Larry Bensky, former national correspondent for Pacifica Radio who excelled at anchoring live coverage, died at his home in Berkeley, Calif., Sunday after a long illness. He was 87.
“He was the signature voice of KPFA,” said Aileen Alfandary, a longtime colleague and former news director at the Pacifica station in Berkeley where Bensky was a fixture for more than 40 years. He hosted a talk show, mentored young journalists who went on to award-winning careers and even served as GM following a staff uprising.
“Larry narrated life for a generation of people,” said Aaron Glantz, an investigative journalist who reported for KPFA from 1996–2008 and co-hosted specials with Bensky.
Glantz grew up in San Francisco and remembers listening to a live broadcast of Bensky awaiting word of an execution as he stood outside the gates of San Quentin Prison. “Being with you live — he was so good at that.”
Bensky’s first foray into national programming came in 1972, when he produced and anchored Pacifica’s coverage of the Republican National Convention in Miami and the protests that raged outside. The broadcasts, titled The Siege of Miami, were picked up by 18 stations across the country.
He became Pacifica’s national affairs correspondent in 1987, anchoring coverage of numerous demonstrations in Washington, D.C., confirmation hearings of four U.S. Supreme Court justices, hearings of the 9/11 Commission, presidential debates and the 2004 Democratic and Republican conventions.
Many consider Pacifica’s gavel–to–gavel coverage of the 1987 Iran-Contra hearings, which Bensky anchored for 41 days, to be his greatest work. Alfandary called the Iran-Contra coverage “riveting radio.” The broadcasts earned Bensky a George Polk Award and sparked Pacifica to launch more national programming, including Democracy Now! Bensky briefly co-hosted the show with Amy Goodman.
At KPFA, Bensky hosted the long-running talk show Sunday Salon until 2007. He continued to be involved with the station as the occasional host of special programs through 2018.
“It’s always been one of the blessings of being at KPFA and Pacifica that there are so many people with so much to say that are ruthlessly omitted from corporate journalism that you have a plethora of possible people to choose from,” he said, describing the wide range of guests and topics for his show.
Bensky never stopped sending feedback to KPFA or speaking up about how the station and Pacifica are governed, according to Alfandary.
“Local station board elections, as far as I am concerned, are a farce,” he declared in a 2007 interview with the Berkeley Daily Planet. “They contribute nothing.”
‘Principles of his politics’
Larry Bensky grew up in New York City, where he attended the elite Stuyvesant High School. In a 2007 KPFA retrospective of his career, Bensky said he was motivated to become a journalist after reading coverage of the Holocaust in New York’s daily newspapers.
He earned his undergraduate degree from Yale, where he was managing editor of the Yale Daily News and went on to a job with the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. After working in France during the mid-1960’s as a poorly paid editor at The Paris Review, he was recruited for a job at the prestigious New York Times Sunday Book Review.
In 1968 Bensky moved to San Francisco to serve as managing editor of Ramparts magazine, an anti-war publication with a circulation of 250,000. His radio career began in 1969 at KSAN, a commercial rock station that was part of the burgeoning counterculture. Bensky worked there as a news anchor, reporter and talk show host at KSAN before moving on to KPFA.
His conviction that journalists could also be activists played out during his tenure at KSAN. With Scoop Nisker, a news colleague, Bensky piloted a boat stocked with frozen turkeys and other food to Alcatraz Island on Thanksgiving Day in 1969. Alcatraz was occupied at the time by Native American activists. Their vessel was rammed by the Coast Guard but some of the food was delivered to the protestors.
“His adherence to the principles of his politics made him, I suppose, persona non-grata in some of the zones of establishment journalism,” said Alan Snitow, KPFA news director from 1974 to 1981.
Snitow was involved in a month-long KPFA workers’ strike in 1974. It was settled after a vote that elected Bensky to take over as station manager. He held the position for three years.
“He was one of those people who would say, ‘OK, I’ll be manager and try to make this [radio station] live,’” said Adi Gevins, a former KPFA producer who has also been involved in preservation of the Pacifica Archives. “That’s a big sacrifice because, if you’re manager at a Pacifica station, everyone hates you.”
Laurie Garrett, a KPFA producer who went on to NPR and a Pulitzer Prize-winning stint at the Long Island newspaper Newsday, credited Bensky with keeping the ship sailing through massive chaos at KPFA.
“He kept the money flowing somehow,” Garrett said. “A lot of the time I had no idea how he pulled it off. He broke up fights. He settled disputes. It’s kind of amazing because people were really off the wall.”
During his time as GM, Bensky dealt with the FBI and the Berkeley police as they investigated the kidnapping of newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst by the Symbionese Liberation Army. In 1974, the militant group sent messages and recordings to KPFA while Hearst was held captive.
‘Freedom to … expose the illegitimate uses of power’
During a Democracy Now! segment on Pacifica’s 60th anniversary, Bensky told a story about the Iran-Contra hearings. A reporter at an all-news station had complimented the coverage as the best live broadcasting he had ever heard.
“I don’t take it so much as personal praise,” Bensky told Goodman. “But — how wonderful it is, despite all the poverty we have and all the internal aggravation at Pacifica — that we have this freedom to cover stories and expose the illegitimate uses of power.”
The hearings briefly put Pacifica back on the map in the national media. Matthew Lasar, the author of two books on Pacifica history, describes the gavel-to-gavel coverage as an effort to rebuild an audience that had largely drifted to NPR.
“The Iran-Contra hearings were a kind of live, stream-of-consciousness coverage of an extraordinary window into the U.S. National Security State,” Lasar wrote in an email to Current. “Larry took that moment as far as it would go. It was his work of art, for which he will long be remembered.”
While Bensky made guest appearances on All Things Considered, The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour and KQED’s Forum, his foray into mainstream public radio employment was brief.
In the early 1980’s he worked as managing editor of California Edition, a short-lived 15-minute program produced by the equally short-lived California Public Radio. Based in San Francisco and funded by the state’s Humanities Council, CPR’s California Edition aired statewide.
NPR National Political Correspondent Mara Liasson, who began her radio career in 1979 as a KPFA volunteer, followed Bensky to California Public Radio. She worked with him as a host and reporter for two years until California Public Radio’s budget was eliminated by the governor.
“He was very responsible for my entry into public radio and encouraged me in all those early years,” said Liasson, who went on to work at NPR as a newscaster. “He was a mentor, even when I worked at NPR and I was wondering, ‘Gee, what should I do next? I don’t want to be a newscaster any more. I want to be a reporter.’”
Youth Radio founder Ellin O’Leary, who worked in Pacifica’s Washington bureau and as an NPR correspondent early in her career, said Bensky was committed to “community-powered, proudly left-leaning radio versus the corporate model and style of public radio. He showed us there was another way to engage with audiences beyond the all-politics approach of the New Left.”
“Larry’s brand of journalism — personality along with in-depth reporting — was a model for countless reporters and hosts coming up in the early days of community radio, and he held that position of esteem throughout his career,” she added.
In addition to his broadcast work, Bensky taught journalism, political science and mass communication at Bay Area colleges, including Stanford and California State University, East Bay. His teaching career was cut short by an accident getting off a public bus in San Francisco. In recent years Bensky wrote a column for the Anderson Valley Advertiser in Mendocino County.
Bensky’s sister Joyce Silverman confirmed his death but did not disclose the cause.
Bensky is survived by his wife Susie Bluestone, daughter Lila Bluestone and five grandchildren. A memorial service will be held on June 13 at 4:00 p.m. at the St. John’s Presbyterian Church in Berkeley.
In the late 1970s, Bensky brought me into the KSAN “Gnus” Department as an intern and I loved it loved it loved him and learned a lot. Last saw him last fall at his home in Berkeley; we had chocolate cake and orange drink out back of the house. Larry talked about his beloved Proust, offered up tales to astonish for my KSAN oral history book, “The Jive 95,” and insisted I pack the car with political posters from his fabulous collection for my drive back to Santa Monica.
Bensky was unlike anyone I ever met on radio & in the world we ridiculed any chance we got on KSAN.
What A Guy!
Bravo for doing such a fine obit. Larry was a beauty. I didn’t know him well enough to call him a mensch but that’s how I thought of him. greatly enjoyed the few occasions he invited me to share the air with him. he was a reminder for those of us writing for “big” newspapers and “giant” publishers that we could be insurrectionists, too.