Commentary: High Honors for Editor 25 Years Later
Tick, tock, tick, tock . . . .
That’s the sound of time passing, 25 years in the case of Commentary magazine editor Norman Podhoretz, or 40 if you count the lifetime of that journal of opinion, published since just after World War II by the American Jewish Committee.
Left, right, center, right . . . .
That’s the motion of the political pendulum that Podhoretz and his publication have swung from, starting, if not exactly as a firebrand, certainly with no lack of controversy, in 1960, and drifting steadily, strongly, solidly to the right.
Finally Surrendered
Neo-conservative is the term that most people paste on Podhoretz and Commentary alike these days. Commentary’s editor and frequent contributor, the 55-year-old Podhoretz, merely shrugs and says that yes, “ neo-conservative is a word I have surrendered to after resisting for a long, long time.”
Certainly, Podhoretz said Tuesday night as about 250 people poured into the chic Rainbow Grill to honor his quarter-century at the helm of Commentary, “certainly 25 years ago Commentary was a radical magazine.” But “we did in the ‘60s break rank with the left.” Actually, Podhoretz said, “I had always thought of the magazine moving to the center rather than to the right.”
Standing there in his tuxedo, greeting guests, as one of them observed, “like a Catskills tumler ,” Podhoretz conceded, however, that “in some ways the magazine has swung, and in some ways the world has swung.”
Sixty-five floors above the skating rink at Rockefeller Center, the big skyscraper itself was almost tilting a bit to the right Tuesday night, so heavyweight was the crowd of conservatives, neo and otherwise, who gathered to celebrate Podhoretz.
“Well, I will leave you to make that judgment for yourself,” Podhoretz said when asked if he could feel the building leaning right. “I would say it is solidly centered, well-anchored in the center of American political and intellectual life.”
“This is the heart of the so-called neo-conservative movement,” said American Jewish Committee spokesman Morton Yarmon. To that movement, Yarmon said, “the intellectual solidity has been given over the years by Norman Podhoretz.” Commentary magazine, Yarmon said, “has in the past 25 years come to be the public organ of the movement.”
Nearby, for example, septuagenarian William Phillips, for 50 years the editor of Partisan Review, was trading political quips with a crowd he has sometimes gone head-to-head with in print on his own periodical’s pages. Like his old friend and sometime intellectual sparring partner, Phillips and his magazine have gravitated steadily to the right. As for possible political sympathies with Podhoretz, Phillips, leaning on his cane, smiled and philosophized: “There are some similarities; there are some differences.”
Said Phillips, “Sure, I’ve been swinging back and forth all my life.”
On their respective pages, Phillips went on, “we have polemics and we have disagreements. We fight it out in the magazine.
“And on occasions like this,” he said, “you bury the differences.”
Political Labels Passe
Labels, sniffed American Jewish Committee president Howard I. Friedman, labels like conservative, neo-conservative, arch-conservative, even (as a whispered word in this particular surrounding) liberal , “these labels don’t mean anything anymore.” Just off the plane from Los Angeles, Friedman checked his coat and checked out the crowd around him. “It would be difficult to describe many of the people here as to the right of anything,” Friedman opined.
As one prominent example, “well, now, Henry Kissinger is a Democrat, a Scoop Jackson Democrat, and no one ever accused him of being a neo-conservative.”
A Scoop Jackson Democrat? Could one be classified in that category even after the death of the former senator from Washington?
Friedman smiled. “I hope so. I am one.”
Kissinger, not surprisingly, was accorded near-royal treatment as he entered the party on the arm of his wife, Nancy. Photographers flashed with a frenzy, and old and/or would-be old friends fairly glued themselves to the one-time secretary of state and top adviser to presidents.
Locked in Conversation
Soon Kissinger was locked in conversation with former network correspondent Bernard Kalb, now the spokesman for the Reagan State Department, and curious guests hovered about hoping for a word with Kalb’s boss, Secretary of State George P. Shultz. And any minute now, an American Jewish Committee spokesman reassured anxious press types, any minute, U.N. Ambassador Jeane J. Kirkpatrick would be arriving at the gathering as well.
“Shultz is the star tonight,” an American Jewish Committee aide said, “although Henry Kissinger would probably say he is the star, and Jeane Kirkpatrick would probably say she is.”
The aide groaned, albeit delicately. “Now you know some of the protocol problems in trying to run one of these things.”
Some protocol questions reached unusual heights, or perhaps new lows would be more appropriate. New York City cultural affairs commissioner Bess Myerson, a legendary former Miss America who serves also on the board of Commentary’s publication committee, slipped off her shoes as she posed for pictures beside the diminutive Podhoretz.
“I often do this,” said Myerson, resplendent in a glittering golden gown. “It helps me get closer to people in pictures.”
But the real etiquette question had less to do with size of bodies at the party than the proportions of egos on the program. Who would toast Podhoretz first? Kissinger? Kirkpatrick? New York City Mayor Ed Koch? Shultz? Bayard Rustin? Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations Benjamin Netanyahu?
“Oh, my goodness,” said Friedman, slated on the program to offer a few remarks. “It’s intimidating! I have to say a few words. I’ve never said a few words to a crowd like this.”
Crisis Resolved
At last the crisis was resolved with what the American Jewish Committee called “an ingenious solution”: Toasters would toast in alphabetical order. Right from the start, however, that sequence was shattered with the reading of a toast-in-absentia from a Podhoretz fan named Ronald Reagan. Among other things, the President wrote in a lengthy letter, “I have to credit Commentary with bringing to my attention one of the best United Nations ambassadors, Jeane Kirkpatrick.” It was as a result of an article Kirkpatrick wrote in Commentary, the President explained, that the former Georgetown University professor and author came to his attention as a potential candidate, and his ultimate selection, for the job.
Describing Commentary as among his favorite reading material, Reagan ended his missive with warm congratulations from him and Mrs. Reagan.
From then on it was a veritable Podhoretz love-in, as guest after guest praised what one called “the Norman Conquests.” Praised by the President, not to mention Podhoretz, Kirkpatrick herself turned around and returned the compliment--at least to Podhoretz:
An Archetype
“I believe in a curious way that Norman has been an archetype, not only for a generation, but for a civilization, our civilization,” Kirkpatrick said.
Furthermore, she continued, “Norman’s own ‘no’ to the terrible temptations and permissiveness of the counterculture has been important to the very survival of our civilization.”
And Kissinger, for his part, gazed out at a room that was by now working its way through tortellini in cream sauce and confessed that “my capacity to admire people is not my most developed trait.”
For that matter, he said, “had Gen. Custer survived the Battle of Little Big Horn and been invited to a reunion, he might feel as I do now: Never have so many been assembled in one room who were after my scalp.”
Not that Podhoretz was dogmatic or anything, Kissinger said, “but I understand that Norman objected to moving the inauguration indoors as an unnecessary appeasement of the weather.”
Remembering his work on the President’s Central American Commission, Kissinger recalled how “Norman fixed me with a beady eye and said, ‘I know you’re going to come up with a deal with the Russians.’ ” On the contrary, Kissinger had a much better idea, “which I am going to propose to the secretary of state tonight. I suggest that they drop the unused copies of the report on Nicaragua.”
To put it mildly, Kissinger said, his views and those of Podhoretz had not always been entirely in concert. “I only met Norman in 1978,” Kissinger said. “And he had already left his mark on America, and I must say, many marks on me.”
Still, Kissinger finally admitted, “Norman and Commentary have enobled our society. They have asked the right questions. They have usually given the right answers.”
And so it continued, plaudit after plaudit. Podhoretz, with his wife, Midge Decter, seated nearby, basked in it all. But it was his 82-year-old mother, Helen Podhoretz, who truly relished the occasion.
Was Helen Podhoretz just a little proud of her little boy, the milkman’s son who had studied with Lionel Trilling and gone on to shape a publication that shapes a fair number of opinions of its own?
“ Oy gevalt !” the senior Podhoretz crowed. “Oh, I sure am proud, I sure am.”