It is possible to admire Norman Podhoretz, who died on Tuesday, as a beacon of eloquently expressed, relentlessly honest moral clarity. Or to loathe his influence as a prime feeder of self-destructive militaristic hubris, an intellectual spawn of unnecessary killing. I have, in different decades, done both. But both views flow from the same departure point: Norman’s influence as an essayist made him one of the most consequential American intellectuals of the second half of the 20th century. When joined to his editorship of Commentary from 1960 to 1995, in pre-internet days when a serious magazine could still be enormously consequential, he had a fair claim to be considered the most important of all.
In his important memoir Breaking Ranks, published in the late ’70s to explain his and Commentary’s shift from a liberal and slightly proto-New Left countercultural stance in the early ’60s to waging a full-blown intellectual war against the New Left and more or less founding neoconservatism, Podhoretz touts his radical temptations of the early ’60s. No doubt they existed, but if you were enough of a Podhoretz fan to go back and read some his 1950s essays and reviews (written in his 20s), you will find a shockingly grown up and conservative young man, eager to get on quickly with a professional career and fatherhood, with an atypical (for intellectuals) scorn for beatniks, and much readiness to accept that the America of the 1950s was essentially and deeply good. Before his rightward shift actually happened, he published in 1963 “My Negro Problem—and Ours,” which, under liberal guise of condemning his own racism, sought to understand it. If you grew up around blacks, as Podhoretz did in Brooklyn in the 1930s and ’40s, it was natural enough to admire their swagger and fear their violence. Published in a time when all good-thinking Americans, except for Southern racists, understood that only segregation laws and white racism stood in the way of successful racial integration, Podhoretz was the first and more or less only Northern intellectual voice to say that it was more complicated than that.
By the late 1960s, Commentary was in full revolt against every aspect of the New Left and the counterculture, which was ascendant and often powerful in most of the country’s old-line intellectual and media institutions. Coming from the milieu of Jewish intellectuals in New York, then universally understood as liberal, Commentary was a shooting star, a running back reversing field and scoring against an entire defense going in the other direction. Over time it brought many with it, liberals who felt uncomfortable with the “excesses” of the ’60s but didn’t have the vocabulary or a sense of their like-minded allies to express it—liberals who would never before have imagined thinking of themselves as conservative, liberals who realized that the only way to protect the rights and liberties of traditional liberalism was to become conservative.
Norman and Commentary were seriously anticommunist, even as the ’60s had faded. It’s possible that communism was already a dying star by the time Ronald Reagan came to power; but, if so, it was anything but obvious at the time. And Norman and his allies at Commentary and elsewhere were able—at a time after the United States had been defeated in Vietnam—to raise high a banner proclaiming that communism was an evil system and opposing it was a moral and necessary calling. They resurrected the term “the Free World,” which had fallen into derision after overuse to justify the war in Vietnam, and helped a younger generation of Americans recognize it still had meaning. It is doubtful that without Commentary, Ronald Reagan could have acquired enough intellectual support to win.
Many have written about the conservative crack-up over immigration and the resurrection of the America First voices after the collapse of communism. By the late 1990s, I was no longer publishing in Commentary; by 2002, Norman considered me a political foe and told me so when I was seated at his table at a dinner party. As with so much of his writing, certain arresting phrases stand out and stick in the mind; shortly after 9/11, he wrote for the Wall Street Journal arguing how the United States could now go through the Middle East and topple governments “willy-nilly”—perfectly encapsulating the madness of “democracy expanding” neoconservatism regnant in George W. Bush’s first term. As a retired editor at that point, Norman was an avid cheerleader for “World War IV,” as he called it, but unlike in the creation of neoconservativism, he did not play a decisive role. He had wielded influence by forceful writing and argumentation; the neoconservative successor generation, less talented but often comfortably immersed in government, could use more subtle measures to get the state to do what they wanted.
He was of course a great friend of Israel, where one of his daughters lives. I think that affection is at the root of his enthusiasm for overreaches regarding American policies in the Mideast. It is an understandable affection, particularly for a Jew who grew up in the last century, but really for anyone capable of observing Israel’s accomplishments; Norman told me that he took his affection for Israel very seriously (in the same conversation where he told me I was a foe). As always, one remembers decades later arresting Podhoretz phrases; during one of his attacks on Yitzhak Rabin for seeking to make peace with Yasser Arafat’s PLO, he wrote that if Israel gave the Palestinians full control over the West Bank, it would inevitably have to invade it all over again after the Palestinians used it as a base to launch attacks. I deplored the essay, but it’s less than obvious that this conclusion is mistaken.
Norman Podhoretz was a towering figure in American life in the last half of the 20th century. History would have been different without him. Despite our differences, I am deeply honored to have known him.
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