What do you think?
Rate this book
Mostly on the Edge: An Autobiography
He left school at fifteen to work as a reporter and wound up, just a few years later, as associate editor at Newsweek. He helped William F. Buckley Jr. found the National Review, worked closely with Joseph McCarthy, and became chief speechwriter for Barry Goldwater. But true to a conscience that caused him to question the claims and authority of others, Hess eventually rejected conservatism and embraced the libertarian politics of the New Left. He dabbled with drugs, rode motorcycles, worked with the Black Panthers, got arrested while protesting the war in Viet Nam, and published an article in Playboy that defined libertarianism and ignited a national debate. As an anti-Communist he cooperated with the FBI, but as a libertarian he fought the IRS until he was nearly destitute. Whatever his political leanings, he always despised conceit, exploded intolerance, and embraced life to the fullest. He was a man who traveled in influential circles, often close to power, but, in his own words, "mostly on the edge."
Karl Hess participated in many of the defining events of 20th-century America, a self-taught boy who became a self-made journalist. Mostly on the Edge chronicles the life education of Hess, who became a defiant tester of the prevailing ideas of each decade. He lived by trial and error, and was always willing to acknowledge his mistakes.
Like Franklin and Thoreau, Hess hoped to wake up America by questioning the moral majority, fighting the Kafkaesque intrusions of government, and encouraging his family, friends, and highly influential colleagues to think for themselves. Hess provides eyewitness accounts, unique personal observations, startling and valuable insights on leadership and dissent, and, in the end, leaves behind a clear path to realizing the dream of freedom.
Karl Hess participated in many of the defining events of 20th-century America, a self-taught boy who became a self-made journalist. Mostly on the Edge chronicles the life education of Hess, who became a defiant tester of the prevailing ideas of each decade. He lived by trial and error, and was always willing to acknowledge his mistakes.
Like Franklin and Thoreau, Hess hoped to wake up America by questioning the moral majority, fighting the Kafkaesque intrusions of government, and encouraging his family, friends, and highly influential colleagues to think for themselves. Hess provides eyewitness accounts, unique personal observations, startling and valuable insights on leadership and dissent, and, in the end, leaves behind a clear path to realizing the dream of freedom.
409 pages, Kindle Edition
First published April 1, 1999
4 people are currently reading
69 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
June 26, 2023
My primary interest in Hess involves the middle phase of his intellectual career -- the period in which he joined the Wobblies, worked with the Institute for Policy Studies and otherwise collaborated with the New Left, and was involved in the alternative technology movement. Unfortunately his later shift back to the right was so dramatic that even his retrospective characterization of his earlier views is largely framed in know-nothing cliches of the sort normally seen in a Thomas Sowell column.
December 27, 2012
Absolutely amazing. His life is an inspiration to me. I really enjoyed his writing style as well as the content of the book. Such a diverse and interesting life he led and I wish more libertarians were familiar with his work. It has given me a new respect for "beltway libertarians" as well as new inspiration to pursue my own desires and live my life as I choose.
December 1, 2024
THE LIFE STORY OF AN EXTREMELY ‘UNIQUE’ INDIVIDUALIST
Karl Hess (1923-1994) had a very unusual life. His son, Karl Hess Jr., wrote in the Preface of this 1999 book, “Karl set his mind to writing his life story in January 1988. What little progress he made that year came to a screeching halt when he suffered a near-fatal aortic dissection after a speaking engagement… his recovery was slow, preventing him from making any substantial progress on his autobiography for almost two years. By 1990, his energy had rebounded… He was able to start, in earnest, the writing of ‘Mostly On the Edge.’ … Progress, however, was… interrupted by recurring bouts of congestive heart failure… Nonetheless, almost half the book was either completed or partially sketched by the time of his heart transplant in … 1992. Karl never fully recovered …. Yet amidst that pain, he managed to complete or sketch out an additional third of the manuscript…
“Sadly, he was unable to complete the book before his death. Completing what my father began became a labor of love for me… I realized that the completed autobiography lay within my hands. All I had to do was to follow his outline and to pick and choose among his voluminous correspondence the remaining pieces… Chapters 15-20 presented a … challenge… what made their completion possible were … twenty hours of taped autobiographical interviews of Karl conducted by Charles Murray… I launched into the completion of the final chapters… There are occasions where I have had to speak directly, in my own words. Those instances are noted. Because of conspicuous gaps… I have been forced to fill in the holes with written excerpts from several of my father’s past essays. All excerpts … [are] inserted as subtext to set them apart from the main flow of the main text.” (Pg. 8-9)
In the first chapter, Hess provides an overview of his life: “I have participated in most of the major cultural and political-social movements of our time, excepting only one. I am not now, nor have I ever been, a liberal… not your modern, mainstream, big-government liberal… My work has always been close to power… sometimes influential, but mostly on the edge…. However, I don’t honestly feel that my basic ethics and concept of self have changed much at all… I was in on the old Right and the beginnings of neo-conservatism---helping to start ‘National Review’ with Bill Buckley… I was part of the extreme Right… I worked with H.L. Hunt … and found him to be a man of incredible gullibility… Then I was part of the corporate Right… I worked closely with Joe McCarthy… before Castro’s triumph in Cuba, I smuggled guns and munitions to anti-Batista factions… For a time I worked at the American Petroleum Institute. I worked at the American Enterprise Institute, then the most respected of conservative think tanks… Prior to the 1960 and 1964 Republican presidential campaigns, I was chief writer for the party’s national platform… [I was] chief speechwriter for the Goldwater campaign…
“[P]ostcampaign, Goldwater intimates were pretty much purged from the party… Separated from my first wife, I lived on a boat… with a young lady who introduced me to hallucinogenic drugs… My article, ‘The Death of Politics,’ which appeared in the March 1969 issue of Playboy magazine, has been credited with being an important rallying point for libertarians. I was very active on the libertarian side of the New Left… I protested the war in Vietnam---a war which I had once vigorously supported until getting hold of something like early versions of the Pentagon Papers… My wife, Therese, and I both spent time in jail. I worked with the Black Panthers, realizing that this group, almost alone among black militants, was decentralist and antistatist at the neighborhood level… the Panthers, like most of the New Left, were under the illusion that shouting revolutionary slogans actually was revolution…
“Then came the counterculture, alternative technology, and urban homesteading, Mother Earthing, and trying to re-create a barter economy. I met and greatly enjoyed the company of people who called themselves anarchists. The most influential one of them, Murray Rothbard, became a good friend and a continuing factor in my life, though he later moved into the fringe of the Republican Party best described as Paleo-Conservative. It was during these years that I took one of the most … … counterproductive actions of all: a voluntary public refusal to pay taxes to the Internal Revenue Service… Refusing to pay taxes … has cost me a mint of money, left me pretty much destitute, and caused a terrible amount of trouble for my family… I married Therese Machotka… It was one of the most important things I have EVER done…along with siring two wonderful sons…
“There is a core that holds me together… I try not to betray my friends… I am madly in love with Therese… My sons and my very closest friends mean more to me than humanity or society… Of all the things a person can be that sound crazy, anarchist must rank way up near the top. Yet I do believe that I am one… I believe that there is no God. But I know that’s just an opinion.” (Pg. 35-42)
He then slows down, and recalls, “it was the library that was, and remains, my most beloved school. Because of it, I never graduated from high school; I didn’t need to.” (Pg. 53) He notes, “I had to choose between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology---where I had just been admitted… and the life of a scribbler. It was immediately apparent to me that writing was more fun than even chemistry. And so I dropped my romantic notions of … Howard Roark in ‘the Fountainhead,’ and picked up a pencil, pad, and my first typewriter. I have been atoning for that decision ever since.” (Pg. 70)
He continues, “I wasn’t invited to become a Communist and I quit the Socialists after that first meeting. Where was a young fellow to go then for compatible politics? The Republican Party, of course… The Republicans were radical then. They had the best notions of what I had hoped to find in socialism, but they didn’t have the obsession with power… Back, then, to the anti-Communist network of which I immediately became a part.” (Pg. 103) He goes on, “When I was fired from Newsweek in favor of the publisher’s son, I moved from the … world of newsmagazine journalism, into the gloriously darker areas of straight-out ideological journalism.” (Pg. 116-117) He recounts, “My interest in guns… did not stop with the hunting of game and the pursuit of sport… I had already put my sights on toppling the Cuban dictator, Fulgencio Batista.” (Pg. 128)
He summarizes, “Among all the goofy positions I have taken in my life, hatred of America has not been included… To love, reflexively, all who hate America… [is] a form of political or ideological fanaticism. Where else on the face of the earth would these unthinking critics want to live?” (Pg. 135) He observes, “Anti-Semitism on the Right. Yes, there was some… Yet I do not honestly believe that it is any more prevalent on the Right than, for instance, in the black-power Left.” (Pg. 143)
He recalls H.L. Hunt would ask him, “If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?” He explains, “It’s simply because I have never offered the products which in a free market would make me rich. I am not unhappy about that, however. I have lived much the way I wanted to and have done the things I wanted to… Society didn’t do it… The system didn’t do it. The system, in fact, made it all possible. What collectivist society could even come close?” (Pg. 147-148)
Significantly, he reports that one phrase from Goldwater’s 1964 acceptance speech has echoed over time… ‘Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. Moderation in pursuit of justice is no virtue.' The wording itself was buried in a long letter written to me by Harry Jaffa, … a professor at Claremont State College in California. He later said that he had gotten the phrase from a Lincoln speech. The novelist Taylor Caldwell said she had traced it to Roman antiquity. I had the opportunity to make it famous in the acceptance speech, which I wrote for the senator.” (Pg. 170)
He asks, “What was it about the New Left that attracted me without at all disturbing my Republican upbringing? The New Left that unfolded itself for me was as isolationist as my old hero, the late Sen. Robert Taft… the part that first attracted me---was oriented toward neighborhoods, toward localism, and away from central bureaucracies. This thrust … would eventually be overturned by the growing domination of the New Left by Maoists, Marxists, Leninists… But for a time, the New Left … felt good, and the Port Huron Statement … seemed a platform with principle, punch, and possibility.” (Pg. 191-192) He adds, “My attraction to the Black Panthers, like SDS, was again my liking of direct, NONFEDERAL community action.” (Pg. 195) He recalls, “I attended a series of seminars discussing the Objectivist philosophy of Ayn Rand. The Rand attack on religion was quite powerful and her books… greatly impressed me… [and] made it necessary to at least consider religion as an undesirable doctrine of self-sacrifice.” (Pg. 207)
He reports, “I was racing headlong into hippiedom… My girlfriend and I lived the life of the stereotypical hippie couple right up to the time she sold her boat and then left D.C. to be a lesbian in California. ‘Hippie’ meant many things in the late ‘60s. The idea of community was its great driving force… Hippiedom died when long hair, rather than any particular way of living, became its icon.” (Pg. 214-215) After his marriage to Therese, they “formed a group called Community Technology. Its purpose was simply to demystify technology so that … it could become a part of everyday life… a way to give people greater control over their individual destinies… Socially it was a failure… most people made the choice to let somebody else give them the essentials of life. Why work when you can just shake the magic tree?” (Pg. 235-237) He continues, “Community Technology died shortly after Therese and I left Washington … [in] 1975… The catalyst for our leaving … was crime… Our apartment had been broken into... and our Ford pickup had been vandalized on an almost regular schedule.” (Pg. 241)
He asserts, “Inventors, scientists, artists and merchants change the way we live. Social theorists and political philosophers usually just explain it… No political or social scientists in the history of the world has ever changed the way people live.” (Pg. 245) Still, he assumed the editorship of the ‘Libertarian Party News’ in 1986. “I wrote that … I am not a defender of state-corporate capitalism, the capitalism of the two larger political parties… I am… a free-market pluralist… I joined the Libertarian Party … [to] affiliate with a party of … SELF-DEFENSIVE politics… aimed at rolling back the coercive apparatus of the state.” (Pg. 263) He concludes, “Politics has always been the institutionalized and established way in which some men have exercised power to live off the output of other men. But… men do not need to live by devouring other men.” (Pg. 343)
This is definitely one of the most thought-provoking and interesting autobiographies out there.
Karl Hess (1923-1994) had a very unusual life. His son, Karl Hess Jr., wrote in the Preface of this 1999 book, “Karl set his mind to writing his life story in January 1988. What little progress he made that year came to a screeching halt when he suffered a near-fatal aortic dissection after a speaking engagement… his recovery was slow, preventing him from making any substantial progress on his autobiography for almost two years. By 1990, his energy had rebounded… He was able to start, in earnest, the writing of ‘Mostly On the Edge.’ … Progress, however, was… interrupted by recurring bouts of congestive heart failure… Nonetheless, almost half the book was either completed or partially sketched by the time of his heart transplant in … 1992. Karl never fully recovered …. Yet amidst that pain, he managed to complete or sketch out an additional third of the manuscript…
“Sadly, he was unable to complete the book before his death. Completing what my father began became a labor of love for me… I realized that the completed autobiography lay within my hands. All I had to do was to follow his outline and to pick and choose among his voluminous correspondence the remaining pieces… Chapters 15-20 presented a … challenge… what made their completion possible were … twenty hours of taped autobiographical interviews of Karl conducted by Charles Murray… I launched into the completion of the final chapters… There are occasions where I have had to speak directly, in my own words. Those instances are noted. Because of conspicuous gaps… I have been forced to fill in the holes with written excerpts from several of my father’s past essays. All excerpts … [are] inserted as subtext to set them apart from the main flow of the main text.” (Pg. 8-9)
In the first chapter, Hess provides an overview of his life: “I have participated in most of the major cultural and political-social movements of our time, excepting only one. I am not now, nor have I ever been, a liberal… not your modern, mainstream, big-government liberal… My work has always been close to power… sometimes influential, but mostly on the edge…. However, I don’t honestly feel that my basic ethics and concept of self have changed much at all… I was in on the old Right and the beginnings of neo-conservatism---helping to start ‘National Review’ with Bill Buckley… I was part of the extreme Right… I worked with H.L. Hunt … and found him to be a man of incredible gullibility… Then I was part of the corporate Right… I worked closely with Joe McCarthy… before Castro’s triumph in Cuba, I smuggled guns and munitions to anti-Batista factions… For a time I worked at the American Petroleum Institute. I worked at the American Enterprise Institute, then the most respected of conservative think tanks… Prior to the 1960 and 1964 Republican presidential campaigns, I was chief writer for the party’s national platform… [I was] chief speechwriter for the Goldwater campaign…
“[P]ostcampaign, Goldwater intimates were pretty much purged from the party… Separated from my first wife, I lived on a boat… with a young lady who introduced me to hallucinogenic drugs… My article, ‘The Death of Politics,’ which appeared in the March 1969 issue of Playboy magazine, has been credited with being an important rallying point for libertarians. I was very active on the libertarian side of the New Left… I protested the war in Vietnam---a war which I had once vigorously supported until getting hold of something like early versions of the Pentagon Papers… My wife, Therese, and I both spent time in jail. I worked with the Black Panthers, realizing that this group, almost alone among black militants, was decentralist and antistatist at the neighborhood level… the Panthers, like most of the New Left, were under the illusion that shouting revolutionary slogans actually was revolution…
“Then came the counterculture, alternative technology, and urban homesteading, Mother Earthing, and trying to re-create a barter economy. I met and greatly enjoyed the company of people who called themselves anarchists. The most influential one of them, Murray Rothbard, became a good friend and a continuing factor in my life, though he later moved into the fringe of the Republican Party best described as Paleo-Conservative. It was during these years that I took one of the most … … counterproductive actions of all: a voluntary public refusal to pay taxes to the Internal Revenue Service… Refusing to pay taxes … has cost me a mint of money, left me pretty much destitute, and caused a terrible amount of trouble for my family… I married Therese Machotka… It was one of the most important things I have EVER done…along with siring two wonderful sons…
“There is a core that holds me together… I try not to betray my friends… I am madly in love with Therese… My sons and my very closest friends mean more to me than humanity or society… Of all the things a person can be that sound crazy, anarchist must rank way up near the top. Yet I do believe that I am one… I believe that there is no God. But I know that’s just an opinion.” (Pg. 35-42)
He then slows down, and recalls, “it was the library that was, and remains, my most beloved school. Because of it, I never graduated from high school; I didn’t need to.” (Pg. 53) He notes, “I had to choose between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology---where I had just been admitted… and the life of a scribbler. It was immediately apparent to me that writing was more fun than even chemistry. And so I dropped my romantic notions of … Howard Roark in ‘the Fountainhead,’ and picked up a pencil, pad, and my first typewriter. I have been atoning for that decision ever since.” (Pg. 70)
He continues, “I wasn’t invited to become a Communist and I quit the Socialists after that first meeting. Where was a young fellow to go then for compatible politics? The Republican Party, of course… The Republicans were radical then. They had the best notions of what I had hoped to find in socialism, but they didn’t have the obsession with power… Back, then, to the anti-Communist network of which I immediately became a part.” (Pg. 103) He goes on, “When I was fired from Newsweek in favor of the publisher’s son, I moved from the … world of newsmagazine journalism, into the gloriously darker areas of straight-out ideological journalism.” (Pg. 116-117) He recounts, “My interest in guns… did not stop with the hunting of game and the pursuit of sport… I had already put my sights on toppling the Cuban dictator, Fulgencio Batista.” (Pg. 128)
He summarizes, “Among all the goofy positions I have taken in my life, hatred of America has not been included… To love, reflexively, all who hate America… [is] a form of political or ideological fanaticism. Where else on the face of the earth would these unthinking critics want to live?” (Pg. 135) He observes, “Anti-Semitism on the Right. Yes, there was some… Yet I do not honestly believe that it is any more prevalent on the Right than, for instance, in the black-power Left.” (Pg. 143)
He recalls H.L. Hunt would ask him, “If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?” He explains, “It’s simply because I have never offered the products which in a free market would make me rich. I am not unhappy about that, however. I have lived much the way I wanted to and have done the things I wanted to… Society didn’t do it… The system didn’t do it. The system, in fact, made it all possible. What collectivist society could even come close?” (Pg. 147-148)
Significantly, he reports that one phrase from Goldwater’s 1964 acceptance speech has echoed over time… ‘Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. Moderation in pursuit of justice is no virtue.' The wording itself was buried in a long letter written to me by Harry Jaffa, … a professor at Claremont State College in California. He later said that he had gotten the phrase from a Lincoln speech. The novelist Taylor Caldwell said she had traced it to Roman antiquity. I had the opportunity to make it famous in the acceptance speech, which I wrote for the senator.” (Pg. 170)
He asks, “What was it about the New Left that attracted me without at all disturbing my Republican upbringing? The New Left that unfolded itself for me was as isolationist as my old hero, the late Sen. Robert Taft… the part that first attracted me---was oriented toward neighborhoods, toward localism, and away from central bureaucracies. This thrust … would eventually be overturned by the growing domination of the New Left by Maoists, Marxists, Leninists… But for a time, the New Left … felt good, and the Port Huron Statement … seemed a platform with principle, punch, and possibility.” (Pg. 191-192) He adds, “My attraction to the Black Panthers, like SDS, was again my liking of direct, NONFEDERAL community action.” (Pg. 195) He recalls, “I attended a series of seminars discussing the Objectivist philosophy of Ayn Rand. The Rand attack on religion was quite powerful and her books… greatly impressed me… [and] made it necessary to at least consider religion as an undesirable doctrine of self-sacrifice.” (Pg. 207)
He reports, “I was racing headlong into hippiedom… My girlfriend and I lived the life of the stereotypical hippie couple right up to the time she sold her boat and then left D.C. to be a lesbian in California. ‘Hippie’ meant many things in the late ‘60s. The idea of community was its great driving force… Hippiedom died when long hair, rather than any particular way of living, became its icon.” (Pg. 214-215) After his marriage to Therese, they “formed a group called Community Technology. Its purpose was simply to demystify technology so that … it could become a part of everyday life… a way to give people greater control over their individual destinies… Socially it was a failure… most people made the choice to let somebody else give them the essentials of life. Why work when you can just shake the magic tree?” (Pg. 235-237) He continues, “Community Technology died shortly after Therese and I left Washington … [in] 1975… The catalyst for our leaving … was crime… Our apartment had been broken into... and our Ford pickup had been vandalized on an almost regular schedule.” (Pg. 241)
He asserts, “Inventors, scientists, artists and merchants change the way we live. Social theorists and political philosophers usually just explain it… No political or social scientists in the history of the world has ever changed the way people live.” (Pg. 245) Still, he assumed the editorship of the ‘Libertarian Party News’ in 1986. “I wrote that … I am not a defender of state-corporate capitalism, the capitalism of the two larger political parties… I am… a free-market pluralist… I joined the Libertarian Party … [to] affiliate with a party of … SELF-DEFENSIVE politics… aimed at rolling back the coercive apparatus of the state.” (Pg. 263) He concludes, “Politics has always been the institutionalized and established way in which some men have exercised power to live off the output of other men. But… men do not need to live by devouring other men.” (Pg. 343)
This is definitely one of the most thought-provoking and interesting autobiographies out there.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews