05/20/2024
We just lost one of the towering figures from KPFA’s history, Larry Bensky.
He had a long stint in letters before he came to KPFA – at Random House (he gave Cormac McCarthy his first book contract!), the New York Times Book Review, then the Paris Review. But I think radio was where he found his home.
Larry was probably most famous for his live broadcasts of the Iran-Contra hearings, which won him the Polk Award. But what he also accomplished, was to turn KPFA and Pacifica into a place that *did* live broadcasts of events of national significance. Not just the obvious ones like Presidential debates: he whipped us into the kind of place that could produce grippingly-annotated broadcasts of what might otherwise be relegated to C-span 3: congressional oversight hearings on executive power during the Bush years, the proceedings of a state reform body created by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, deliberations at the United Nations . . . that wound up ending Israel’s 2006 war in Lebanon. I think it’s safe to say that if it weren’t for Larry Bensky, we wouldn’t be the kind of place that broadcast last week’s arguments in the genocide case against Israel in the World Court.
I worked with Larry on a lot of his broadcasts in his later years with KPFA. Part of my job, as a new reporter who hadn’t been around long enough to make enemies, was to do shuttle diplomacy. Larry had a short fuse, and knew he had a short fuse, so he kept away from planning meetings where network politics got sorted out and left it up to someone younger and more patient to represent his position and absorb his occasional outbursts.
I learned a lot of things from working with him that way. I learned the magic of live radio, the power of synchronizing the attention of a large audience on a single event. I learned that I don’t want to be the kind of person who yells at younger colleagues. And I learned Larry Bensky yelled because he cared deeply about KPFA.
In 1974, just after our 25th birthday, internal strife at KPFA culminated in a strike that took the station off the air and cleaned out its bank account. Larry volunteered to take over as manager to reconstruct the books, re-populate the airwaves, and get KPFA back on its feet.
In 1999, just after our 50th birthday, a hostile leadership at Pacifica, was clamping down on internal dissent at KPFA. Larry violated a gag order to go on air criticizing their actions, got himself fired, and, instead of walking away, helped build a national campaign that brought that network leadership to their knees and forced them out.
Larry was always someone who was proud to be part of KPFA, but never seemed completely happy with KPFA, because he always wanted to KPFA to be better and bigger. And because of him, we are.
