NEW YORK \u2014 Norman Podhoretz, the boastful, hard-line editor and author whose books, essays, and stewardship of Commentary magazine marked a political and deeply personal break from the left and made him a leader of the neoconservative movement, has died. He was 95.<\/p>\n
Mr. Podhoretz died \u201cpeacefully and without pain\u201d on Dec. 16, his son John Podhoretz confirmed in a statement on Commentary\u2019s website. His cause of death was not immediately released.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe was a man of great wit and a man of deep wisdom and he lived an astonishing and uniquely American life,\u201d John Podhoretz said.<\/p>\n
Norman Podhoretz was among the last of the so-called \u201cNew York intellectuals\u201d of the mid-20th century, a famously contentious circle that at various times included Norman Mailer, Hannah Arendt, Susan Sontag, and Lionel Trilling. As a young man, Mr. Podhoretz longed to join them. In middle age, he departed. Like Irving Kristol, Gertrude Himmelfarb, and other founding neoconservatives, Podhoretz began turning from the liberal politics he shared with so many peers and helped reshape the national dialogue in the 1960s and after.<\/p>\n
The son of Jewish immigrants, Mr. Podhoretz was 30 when he was named editor-in-chief of Commentary in 1960, and years later transformed the once-liberal magazine into an essential forum for conservatives. Two future U.S. ambassadors to the United Nations, Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Jeane Kirkpatrick, received their appointments in part because of essays they published in Commentary that called for a more assertive foreign policy.<\/p>\n
Despised by former allies, Mr. Podhoretz found new friends all the way to the White House, from President Ronald Reagan, a reader of Commentary; to President George W. Bush, who in 2004 awarded Mr. Podhoretz the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation\u2019s highest civilian honor, and praised him as a \u201cman of \u201cfierce intellect\u201d who never \u201ctailored his opinion to please others.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mr. Podhoretz, who stepped down as editor-in-chief in 1995, had long welcomed argument. The titles of his books were often direct and provocative: Making It, The Present Danger, World War IV, Ex-Friends: Falling Out with Allen Ginsberg, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Lillian Hellman, Hannah Arendt, and Norman Mailer. He pressed for confrontation everywhere from El Salvador to Iran, and even disparaged Reagan for talking to Soviet leaders, calling such actions \u201cthe Reagan road to detente.\u201d For decades, he rejected criticism of Israel, once writing that \u201chostility toward Israel\u201d is not only rooted in antisemitism but a betrayal of \u201cthe virtues and values of Western civilization.\u201d<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, Mr. Podhoretz became a choice target for disparagement and creative license. New York Times reviewer Michiko Kakutani called World War IV an \u201cillogical screed based on cherry-picked facts and blustering assertions.\u201d Ginsberg, once a fellow student at Columbia University, would mock the heavy-set editor for having \u201ca great ridiculous fat-bellied mind which he pats too often.\u201d Joseph Heller used Mr. Podhoretz as the model for the crass Maxwell Lieberman in his novel Good as Gold. Woody Allen cited Podhoretz\u2019s magazine in Annie Hall, joking that Commentary and the leftist Dissent had merged and renamed themselves Dysentery.<\/p>\n
Born to succeed<\/p>\n
Mr. Podhoretz never doubted he would be famous. Born and raised in a working-class neighborhood in Brooklyn, he would credit the adoration of his family with giving him a sense of destiny. By his own account, Mr. Podhoretz was \u201cthe smartest kid in the class,\u201d brash and competitive, a natural striver who believed that \u201cone of the longest journeys in the world is the journey from Brooklyn to Manhattan.\u201d<\/p>\n
He would indeed arrive in the great borough, and beyond, thriving as an English major at Columbia University, from which he graduated in 1950, and receiving a master\u2019s degree in England from Cambridge University. By his mid-20s, he was publishing reviews in all the best magazines, from the New Yorker to Partisan Review, and socializing with Mailer, Hellman, and others.<\/p>\n
He was named associate editor of Commentary in 1956, and given the top job four years later. Around the same time, he married the writer and editor Midge Decter, another future neoconservative, and remained with her until her death in 2022.<\/p>\n
In childhood, Norman Podhoretz\u2019s world was so liberal that he later claimed he never met a Republican until high school. When Mr. Podhoretz took over Commentary, founded in 1945 by the American Jewish Committee, the magazine was a small, anti-Communist publication. Mr. Podhoretz\u2019s initial goal was to move it to the left \u2014 he serialized Paul Goodman\u2019s Growing Up Absurd, published articles advocating unilateral disarmament \u2014 and make it more intellectual, with James Baldwin, Alfred Kazin, and Irving Howe among the contributors. Subscriptions increased dramatically.<\/p>\n
But signs of the conservative future also appeared, and of his own confusion over a world in transition. He was a prominent critic of Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and other Beat writers, dismissing the upstart movement in 1958 as a \u201crevolt of the spiritually underprivileged\u201d and branding Kerouac a \u201cknow-nothing.\u201d In a 1963 essay, Mr. Podhoretz admitted to being terrified of Black people as a child, agonized over \u201chis own twisted feelings,\u201d wondered whether he, or anyone, could change and concluded that \u201cthe wholesale merging of the two races is the most desirable alternative for everyone concerned.\u201d<\/p>\n
Liberal no more <\/p>\n
Making It, released in 1967, was a final turning point. A blunt embrace of status seeking, the book was shunned and mocked by the audience Mr. Podhoretz cared about most: New York intellectuals. Mr. Podhoretz would look back on his early years and conclude that to advance in the world one had to make a \u201cbrutal bargain\u201d with the upper classes, in part by acknowledging they were the upper classes. Friends urged him not to publish Making It, his agent wanted nothing to do with it and his original publisher, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, refused to promote it (Mr. Podhoretz gave back his advance and switched to Random House). Even worse, he was no longer welcome at literary parties, a deep wound for an author who had confessed that \u201cat the precocious age of 35 I experienced an astonishing revelation: It is better to be a success than a failure.\u201d<\/p>\n
By the end of the decade, Mr. Podhoretz was sympathizing less with the young leftists of the 1960s than with the way of life they were opposing. Like other neoconservatives, he remained supportive of Democrats into the 1970s, but allied himself with more traditional politicians such as Edmund Muskie rather than the anti-Vietnam War candidate George McGovern. He would accuse the left of hostility to Israel and tolerance of antisemitism at home, with Gore Vidal (who called Mr. Podhoretz a \u201cpublicist for Israel\u201d) a prime target. Echoing the opinions of Decter, he also rejected the feminist and gay rights movements as symptoms of a \u201cplague\u201d among \u201cthe kind of women who do not wish to be women and among those men who do not wish to be men.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cTact is unknown to the Podhoretzes,\u201d Vidal wrote of Mr. Podhoretz and Decter in 1986. \u201cJoyously they revel in the politics of hate.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mr. Podhoretz was close to Moynihan, and he worked on the New York Democrat\u2019s successful Senate run in 1976, when in the primary Moynihan narrowly defeated the more liberal Bella Abzug. From 1981 to 1987, during the Reagan administration, Mr. Podhoretz served as an adviser to the United States Information Agency and helped write Kirkpatrick\u2019s widely quoted 1984 convention speech that chastised those who \u201cblame America first.\u201d He was a foreign policy adviser for Republican Rudolph Giuliani\u2019s brief presidential run in 2008 and, late in life, broke again with onetime allies when he differed with other conservatives and backed Donald Trump.<\/p>\n
\u201cI began to be bothered by the hatred against Trump that was building up from my soon to be new set of ex-friends,\u201d he told the Claremont Review of Books in 2019. \u201cYou could think he was unfit for office \u2014 I could understand that \u2014 but my ex-friends\u2019 revulsion was always accompanied by attacks on the people who supported him. They called them dishonorable, or opportunists or cowards \u2014 and this was done by people like Bret Stephens, Bill Kristol, various others.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd I took offense at that. So that inclined me to what I then became: anti-anti-Trump.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"NEW YORK \u2014 Norman Podhoretz, the boastful, hard-line editor and author whose books, essays, and stewardship of Commentary…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":197071,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,111778,40,38,41,39],"class_list":{"0":"post-197070","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-obituary-normal-podhoretz-neoconservative-commentary","11":"tag-top-news","12":"tag-top-stories","13":"tag-topnews","14":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197070","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=197070"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197070\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/197071"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=197070"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=197070"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=197070"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}