Norman Podhoretz, who died this week at the age of 95, was the last of the “New York Intellectuals,” that cohort of brilliant, mouthy, anti-Stalinist, mid-century writers and critics who clustered around little magazines like Partisan Review, Commentary, and, later, Dissent. He was also the last of the OG members of that overlapping group of intellectuals who created the neoconservative movement. I interviewed Podhoretz for my chapter on him in my 2016 book Exit Right: The People Who Left the Left and Reshaped the American Century. He was, given what I knew of him from his work, a surprisingly cordial and humble interviewee. In this slightly edited excerpt from that chapter, I write about the aftermath of the publication of his 1967 memoir Making It, which was utterly brutalized by a host of critics, including friends and friendly colleagues of his. My counterfactual guess is that Podhoretz would have ultimately turned right even without this experience, but I think he would have been a different kind of conservative, less combative and perhaps as a result less politically consequential.
After Making It was so publicly savaged, by so many people, Podhoretz went into a kind of emotional cocoon. He began drinking more. He retreated from his social life. He grew depressed. He brooded over the reaction to the book. As had often been the case in the past, he also began to perceive that what was happening inside him was connected, in some profound way, to something larger happening in American culture.
That something, it soon became clear, was a shift in the temperature of the American Left. The root optimism that had animated the Movement throughout much of the 1960s—the sense that for America to be great it had only to heed the call of its better angels—was giving way to perceptions of a more intrinsically rotten society, in need of radical surgery or perhaps even euthanasia. Signs of the shift were everywhere. The civil rights movement of figures like Martin Luther King Jr. and Bayard Rustin had been superseded by the more revolutionary black nationalism of leaders like Eldridge Cleaver and Huey Newton. Out of the ashes of Students for a Democratic Society rose the violent Weather Underground. The Communist Party U.S.A., which everyone had thought dead and buried, seemed to be making a comeback.
One of the key events for Podhoretz was the student protest that broke out on April 23, 1968, at his alma mater, Columbia University, which soon escalated into the dramatic occupation of five campus buildings. Protesters broke through doors and windows, barricaded themselves in, briefly held some administrators hostage, and began issuing demands for, among other things, greater student involvement in the running of university affairs; the severing of ties between Columbia and the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA), a group connected to the Department of Defense; and a wholesale reevaluation of plans to build a massive gym facility on parkland that sat between the predominantly white area around the university and the predominantly black neighborhood of West Harlem.
The occupations were ended a week later by force of tear gas and police batons, and proved, within the limits of the students’ concrete demands, modestly successful. The gym was never built. Some students were suspended, but none expelled. The university cut its ties to the IDA. Grayson Kirk, the president of the university, resigned. Administrative measures were instituted to increase sensitivity to student needs and to open up channels for more student influence on university policies. Yet the significance of the confrontation was taken by almost everyone, almost immediately, to extend far beyond the realm of those actions. The protests had become another one of those emergent little poems of history that were issuing up, so rapidly in those years, from the deep tectonic divisions in the American soul.
For the intellectuals in Podhoretz’s circle, it was the kind of material upon which they’d been feasting for decades. But in this case the intellectual was personal in a way many of them hadn’t experienced since the 1930s, or had never experienced. They were themselves alumni or employees of Columbia University, or close to those who were. They lived in the neighborhood, or not too far away (Podhoretz and Decter were a few stops down on the West Side subway lines). They drank in the bars near there, spoke at symposia there, had constituted their identities in substantial part around the education they’d received there or at similar institutions. The students were—intellectually, spiritually, in some cases biologically—their children. It was part of their world. It was who they were. And it was under attack. They were under attack.
In an essay on the protests published in Commentary a few months later, Diana Trilling wrote of getting an angry phone call from a student radical just hours after he got out of jail. He wanted to know why her husband hadn’t been there at the end to protect him from the brutality of the police. But really, she understood, he was putting them on notice: their neutrality had been registered.
“This was revolutionary scorekeeping, make no mistake,” she wrote. “Its tone couldn’t have been nastier and it spoke of guillotines or their later historical manifestation, the concentration camp, the knock on the door in the night—indeed, the writer-professor’s wife, who in her husband’s absence had taken the brunt of the student’s charge, was herself soon well up on the list of those who, come the tribunals of the young, would never be missed.”
Podhoretz’s friends and colleagues didn’t all react to the Columbia “uprising” with the same perception of imminent threat that Diana Trilling did, but most of them recognized in the upheaval at Columbia stark evidence that their particular synthesis, which derived so much of its vitality from setting liberalism and radicalism into fruitful tension with each other, was under severe, perhaps terminal strain. It was one thing to argue over tactics and rhetoric, while recognizing a commonality of interests, but now it seemed the interests were at odds.
Something fundamental had changed. In 1962 Tom Hayden had hoped that Commentary would publish the Port Huron Statement. In 1965, at Berkeley, Nathan Glazer and his faculty colleagues had been recognized by the student protesters as, if not quite allies, then at least good-faith partners in the process of creating a more humane university. By 1968, at Columbia, when liberal faculty members tried to step into a similar role, they were met with disdain. They couldn’t solve the problem; they were the problem.
“I’ll use the words of LeRoi Jones, whom I’m sure you don’t like a whole lot,” wrote campus SDS leader Mark Rudd, in his open letter to President Kirk, published the day before the uprising: “Up against the wall, motherfucker, this is a stick-up.”
For most of Podhoretz’s friends this was an unpleasant, even traumatic message to receive. For Podhoretz, the primal trauma was what happened to Making It, and the process of reassembling his identity was fueled to an extraordinary degree by his need to reconstruct the recent past so that his book’s rejection by the world, and by his friends, would be endurable. That meant coming to the conclusion that the book’s critics had been dishonest and hypocritical. More radically it meant going back to the genesis of the book and reimagining what kind of act its creation had been. Not primarily a literary act, as everyone (including Podhoretz himself) had thought, but instead a political one. And it was as the raw material in this act of reimagination that the radicalism of the Left, at the tail end of the decade, assumed its significance for him. Podhoretz hadn’t realized it at the time he was writing, but Making It was an expression of his soul crying out in protest against the indictments the New Left and other militant groups were handing down with ever-increasing fury and frequency.
It was a Yes to success and ambition and glory, but more meaningfully it was a No. He would not join with the growing chorus of those who saw the flaws in the major institutions and practices of American life as evidence that it was rotten all the way down. And it was for that political refusal, that act of dissent, that he was being punished. By the radical leftists, of course. By all the organs of the middlebrow media state, which deferred, as they always did, to whatever notions were fashionable at the moment. But also—and this he hadn’t fully anticipated—by those friends and allies of his who should have known better.
By 1968, at Columbia, when liberal faculty members tried to step into a similar role, they were met with disdain. They couldn’t solve the problem; they were the problem.
Podhoretz’s analyses of why particular people failed him differed. Some of them had been genuinely radicalized by the spirit of the sixties; they were philosophically on the side of the radical Left against him. Others were just too tired from battles past to take up the cudgel once again, so they persuaded themselves that the fight was just about a book, which they persuaded themselves they didn’t like. As for his friend Norman Mailer, whose review of Making It had wounded him most painfully, pure cowardice was the explanation. Such pure cowardice, and so deeply characterological, that Podhoretz couldn’t help but revise his judgment of what kind of person Mailer had always been and what kind of game he’d been playing. He wasn’t a rebel, as he claimed. He was the fool, the court jester of the Left, who got away with his rebellious-seeming insults because he delivered them with a wink and because everyone understood that in the end he knew who was paying for the dance. Mailer had had no choice but to turn against Making It if he wanted to retain his position at court.
“The first time he read the book,” Podhoretz later wrote, “Mailer had not realized how subversive it was of the radical party line both in its relatively benign view of middle-class American values and, even more seriously, in its denial that the intellectuals—and the educated class in general—represented a true or superior alternative. Then, having become convinced by a study of the reaction that Making It really had overstepped the line, and wishing to dissociate himself from so dangerous a connection without seeming to behave in a cowardly fashion in his own eyes (and mine), he attacked me for ruining a ‘potentially marvelous book’ not by having gone too far but by having failed to go far enough in exposing what he himself called the new Establishment of the Left.”
During this period of reconstruction Podhoretz didn’t go so far as to persuade himself that the book he’d written was as spectacularly good as its (corrupt) critics were saying it was bad. But by reimagining Making It as a political rather than a literary object, he shifted the criteria according to which its worth should be measured. The question was no longer whether its literary construction was good but whether its political content was right. He also shifted the temporal frame. What he had done wasn’t necessarily done yet, wasn’t bounded by the back cover of the book. It was a beginning, perhaps only the first chapter in an unfolding story of political and intellectual resistance. He could be redeemed over time, depending on what happened next.
From that point forward, Podhoretz began to reorganize his very self around the fight to win the war he hadn’t been aware he was launching when he wrote Making It—in defense of America against the barbarians of the Left. This didn’t mean a sudden conversion to conservatism. He had no template for that. But his sense of where the nation was, and what it needed, had always been a projection of his own feeling of place in the world. When he felt stifled, the nation needed release. When he felt empowered, the nation needed to stride forward exuberantly.
Up until that moment, when the book came out and everything started to go wrong, Podhoretz had been a certain kind of man. His vision of what America would look like at its best was to a considerable degree a nation full of people like him. Loud, open, warm, boisterous, aggressive, hopeful, joyful, loyal, mischievous, vulgar in a knowing and cosmopolitan way, confident bordering on arrogant in some ways but also vulnerable in his affections and enthusiasms.
Then Making It was published, and the landscape of his political imagination transformed. He began retreating from those parts of himself that had been in tune with, or seduced by, the spirit of the decade and “the Movement.” He stopped looking around the corner for some new, fresh thing that might be coming, and began instead to retrench.