In my sophomore year at the University of Chicago, I read a book called Sick Societies, a critique of cultural relativism by the anthropologist Robert Edgerton. On a whim, I decided to write a review of it in the style of a magazine to which my father had introduced me a few years earlier. After showing him the review, he said: “Why don’t you send it to COMMENTARY?”
The review was published in the June 1993 issue. I was 19. My parents must have bought a dozen copies at various New York magazine shops.
I can’t adequately describe Norman Podhoretz’s influence on me without first describing his influence on my father, Charles Stephens. He was born in Mexico City in 1937 to expatriated American Jewish parents and grew up in a family of ideological feuds. His father was a New Deal Democrat who, after World War II, became a fierce anti-Communist. His stepfather was Conlon Nancarrow, a composer and devout Stalinist. The arguments of the Cold War were in my dad’s blood.
My father’s politics began somewhere in the liberal center—he worked as a foreign-policy speechwriter for Senator George Smathers, the Florida Democrat, and briefly dated an office secretary named Mary Jo Kopechne—and then migrated rightward as the Democratic Party began to veer left. In 1974, he ran for Congress as a Republican on a platform supporting continued military aid to South Vietnam and opposing pot legalization. It was not a winning combination in his liberal Westchester district, and his defeat was the reason our family moved back to Mexico, where I was raised. But I grew up imbibing his countercountercultural views: on drug legalization, arms control, statism, Zionism, America. And I admired his willingness to stick to those views, even when it meant getting into arguments and losing friends.
In other words, he was a natural neoconservative, a trait I seem to have inherited.
I can’t recall when Commentary first entered my consciousness. But I remember my father elaborating on Jeane Kirkpatrick’s distinction between authoritarian and totalitarian regimes in “Dictatorships and Double Standards,” her landmark essay from November 1979, and I remember him talking about the Committee on the Present Danger, on which Norman and his wife Midge Decter were leading lights. I also remember, as my father was so politically out of step with our family’s leftish social circles, reading COMMENTARY essays and feeling reassured that my dad wasn’t alone in his views—and that he wasn’t nuts, either.
By the time I got around to writing that first book review, neoconservatives had been proved right in the decisive ideological battle of the 20th century. The Soviet Union’s collapse had exposed the regime’s malevolence even to many of the liberals who had once taken a more benign view of it. It vindicated the wisdom of the Reagan-era arms buildup, not to mention the virtues of free markets and Pax Americana. Yet no sooner had the American left abandoned one utopian fantasy than it took up another—peace in the Middle East—this time with the support of much of the Republican establishment.
Here my COMMENTARY memories are much more vivid. Sitting in the easy chair of a quiet, north-facing nook of the University of Chicago’s Regenstein Library, I read Podhoretz’s April 1993 essay “On the Peace Process,” which appeared just five months before the signing of the Oslo Accords.
“Of course it is theoretically possible that the reason Israel’s policies have become so popular is that they are good and wise and conducive to a new era of peace and harmony,” Podhoretz wrote, referring to the dovish approach of the government of Yitzhak Rabin.
And yet I cannot help suspecting that the enemies of Israel know something about these policies that the friends of Israel are failing to see. I will go further and assert flat out that if those policies are meeting with so much approval in certain quarters, it must mean that they are not good for Israel.
I ask myself, for example, why Syria is so eager to resume negotiations with Israel. Has Hafez al-Assad, the murderous dictator of that country, who has been dedicated all these years to the goal of wiping Israel off the face of the earth, suddenly become reconciled to the existence of a sovereign Jewish state on territory he regards as his own?
What struck me about the essay was that it was at once utterly commonsensical while going completely against the grain of conventional wisdom. It was also intellectually scrupulous, since Podhoretz had previously taken the view that American Jews should defer to the judgments of Israeli leaders when it came to Israel’s basic security needs. For his honesty (not a common trait among pundits), Podhoretz was, as he had so often been before, roundly attacked—and showed he was no less capable of defending himself in terms that were both plain and sharp. “There is,” he wrote that June,
all the difference in the world between attacking Israel as an immoral or criminal state, which is what has so often been done by American Jewish leftists, and expressing doubts and anxieties over the prudence of the policies being pursued by the Israeli government, which is what I am trying to do.
Looking back on Podhoretz’s stance, what’s striking is how right he was. And how brave. Initial support for the Oslo Accords was overwhelming, not just throughout the West but also within most of the American Jewish establishment, including AIPAC. Arguments against a Palestinian state that had previously appeared solid—regarding Israel’s strategic depth or the PLO’s record of terrorism or its ties to the Soviet Union—seemed to suddenly melt away, opening vistas, in Shimon Peres’s formulation, to “the New Middle East.” All this wishful thinking sustained a seven-year peace process that, by the time it concluded in the second intifada, had left Israel more vulnerable to terrorism, more divided internally, and more hated internationally than it had been at the peace process’s outset. It led to the murder of nearly 1,000 Israelis.
I don’t think Podhoretz ever got the credit, much less the apologies, he deserved for his resolute position against Oslo. But it had a deep influence on me, and not just because I found the argument persuasive. Podhoretz was prepared to say no when everyone else was desperate to say yes—to play the role of Jeremiah, warning against all those saying “‘Peace, peace,’ when there is no peace.” The willingness to be unpopular, even hated, when it’s in the service of an honest conviction is one of life’s great gifts and one that’s rarely encountered. Podhoretz had it.
Nor was it simply the clarity and courage of Podhoretz’s views that shaped me. I’m old enough (just) to have come of age in the conservative world when success required an ability to write and a baseline level of erudition. That changed with the advent of Fox News, social media, podcasts, and the rest. But at least until the early 1990s, there was no way to launch a career in the conservative world without showing that you could get your byline into COMMENTARY, the Public Interest, National Review, or the Wall Street Journal’s editorial pages. For many years, this helped exclude from conservative ranks the carnival barkers who would later become what today passes for right-wing thought leaders.
As a prose stylist, Podhoretz had no equal. There tended to be a great deal of storytelling in his essays, which lent his writing its charm without ever distracting from the point. As in this anecdote, written in 1997, about a long-ago meeting with his life-long nemesis, Allen Ginsberg, in the company of Jack Kerouac:
Ginsberg’s apartment turned out to be much as I would have imagined it: a walk-up in an aging building, sparsely furnished, and badly in need of a paint job. Though he had not yet become a Buddhist, he was already “into” Eastern mysticism, and he was sitting on the floor in what looked to my admittedly inexperienced eyes like some approximation of the lotus position. In addition to Kerouac, there were two other people present whom Ginsberg (in what I took to be a sophomoric affront to my bourgeois expectations) never bothered introducing. One of them was obviously the girl who had placed the call; the other was a young man who seemed to be paired up with Ginsberg. I no longer remember the girl’s name, though I do remember that she said not a word the entire evening and lacked only the knitting to complete the impression of a Madame DeFarge making sure that I would be sent to the guillotine when the revolution finally came.
I remember reading this essay on a flight from New York to London when I was on my way to graduate school, then rereading it, all the time asking myself: How does he do it? Podhoretz managed, by turns, to be anecdotal and analytical, easygoing and energetic, elegant and unpretentious, learned but never pedantic. Like a great athlete, the brilliance lay in the way Podhoretz made it seem so easy. I’ve spent a 30-year career as a writer trying, unsuccessfully, to approximate it.
Admiration didn’t mean I agreed with everything Podhoretz wrote. On social issues, he could be well to my right. His literary judgments, particularly when it came to writers like Philip Roth or Herman Wouk, were much more severe than mine. What, really, was so very terrible about Marjorie Morningstar or, for that matter, The Breast?
Our biggest disagreement—the one that, a decade ago, effectively split the conservative movement in two—was over Donald Trump. Unlike most of the neoconservatives who formed the nucleus of the Never Trump movement, Podhoretz was definitive in his preference for the New York businessman as the lesser of two evils over Hillary Clinton. I saw it very differently, seeing in Trump a leader who would infest the conservative movement with Pat Buchanan epigones while undermining everything neocons had contributed to that movement, not the least of which was its (now rapidly fading) anti-anti-Semitism.
The verdict on this argument has yet to be rendered. But I had to offer Podhoretz a silent nod last June, when Trump finally did the thing that no other president—including George W. Bush, who had bestowed on Podhoretz the Presidential Medal of Freedom—would have dared do: destroy Iran’s key nuclear facilities. Besides the long-delayed political vindication for Podhoretz, it must have given him a large measure of relief in the last months of his life that, on this all-important matter, the Jewish people could now breathe a bit easier.
Before sitting down to write this essay, I spent a few happy days reading and rereading many of Podhoretz’s essays archived on the COMMENTARY website. One passage moved me especially. In a valedictory talk he gave in 1995 after his 35-year run as the magazine’s editor, he (characteristically) quoted from something he had said 10 years earlier. It bore then, and bears now, repeating. “I am,” he said:
proud that I have been able, in and through COMMENTARY, to defend my own—my own country and the values and institutions for which it stands; my own people and the religious and cultural heritage by which we have been shaped. Like so many of us, I was educated to believe that the last thing one ought to be defending was one’s own, that it was more honorable and nobler to turn one’s back on one’s own and fight for others and for other things in which one had no personal stake or interest. This has been a very hard lesson to unlearn, and I am proud to have unlearned it.
In all the millions of words of wisdom and warning that Podhoretz produced over his long career, I doubt any come as close as these to expressing the core of his teaching. May they continue to serve us well.
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