Norman Podhoretz, RIP

An American life in letters and public affairs

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Norman Podhoretz, who passed away at age 95 on December 16, made a journey throughout his life that is characteristic of the way lots of the twentieth century’s great minds came to conservatism. He was part of the group, the neoconservatives, whose move away from leftism came a little later than the wave exemplified by the original editorial staff of National Review, but more on that later. What Podhoretz needs to be remembered for was the integrity with which he engaged his times at all the points on his trek.

The 1980s were heady days for conservatism. We had, as you’ll recall, the closest thing to a purist Frank Meyer fusionist in the White House. Think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation (the unfortunate present self-debasement of which is another story, and maybe one we’ll cover at Precipice at some point) and the (still excellent) American Enterprise Institute were feeding policy recommendations to the Reagan administration. Solidly conservative magazines abounded, many of them bringing irreverent humor to their projects. Conferences were festive affairs.

I shared my personal recollections of this era in a post in October:

Once I realized what I was - and wasn’t - I plunged in headlong. Subscribed to Commentary, National Review, Insight, and The American Spectator. Read Whittaker Chambers’s Witness. Became a conference junkie.

The apex of the conference-junkie period was attending the Committee for the Free World’s three-day summit at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington in the spring of 1987. The Committee was a project of Donald Rumsfeld’s and Midge Decter’s. Decter was a much-published contributor to magazines such as those enumerated above, along with The Atlantic, The New Republic and others. She was married to Norman Podhoretz , one of the original New York Intellectuals, the group from which the original neoconservatives emerged.

I wasn’t quite as clueless as I’d been a couple of years earlier, but I still had much to learn. I was living in a small city in the Midwest, working for the family manufacturing business, and I’d heard about the conference from the Committee’s monthly newsletter, to which I also subscribed.

I hopped in my Pinto station wagon and drove out - along I-70 and the Pennsylvania Turnpike, taking a right to head south at Breezewood. I stayed with some friends of mine - a left-leaning couple who lived in suburban DC - and drove into the city every morning.

It was an incredible experience. I rubbed shoulders with - and had great mealtime conversations with - scholars from The American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, various magazines and universities, and government. I met Irving Kristol, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, Michael Novak and Joshua Muravchik, to do a little name-dropping.

The impact of the experience was profound. Since then, I’ve insisted on a rigorous pursuit of the essence of public-policy situations both domestic and world-stage.

So much in the life of these journals and organizations was still in the ascendancy. This was the moment when America got a look at what three-pillared fusionism really had to offer. It provided the infrastructure from which the Reagan administration drew people and ideas.

While I’m name-dropping, I met both Podhortetz and Decter at that conference as well. And some time later, I met Podhoretz again when he spoke at a synagogue in Indianapolis.

Something else to remember about Podhoretz is that he was directed into his life of the mind and literature and public affairs by a high school English teacher. His own family, which raised him in the Brownsville section of Brooklyn, were, while leftist in their political leanings, not bookish people. But “Mrs. K,” as he calls her in his memoir Making It, saw something in him that she felt compelled to refine.

She took him to art museums and the theater, taught him how to dress and conduct himself in intellectual circles, and imparted to him the importance of connections.

Podhoretz went to Columbia on a full scholarship and earned a BA in English literature (and simultaneously a degree in Hebrew literature from Jewish Theological Seminary in America). A Fulbright scholarship enabled him to earn subsequent degrees from Oxford’s Clare College.

He was then welcomed into the New York Intellectuals, a group of left-leaning (often Trotskyist) sociologists, literary critics and philosophers. Others included Nathan Glaser, Irving Kristol, Philip Rahv and Sidney Hook. They were also mostly Jewish, at least demographically if not always in an observant way. They populated the pages of Commentary and Partisan Review.

An early example of his ability to cause dustups within his circle was his 1953 review in Commentary of Saul Bellow’s novel The Adventures of Augie March. While Podhoretz lauds much of what Bellow is up to in the novel, he ultimately concludes that it’s going to take Bellow some more works to fully flesh out his vision:

Mr. Bellow has the very genuine distinction of giving us a sense of what a real American idiom might look like. It is no disgrace to have failed in a pioneer attempt.

Podhoretz became editor of Commentary in 1960, a position he held until 1995. His tenure is a fine way to trace the birth of neoconservatism and its ingraining into the overall conservative project.

It wasn’t long into the 60s until he began to express unease with the New Left, particularly as US involvement in Vietnam became official. He started to see that the Democratic Party was not up to the task of resisting them.

He caused quite a stir in the February 1963 issue of Commentary with his essay titled “My Negro Problem - And Ours.” Bear in mind it was published at the outset of a year that would see Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech and the civil rights rally in Washington where he gave it, as well as the Birmingham church bombing. On the other hand, Motown and jazz were integral parts of popular culture, as were in-demand actors such as Sydney Poitier. It was simultaneously a time of foreboding and possibility.

Here’s the launching point for his exploration:

Two ideas puzzled me deeply as a child growing up in Brooklyn during the 1930’s in what today would be called an integrated neighborhood. One of them was that all Jews were rich; the other was that all Negroes were persecuted. These ideas had appeared in print; therefore they must be true. My own experience and the evidence of my senses told me they were not true, but that only confirmed what a day-dreaming boy in the provinces—for the lower-class neighborhoods of New York belong as surely to the provinces as any rural town in North Dakota—discovers very early: his experience is unreal and the evidence of his senses is not to be trusted. Yet even a boy with a head full of fantasies incongruously synthesized out of Hollywood movies and English novels cannot altogether deny the reality of his own experience—especially when there is so much deprivation in that experience. Nor can he altogether gainsay the evidence of his own senses—especially such evidence of the senses as comes from being repeatedly beaten up, robbed, and in general hated, terrorized, and humiliated.

Here’s a taste of of where he goes with it:

Item: There is an athletic meet in which the whole of our junior high school is participating. I am in one of the seventh-grade rapid-advance classes, and “segregation” has now set in with a vengeance. In the last three or four years of the elementary school from which we have just graduated, each grade had been divided into three classes, according to “intelligence.” (In the earlier grades the divisions had either been arbitrary or else unrecognized by us as having anything to do with brains.) These divisions by IQ, or however it was arranged, had resulted in a preponderance of Jews in the “1” classes and a corresponding preponderance of Negroes in the “3’s,” with the Italians split unevenly along the spectrum. At least a few Negroes had always made the “l’s,” just as there had always been a few Jewish kids among the “3’s” and more among the “2’s” (where Italians dominated). But the junior high’s rapid-advance class of which I am now a member is overwhelmingly Jewish and entirely white—except for a shy lonely Negro girl with light skin and reddish hair.

The athletic meet takes place in a city-owned stadium far from the school. It is an important event to which a whole day is given over. The winners are to get those precious little medallions stamped with the New York City emblem that can be screwed into a belt and that prove the wearer to be a distinguished personage. I am a fast runner, and so I am assigned the position of anchor man on my class’s team in the relay race. There are three other seventh-grade teams in the race, two of them all Negro, as ours is all white. One of the all-Negro teams is very tall—their anchor man waiting silently next to me on the line looks years older than I am, and I do not recognize him. He is the first to get the baton and crosses the finishing line in a walk. Our team comes in second, but a few minutes later we are declared the winners, for it has been discovered that the anchor man on the first-place team is not a member of the class. We are awarded the medallions, and the following day our home-room teacher makes a speech about how proud she is of us for being superior athletes as well as superior students. We want to believe that we deserve the praise, but we know that we could not have won even if the other class had not cheated.

That afternoon, walking home, I am waylaid and surrounded by five Negroes, among whom is the anchor man of the disqualified team. “Gimme my medal, mo’f—r,” he grunts. I do not have it with me and I tell him so. “Anyway, it ain’t yours,” I say foolishly. He calls me a liar on both counts and pushes me up against the wall on which we sometimes play handball. “Gimme my mo’f—n’ medal,” he says again. I repeat that I have left it home. “Le’s search the li’l mo’f—r,” one of them suggests, “he prolly got it hid in his mo’f—n’ pants.” My panic is now unmanageable. (How many times had I been surrounded like this and asked in soft tones, “Len’ me a nickle, boy.” How many times had I been called a liar for pleading poverty and pushed around, or searched, or beaten up, unless there happened to be someone in the marauding gang like Carl who liked me across that enormous divide of hatred and who would therefore say, “Aaah, c’mon, le’s git someone else, this boy ain’t got no money on ‘im.”) I scream at them through tears of rage and self-contempt, “Keep your f—n’ filthy lousy black hands off a me! I swear I’ll get the cops.” This is all they need to hear, and the five of them set upon me. They bang me around, mostly in the stomach and on the arms and shoulders, and when several adults loitering near the candy store down the block notice what is going on and begin to shout, they run off and away.

I do not tell my parents about the incident. My team-mates, who have also been waylaid, each by a gang led by his opposite number from the disqualified team, have had their medallions taken from them, and they never squeal either. For days, I walk home in terror, expecting to be caught again, but nothing happens. The medallion is put away into a drawer, never to be worn by anyone.

Obviously experiences like these have always been a common feature of childhood life in working-class and immigrant neighborhoods, and Negroes do not necessarily figure in them. Wherever, and in whatever combination, they have lived together in the cities, kids of different groups have been at war, beating up and being beaten up: micks against kikes against wops against spicks against polacks. And even relatively homogeneous areas have not been spared the warring of the young: one block against another, one gang (called in my day, in a pathetic effort at gentility, an “S.A.C.,” or social-athletic club) against another. But the Negro-white conflict had—and no doubt still has—a special intensity and was conducted with a ferocity unmatched by intramural white battling.

In my own neighborhood, a good deal of animosity existed between the Italian kids (most of whose parents were immigrants from Sicily) and the Jewish kids (who came largely from East European immigrant families). Yet everyone had friends, sometimes close friends, in the other “camp,” and we often visited one another’s strange-smelling houses, if not for meals, then for glasses of milk, and occasionally for some special event like a wedding or a wake. If it happened that we divided into warring factions and did battle, it would invariably be half-hearted and soon patched up. Our parents, to be sure, had nothing to do with one another and were mutually suspicious and hostile. But we, the kids, who all spoke Yiddish or Italian at home, were Americans, or New Yorkers, or Brooklyn boys: we shared a culture, the culture of the street, and at least for a while this culture proved to be more powerful than the opposing cultures of the home.

Why, why should it have been so different as between the Negroes and us? How was it borne in upon us so early, white and black alike, that we were enemies beyond any possibility of reconciliation? Why did we hate one another so?

Many years later (1982), his book Why We Were in Vietnam was published. He starts his examination back in the days when France was still basically in charge there (although Vietnam was still permitted to consider itself a monarchy with an emperor). He looks at how Vietnam was divided, at the Geneva peace conference of 1954, into northern and southern nations, the former a Marxist-Leninist state and the latter a representative democracy. From there, he examines how US administrations from Eisenhower through Nixon dealt with each Vietnamese nation. His basic conclusion is that it turned into a cluster-you-know-what due to timidity about the mission to keep communism out of the south.

By the mid-80s, Podhoretz was a Reagan enthusiast, and Commentary was home to a number of former left-leaning Democrats who, mostly starting with foreign policy, had drifted rightward.

Actually, that got started with then-American-Enterprise-Institute-scholar-soon-to-be-Reagan’s-UN-ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick’s 1979 Commentary essay “Dicatorships and Double Standards.” In it, she discusses the issue that was the catalyst for my own conversion experience - namely, the Left’s soft-pedaling of the Marxist takeover of Nicaragua’s revolution that year. She also brings up the other big revolution, the overthrow of the Shah in Iran.

Neoconservatism is often thought of as distinctive in its pioneers having come from the Left. But some twenty-five years earlier, many in the original group of editors and contributors at National Review had likewise been Trotskyists, or even Stalinists. Certainly not Buckley, but James Burnham, Frank Meyer and Whittaker Chambers all fit the bill. I suppose that’s what Irving Kristol was thinking of when he quipped that a conservative is a leftie who’s been muggged by reality.

In his 2000 book, Ex Friends: Falling Out with Allen Ginsberg, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Lillian Hellman, Hannah Arendt, and Norman Mailer, Podhoretz recounts a story about how, years after they’d all gone to Columbia together, Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac invited Podhoretz to a sit-down to resolve issues stemming from the university days, particularly the campus literary review. Ginsberg and Kerouac fired up a joint and offered some to Podhoretz, who declined, and took the gesture as an indication that the meeting was not going to be productive.

It was, as you can see, a full and colorful life. It certainly had an impact on me, and caused me to reconsider what’s worth taking seriously, and what can be eschewed as ephemeral.