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The trashing of Norman Podhoretz’s latest book, Why We Were in Vietnam, began even before its official publication date this past spring. It was a sort of pre-emptive strike at a delicious target of opportunity by mainstream liberalism. A month before pub date, the book had been declared a free-fire zone by Arthur Schlesinger Jr. in Harper’s and by Theodore Draper in The New Republic. After this softening up by such Long Toms came the overkill barrage from James Fallows in the New York Times Book Review, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt as the Times’s daily reviewer, and others. No book in recent years has suffered such a battering.

It wasn’t just that the book itself was gassed, shrapneled, bayoneted, strafed, bombed, and nuked: the author, in turn, was made out to be an amalgam of Strangelove, Hitler, Pegler, and Pecksniff. (The uproar increased in intensity after Podhoretz had an essay published in the New York Times Magazine in early May that was sharply critical of President Reagan’s foreign policy for not being conservative enough.) Podhoretz, they said, was “a Spengler on horseback” (whatever that means) and “a highbrow hitman for the neoconservative movement”; his world view was “neurotic, unstable, dingy, and unconvincing.” Commentary, which he edits, reads as if “it were written by one person, a solemn and dyspeptic sourpuss.” The Christian Science Monitor’s Joseph C. Harsch accused him of allying himself with two powerful lobbies—the armaments industry and the Israelis. He was accused of dishonesty for having become pro-Vietnam whereas, a decade earlier, he had been anti-Vietnam; and for (allegedly) concealing in this book his earlier opposition to the war.

AB

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Arnold Beichman

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The trashing of Norman Podhoretz’s latest book, Why We Were in Vietnam, began even before its official publication date this past spring. It was a sort of pre-emptive strike at a delicious target of opportunity by mainstream liberalism. A month before pub date, the book had been declared a free-fire zone by Arthur Schlesinger Jr. in Harper’s and by Theodore Draper in The New Republic. After this softening up by such Long Toms came the overkill barrage from James Fallows in the New York Times Book Review, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt as the Times’s daily reviewer, and others. No book in recent years has suffered such a battering.

It wasn’t just that the book itself was gassed, shrapneled, bayoneted, strafed, bombed, and nuked: the author, in turn, was made out to be an amalgam of Strangelove, Hitler, Pegler, and Pecksniff. (The uproar increased in intensity after Podhoretz had an essay published in the New York Times Magazine in early May that was sharply critical of President Reagan’s foreign policy for not being conservative enough.) Podhoretz, they said, was “a Spengler on horseback” (whatever that means) and “a highbrow hitman for the neoconservative movement”; his world view was “neurotic, unstable, dingy, and unconvincing.” Commentary, which he edits, reads as if “it were written by one person, a solemn and dyspeptic sourpuss.” The Christian Science Monitor’s Joseph C. Harsch accused him of allying himself with two powerful lobbies—the armaments industry and the Israelis. He was accused of dishonesty for having become pro-Vietnam whereas, a decade earlier, he had been anti-Vietnam; and for (allegedly) concealing in this book his earlier opposition to the war.