My late father knew Norman Podhoretz (Alav Hashalom) when they were both counselors at a Jewish summer camp in upstate New York. This would have been in 1946, maybe 1947. Assigned to write lyrics for an official camp song, they got in trouble for making satirical reference to the management’s pompous boast that it served “a cultured clientele.” I never knew the man (my dad was three years older, and they didn’t stay in touch), but I kind of like Podhoretz for that. It was a rare departure from his defining characteristic—a lifelong slavish adherence to a succession of orthodoxies.

Podhoretz was a quick study who believed the secret to success as an intellectual was to master some highly disciplined mode of thought and never deviate from it. Because this approach is obviously very confining, any thinkers and writers of any worth who start down this path break free of it. Podhoretz’s approach was different; when one orthodoxy no longer suited his purposes, he exchanged it for another, and then another.

Podhoretz eventually settled into neoconservatism, an intellectual movement that began as a liberal critique of the New Left counterculture, hardened into anti-liberalism, then degenerated into an indiscriminate military interventionism. You don’t hear much about neoconservatism these days because the Iraq War discredited it, starting around 2005. (Though Donald Trump’s latest folly, a potential regime change war in Venezuela, threatens a revival.) Podhoretz was perhaps neoconservatism’s last surviving active practitioner, and certainly the last survivor of an earlier milieu of Upper West Side liberal intellectuals known as “the family,” from which Podhoretz exited noisily with the 1967 publication of his memoir,

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