David Brudnoy, R.I.P.

IT was as if all of Boston was holding its breath on December 9, yet everyone knew-meaning, every human being in Boston-that the countdown wasn't now a matter of days, but of hours. He was in the Massachusetts General Hospital for a final bout with cancer. In 1994 he had survived an AIDS infirmity. When he left the hospital, he elected to emerge from the closet. He set down his life story in an autobiography (Life Is Not a Rehearsal). And went back to radio station WBZ, from which for over 25 years he broadcast for three hours every day, acting as host to every politician and minstrel and writer in and out of town. And he resumed teaching, reviewing movies (he reviewed them all), and writing, and giving lectures on television.

Reviewing his biography in these pages ten years ago, I wrote: "What is distinctive about the author is that he is universally cherished, not excepting by this reviewer." This is not easy for a talkathoner to achieve. Brudnoy stood by opinions by no means agreeable to the majority of his guests, to say nothing of the guardians of correct thought in Boston. Brudnoy was a libertarian/conservative who expressed himself on political, cultural, and philosophical issues, listening patiently and politely and inquisitively to the views of his guests.

After a stint in Japan-and at Yale, where he studied Japanese-he went to Texas Southern University, a historically African-American school, to teach history. While there, he was dislodged from collectivist liberalism by Ayn Rand. He moved then to Boston, earning advanced degrees from Harvard and Brandeis, and beginning his career as a talk-show host. I never heard that he was rude to any of his guests, never mind that he had strong personal views ("Cathy Young, in today's Globe op-ed," he wrote me in July, "has a nice piece poking holes into the repulsive Michael Moore"). He was an acknowledged highbrow (promoted to full professor at Boston University) totally relaxed when talking with firefighters, with whom he would make friends as convincingly as he did with fellow intellectuals. He was a very lively friend, and when he died, what seemed like everyone who had ever touched base with him, sang in the chorus of grief.

We all wondered at his capacity to maintain friendships with such prodigal attention to them. Afew months ago he was reading my own autobiography, in anticipation of a broadcast, and he noticed that in the war, I had done basic infantry training in Camp Wheeler, Ga., and that I had ended my (inglorious) military career at Ft. Sam Houston, in San Antonio.

Whaddayouknow! Arrives a 700-word letter on the coincidence that his father, an army dentist, had contemporaneously served in Camp Wheeler and at Ft. Sam Houston. On his father's second tour of duty in San Antonio years later, "I sat around the motel swimming pool, or we went to the Alamo, or this and that, and I had the pleasure of Becoming A Man-for some ridiculous reason I wanted to be first among my friends, and called a cab company while my folks were at an officers' club party, and told the driver that I wanted to be taken to a house of ill repute. Deed done, I felt very adult. But then, when we came back to Minneapolis for school in the Fall, I felt idiotic and never told my friends ever, till I wrote about it in my little memoir a few years ago."

"Just a coincidence," he wrote, "but I like it that you were there in Macon and San Antonio and I was there as an infant and teenager. Since I have known you for 36 years I've probably read more by you than by any other person (even the endlessly prodigious Robert B. Parker). And of course you are an honorary Phi Alpha Tau brother." The reference was to a professional fraternity at Emerson College into which I was inducted the last time I was in Boston to appear on his program.

His deteriorating health generated a convenient arrangement with WBZ. He would broadcast not from the studio, but from his own apartment, which could have been mistaken for a book store/kiosk. "I like to make my guests as comfortable as possible," he told the Boston Globe, "so I let them smoke and I make them mixed drinks." He went on as ever, happily at work, and when he was back in the hospital and it was nearing midnight, he did a final broadcast. The Globe's Mark Feeney quoted John Silber, formidable president emeritus of Boston University, where Brudnoy had taught over the years: "A most courageous and gentle man is dead. The loss is ours, we survivors who loved him, respected him, and engaged in conversation for so many years." NATIONAL REVIEW is proud that, for so many years, he resided on our masthead as a Contributor.

--WFB

EDITOR'S NOTE: The next issue of NATIONAL REVIEW will appear in three weeks.