In 1970, Navasky was hired by
The New York Times. He worked as a manuscript editor and staff writer for
The New York Times Magazine and was a frequent book reviewer. He also wrote a
New York Times Book Review monthly column, "In Cold Print", about the publishing business. In one of his most controversial editorial stances, Navasky was a longtime defender of alleged Soviet spy
Alger Hiss. Beginning with a critical review of
Allen Weinstein's book
Perjury: The Hiss-Chambers Case in an April 1978 issue of
The Nation, Navasky maintained that Hiss's guilt had not been proven beyond a reasonable doubt.
Kai Bird wrote, "Navasky quite simply thought
Chambers made an unreliable witness. Navasky was not a Hiss believer but an agnostic. As late as 2007, he wrote in
The Nation, 'This is a case that will not die. It will not go away. The Cold War is over but this, among other Cold War ghosts, lingers on.' For Victor, it was important and interesting to ask why." Throughout his journalistic career, Navasky worked on various academic pursuits. He researched and wrote several non-fiction books of biography and history. In 1971, he published
Kennedy Justice, described as "a scholarly account of the Justice Department under Attorney General
Robert F. Kennedy".
Kennedy Justice was a finalist for a
National Book Award. Navasky then embarked on an eight-year effort to study the
Hollywood blacklist. In the course of his research, he pored through
House Un-American Activities Committee testimony and interviewed over 150 actors, writers, directors, and producers. The resulting book,
Naming Names, was a huge critical success.
Daniel Aaron praised Navasky's achievement in
The New York Review of Books: "One can only applaud the adroitness with which he has put together a lucid and persuasive narrative from such a mare's nest of fact and supposition". The 1980 hardback was a finalist for a National Book Award in the General Nonfiction category, and the paperback reprint won the award in 1982. In 1994, while on a year's leave of absence from
The Nation, Navasky served as a fellow at the
Institute of Politics at
Harvard Kennedy School, and a senior fellow at the Freedom Forum Media Studies Center at
Columbia University. Upon returning to
The Nation in 1995, he led a group of investors (including
Paul Newman and
E.L. Doctorow) in a $1 million purchase of
The Nation from
Arthur L. Carter. To fulfill his expanded leadership duties at the magazine, Navasky sought to better educate himself in business fundamentals. To that end, he enrolled in the
Owner/President Management (OPM) program at
Harvard Business School, where he was remembered as an unlikely political progressive among mostly conservative classmates. He served on the boards of the
Authors Guild,
International PEN, and the
Committee to Protect Journalists. In 2005, he was named chairman of the
Columbia Journalism Review (
CJR), which engendered controversy when Navasky's name was not listed on the magazine's masthead. This omission, critics on the political right claimed, hid the fact that—despite
CJRs purported lack of political bias—a "major left-wing polemicist is calling the shots at
CJR without any mention on the masthead." In 2005, Navasky received the
George Polk Book Award given annually by
Long Island University to honor contributions to journalistic integrity and investigative reporting. In that same year, he published his memoir,
A Matter of Opinion. In the book, he summarized his political views as follows: In 2013, Navasky published his final book,
The Art of Controversy: Political Cartoons and Their Enduring Power, which looked at the impact over the centuries of provocative political cartoons. In 2017, he was awarded the
I.F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence by Harvard's
Nieman Foundation. In 2020, Navasky was appointed to the board of
Defending Rights & Dissent. == Personal life and death ==