Born, as he described in Making It, in a Jewish slum in Brooklyn, Norman Podhoretz blazed through Columbia and Cambridge, where he impressed first Lionel Trilling then F. R. Leavis (talk about the anxiety of influence), then became editor of Commentary magazine at age 30. When he took the reins, Commentary was a learned, sedate monthly publication of the American Jewish Committee, committed to postwar, liberal anti-communism. A friend of Norman Mailer and Paul Goodman, Podhoretz initially nudged it in a countercultural direction. But then he swung right.
How they hated him for it — they being the unpersuaded members of the New York family of intellectuals, almost all Jewish, all to one degree or another on the left. Podhoretz hoped to swing them with him, and he succeeded with many. But the larger remainder remained, and never ever forgave him. Apply the rhetorical Geiger counter to reviews of his late books in mainstream publications. The animus pushes the needle out of the dial.
Podhoretz gave as good as he got. He was a fighter. One of his late books was devoted to friends he had broken with, titled Ex-Friends (the cover displayed a huge red X). The discarded included Mailer, Columbia contemporary Allen Ginsberg, and Lillian Hellman.
He fought zealously because the stakes were high. He agreed that liberals pursued social policies that had proven to be feckless, though that was an insight more central to his comrades in defection, Irving Kristol and (to a lesser degree) Daniel Bell. What animated Podhoretz most was the threat to the United States and to Israel posed by the Soviet Union, and by the left here and abroad generally. It was to combat this threat that he ghost-wrote Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s speech condemning the U.N.’s resolution labeling Zionism as racism. It was to combat this that Commentary under his leadership published hawks like Jeane Kirkpatrick.
He was not all politics. His undergraduate and postgraduate education stuck with him. In an essay blasting Ezra Pound’s fascism and antisemitism, Podhoretz paused to say, in a footnote, that his stylistic suggestions to a middle-aged William Butler Yeats were even more decisive than his editing of The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot. He loved classical music, especially when played on his state-of-the-art, immersive sound system.
The eye could twinkle. During the Iraq War, Bill Buckley greeted him at a dinner at the Union League Club by saying that he, Podhoretz, had not written him any critical letters recently (Bill had begun to cool on war). Podhoretz said, “I’ve been blocked.” At other times his intensity weighed on him. When our colleague Rick Brookhiser had lunch with him after finishing a book on four Adamses — John, John Quincy, Charles Francis, and Henry — he remarked that in order to write an essay on Henry he not only read all of Henry Adams’s books, but the six fat volumes of his published correspondence.
He was devoted to his wife Midge Decter (d. 2022) and to their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. Commentary is now in the capable hands of his son John. Dead at 95, R.I.P. — though the next time you see lightning it may be Podhoretz dissecting something by Mailer.