Kristol and the New York Intellectual Establishment
Glazer, Nathan
the American mainstream, but opposition to it. There is, of course, much truth in each of these conservative positions. Government regulation has an automatic tendency toward...
...It must have appeared to all concerned that the old succession of those who edited, wrote for, could have written for or hoped to write for Partisan Review was being maintained at the editorial offices of Commentary...
...A Memoir of the 1940s Kristol and the New York Intellectual Establishment Nathan Glazer I N 1945, I was an assistant editor at Commentary, which had started at the beginning of that year, a successor to the Contemporary Jewish Record...
...Third, Kristol knew about and was interested in politics, and this also set him off from the rest of us...
...But the fact is, Kristol was very different from the rest of us, and I recall my perpetual surprise at how different lie was...
...much difference how dilapidated our defenses become because after all there is no conceivable situation in which an American president would touch the nuclear button...
...He is a regular contributor to Commentary and The New York Times Magazine...
...During the 1950s The Reporter was preoccupied with certain themes one does not take to be particularly congruent, looking back...
...Politically, for example, they are something of a swing group between the two major parties...
...Nevertheless, it was an odd concatenation, and I do not know all the reasons for it...
...The collapse of vlaues...
...The Alternative June--September 1972 7...
...Glazer and Bart[ey have mentioned, and for many others besides...
...they are in fact what underlies "the social issue" of political note...
...The publisher was an Italian anticommunist liberal who was fascinated by the China lobby and spent several hundred thousand dollars promoting the thesis that Alfred Kohlberg was a ganglion of reactionary activity which somehow stood in the way of a successful Far Eastern policy...
...Kristol after all came out of a similar background - - a Jewish neighborhood of New York, City College, the Troskyist youth, then he affiliated with the moderate Schachtamanite minority in the split of 1939, then he affiliated with the small group that split away again from the Schachtamanites, finding even its Marxism rather too nmch...
...They felt this turn led away from the key question of values...
...Government regulation has an automatic tendency toward overextention...
...He hired me - - at least I had been in student Zionist politics and knew something, if not enough, about that side of things...
...The place of tradition in a time of change...
...Yet something like that seems to have happened to produce the melding of values and data that is represented by Kristol and his friends...
...The final oddity: Kristol was interested in business and businessmen, in gambling and speculation...
...Somehow there is the doctrinal rigidity one would expect of radicals, not the moderation one would expect of conservatives...
...Now we even find that the New York Conservative Party has decided to oppose state senator John Marchi, its impeccably civilized standard-bearer against John Lindsay...
...He discovered obscure existential philosophers who did not figure in the postwar existentialist craze, such as Shestov...
...This may appear outlandish -- what did all of us ex-, semi-, and slightly Marxists do but talk about politics...
...Kristol's habit, I judge, is to work out his ideas orally, to exercise them if you will, perhaps to discover what kind of promise they have before taking them out to Hialeah, where he almost always comes up with a winner...
...He began to study Hebrew - - from a grammer published by Oxford University Press, and of a level 6 The Alternative June--September 1972 of complexity that put our afternoon Hebrew-School Hebrew to shame...
...I do not know, but he did...
...Tyrrell is adroit in summoning their attention - - our attent i o n - - to the phenomenon of Irving Kristol, who quite simply is writing more sense in the public interest these days than anybody I can think of...
...The place of an intellectual elite in a nation where, The Public Interest reminds us, only eleven percent of adults have completed four years of college...
...That is why, when the intellectual history of the 1960s is ultimately written, we may find that the event of most lasting significance was not the advent of a new radicalism but the evolution of a new and newly relevant conservtism...
...He appointed Robert Warshow, the young aspiring film critic, to the magazine...
...The visits were always pleasant, and often quite animated...
...But his writings, by contrast, are although firm, the absolute soul of reasonableness, totally devoid of any sign of arrogance or of cocksurenesss or of an indisposition to understand the other fellow's point of view...
...Finally, in terms of policy as opposed to politics, the neo-conservatives have been able to deal with the realities that confront a relatively disinterestedpolicy-maker...
...He is very interesting for all the reasons Messrs...
...He even discovered "articles by Samuel Lubell in the Saturday Evening Post (none of us ever would dream of looking at the Saturday Evening Post,) and got Lubell to write for Commentary...
...Intellectually, the neo-conservative themes are the central issues of our time...
...Their political outlook is that of establishmefitarians looking for an establishment worthy of the name, and without taking any polls, one can guess that among them the most common Presidential preference would be, 1. Henry Jackson, 2. Richard Nixon...
...at reality would lead back to the same questions, that a rigorous empiricism would prove that Aristotle was right...
...Tl~e gathering was a little nervous and self-conscious because The Reporter and National Review had been shooting a little at each other...
...I met him first in 1960 during the brie ~ period when he was editing The Reporter (now demnct...
...and they may very well be the pressing issues of the vaunted postindustrial society...
...The intellectual ambience of the Contemporary Jewish Record and Commentary are not easy to communicate now...
...And in 1945 Irving Kristol began to write for it, and shortly thereafter joined it as an editor...
...Kristol, in short, was a surprise -certainly not part of Harold Rosenberg's "Herd of independent Minds," who couldn't care less in 1945 and 1946 and the next few years about religion, philosophy, politics and money...
...They were supported by the American Jewish Committee, the most conservative of the American Jewish defense organizations - - and staffed by editors who thought of themselves as radical...
...I had my doubts too -- I suppose even Kristol did -- but was willing to go along...
...The need not only for outward material progress but for the inner satisfaction of living in what seems to be a proper society...
...Nathan Glazer is professor of education and social structure at Harvard...
...Rosenfeld knew Yiddish, and this seemed some basis for hiring him...
...Even while dealing with Communist China, we should remember that its totalitarianism denies the values Western civilization holds dear...
...And so, why not Commentary, home of radicals with such or similar careers...
...M R. GLAZER PROVIDES us with fascinating biographical details about Irving Kristol, whose mind was tempered in that strange and productive foundry over which the formidable Elliot Cohen presided, and Robert Bartley situates him at the center not so much of a movement as of a consolidation of political and social attitudes, and Mr...
...When Elliot E. Cohen became editor of the newly enlarged magazine, Commentary (Cohen too was a friend of the Partisan Review circle, but he differed from it in a number of important ways), he inherited Greenberg and me...
...The words I have to contribute to this mini-festschrifft are mostly personal, but not I hope uninstructive...
...It never occurred to them, it seems, that a truly hardheaded look...
...With all these oddities, it is no surprise he kept on thinking thoughts none of the rest of us had...
...He began to study the Bible...
...The melding has produced an exceptionally strong and valuable outlook, one sensitive to both detail and the broad sweep, one relevant both to important political battlegrounds and to the diffuse hunger of our times, and above all one that resonates to reality...
...Robert L. Bartley is associate editor in charge of day-to-day operations of the editorial page of the Wall street Journal...
...His books include Beyond the Melting Pot (with Daniel P. Moynihan) and Remembering the Answers: Essays on the American Student Revolt...
...The policy relevance is not due to the philosophers of the movement as much as to its social scientists, those initially attuned not to values but to the data that moves policy-makers...
...But whereas a good number of the rest of us were content, if we had any -- and as time went on, we did -- to leave our money in the bank or buy a stock recommended by the non-intellectual brother-in-law, Kristol got interested in money on his own account, and knew things about the money market, business, speculation that was, if known in the rest of the intellectual world, strictly underground information...
...Many recent American trends wholly deserve opposition...
...It is time he were more greatly celebrated, even if it seems impossible to make him more widely admired...
...This article was adapted by the author from an article An that publication...
...Certainly this immediately marked him with a rather surprising difference from Cohen, Greenberg and Warshow, who could never quite see the point of such enterprises...
...It is .my impression that a good part of the New York intellectual establishment never got around to the stories in newspapers with Washington datelines until 1965 -and even then it was only the Vietnam stories...
...One finds it the most cited single source when talking seriously about social policy with policy-oriented White House aides, or assistant secretaries of cabinet departments or assistant directors of the office of management and budget...
...There was something more interesting and more important going on in Washington...
...Quite coolly, he had turned his back on the sectarian politics of the left...
...Kristol: Through the Jeweler's Eye Re Irving Kristol William F. Buckley, Jr...
...That is why conventional conservatives so often march off into what strikes even many would-be friends as political irrelevancy, with the Goldwater campaign, strident opposition to the China initiatives, the Ashbrook candidacy...
...The Public Interest has a circulation of only 10,000, but is perhaps the chief medium of common knowledge within the incredibly small circle where the public interest is weighed in a rigorous way...
...For one thing, he is unbelieveably opinionated in person...
...And in the process, broke down a lot of panes in the hothouse in which we lived...
...It is the strength of the neo-conservatives, by contrast, that despite their small numbers they have occupied a number of strategic intersections in American life...
...He is never rude in person, merely absolutely assured on all matters, except those that involve vulgar prediction: e.g., he would not tell you who the Democratic Party is going to nominate, though he will tell you that it doesn't really make very...
...Of course, if it had been only the fashionable philogophy of French existentialism -- Sartre, Camus -- it would not have been at all surprising - - that was what everyone was reading...
...How ar editor of Enquiry (the journal of hi., groupuscule, now reprinted and avail able again) developed such an interest...
...This all g o t mixed up with Senator Joe McCarthy, who was himself through by the time National Review began publishing, but whose shadow stuck like a birthmark on anyone who had ever a kind word to say about him (calamitous) or his activities (fatal...
...I doubt if he has ever ventured a tentative opinion in the presence of one other human being...
...Indeed, the first successor to Rosenfeld, who left the job to write, was no less a figure than Clement Greenberg, one of the editors of Partisan Review, who included such awesome figures as Philip Rahv, William Phillips, Lionel Trilling and Dwight MacDonald...
...These are contemporary issues...
...Now, of course, everyone is interested in money...
...But he got up early in the morning to study German and read Hegel...
...What he found in them I do not know, but what was surprising was that no one else -- in our world, at least -- was reading them or knew of them...
...But we talked about a strange politics, one thai existed on neither heaven nor earth -- or more practically, neither in Russia Europe or America, and Kristol wonder of wonders, was interested ir real politics, the politics that took place in Washington, the politics o~ Democrats and Republicans...
...There is something of an irony here, since the Straussians have been among the strongest critics of the recent empirical turn in the social sciences...
...They represent an opportunity for the Republicans to break the Democratic strangle-hold on intellectual talent, and if the Republican Party ever figures out how to make use of any such thing it may, in fact, make itself into the sought-after establishment...
...Admittedly, to be radical and antiStalinist in 1945 was a rather mild sort of thing...
...First, Kristol was interested in religion, and even, -mrprisingly enough, Judaism...
...He decided we should study the Talmud, and he recruited me to a class of two that met with Seymour Siegel of the Jewish Theological Seminary...
...Anyway, Irving said something mildly pleasant about some of the writers for National Review, I returned the compliment for some of the wt:iters for The Reporter, and we took to seeing each other, maybe once or twice a year...
...This developed a link between the Contemporary Jewish Record and the world of Greenwich Village, that is, of the readers of Partisan Review, and those who aspired to write for it...
...Second, Kristol was interested in philosophy...
...These are truths we should not forget, but they do not really seem the truths central to our day...
...Clement Greenberg was left as acting editor of the magazine when Oko died suddenly...
...It appears that Louis Oko, the editor of the Contemporary lewish Record, who it appears did represent the American Jewish Committee and its outlook, had hired Isaac Rosenfeld, the young Jewish novelist from Chicago, as his editor...
...Kristol spent those particular years in England, editing Encounter, an invaluable monthly which was given to acknowledging the existence of the Soviet Union and correctly identifying its policies and even, on occasion, its apologists, in between issues devoted to the question whether Lady Chatterley's Lover should be proscribed, a question that was finally dropped when the editors could not think where to take it after the Warden of All Souls was required to point out to Dame Rebecca West that the gamekeeper was a buggerer...
Vol. 5 • June 1972 • No. 9
