The longtime Commentary editor was prophetic

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Iconic American intellectual Norman Podhoretz died earlier this month, peacefully at 95. Reading this news, I recalled a luncheon conversation with my then colleague George Jonas, whose brilliance and wit graced these pages from 2001 until his death in 2016, during which he asked me to rank the formative intellectual influences that had steered me towards conservatism as my default mindset. I named several writers, but Podhoretz led the pack. 

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I took out a subscription to Commentary Magazine in the early 1960s, shortly after Norman Podhoretz assumed its editorship. I never missed reading an issue cover to cover until his retirement in 1995. The ideas he advanced were intellectually persuasive and brimmed with moral clarity, but I mainly recall burning with futile envy of the eloquence with which they were expressed. 

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Podhoretz was one of a loosely defined assemblage of New York intellectuals known amongst themselves as The Family. Almost all of them were first generation American Jews — liberal and pro-Freud, but anti-Soviet — who considered themselves resident at the crossroads where politics and literature met.  

In 1960, Esquire called Commentary “the red-hot centre of the literary world.” And because of his increasing fame in that world, Podhoretz himself became the red-hot centre of a social whirl amongst cultural and political elites that he embraced with unabashed delight in the social stimulation and professional networking it provided. He and his wife, Midge Decter, a powerful cultural critic in her own........

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