Before Paul Berman became a liberal hawk, he was a New Left veteran who edited a book called Quotations from the Anarchists. In 1986, his long-standing anxiety about the authoritarian left may have produced a casualty: Michael Moore’s magazine career.

Moore had edited Mother Jones for five months when he tried to kill the second installment of Berman’s two-part commissioned dispatch on Nicaragua. Berman did identify the Contras as US-financed, traced their leadership to Anastasio Somoza Debayle’s National Guard, and acknowledged the “blood on their hands.” But his overarching concern was Sandinista Leninism: their restrictions on political competition and refusal to share power. Moore was unmoved. “The article was flatly wrong and the worst kind of patronizing bullshit,” he said. “You would scarcely know from it that the United States had been at war with Nicaragua for the last five years.”

With Washington funding a counterrevolutionary army and the civil war’s outcome very much in doubt, Moore worried about the impact the article could have. President Ronald Reagan, he complained, could wave it around and say, “See, even Mother Jones agrees with me.” He’d wanted Alexander Cockburn writing on Nicaragua instead of “neo-nudnik Paul Berman.”