The Norman Podhoretz Reader
A Selection of His Writings from the 1950s through the 1990s
edited by Thomas L. Jeffers
Free Press, 496 pp., $35 IN ESSAYS in the American Historical Review in 1992 and 1995, historians Michael Kazin and Alan Brinkley asked why so few of their colleagues have undertaken research on political conservatism. "Historians, like most people," Kazin ventured, "are reluctant to sympathize with people whose political opinions they detest." Overwhelmingly cosmopolitan in their cultural tastes and liberal or radical in their politics, scholars of modern American history have largely eschewed "research projects about past movements that seem to them either bastions of a crumbling status quo or the domain of puritan, pathological yahoos."
Since those articles were written, there has been a flood of books and articles on the subject--particularly on neoconservatism. Joining this celebration is Thomas L. Jeffers, a professor of literature at Marquette University who is writing a biography of Norman Podhoretz. By way of beginning his project, Jeffers has edited "The Norman Podhoretz Reader," a collection of writings from the 1950s to the 1990s along with brief commentary on each decade's work.
The continually embattled Podhoretz has been an enduring figure over a period of fifty years. Even as a young critic in the 1950s, Podhoretz proved remarkably prescient. In "The Know-Nothing Bohemians," for example, the twenty-eight-year-old Podhoretz skewered such contemporary icons as novelist Jack Kerouac and poet Allen Ginsberg--charging them with providing the model for destructive lifestyles and for creating a cult that emphasized a highly irresponsible individualism. America needs instead, Podhoretz suggested, such everyday middle-class values as self-restraint and individual responsibility, in particularly marrying and rearing a family. He described these virtues as the cement that held the society together and, not incidentally, the basis for orderly and progressive change. How far ahead of the pack he came to be seen only a few years later when a full-blown counterculture arose whose unhappy consequences are still with us today.
Podhoretz would continue to pound away at this theme when he became editor of Commentary in 1960, where he remained for thirty-five years. As he wrote in a postscript to his second volume of memoirs, "Breaking Ranks": "The young were especially vulnerable [to the counter culture]. They had been inoculated against every one of the physical diseases which in times past had literally made it impossible for so many to reach adulthood. But against a spiritual plague like this one they were entirely helpless. Indeed, so spiritually illiterate had the culture become, that parents were unable even to recognize the disease when it struck their own children."
THROUGHOUT HIS CAREER, Podhoretz has exhibited an almost reckless courage. The safest thing would have been to join what Harold Rosenberg once called "the herd of so-called independent minds." Instead, Podhoretz chose to take on the adversary culture, leaving in his wake a group of "ex-friends" (the title he gave another book of memoirs).
The reasons were the intensity of his feelings and honesty. This included exposing himself and his own failures in a series of self-portraits like, "My Negro Problem, and Ours" and his first memoir, "Making It" (excerpts from which Jeffers includes in "The Norman Podhoretz Reader"). What made him a pariah especially was his description of the "dirty little secret" that intellectuals and cultural leaders are as motivated as much by success and power as by the noble causes they more formally espouse.
Still, the lucidity and muscularity of his prose guaranteed him a band of devoted admirers. His writing abounds with lines like: "One of the longest journeys in the world is the journey from Brooklyn to Manhattan." If there is a core principle that has driven him, it is his unalloyed love of his country, gratitude for the opportunities it made available to what Sam Lubell once called "children of the tenement trail." The magazine he edited could always be counted upon to discover what was right about America. Jeffers quotes from Podhoretz's "Valedictory" on stepping down as editor in 1995: "Commentary has defended America at a time when America has been under moral and ideological attack. Commentary has defended the Jewish people and the Jewish state when they, too, and for many of the same reasons, have been subjected to a relentless assault on their legitimacy and even their very existence. For me there has been no conflict or contradiction involved in defending this dual heritage by which I have been formed."
Podhoretz's finest moments came during the Vietnam meltdown, when many came to feel that confronting the Soviet Union's aggressive designs in the world would lead us into similar disasters. He had been an early opponent of the war--but he felt it to be a tragic mistake, not the moral iniquity that so many on the Left assumed it to be. Simultaneously, he was opposed to President Nixon's and Henry Kissinger's strategy of détente, which would permit that Communist power to remain in charge of territories it occupied in Eastern Europe and continue to threaten the undeveloped and free world.
THUS, AT A TIME OF GRAVE DANGER and what Jimmy Carter called "malaise," Podhoretz went on the attack. In his books "Why We Were in Vietnam" and "The Present Danger," along with his stable of writers at Commentary, Podhoretz poured forth article after article that became the underpinnings of the Reagan policy of bringing down the Soviet Union. (Following an article by Jeane Kirkpatrick in Commentary, Reagan named her the United States' ambassador to the United Nations.) Describing Podhoretz's critical role, historian Richard Gid Powers wrote, "During those bleakest days of anti-communism, there was, however, the first stirring of life, of rebirth, a sign of vigor at odds with the uncertainty and pessimism. . . . One man summoned the will, the strength, and the imagination to commence the giant task of rebuilding the antiCommunist coalition. This was Norman Podhoretz."
Podhoretz continues to remain a figure of importance, as his 2002 book on the Bible, "The Prophets: Who They Were, What They Are," showed, and will continue to pour out powerful work. But until Jeffers finishes his biography, "The Norman Podhoretz Reader" will serve as the best introduction to all that he has already accomplished.
Murray Friedman is director of the Feinstein Center for American Jewish History at Temple University. His books "The Neo Conservative Revolution" and "Commentary and American Life" are forthcoming this year.