She was often called a “social critic.” You could also classify her as a writer, an editor, an activist — a force. In its obituary, the New York Times called her “an architect of neoconservatism.” She was part of a mighty foursome, composed of two married couples: Norman Podhoretz and Midge Decter, and Irving Kristol and Gertrude Himmelfarb. These couples moved mountains, or at least nudged them in positive directions.
Midge Decter passed away on Monday at 94.
She was born Midge Rosenthal in 1927, in St. Paul, Minn. She wanted to go to the outstanding university in the Midwest: the University of Chicago. But her parents thought the University of Minnesota was good enough, and she attended that institution for a while. Then she did what she most wanted to do: move to New York and have a New York life. She never earned a college degree, but she was steeped in learning. Also, she was as natural in New York as the Empire State Building.
Befitting someone of her inclinations and talents, she spent her days reading, writing, and editing. And arguing. She worked at Harper’s (with Willie Morris), Saturday Review, and Basic Books, among other places. She was a foe of the 1960s counterculture, which became something like the culture writ large. She was a foe of feminism, certainly in its screwier manifestations. It was interesting to have such a strong, independent-minded woman socking it to feminism, day after day.
She was a champion of freedom, democracy, and human rights. She was a liberal Cold Warrior, who became a neoconservative Cold Warrior, who became a conservative Cold Warrior, with no need of prefix. In 1981, she founded the Committee for the Free World. Among its members were Leszek Kołakowski, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Tom Stoppard, and Donald Rumsfeld. (Decter would later write a book about Rumsfeld.)
Here is a typical line from the pen of Midge Decter: “Peace prizes are a kind of abomination, as if peace were a primary value when evil is stalking the world.” Here are some more, looking back at those momentous times when the Free World prevailed over the unfree one:
When the Berlin Wall came down, some of us literally wept for joy. And when the communist regime in the Soviet Union gave way, we were beside ourselves with the kind of hope it would be difficult for anyone who had not spent his adult life keeping an eye on the evil uses of Soviet power to understand. Although freedom and democracy were a long, long way from universal, and might never be so, they seemed to me nevertheless to be ideologically no longer in question.
When the Soviet Union ended, so did Decter’s Committee for the Free World. She did not want to perpetuate the organization for the sake of perpetuation. The aim of Decter and her cohort had been met.
Midge Decter had many children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and she was motherly and grandmotherly to many young people she was not related to at all. With her husband Norman, she was a friend of William F. Buckley Jr., who loved and admired her (and him).
In 2001, she wrote a memoir: An Old Wife’s Tale: My Seven Decades in Love and War. The review in our pages was headed “Our Gal.” Elizabeth Fox-Genovese — another great and independent-minded woman (married to a leading intellectual, Gene Genovese) — began,
Forthright to a fault — or a virtue — Midge Decter enjoys a well-deserved reputation for speaking her mind. In this new book, she lays her formidable polemical skills aside, adopting instead a rather irenic and bemused tone, perhaps on the assumption that polemics ill become a review of one’s life, perhaps because she truly views her personal experience as personal rather than political.
Nonetheless, observed Fox-Genovese, “she cannot resist plunging the odd stiletto into a former foe,” and why not?
Above, we described Midge Decter as a “force.” Her husband once recalled a moment fairly early in Midge’s career, when she was speaking at a labor meeting. She was giving a characteristically robust and stylish address. George Meany, seated on the dais, was impressed. He turned to the person next to him and said, in a stage whisper, “Who is dis goil?”
That girl could have been none other than Midge Decter, a unique and delectable personality.