They Made It!
Kazin, Alfred
In that long gone time during Hitler's war when I was madly in love with M., the Village's most frequented femme fatale, I had to hear a lot about her other lovers, some of whom must have...
...Otherwise Kramer seems a man possessed, is regularly heated up by the seditious names of intellectuals he regards as a danger to the Republic...
...He presented himself as a quietly superior mind, a philosopher of the law, someone the hotheads of left and right were just not accustomed to...
...Kramer, former art editor of the New York Times, tends to sniffy surveys of the art scene that evidently try to capture the Olympian haughtiness of Eliot's Criterion...
...Whatever else may be going on in South Africa, Chile, El Salvador, and the South Bronx, editor-in-chief Hilton Kramer is hypnotized by people who, because they are not so riveted by current ideologies, are irredeemably guilty, a threat to the social order...
...Along came the AIDS horror, and Podhoretz filled the role to perfection...
...Subject matter is not important" —had his considerable literary rights and properties guarded by a Jewish lawyer...
...David A. Wyman, a historian deeply concerned with the Holocaust, publishes The Abandonment of the Jews, which charges the Roosevelt administration with indifference and worse to the plight of the Jews during the war...
...Seven thousand people have been officially executed in this country since 1900...
...It seems that "Americans have been more inclined to make universal moral judgments than to draw political conclusions from history...
...Apparently (I never met him) he relished the extreme stand, unheardof intellectual provocation...
...In her dinky Barrow Street room below stairs, usually vibrating with high cultural chatter, he apparently provided a note of intimidation...
...It is this need for camouflage that may help to explain the apparent attempt on his life . . . well-nigh universally attributed to the KGB and its [Bulgarian] puppets .. . If [the attempt] is not conceived of as an attempted assassination in which the goal was the elimination of an individual without disclosing the identity of the assassins, but as a "public relations" operation then it can easily be seen as a success...
...Perhaps not on Jewish intellectuals, who ever since they were educated by the left have been accustomed to draw "political conclusions from history...
...The Pope may seem to be a conservative theologian, said Carmichael, but this requires the elimination of any suspicion of complicity with the Soviet executive...
...Their effect on the Museum visitor is too emphatically negative for that description to suffice...
...He is an indefatigable if eccentric specialist in conspiracy theories of history who along these lines has published biographies of Jesus, St...
...At that time they had no such practical and political power as they have acquired since...
...Cockburn has a fondness for upperclass life that made the present owner of the Nation, the very rich and mischievous Arthur Carter, laugh, "Cockburn writes left but sleeps right...
...But what is going on, among Jews whose only religion now is support of Israel, right or wrong my Israel, that fosters such distortion and even paranoia...
...He was something of an intellectual presence in New York...
...He impressed M. by making everyone else she knew sound a weak liberal, ridiculously soft...
...A chair in jurisprudence and public policy was created for him by a right-wing foundation...
...So entirely absorbed in their current status and advancement have these respectable folk become, that the routine response was to shrug off Carmichael's views as "merely personal...
...However, there was one foreign-born member of her circle, a wartime visitor from Holland (no doubt a refugee), whom she referred to with a certain fear...
...He is a very solemn stylist...
...it was all "mass culture...
...It is not enough to say that these galleries designed by Kevin Roche, John Dinkeloo and Associates, are dull and undistinguished...
...Of course Cockburn is a very unusual sort of Jew-hater...
...When I arrive, I like 612 • DISSENT 1111110111113 AND IMPRESSIONS to think that, as a novelist, I'm unique...
...Lionel Abel in the most casual exchange reminds me of Guela Cohen, the famously excitable Israeli deputy who admitted: "I can control myself, but don't want to...
...I shall remember the "friend of Sartre and Camus," as Lionel Abel calls himself, becoming a super patriot yet remaining contemptuous of American society, which Abel told me was becoming "proletarianized...
...He was always in there...
...These days it is intellectual Catholics who seem to be mindful of the mass suffering behind rebel movements in Central America, while it is the accommodating Jews among the right wingers who not only support the contras but, as with Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams, are a principal force behind them...
...In short, the Kremlin is winning—and the Church is adapting itself to that fact...
...But as Napoleon's mother sighed when complimented on the success of her children, "Let's hope it lasts...
...Stone and me how outraged he was by people who did not respect "the state...
...In some way this impressed her...
...As they used to say in Berlin cafes before Hitler — "What one intellectual hates most in this world is another intellectual...
...Nor am I amused by his Schadenfreude when Israel's very clever Shlomo Avineri twits American Jews, on the occasion of the Pollard case, for still feeling insecure in their much-cherished country...
...A Figure...
...Of course they show no interest in America's domestic life and civil strife, the devastation currently visited on so many farmers and factory workers in the Middle West, in the corruption of America by drugs, the ever-boiling race hatred, the dominating force of greed...
...The Zeitgeist is sure catching...
...Nevertheless, Carmichael accused the Pope of surrendering to Moscow as the wave of the future...
...Only a few years ago that great liberal Adlai Stevenson, when asked what he thought of the Bellow novel he was seen carrying off a plane, responded "I can't say, I don't read Yiddish...
...That eliminates the dreary housekeeping details which are a crashing bore and leaves you free to enjoy the city...
...She favored intellectuals of an advanced tendency...
...He was extremely, even contemptuously...
...This deplorable tendency we owe to the fact that "the Puritan ethic has made moralism something of a national trait and moralizing a national posture...
...Times story "Luxury Boundless For Some In Hotels...
...As the "people of the book" have become the people of the magazine, publicists and columnists, big shots in every communications network from New York to Hollywood (a "conspicuous race" indeed as Walter Lippmann used to complain in fear that someone might discover he belonged to it), I have noticed sideswipes, just personal eruptions so far, on the part of some "beautiful people...
...Before getting to Emerson at all, the reviewer informs us that Howe has a "socialist" record and has published books on labor and the American Communist party...
...Katherine Anne Porter hated Jews in her private notes—Augie March particularly stirred her up as an assault on "her" language—as much as she did "niggers" (meaning James Baldwin...
...The lawyer was Truman's mainstay to the end—and there was certainly a lot to take care of as this very broken-down man reached his end...
...0 FALL • 1987 • 617...
...My old friend Truman Capote— "It's just style," Capote used to say, hitting the fan on his palm for emphasis, "it's all style...
...Joel Carmichael is the son of the old Zionist leader Louis Lipsky, an Oxford-educated specialist in Russian and Arabic...
...It planned assassinations of important figures in society, either Jews who were detrimental to society, which most Jews were considered to be, or "traitors to the race...
...In his novel Updike gratuitously inserted, as a footnote, a quotation from his beloved Karl Barth testifying to Barth's physical aversion to Jews...
...616 • DISSENT MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS When the great Reagan counterrevolution is over, what I shall remember most is the way accommodating intellectuals tried to bring to an end whatever was left among Jewish intellectuals of their old bond with the oppressed, the proscribed, the everlasting victims piled up now in every street...
...Paul, Trotsky...
...Jews have been in a conspiracy all right—to achieve a respectability, a protective coloration within officialdom and super patriotism, that must inevitably break down, that has already betrayed the excessive, overheated, characteristically ideological zeal that went into it...
...In his March 1987 number, disparaging the just-opened Lila Acheson Wallace wing for twentieth-century art at the Metropolitan Museum, he seems to be parodying Henry James as grave Victorian: The first note sounded is decidedly that of commerce, and the comedy of it lies, of course, in the fact that the visitors to the Wallace wing are expected to make their selection of "souvenirs" even before they have had a glimpse of the objects in the galleries...
...Jerzy Kosinski: "She understands that every profession generates a few princes or kings, and that there's no need to invite several at the same time...
...I am not enchanted when, reviewing new books on the greedy Bernard Berenson, John Updike manages, as he did in his novel Roger's Version, to rub Jewish noses in the dirt...
...He was offering his reminiscences of the Left Bank to a puzzled audience at . . . Chatauqua...
...have succeeded in making America safe for the Jews...
...Until Carmichael took over Midstream, I had not anticipated such a passion for the status quo (anything less being a danger to the State of Israel), such oblivion to the impoverished majority of our planet, such justification of power for its own sake, power free to make its own laws...
...No one could have anticipated that the Nation would permit someone so openly hostile to Jews as Alexander Cockburn to insinuate that Anatoly Scharansky was really imprisoned because he was an American spy...
...Capote's book and magazine editors were Jews...
...In order to fight AIDS we need the civil equivalent of universal military training...
...In private, one member of the American Jewish Committee's group overlooking Commentary admitted to me that Commentary's party line is an embarrassment (to him...
...The group subscribed to a racist ideology that teaches that "the Jews were the progeny of the devil and it was the responsibility of the white race to destroy the Jew...
...Neil Simon at the Ritz Tower]: "The location is perfect, the service is wonderful and the people are first class...
...It appeared in the Fall 1985 number of This World, published by still another conservative outfit in Washington...
...He added that it is impossible for the publications committee to meet without Podhoretz insisting on being present...
...What do they really think of us...
...Six members of "The Order," also called "Bri,ider Schweigen" in German, were diverted by the news that a Rothschild would visit the Four Seasons Olympic, a Seattle hotel, for a reception...
...Roosevelt, whether or not he personally "abandoned" the Jews, thought it politically wise to do that...
...While desire tore up my life, hers aimed chiefly at cultural improvement...
...But there was fear...
...Now, happy as can be with Reagan's Macht and Realpolitik, she absolves the U.S...
...Everyone laughed except the hostess...
...Abrasive habits of mind natural to political salvationists flourish on Op-Ed pages, in Commentary, Midstream, the National Review, the American Spectator, the New Criterion, the American Scholar, the Public Interest, the National Interest, and many other repositories of the new patriotism...
...whether or not the storm will actually break depends, of course, not on the usual social and literary jabs, vicious as they may be, but on the great horde of bitterly extreme people who—as in the case of several Midwest farmers who have lost everything in the "great" Reagan years—blame the government of Israel and its intelligence services for their economic plight...
...Dissident priests from Holland, Germany, and the Americas have been harshly criticized and their right to teach and publish curtailed...
...I wonder what they really think of us...
...As every observer of corporate American life, the * Her review was commissioned by the New Republic, which then declined to publish it...
...Builder Gerald Oestreicher], twenty-three years at the Carlton House: "If you're the quintessential New Yorker, like myself, you have everything you need at your service with the least effort needed on your part," said Mr...
...Definitely, Lionel's period, Lionel's style, were over...
...It was as good as a play to watch Lionel, toothpick in his mouth, laying down the law— amidst the stares of the other diners...
...their murderousness is as repulsive as their opinions, "right" and "left...
...How I miss Francoise de la Renta...
...That is the level of political discourse that Podhoretz has fostered in Commentary, his wife Midge Decter in Contentions, the organ of the modestly entitled "Committee For the Free World," and their son-in-law Elliott Abrams in FALL • 1987 • 615 MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS the State Department...
...right-wing, but not abrasively so...
...When it came to promoting popular prejudices he was as fearless as Norman Podhoretz...
...What this well-known lawyer did not say is that the virulently right-wing views of the Podhoretz family (relatives of neoconservatives are equally neoconservative...
...And Israel is bound to become a prime target of that collaboration...
...Which is certainly recalled with anguish...
...As the electric chair, the gas chamber, the firing squad, and the lethal injection were revved up in the Reagan years, as crowds of enthusiasts gathered outside prisons to cheer the executioner on, there was no firmer advocate of what Soviet judges called the "supreme penalty," no legalist more contemptuous of the bleeding hearts against it, than M.'s little ole devil of forty and more years back in Barrow Street...
...The editor of the Zionist journal Midstream, Joel Carmichael, published in its May 1985 issue an article suggestively entitled "The Kingdom of God and the KGB...
...Philip Roth mused one night at dinner...
...Although lively, these attempts to revalue remarkably influential Jews somehow bog down in Carmichael's penchant for eliciting "hidden" facts—like the Pope's being a Communist...
...Although I never got to her dinner parties, I lapped up all reports of them by writers I knew...
...Although John Paul II has repeatedly denounced "liberation theology" while guardedly acknowledging the destitution that is the most elementary fact of life in Central America, the Pope's institutional compassion was enough for Carmichael to identify John Paul with the "liberation theology" the Vatican is doing its best to suppress...
...When years ago I recommended Bernard Malamud's books to Allen Tate, he made the same impolite noises that, years earlier, he made when invited to meet Langston Hughes...
...You saw him on television talk shows whenever Ed Koch lifted his important voice in favor of the electric chair against Mario Cuomo's horror of it...
...Nothing was very much changed when Norman Podhoretz denounced as "defeatist" a brilliant general, retiring Army Chief of Staff Edward Meyer, because he doubted the practicality of sending our troops into Central America...
...government on the grounds that nothing could have been done for the Jews before victory over Nazism...
...You read him on the Op-Ed page...
...With M. it clearly helped to be of European Jewish origin, to recite Rilke, Pushkin, and Pindar in the original...
...some of them became stars in the highest academic heavens...
...Buckley: "Everyone detected with AIDS should be tattooed in the upper forearm, to protect commonneedle users, and on the buttocks, to prevent the victimization of other homosexuals...
...She smiled...
...He seemed to have a hand in many things: he was identified as psychoanalyst, social philosopher, expert in the law without being a lawyer...
...Any time I look into the New Criterion, I recall Emerson's saying that intellectuals "are born with knives in their brains...
...Oestreicher, who lives with his wife in a seven-room, threebedroom apartment...
...Vidal is an intellectual brat, terribly and professionally michant, who for years has felt crowded by more original writers and takes out his resentment on Jews supposed to be homophobes...
...He quoted Shlomo Avineri quoting Hegel on the importance of the state...
...Yet in his last years I found, to my surprise, that good old "T" was capable of saying, and writing to Jews, that Jews were in a "conspiracy...
...David A. Wyman, grandson of two Presbyterian ministers, is dismissed as "a natural heir to the Christian moralist tradition...
...Podhoretz and "leftist" antagonists like Alexander Cockburn and Gore Vidal have contributed a new brutality to political journalism...
...If Susan Sontag's son David Rieff publishes a review in the New Republic recounting the ordeal of Armando Valladares in Castro's prisons, Kramer has to publish a leading article on the "Sontag Family Circle" warning us not to forget Susan Sontag's wild pronouncements in the past...
...You don't get in my tax bracket by looking at the scenery," replied Lyons...
...Alexander Cockburn, a frightful Stalinoid influence on the "progressivist" Nation, calls Podhoretz "a mass murderer whenever he sits down to write or stands up to speak...
...It may no longer be the well-kept secret it had to remain in the days right after Auschwitz...
...in righteousness...
...The New Brutality The "Americanization" of so many ex- radicals is an endearingly comic spectacle to me, a lifelong student of American culture and society who has lived and taught in every section of the country, and during the war was already traveling the length and breadth of it as a reporter...
...I shall remember the enthusiasm for Franco, the excuses for Botha and Pinochet, the admiration for Thatcher, the lust for war...
...Still, there was something anachronistic about Lionel, definitely vieux jeu, when I last saw him...
...Years ago, when I accused him to his face of being one, he airily replied "Not at all...
...this isn't just a movement, it's a job market) represent, like the hounding of the Rosenbergs to the chair, a maximum effort to guard the newly won status of Jews, to assure their respectability...
...Podhoretz: "Are they aware that in the name of compassion they are giving social sanction to what can only be described as brutish degradation...
...Nothing about the heavily subsidized, power-licking, altogether mechanical jingoism of the ex-left Reaganites is so striking as their hatred for intellectual "enemies...
...And how Delmore could shriek...
...As related in Truman Capote's The Muses Are Heard, someone on the train, seeing Lyons holed up all day in his compartment, wondered why Lyons never seemed to take his eyes off his notes...
...He explained the attempted assassination of the Pope as necessary to "camouflage" the "Pope's espousal of implicit Marxism...
...614 • DISSENT MAORI= AND DEPRESSIONS stock market, and the thousand-and-one varieties of corruption in American business and politics can testify, the "Puritan ethic" is the dominant influence on this country...
...If Irving Howe publishes a series of Harvard lectures on Emerson, Kramer hires a venomously envious scholar, a specialist in Washington Irving to knock Howe's book...
...Once I caught him on television...
...As the dinner party slowed down, someone recalled that great bit about poor old Leonard Lyons, the New York Post gossip columnist, who accompanied the Porgy and Bess company to the Soviet Union...
...Since then America-as-ideology, the very latest, has found its recruits among polemicists who still show not the slightest interest in the common pleasures of American life, no feel whatever for the different American regions, for indigenous Amefican characteristics and personalities...
...Reagan has finally mentioned the word in public...
...In that long gone time during Hitler's war when I was madly in love with M., the Village's most frequented femme fatale, I had to hear a lot about her other lovers, some of whom must have been concurrent with me...
...It has been officially confirmed that twenty-four of them were innocent of the crimes for which they were put to death...
...I began to see him as someone who could be depended on to play the totally odd card, to shock the routine leftists of the day—some of whom, like Paul Goodman and Dwight Macdonald, were "anarchists" loftily superior to the "imperialist" war...
...But the FALL • 1987 • 613 MEMORIES AND IMPRESSIONS Birchers have found their match in rightist Jewish circles...
...But it is a sad fact that "American Jews, too, have succumbed to self-castigation...
...Haunted by feelings of guilt for not having moved heaven and earth to have averted the murder of their fellow Jews . . . they keep asking if they could not have done more...
...Less than two years ago a group of neo- Nazis in Seattle pleaded guilty to robbery and murder...
...I live with Emma Rothschild...
...Where he used to follow the would-be outlaw Norman Mailer around, both in black leather, today Podhoretz emulates his ideological buddy William F. Buckley Jr...
...M's old friend: "Twenty- four is an acceptable number...
...No doubt more has been added to the pot...
...There was the most feeble, confused rejoinder to Carmichael on the part of his constituency...
...Frowning, she said "I must get my husband to explain that to me...
...He had been published, admired, endlessly protected by Jewish friends in "society...
...Another long-term resident]: "The great thing is the straight corridors...
...One can learn a hell of a lot from the demi-mondaine...
...they are not about being entertained...
...And smiling...
...On another occasion Podhoretz genially explained that critics of American policy are "de facto supporters of totalitarianism...
...Admittedly, much of this stuff is just opinion mongering among rival columnists...
...After reading Carmichael's unbelievably ridiculous piece in an official Zionist journal, I looked for some protest, even the mildest disquiet, from those who—whatever their concern for Israel—should have been shocked by Carmichael's total indifference to the abysmal misery in Latin America that has led to so many priests, bishops, even cardinals vehemently publicizing the torture and murder practiced by beasts like Pinochet...
...The John M. Olin Foundation, originally established with $50 million by the will of the famous inventor and businessman because "My greatest ambition is to see free enterprise reestablished in this country," provided (through the agency of Irving Kristol, who is supposed to have done it all on the phone) funds for establishing the New Criterion that (with help from four more right-wing foundations) came to half a million dollars...
...Last year Podhoretz condemned politicians "from Ronald Reagan on down" for even considering a crash program to develop a vaccine against AIDS...
...I am not persuaded, in these possibly dying days of Reaganism, that people like Podhoretz and Co...
...In war and politics," Dawidowicz sums up, "it's only power that counts...
...On the subject of Jews in general there is always the sound of distant thunder...
...Not altogether to my surprise, it turned out that his greatest interest was justifying capital punishment and releasing it from legal barriers...
...By the 1950s the belated discovery of America during the cold war so affected the gifted Delmore Schwartz in his dottiness that he had only to hear that Ignazio Silone had lamented some unduly aggressive aspect of current American policy for him to shriek against Silone...
...I remember Partisan Review editor William Phillips telling me that he could not understand my interest in the American scene...
...They knew what Lucy Dawidowicz in her patriotic fervor is pleased to forget...
...It was the smile that finally told me what M. had been afraid of...
...He was no Patrick Buchanan, William F. Buckley, Jr., or Lionel, Abel...
...Before he went on stage, he loudly, bitterly explained in the dining room to I.F...
...They were our brothers and sisters, our fathers and mothers...
...The book is attacked by my old friend Lucy Dawidowicz, author of a great book on the Holocaust, who was once so absorbed in the tragedy of the Jews that she became a thrilling example of a historian living her subject...
...When the designer Bill Blass admired, "I've never seen a table setting repeated," Francoise herself admitted, "And I think I learned a lot from reading Balzac: One thing that is very noticeable in Balzac is the demi-mondaine...
...No zigzags, no cubby holes to hide in, so the elevator man can watch you all the way to your door...
...In point of fact, Jews do not "blame themselves for their practical and political failures" during the war...
...Her flying Dutchman had clearly learned to advance himself in some fashion "outrageous" to the still liberal standards of the day...
...Civility has never been a feature of Jewish intellectuals in dispute...
...Over the years I could not help encountering news of him...
...From that point of view, the KGB professionally arranged an unprofessional-looking assassination, designed to establish in the minds of multitudes a primordial, would-be fact—the "natural" hostility between the Kremlin and the Vatican...
...The John Birch society, apparently defunct now or just in retreat, was so looney that it saw the Bolshevization of America in the fact that the red traffic light is usually higher than the green...
...And if there is any "anguish" among American Jews today, it is due not to "guilt" but to the fact that, in the secularized world of most middle-class Jews, there is nothing "sacred" to believe in except the Holocaust...
...In the strangely different world since my youth I have followed with interest the careers of the Nobel Laureate in economics, the Harvard social theorist, the specialist in German romanticism (once a pliant refugee at the New School), who cheerfully "went home" to a famous chair in East Germany...
...Times have certainly changed...
...He added: "The evenings are intellectually demanding...
...There would have been the strongest opposition to any major effort on behalf of the Jews...
Vol. 34 • September 1987 • No. 4
