in the same subject; how institutions work. I was influenced by Mary Douglas, Stewart by Gregory Bateson. Stewart began studying large corporations and global entities. I began interviewing thinkers on the subject for a public radio program that was broadcast widely for seven years in 300 half-hour shows. Now on the Internet. We never compared notes.
Two footnotes:
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I don’t get credit in the book for the man-made planet that was important in Stewart’s relations to the environmentalists. I found Gerard O’Neil, the physicist who conceived the man-made planet. I gave O’Neil his first grant (Point Foundation money) and taught him how to get attention for his project.
- In the early 1980s Stewart heard rumors from NASA about the issue of global warming and asked me to look into it. The only public temperature records going far enough back were in the Harvard Library of water temperature measured by ships from 1825. I told Stewart that the noise in the data was greater than the signal and no evidence of warming could be found. The variance was too great to run an average. If I had run an average, I could have found slight evidence for warming but it was due to the opening of the Panama and Suez Canals which allowed fewer ships to go to the Antarctic waters in the 20th century.