Larry Bensky, a radio journalist whose reporting on major political events made him the distinctive voice of Pacifica Radio, a network of listener-supported progressive stations, died May 19 at his home in Berkeley, California. He was 87 years old.
His wife, Susie Bluestone, said he died in hospice care at home.
Mr. Bensky’s in-depth coverage of the 1987 Iran-Contra Congressional hearings put the Pacifica network on the map, earning him a prestigious Polk Award for radio reporting.
Bensky, who called himself an activist journalist, brought left-wing viewpoints to reporting (often on people and topics little covered by other media outlets) that he hoped would, as he often put it, “shake things up.”
That was not a fringe vision in the progressive spirit of the Bay Area, where he was based, although he still managed to transgress the boundaries on a regular basis. Free rock station KSAN, the voice of Haight-Ashbury in the 1960s, kicked him off the air for interviewing workers who had been fired by one of the station’s sponsors.
He was later fired from his former home, KPFA, in Berkeley, for criticizing on-air the decisions of the station’s owners, although he was reinstated after broadcasting via a pirate radio signal from the street. His colleagues knew him as a curmudgeon, but he also had so much knowledge of history and politics that he could convey for hours without notes or script.
KPFA, founded by pacifists in 1949, was the country’s first listener-supported radio station, the first to broadcast Allen Ginsberg’s reading of his poem “Howl” and the first to open its airwaves to Patricia Hearst, who denounced their parents as “capitalist pigs.” during her kidnapping.
For 38 years at KPFA, Mr. Bensky provided listeners with live accounts of major local and national events. “Larry had this incredible ability to take you there, hold the space and let you know how he felt,” said Aaron Glantz, an investigative journalist and former colleague of Bensky, in a tribute broadcast on KPFA last week.
Working from a broadcast van called the Green Weenie, Bensky chronicled clashes between protesters and National Guard troops at People’s Park in Berkeley in 1969. A decade later, he reported from a phone booth on the so-called White Night riots in San Francisco. after Dan White’s lenient sentence for the murders of Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk, the first openly gay elected official in California.
From 1987 to 1998, Bensky was national affairs correspondent for Pacifica, a group of community-focused and often financially weak stations with more than 200 affiliates, including KPFK in Los Angeles, WBAI in New York and WPFW in Washington.
There, he covered the confirmation hearings of four Supreme Court justices, the presidential nominating conventions, the 1990 elections in Nicaragua, and the aftermath of the 2004 presidential election in Ohio, which some Democrats claimed were marred by irregularities in the vote.
During the Iran-contra hearings, Pacifica livestreamed weeks of testimony; During breaks, Mr. Bensky hosted an impromptu talk show from the courtroom, complete with expert commentary and listener calls.
He later hosted “Sunday Salon” on KPFA, a weekly two-hour public affairs program, and co-hosted “Democracy Now!” of Pacifica Radio, a popular daily program that covered news from the left. -Viewpoint wing.
But the internal politics of Pacifica and KPFA were often seething, reflecting the factionalism of the left and the tensions of community-supported radio. Bensky was fired twice in 1999, the first time for criticizing President Bill Clinton because, he later said, the views he expressed conflicted with “the liberal line of the Democratic Party.”
He soon returned to the air, but was fired a second time after reading a statement in support of KPFA’s station manager, whom Pacifica executives had ousted as they sought to expand the station’s audience beyond the small group of activists and Berkeley militants. After a 30-day lockout over the dispute, pressure from listeners forced management to back down and Mr. Bensky was reinstated.
“It was the most rewarding thing in my life to see people moving forward,” he told the Berkeley Daily Planet in 2007.
Lawrence Martin Bensky was born on May 1, 1937 in Brooklyn. He was one of two children of Eli Bensky, a lawyer, and Sally (Davidson) Bensky, who managed the home.
Raised in a Jewish home, he became interested in becoming a journalist when he read newspaper accounts about the Nazi genocide, he said in a retrospective broadcast in 2007 on KPFA.
“I was one of those kids who taught myself to read newspapers, because my father used to bring home six or seven newspapers a day, and it was during World War II and the Jews were being exterminated, and that interested me a lot. . issue,” he said.
He graduated from Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan in 1954 and, in 1958, from Yale, where he was editor-in-chief of The Yale Daily News.
He was briefly a book editor at Random House, where in 1962 he read a manuscript that Cormac McCarthy had mailed over the transom. He recommended the work for publication and spent a year working with McCarthy on what became his first novel, “The Orchard Keeper.”
In 1964, Bensky moved to France to become editor of The Paris Review. Two years later, he returned to the United States to work at The New York Times, as an editor at Book Review, and as an occasional writer. But both he and his bosses discovered that it wasn’t a good fit.
A Sunday magazine article he wrote about the anti-Vietnam War movement was never published. “I worked on this for weeks, wrote it, and they canceled it because they said it didn’t have enough criticism of the anti-war movement on the other side,” Bensky said in the 2007 retrospective. “I could see that it really wasn’t cut out to be there.”
He then accepted a job as editor-in-chief of Ramparts, a rampant New Left magazine based in San Francisco, which brought him to the epicenter of the country’s anti-establishment uprisings. He had found his home.
Mr. Bensky’s brief first marriage ended in divorce. In 1997, he married Ms. Bluestone. In addition to her, he is survived by her daughter, Lila Bluestone Bensky; five grandchildren; and his sister, Joyce Silverman.
When not broadcasting, Mr. Bensky taught journalism at Stanford University and political science at California State University, East Bay.
After retiring from daily journalism, he nurtured other long-standing interests: he hosted a Sunday morning classical music program on KPFA called “Piano” and renewed his love of the French language and literature by hosting a website, “Radio Proust ”, dedicated to the Life and Work of Marcel Proust.