I loved Norman Podhoretz living, and I love him still. We first met at a 1982 fundraiser for the Senate reelection campaign of Daniel Patrick Moynihan. It was, to say the least, an unorthodox introduction. Norman didn’t need to introduce himself. I knew who he was. He just walked up and asked if I’d help him with his life savings, such as they were. If anything, he was direct. As I remember, he said, in a chant that Zero Mostel would have been proud of, “I’m poor. I’ve never made much money. I’ve never even been able to save any money. And in truth, I can’t imagine why you would bother with my money.” Then, anticlimatically, Norman asked, “But will you?”

I, of course, said yes, and for the next 45 years we were friends. Not least because he was interested in “making It,” by which I mean money. As our friendship grew, I was taken aback by how prolific he was. He wrote more articles, more books, than any other contributor to COMMENTARY. He had written more than a million words, and God only knows how many more he and Neal Kozodoy had rewritten or maybe even written on behalf of other authors.

At one of Norman’s retirement dinners, Henry Kissinger, joking with Norman, asked him if it weren’t embarrassing as an editor to publish himself so frequently. Norman, in his typical humble manner, said he didn’t think so. After all, he knew he was very easy to edit, took instruction well, and didn’t ask for much money. And when Henry asked, “Might that not apply to other writers?” Norman agreed that it might apply, but “unfortunately, they’re all wrong.”

The Norman Podhoretz we all know and admire made it because of his love of the written word, the sheer power of his mind, and, most important, his undaunted courage for standing against the prevailing wisdom, especially among the intelligentsia.

Norman’s second quality was his incredible intellectual range, from his book on the prophets to World War IV, and from his brilliant literary criticism to his love affair with America. Very few people have written with such a remarkable combination of depth and breadth.

His third quality reminds me of what I read about the Duke of Wellington, the English general who defeated Napoleon. Wellington’s military strategy was to march toward the sound of gunfire, toward the action. Norman was our Wellington. He led; we followed. His late wife Midge said it best: “I bring him coffee; he brings me courage.” And he did that for all of us. At its essence, Norman’s writings came down to political arguments and why we had to fight for our beliefs.

Charles Krauthammer said, “If you get your politics wrong, nothing else matters.” What mattered most to Norman was his proud and unrelenting defense of Americanism and Zionism. He understood that as a Jew you had to fight for Israel and, further, if the West were to survive and have meaning at all, it had to include Israel. Many years ago, Norman wrote this prescient paragraph: “Now, as in ancient times, the battle will have to be fought first and foremost with ourselves. Because unless we commit ourselves to the struggle for our own civilization, it will, like Jerusalem in the days of Jeremiah, wind up being sacked from within. And we will then become vulnerable to sacking from without.” Sadly, we appear dangerously close to that today.

Those who knew him best miss him most. But our country misses him now.

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