He was a great man. A clever man. A family man. A man of faith and freedom.
I loved Norman Podhoretz. He was a kind man to a 20-something ink-stained wretch trying to help keep the trains running on time with no logistical skills to her name. He may have written a book called Ex-Friends, but he was all gratitude in my experience of him. And that wasn’t just with me. If you’ve never read a Norman Podhoretz book — some of us kids called him NPod with love — read My Love Affair with America.
At one point in it, he wrote:
Looking back as a septuagenarian on my life as an American in America, I am reminded of something Jewish — this time of a special hymn of thanksgiving. . . . Each element is the subject of its own sentence, and each sentence of the series concludes with the word dayyenu, which can roughly be translated as “That alone would have been enough for us.” The idea is that, not content with “that alone,” God went on and on and on to pile wonder after wonder and marvel after marvel; so many that those participating in the seder invariably grow fatigued by the time they finish reciting them all.
He also said, of course:
America is not God, but it declared its independence as a nation by an appeal to “the law of Nature and Nature’s God,” and the Constitution its founders wrote and ratified for that new nation uses the word “blessings” in its very first paragraph. The particular blessings to which they referred were those of liberty, to “secure” which to themselves and their posterity they created the Constitution that set the United States of America on its course.
He and National Review founder William F. Buckley Jr. were friends and kindred intellectual spirits here. Bill talked about how we were unique. Our Bill of Rights is about prohibitions on the government, to protect the freedom and dignity of the people, because our Creator gave us these gifts and made us in His image.
Anyway, I can’t imagine what it was like for Norman to still be alive with so many of his friends gone — he was almost 96, WFB would have been 100 last month. And his beloved wife, Midge Decter. I have many regrets in life thus far, and one of them is I did not insist on recording video of my interview with the two of them in Portugal many moons ago. It was a donor fundraising cruise event, and what I really remember most is the love and the humor. The two of them lived joy together, and gave us some great gifts in their family life and their writing.
The first remembrance from his son John is here on Commentary‘s website.
Just living at the same time as NPod would have been enough for us. And yet there was so much more.
As a priest friend of mine says: God be good to him!