Norman's Conquests

...The preferential action that Podhoretz resists is the action that would assign numerical quotas to any communal or ethnic group in the population, or that would offer members of one group the opportunity to qualify for credentials or employment with a standard lower than that of other groups...

...As the war continued, however, he became increasingly disturbed by his fellow opponents...

...When Mr...

...Podhoretz emerged from Columbia College after World War II, the intellectual community included writers, mostly with left-wing backgrounds, who lacked signifi-cant connections with the large institutions of their time...

...that communal and ethnic friction cannot be resolved by the allocation of roles or tampering with standards...

...Podhoretz detected the seeds of immense destructiveness in movements whose leaders, ostensibly educated, felt they had to dismiss intelligence as a regressive force in human behavior...

...Ten years later, he regards as most dangerous those intellectuals whose reaction to the bland-ness of Camelot was too uncritical, and who have deliberately stripped their own radicalism of responsibility, threatening the very continuity of political discourse...

...Podhoretz' sense of the depth of those differences, coupled with his insistence on the inability of government to ensure equality of result, places him in square opposition to the large number of intellectuals who believe that preferential action by government can establish equality among blacks and whites, and that such action is justified...

...He is a man renowned for his enemies, and yet he has attracted to the pages of Commentary over the period of his stewardship almost every member of the intellectual community of the country...

...Race is another story...

...By success, Podhoretz meant not only the approbation of one's intellectual peers, which few are embarrassed to savor, but also the acceptance of oneself as a figure of importance by the popular culture...

...This new book, thus, is the story of Mr...

...They find Podhoretz' contrary view anti-black and racist...

...Dwight MacDonald asked Podhoretz when Kennedy's involvement was just beginning...

...Nowhere does he support the notion that the ascendancy to power of a new class, or the alteration of the political system to change in a fundamental sense the economic relationships between producers and consumers, will avoid any of the problems society now faces...

...To these ideas might be added a fourth factor of which one cannot speak without a measure of embarrassment: Podhoretz is in the deepest sense a patriot, an almost crippling infirmity for a modern intellectual...

...Podhoretz' own movements in phase with his view of the changing tempers of his time...

...He claimed not only that intellectuals enjoy these stigmata of success, but that the desire for them is a valuable motivating force even in stimulating intellectual activity...

...On this subject, Podhoretz has managed to offend as many as on the subject of success...

...As die magazine became concerned with the excesses of the "counter-culture," the problems of integration, and the post-Vietnam foreign policy challenge, many of those who had opposed his move to the left now opposed what they read as a swing to the right...

...But, of course, interest mounted, not only in Vietnam, but in the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the birth of a new force in American politics, Students for a Democratic Society...

...In the years since he first broke ranks, Podhoretz has been vilified as a racist, a fascist, and, equally wounding, "mean-spirited" He has been caricatured, with incongruous and imprecise details, in fiction...

...By the end of the 1960s, he was questioning his own turn to the left...

...Roger Starr NORMAN'S CONQUESTS Since "breaking ranks'' with the intellectual community in the late 1960s, Norman Podhoretz has been called a "racist," a "fascist," and, now, a "neoconservative...

...It pits loyalty to friends, like Hannah Arendt, against loyalty to ideas on which the same friends profoundly disagree...

...Nevertheless, it is only in the case of Jason Epstein, who serves at every stage of the Podhoretz narrative as the face on die far end of the seesaw, that the author yields to the urge to repeat bits of undergraduate history that might, with a special surge of restraint, have better been left out...

...Intellectuals, with a clear tendency to line up along either the port or starboard rail of the ship of state, can cause immense, sudden, and destabilizing shifts of weight and direction...

...He took over the editorship of Commentary when he was 30, and reshaped it, as noted, culturally leftward and out from a somewhat more intense focus on Jewish matters...

...Success, and its enjoyment, also mean relishing the attributes of success in a culture: in ours, money, personal mobility, association with the highly-placed in other hierarchies of the general culture...

...But he dared to say that the immense cultural differences that separated blacks from whites (and tended to separate other ethnic groups in America) made integration unlikely without actual miscegenation...

...He genuinely loves America, not only for broad principles to which he believes it has generally clung, but because he continues to be absorbed by the concrete details of life here...

...The Podhoretz line would not exclude the taking into account of individual factors, including hardship, in the appraisal of candidates who fall within a reasonable range of the standard, and it would encourage heavy investment in special educational and training programs...

...The new view would require society to assure each citizen that he will attain equal material standards, equal responsibility, equal authority, with all other citizens...

...At the time of each major change, one at the beginning of the 1960s, the other about ten years later, Podhoretz turned the magazine away from the line of march of the majority of the intellectual community...

...Governmental power, supreme in the area of law, powerful in the economic realm, has relatively little power in the elimination of the gross misunderstandings and misperceptions that accompany ethnic differences...

...So the three basic Podhoretz positions -that a good society must offer, not equal results, but the possibility of personal satisfaction that we call "success...

...and that revolutionary enthusiasm is devoid of intellectual seriousness-account for much of the present antagonism to Podhoretz by his critics...

...His crucial positions are in the sectors of success and egalitarianism...

...But it draws a heavy line against the establishment of systematic preferences, or rights ascribed to specific categories of people, on the grounds, among others, that such acts are incompatible with the most felicitous of American principles...

...In great part, Podhoretz says, he reached his disenchantment with intellectual revolutionaries because of their readiness to abandon rational process of thought and to tolerate youthful gibberish about the significance of changes in consciousness...

...Pod-horetz makes a good case (though, as will be noted, not a scholarly one...

...He was as put off by their urgent self-righteousness as by the smugness of the Camelot period a few years earlier...

...Too many found in it the occasion for spiteful misreadings of American intentions...

...Commentary leaned toward them, but Mr...

...Though Podhoretz does not directly set forth his own views of the nature of a good society, the narrative itself makes them clear...

...This weakness-added to his vision of social responsibility-stirs his critics as nothing in his style, presentation, or frank- ness would...

...But Mr...

...This is not an indictment of criticism...

...in the sector of inter-communal relations, it is fair to say that, with one immense exception, American society has managed them far better than, say, Ireland, Nigeria, and Belgium...

...He believes he has, on both occasions of breaking ranks, resisted the then dominant trend in the intellectual community, the trend that posed the greatest threat to the very intellectual values the members of that community believe themselves to treasure...

...and now the magazines that vent their views include the nation's most widely read...

...Basic to Podhoretz' social values is the insistence on free discussion, and the retention of faith in the effectiveness of intellectual analysis, a faith which many in the intellectual world were prepared to drop under the press of fashion...

...The move to the left alienated many of the magazine's readers who were then interested in cultural affairs ("Why are you writing so much about Viet-Nam...

...race and ethnicity in a pluralistic society...

...Today, the author notes, the intellectual world has broadened...

...Since his life was spent in the company of the writers, academics, and editors who formed the core of the intellectual community, the book is a chronicle of New York intellectual life, with some attention to outlying suburbs like Washington, Cambridge, and, for a time, Berkeley...

...An author who confesses to changing his mind must raise in the minds of his readers the question of whether he suffers from intellectual or moral instability, or whether, as he claims, everyone else does...

...Its precise textual references are few...

...And, ironically, although his 1967 book Making It brought a flood of invective against his allegedly careerist ambitions, he points out that the effect of its candor in some New York literary circles was to hang a silent leper's bell around his neck...

...He also has demonstrated a quality known to horsemen: "early foot...

...Podhoretz' own memory, unrecorded in any library of oral history...

...Podhoretz discusses the effect (and causes) of this change on American life, and concludes that for a contemporary man of affairs, association with a literary lion is an authentication of success, much as Theodore Roosevelt authenticated his success by shooting elephants...

...This enraged his colleagues, who feared that the allegation would menace their claim of freedom from such streaks of common clay as the desire for power, prestige, influence, and adulation...

...His detractors' real complaint, as Podhoretz' new political memoir makes clear, is that he is a man of conviction and a patriot...

...But the book is a personal memoir and its values far outweigh its academic laches...

...But die reader who does not know Epstein will accept the total characterization as easily as Anthony Powell's readers accept Wid-merpool...

...it is based on a view of government and communal relations...

...He believes that he has been consistent while the intellectual community itself has been faithful only to its own taste for power...

...Somewhat too young to have participated in the Stalinist-anti-Stalinist intellectual civil war of the 1930s, but old enough to have applied its lessons to the revival of intellectual revolutionary interest during Vietnam, Podhoretz disclaims the usefulness of revolution and, in so doing, offends that whole section of the intellectual community that, while not itself advocating revolution, seems to believe it has purified its soul when it foresees the inevitability of a revolutionary future and argues that such a radical change will somehow make things'' better...

...serious academics have become public figures...

...Podhoretz won his first stripes of public disapproval with his earlier book, Making It, in which he called the "enjoyment of success" the "dirty little secret" of his age...

...In the 1960s, he saw the paramount danger in the acceptance of anti-Communism as the fixed base of international relations, and in the loss of the spirit of adventure in the institutions of a society that seemed blandly to have stuffed its social problems in a drawer marked "solved...

...some members hold responsible posts in government...

...He was quick off the mark to be published, fresh out of college, in Partisan Review and Commentary, among little magazines, and the New Yorker\ among big ones...

...Podhoretz buttresses this last allegation with a long list of the offenses of anti-intellectual intellectuals during and since the Vietnam war...

...And later, having distorted the significance of the Vietnam experience, they hampered the conduct of foreign policy by the world's few remaining non-totalitarian states...

...It is illuminated by conviction and the unmatched personal recollection of events lived with passion...

...But the Roosevelt way, though bad for the elephants, was less dangerous for the country...

...No one's interested...

...Disturbed in I960 by the shallow values of a euphoric America, he plunged off toward the left, bringing to Commentary's pages writers like Paul Goodman and Norman O. Brown who were seeking a radical transformation of the dominant notion that America had solved its social problems and was firmly establishing an era of international peace based on anti-Communism, economic strength, and the new sensitivity of its political Camelot to the ideas of intellectuals...

...He makes few cheap points for which the temptation-given the kind of points others have made against him- must have been formidable...

...For almost 20 years, Norman Podhoretz has been editing Commentary, making of it a magazine to which few readers can feel indifferent...

...they bring out the beagle in him...

...To those who would appraise Breaking Ranks by the formal tests of academic social history, it must fail on every count...

...If he broke ranks to the left because America was neglecting the cultural impediments of the early sixties, he has broken back again in the seventies, to stand against those who would impose their own " socially desirable" handicaps in the pursuit of equality of result...

...And if he were to wait in making it for his catastrophic predictions to be proved by the event, he might well be unable to write about the matter at all...

...Indexed end to end they would make a list so replete with incompatible personalities, warring ideologies, and uncongenial sensibilities that it seems impossible they could have been gathered together by a single editor of principle...

...Its tracing of the links between Paul Goodman and the hard-rock culture simply does not exist...

...Clearly a world that guarantees equality of result removes from human experience the feeling of success even as it removes the possibility of failure...

...Podhoretz that they alternately hate and admire...

...It is, obviously, conceivable that an author who concentrates on the activities of intellectuals exaggerates the weight of their opinions...

...Within ten years, he broke ranks again, this time running in the opposite direction, the intellectual community having in the interim swung away from the substantially pro-American view of the world to a countervailing notion that America not only could not do anything right, but could scarcely do anything that was not criminal...

...Podhoretz himself was an early, indeed a premature, opponent of American military participation in Vietnam...

...In his new book, Breaking Ranks,* the editor himself tells the story of the 20 years, bringing to them a unity that underlies the two major changes in editorial em-phash that broke the ranks...

...criticism is the primary function of an intellectual, but it loses its effectiveness, and raises questions about the good faith and basic value system of the critic, when it becomes hyperbolic, inaccurate, and vilifying, as in the use of "Amerika" during the Vietnam era, when the country was being compared with Nazi Germany by some who should have been aware of the imprecisions of the comparison (their being free to make it, for one...

...Finally, Podhoretz has made clear over the years that he distinguishes between the radical, which may be necessary and is often beneficial, and the revolutionary, which he regards as the pet, unexamined idea of the intellectual community...

...But Podhoretz' position is not based on a view of race...

...Their reputations (with some exceptions, including Lionel Trilling and Edmund Wilson) depended on their essays in magazines of high culture and low circulation...

...intellectuals and revolutionary change...

...Podhoretz brings to Breaking Ranks talents that might be summed up in a child's catalogue of the Animal Kingdom...

...The author is serious about his work...

...For Podhoretz, government had a substantial and significant role to play in the abolition of all legislation that required the separation of the races, and an obligation to provide, as Bayard Rustin later wrote in Commentary, the economic assistance with which black Americans might overcome the immense handicaps they had suffered under slavery and imposed segregation...

...Yet it is the principles in Mr...

...But Podhoretz' view of success and its importance bore even more heavily on the arguments of the egalitarians who are now insisting that society has scarcely begun to achieve equality when it offers all citizens equality before the law...

...It is obvious that Podhoretz holds three positions about which current controversy rages, and his obstinate clinging to these positions accounts for his willingness to oppose current vogue, and for the anger levelled against him by so many others in the intellectual community...

...They can actually menace its seaworthiness...

...They romanticized the monolithic brutalities of the North Vietnam government...

...Today, he tells the reader, he grudgingly accepts being called a "neoconservative," but he refuses to interpret this in the economic sense in which it is usually meant...

...While they complain about the author's methods, they would not give his message credence if it were brought down from Sinai by Marx, Freud, and Einstein, fully annotated...

...In the early sixties, he published an essay of his own in Commentary that frankly, and to some eyes brutally, dealt with the then widely-held notion that the race problem was to be solved by integration of blacks and whites...

...Its substantiating footnotes are few, and depend largely on Mr...

...It is the message they deplore, not the medium...

...They came in response to his vision of Commentary over the two decades...

...The author has the memory of an elephant, the eye of a hawk, the nose of a beagle, the suspicions of an owl, and the drive of a beaver...

...Podhoretz consistently speaks for the responsibility of society to avoid handicapping people so heavily that they cannot fulfill the potential of their talents, but, equally, to stop society from assigning its own handicaps in order to make human competition come out even...