New York — Norman Podhoretz, the vaunted and militant editor and author whose books, articles, and management of Commentary marked a profound political and personal break with the left and made him a leader of the neoconservative movement, has died. He was 95 years old.
His son, John Podhoretz, confirmed in a statement on the Commentary website that Podhoretz died “peacefully and painlessly” Tuesday night. The cause of his death was not immediately announced.
“He was a man of great intellect and a man of profound wisdom, who lived an amazing and uniquely American life,” John Podhoretz said.
Norman Podhoretz was among the last of the so-called “New York Intellectuals” of the mid-twentieth century, a famously controversial circle that at various times included Norman Mailer, Hannah Arendt, Susan Sontag, and Lionel Trilling. As a young man, Podhoretz longed to join them. In middle age he passed away. Like Irving Kristol, Gertrude Himmelfarb and other establishment neoconservatives, Podhoretz began to turn away from the liberal politics he shared with many of his peers and helped reshape the national dialogue in the 1960s and beyond.
Podhoretz, the son of Jewish immigrants, was 30 when he was appointed editor-in-chief of Commentary in 1960, and years later he turned the once liberal magazine into a mainstream forum for conservatives. Future US ambassadors to the United Nations, Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Jane Kirkpatrick, were appointed in part because of articles they published in Commentary magazine that called for a more assertive foreign policy.
Despised by former allies, Podhoretz found new friends along the way to the White House, from President Ronald Reagan, Comment Reader; President George W. Bush, who in 2004 awarded Podhoretz the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, praised him as a man of a “fierce mind” who “never shaped his opinion to please others.”
Podhoretz, who resigned as editor-in-chief in 1995, has long welcomed this argument. The titles of his books were often direct and provocative: The Making of It, The Present Danger, World War IV, and Former Friends: The Feud with Allen Ginsberg, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Lillian Hellman, Hannah Arendt, and Norman Mailer. He pushed for confrontation everywhere from El Salvador to Iran, and even disparaged Reagan for talking to Soviet leaders, calling such actions “Reagan’s path to detente.” For decades, he dismissed criticism of Israel, once writing that “hostility toward Israel” was not only rooted in anti-Semitism but also a betrayal of “the virtues and values of Western civilization.”
At the same time, Podhoretz became an optional target for disparagement and creative license. Michiko Kakutani, a New York Times reviewer, described World War IV as “an illogical plan built on cherry-picked facts and loud assertions.” Ginsberg, who was a fellow student at Columbia University, mocked the heavy-handed editor for having “a great, fat, silly mind which he pats a lot.” Joseph Heller Podhoretz used the harsh Maxwell Lieberman as a model in his novel “Good as Gold.” Woody Allen cited Podhoretz magazine in “Annie Hall,” joking that the leftist “Commentary” and “Dissent” had merged and renamed themselves “Dysentery.”
Podhoretz never doubted that he would become famous. Born and raised in a working-class Brooklyn neighborhood, he credited his family’s adoration for giving him a sense of destiny. By his own account, Podhoretz was “the smartest kid in the class,” brash, competitive, and a natural striver who believed that “one of the longest flights in the world is the one from Brooklyn to Manhattan.”
He had already made it to the big town and beyond, thriving as an English major at Columbia University, from which he graduated in 1950, and earning a master’s degree in England from the University of Cambridge. By his mid-twenties, he was publishing reviews in top journals, from The New Yorker to Partisan Review, and corresponding with Miller, Hellman, and others.
He was appointed associate editor of Commentary in 1956, achieving the top position four years later. Around the same time, he married the writer and editor Midge Decter, a neoconservative futurist, with whom he remained until her death in 2022.
As a child, Norman Podhoretz’s world was so liberal that he later claimed he never met a Republican until high school. When Podhoretz took over Commentary, founded by the American Jewish Committee in 1945, it was a small anti-communist publication. Podhoretz’s initial goal was to move it to the left—he published Paul Goodman’s “Absurd Growth” articles calling for unilateral disarmament—and make it more intellectual, and contributors included James Baldwin, Alfred Kazin, and Irving Howe. Subscriptions have increased dramatically.
But there were also signs of a conservative future, and his confusion about a world in transition. He was a prominent critic of Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and other Beat writers, dismissing the emerging movement in 1958 as a “revolution of the spiritually deprived” and describing Kerouac as a “know-nothing.” In a 1963 essay, Podhoretz admitted that he had been terrified of blacks as a child, agonized over his “twisted feelings,” wondered whether he, or anyone, could change, concluding that “universal integration of the two races is the most desirable alternative for all concerned.”
1967’s “Making It” was a final turning point. This book was an explicit embrace of the pursuit of status, and it was shunned and ridiculed by the audience to which Podhoretz cared most: New York intellectuals. Podhoretz would look back on his early years and conclude that in order to advance in the world, one had to make a “brutal bargain” with the upper classes, in part by admitting that they were upper classes. His friends urged him not to publish Making It, his agent wanted nothing to do with the book, and neither did its original publisher, Farrar, Straus & Giroux refused to promote it (Podhoretz re-advanced and moved to Random House). Worse still, he is no longer welcome at literary parties, which is a deep wound for the author, who admitted: “At the young age of thirty-five, I had an astonishing discovery: it is better to be successful than to fail.”
By the end of the decade, Podhoretz’s sympathy was less with the young leftists of the 1960s than with the way of life they were opposing. Like other neoconservatives, he remained supportive of the Democrats into the 1970s, but allied himself with more traditional politicians such as Edmund Muskie rather than the anti-Vietnam War candidate George McGovern. The left may be accused of hostility to Israel and tolerance of anti-Semitism at home, with Gore Vidal (who has described Podhoretz as an “Israel advocate”) as a prime target. Echoing Decter’s views, he also dismissed the women’s and gay rights movements as symptoms of a “plague” between “the kind of women who don’t want to be women and those men who don’t want to be men.”
Vidal wrote of Podhoretz and Decter in 1986: “Cuteness is unknown to the Podhoretz family. They happily enjoy the politics of hate.”
Podhoretz was close to Moynihan, and had worked on the New York Democrats’ successful run for Senate in 1976, when Moynihan narrowly defeated the more liberal Bella Abzug in the primary. From 1981 to 1987, during the Reagan administration, Podhoretz served as a consultant to the US Information Agency and helped write Kirkpatrick’s widely quoted speech at the 1984 conference in which he criticized those who “blame America First.” He was a foreign policy adviser during Republican Rudolph Giuliani’s brief presidential run in 2008, and late in life, he again broke with his former allies when he disagreed with other conservatives and supported Donald Trump.
He told the Claremont Review of Books in 2019: “I began to feel disturbed by the anti-Trump antipathy that was accumulating from my group of soon-to-be ex-friends. You might think he was unfit for office — I can understand that — but the disgust of my ex-friends was always accompanied by attacks on the people who supported him. They called them disgraces or opportunists or cowards — and that’s what people like Bret Stevens, and Bill, did.” Kristol, and various others.
“And I was offended by that. And that’s what led me to what I became: anti-Trump.”