In the early 1960s, the great Columbia professor and literary critic Lionel Trilling warned of the impending "Norman Invasion." He was talking about three brash and brilliant young stars of the literary world—Norman O. Brown, Norman Mailer, and Norman Podhoretz. A generation later, no one recalls Norman O. Brown, and Norman Mailer will be remembered as an unharnessed genius. Of Trilling's invaders, one has conquered: Norman Podhoretz.
William, the great Norman conqueror of 1066, left behind the glorious Bayeux Tapestry detailing the story of his invasion of England. Despite two world wars and countless smaller ones, the tapestry remains with us. Norman Podhoretz has left us not a tapestry, but 412 issues of Commentary, which The Economist once called "the best magazine in the world." Podhoretz served as its editor in chief from February 1960 until May of this year. These were the years and this was the magazine in which neoconservatism -- one of the most important political movements of this century -- was conceived, developed, and eventually blossomed.
What hath Norman Podhoretz wrought? Three extraordinary contributions to our intellectual culture stand out. First, Podhoretz and his Commentary writers were the intellectual force behind Ronald Reagan's Cold War battles. Their ideas, harnessed by a gifted statesman and backed by a strong and capable military, helped bring about the collapse of the Soviet Union and the intellectual delegitimation of Third World and anti-Zionist politics.
Another legacy of Commentary is evident in today's debate over affirmative action. Podhoretz and his writers, strong supporters of the civil-rights movement in the 1960s, have maintained a steadfast opposition to racial classifications or preferences throughout their careers. When the honorable movement of Martin Luther King Jr. veered into a realm of quotas, racial preferences, and social engineering, Podhoretz stood firm. Commentary authors identified the grave moral weaknesses of affirmative action before anyone else, warning that quotas betrayed the promise of civil rights and victimized their intended beneficiaries. Present-day opponents of quotas often sound like they are quoting from Commentary articles written two decades ago.
The same can be said about discussions regarding what Lionel Trilling called the "adversary culture" -- opponents of middle-class values whose influence spreads far beyond the college campuses where the critics flourish. While many Americans once tolerated these people, praising their "idealism," Podhoretz and the neoconservatives saw them as destructive, nihilistic, and ultimately dangerous. Rare for intellectuals, the neoconservatives celebrated the prosaic and unromantic culture of the ordinary American. In so doing, they provided bourgeois culture with the intellectual self-confidence to stand up against those whom most now recognize as cultural barbarians.
Beginnings
Born in 1930, Podhoretz was raised in a lapsed Orthodox Jewish home in Brooklyn, New York. After graduating from high school, he enrolled at Columbia University. There he became the protégé of Lionel Trilling and distinguished himself as one of the brightest literary minds of his generation. After graduate studies at Cambridge University, Podhoretz served for two years in the United States Army before returning home to assume a position as an assistant editor of Commentary -- a job that Trilling had arranged for him. While at Commentary, Podhoretz wrote prolifically, publishing in nearly every New York magazine of note. In present-day discussions of neoconservatism, it is often said that Podhoretz (and the other neoconservatives) are refugees from the Left who, in reaction to the 1960s counterculture, moved rightward. Although Podhoretz was a liberal in that he supported the New Deal and civil rights, his work in the 1950s demonstrates how that observation reveals far more about changes in liberalism than changes in Podhoretz.
While the topics of Podhoretz's essays in the 1950s ranged from William Faulkner to nuclear war, they reveal the skepticism of a serious critic inclined to doubt any simple answers to social, political, and literary questions. Rejecting the rationalist and utopian themes of liberalism, Podhoretz had a great appreciation for the commonplace and the prosaic. In a 1957 essay, Podhoretz indicted liberalism for being unable to "take a sufficiently complicated view of reality." Liberalism was "a conglomeration of attitudes suitable only to the naive, the callow, the rash: in short, the immature. Its view of the world was seen to be an undignified, indeed dangerous philosophy for the leading nation in the West to entertain."
In "The Know-Nothing Bohemians," a seminal 1958 essay in Partisan Review, Podhoretz focused his attack on what he regarded as an exceptionally naive, callow, and immature group of leftists -- the Beats, a group of literary intellectuals centered in Greenwich Village who were attaining increasing prominence in American letters. Podhoretz charged that the Beats' disdain for traditional, middle-class morality translated into a dangerous nihilism, "the revolution of the spiritually underprivileged and the crippled of soul -- young men who can't think straight and so hate anyone who can." For Podhoretz, the message of their animosity toward private property and the middle class was clear: "Kill the intellectuals who can talk coherently, kill the people who can sit still for five minutes at a time, kill those incomprehensible characters who are capable of getting seriously involved with a woman, a job, a cause."
The Implosion of Liberalism
In 1959, Podhoretz was named the editor in chief of Commentary, but he did not take up arms against the nihilists right away. In keeping with the zeitgeist of the times, he flirted with the Left. He opened the pages of Commentary to writers supporting the peace movement and radical cultural critics like Paul Goodman, who wrote of the "beautiful cultural consequences" that would follow from legalizing pornography. Podhoretz upset many people with his movement toward the Left -- namely Lionel Trilling and Irving Kristol -- but maintained his connections to the traditional liberal community as well.
The Vietnam War proved a pivotal event in the development of Podhoretz's thought, but not in the way it would for so many others of his generation. Podhoretz opposed military intervention in Vietnam, and under his stewardship, Commentary was the first magazine to seriously consider the war and its potential ramifications. His opposition was always on tactical grounds; he maintained simply that it was a conflict from which the United States could not emerge victorious. To Podhoretz, this one error of the United States did not change the fact that communism and the Soviet Union were evil, and did not suggest any fundamental flaws in the American way of life. The Left and the counterculture, on the other hand, used the war to impugn American institutions like the family and the university.
So while Podhoretz opposed the war, his opposition to the antiwar movement was more intense and ultimately more important. His position was barely represented in the intellectual community. He saw liberal intellectuals, colleagues whom he respected and trusted, fail to criticize increasingly militant student protesters. Whatever the students did -- even when radicals at Columbia urinated on the carpet in the office of university president Grayson Kirk -- liberal professors praised the "idealism" of the students and excused their tactics as the excesses of youthful exuberance. Podhoretz's wife, the noted writer Midge Decter, recalls the student takeover at Columbia University. She was at a party of New York intellectuals, and criticized the students who had overturned files and destroyed a professor's life's work. Dwight MacDonald, a major figure on the New York intellectual scene for 25 years, responded, "Obviously, you care more about material values than human values."
This incident was emblematic of what Podhoretz, Decter, and their allies identified as a major crisis in liberalism. Though the term "neoconservatism" was not coined until the early 1970s -- by the socialist Michael Harrington -- it is used now to describe the New York intellectuals and their compatriots who opposed the counterculture and its various permutations. What Podhoretz had called in 1957 "a conglomeration of attitudes suitable only to the naive, the callow, the rash" imploded 10 years later. Unable or unwilling to define and protect its principles against the radical onslaught, liberalism self-destructed as a coherent, governing philosophy -- with devastating effects on its key institutional expressions: the university and the government. Though he was not yet a conservative, Podhoretz became as effective a critic of the Left as anyone on the Right. Many arguments that we now regard as staples of conservatism originated in the pages of Commentary 20 years ago. An example is political correctness: Though the term was not coined until the 1980s, it was best described in a 1973 Commentary article called "The New Inquisitors," written by Podhoretz himself:
"The upshot is an atmosphere which is no longer conducive to fearless inquiry or even to playful speculation and which, far from encouraging, positively obstructs the development of independence of mind and of the critical spirit. Thus do our colleges and universities continue their degenerative mutation from sanctuaries for free discussion into inquisitorial agents of a dogmatic secular faith."
Though Podhoretz and several others -- especially James Q. Wilson, whose 1972 Commentary article, "Liberalism Versus Liberal Education," explains perfectly the crisis in higher education today -- tried to protect the university, they saw that their task was virtually hopeless. The university was liberalism's home turf, and was the first casualty of the liberal implosion. The issue to which Norman Podhoretz and Commentary dedicated most of their ideological firepower was the legacy of the civil rights movement: affirmative action and quotas.
Originally conceived by President Kennedy, affirmative action was designed to encourage institutions to make a concerted effort to be inclusive of all people. Podhoretz always supported this. In his 1979 memoirs, Breaking Ranks, Podhoretz recalled saying when the debate had begun earlier in that decade that "I supported special efforts to recruit qualified blacks and that I also supported special efforts to help unqualified blacks compete on an equal footing." But affirmative action had soon become a series of programs and benefits intended to give preference to people based upon their race, and, over time, upon their ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation as well. And, to Podhoretz, this violated a crucial tenet of his liberalism -- that an individual should not be judged on the basis of an involuntary characteristic. Consequently, Podhoretz made Commentary the intellectual center of opposition to affirmative action. Throughout the 1970s, Commentary attacked affirmative action from every angle.
Commentary authors were among the first to argue that those who would suffer the most from affirmative action programs would be the intended beneficiaries; that those not slated to "benefit" from affirmative action would react bitterly when a member of a preferred group received an admissions slot or a job on the basis of race or another superfluous category; and that those "minorities" in the institutions would constantly feel the need to prove themselves worthy, to demonstrate that they were not a "quota hire." As Michael Novak noted in a 1976 Commentary article, "If you grant no responsibility or hope for their own advancement to blacks, but treat their needs as in every respect due to a form of victimization, then no one calls you a racist; you are regarded, instead, as a friend to blacks. 'Don't blame the victim' is the slogan of such friendship. But if, on the other hand, you assert that blacks are equal to whites in potency, moral spirit, dignity, responsibility, and power over their own future, and deny that they are mere pawns and victims, then you set off a chorus of alarums and find yourself on treacherous emotional territory."
The Failure of Nerve
After the American defeat in Vietnam, Podhoretz saw this same shifting of responsibility that liberalism had come to embody on the international scene. Podhoretz believed the Vietnam War was a major tactical blunder, but America's misfortune should not serve as a precedent. America was the same great, powerful, and responsible nation that she was when she embarked on this mistaken path. And when the United States had to become engaged militarily in the future, she should do so with a clear conscience and with strength of will.
This was not so easily done. The Vietnam War had taken quite a toll on the American people: As Midge Decter explained in a 1976 Commentary symposium, "Defeat (and it is a tribute to something that one should feel impelled to remind on this point) is not good for people. And it is no better for nations than for individuals. It humiliates, raises doubts, heightens acrimony, increases recourse to tricky euphemism, and stirs up all those lurking and treacherously seductive fantasies of escape. Most of all, it paralyzes, and once again does so no less to nations than to individuals."
In the wake of the defeat in Vietnam, Podhoretz worried about what he called "a failure of nerve" triggering "a culture of appeasement." The Soviet Union was as evil as ever, gobbling up nations and subjecting them to totalitarian terror. As he wrote in Commentary in 1976, the Soviet Union is "the most determined, ferocious and barbarous enemy ever to have appeared on the earth." Podhoretz resurrected the argument that Communism is morally equivalent to Nazism; in fact more dangerous in one respect -- intellectuals and their young charges had never been attracted to Nazism.
How to stop Soviet aggression? Only the United States would have the power to do so, and effective resistance would demand not only substantial resources but a will to win. And in the mid-1970s, following Vietnam, Podhoretz was worried that such a will did not exist. "While the Soviet Union engages in the most massive military buildup in the history of the world, we haggle over every weapon. We treat our own military leaders as though they were wearing the uniform of a foreign power. Everything they tell us about our military needs is greeted with hostility." Podhoretz savaged anyone who stood in the way of this American effort. That included not only the political and intellectual Left, but the business community as well: Corporate moguls were all too ready to sacrifice anti-communist principle for the profits in trading and dealing with America's totalitarian enemies. Self-indulgence on the Right was, according to Podhoretz, just as bad as self-indulgence on the Left. Two books he published in this period, The Present Danger and Why We Were in Vietnam, sought to establish the righteousness of the anticommunist cause, and the moral and military readiness of the United States to prosecute it.
In addition to his own writing, Podhoretz published many important articles on these subjects. Especially notable were Richard Pipes's work on the Soviet Union and Robert Tucker's essays on the danger posed by the oil-producing states. But the most significant essay he published during that period was Jeane Kirkpatrick's "Dictatorships and Double Standards," in November 1979. Kirkpatrick wrote that anticommunism should be the priority of American foreign policy, even if that meant making alliances with nondemocratic, authoritarian governments. Communist governments were worse than noncommunist authoritarian governments because the former destroy civil society and ruin the lives of all of their inhabitants.
"Dictatorships and Double Standards" was widely read: One prominent reader was Ronald Reagan, then running for president. He expressed his admiration for Kirkpatrick, and later appointed her U.S. ambassador to the United Nations when he became president. Kirkpatrick used her position as a bully pulpit from which to defend American values and interests and to excoriate its enemies in the Communist bloc and the Third World.
Kirkpatrick was not the first Commentary writer to defend Podhoretz's ideals from the floor of the United Nations. In the 1970s, there was no place where the ideas of communism -- or at least the idea that communism was no worse than American democracy -- were more prevalent than in the United Nations. Often combined with virulent anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, the Soviet Union and its Third World charges passed resolutions blasting the West and the Jews. And the West, by and large, had little to say in response. At least, until Norman Podhoretz gained influence in that body. In 1975, Podhoretz published a remarkable essay by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, "The United States in Opposition," calling upon the West to take up the war of ideas with the pernicious forces of the Soviet Union and the Third World. This article also was widely read -- Secretary of State Henry Kissinger called to congratulate its author -- and President Gerald Ford responded by appointing Moynihan ambassador to the United Nations.
Moynihan took the job in 1975, at the height of the anti-Semitism and anti-Western sentiment in the U.N. The United States could not have found a better man to respond to the virulent ideological challenge being put forth by her enemies. In November 1975, Ugandan dictator Idi Amin took to the floor of the United Nations to deliver one of the most anti-Semitic speeches given since Hitler. Maintaining that "the United States of America has been colonized by the Zionists who hold all the tools of development and power," Amin called upon the United States to "rid their society of the Zionists," and for the United Nations to pursue the "extinction of Israel as a state." The United Nations delegates responded with a standing ovation, and the accompanying resolution that he sponsored -- "Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination" -- passed easily. A majority of the nations of the world had, in the very institution that was once the hope of liberalism in the wake of Nazism, passed a resolution that Hitler could have offered, and did so with a fervor Hitler would have admired. A response was needed, and Ambassador Moynihan turned to his old editor for advice.
Podhoretz drafted most of the speech with which Moynihan responded. It was a moving address, one that sent shock waves through the United Nations and upset countless liberals. That speech, and the events leading up to it, are masterfully recounted in Moynihan's memoirs of his service at the United Nations, A Dangerous Place, which is dedicated to Norman Podhoretz and Leonard Garment. Moynihan became so popular in New York as a result of that speech that he was catapulted to the United States Senate in 1976, with Norman Podhoretz as one of his principal advisors.
By the end of the 1970s, liberalism had, in the mind of Norman Podhoretz, become so corrupted that there was no longer any place for him in it or in the Democratic Party. Although Podhoretz did not resign from the Democratic Party, he voted for Ronald Reagan -- the first time he voted Republican in a presidential election. But he had good reason to do so; Ronald Reagan and his staff took the ideas in Commentary very seriously, and The Present Danger was required reading in the Reagan campaign.
While Reagan's stance toward Communism and Israel were the main reasons for Podhoretz's support, Podhoretz had also become more conservative on domestic issues. Midge Decter calls an aversion to capitalism "the last vestige of our liberalism," and they were supporters of capitalism by 1981 when Podhoretz published "The New Defenders of Capitalism" in the Harvard Business Review. In that article he wrote:
"[Capitalism] is a necessary, if not a sufficient, condition of freedom; it is both a necessary and a sufficient condition of wealth; it provides a better chance than any known alternative for the most widespread sharing in the wealth it produces."
His support for capitalism deepened throughout the decade, as he published important pieces on the subject by its great celebrators George Gilder and Michael Novak. Podhoretz also saw clearly the failures of the welfare state, and opened his pages to thinkers like Charles Murray, who diagnosed its brutal unintended consequences. He also maintained an assault on affirmative action; indeed, Thomas Sowell's December 1989 essay, "Affirmative Action: A Worldwide Disaster," may be the best critique of quotas ever penned.
But his prime area of interest remained foreign policy. Though many of his contributors, friends, and relatives (notably his son-in-law Elliott Abrams) served in high positions in the Reagan administration, Podhoretz harshly criticized the president for capitulating to the Soviets. His 1982 New York Times Magazine article, "The Neoconservative Anguish over Reagan's Foreign Policy," makes this case quite succinctly. Podhoretz detected Reagan's tendency, as George Will put it, to love commerce more than loathe communism -- and make deals with the Soviets when his corporate constituency thought that doing so would yield a profit. Podhoretz stated boldly that America's most important responsibility was to fight the evil of communism.
Fighter for the Right
After those 412 issues of Commentary, what has Norman Podhoretz taught us? Several important lessons. He has taught us that everything we treasure is fragile, and needs constant attention and defense. The implosion of liberalism in the 1960s is destroying our university system. The ideas of Martin Luther King Jr. were bastardized into support for race-based preferences that are anathema to the central liberal principle that people should be judged on their individual merits.
Leftism took over liberalism because Leftists never forgot, as others did, that ideas -- not economic interests, not social arrangements -- rule the world. Podhoretz has constantly reminded us of this truth, when he stressed that freedom could only be preserved if America had the will to defend it herself, when he bore witness to the original tenets of the civil-rights movement, when he scored communism and supported Israel. In his valedictory statement in the June 1995 issue of Commentary, Podhoretz quotes Theodore Roosevelt. "Aggressive fighting for the right is the noblest sport the world affords." Podhoretz has spent a long and fruitful career fighting for the right, and we are all indebted to him for it.
