Dear Editor
Dear Editor Podhoretz John Romano is responsible for his own vexation ("Making Politics Simple," NL, October 5). He writes: "The more one has invested in the hopes tor true conservatism, the more...
...Yet the Nixon-Kissinger experience appears to have changed him, just as Dostoev -sky was converted by his Siberian exile...
...Those adopting less eccentric notions of conservatism and liberalism will not share the extravagant and plainly odd judgment that Podhoretz is unworthy of a berth in either tradition...
...He writes blueprints for disaster...
...Dostoevsky went to Siberia a radical-liberal-Leftist...
...During the French-Indochina and Algerian wars, he surpassed them in his shrewd reporting on the follies and atrocities of the French...
...And liberalism, which Romano finds admirable for its capacity ui acknowledge the justness of competing claims, exemplified in the exquisite balance of Lionel Trilling, supposedly dictates to our conscience, if it is good, a quickening in the development of our ability to admit wrong-doing...
...Unlike Dostoevsky, he is often shrill and silly...
...The ideas he detested continued to have a real life in believable characters...
...He says that conservatism should not be a consistent ideology...
...But blind as he was to the evils of that ancient regime, he remained a great novelist...
...the hallmark of its health will always be its liberalism...
...They would be wiser if obedient to the Biblical limits on human acts...
...With these prescriptions Romano must adjust his position each time people on the fashionable extremes conceive new claims if he wishes to remain balanced...
...And his niceties have already been appropriated by those who prejudge the country to be guilty till proven innocent because it might wish to continue as a strong power even should it remain as imperfect as it is in 1979...
...It The New Leader welcomes comment and criticism on an> of its features, but letters should not exceed 300 words...
...he returned praising the Tsar and the Russian Orthodox Church...
...Since 1914, there have been few wise conservatives in power in the world...
...But adherence to consistent principles need not be so enervating...
...He writes: "The more one has invested in the hopes tor true conservatism, the more distressing will be Norman Podhoretz' relentless disdain tor its complexities...
...underscored for me how men like Podhoretz, Joseph Kraft, Sol Sanders, and Irving Kristol are losing the informed liberal-conservative good sense I used to admire in the days when they were fairly frequent contributors to The New Leader...
...Kraft and Podhoretz seem to me to worship only nuclear and conventional arms, and subversion...
...he had many important contacts in France and North Africa with Vietnamese from both sides...
...Krafl now praises the equivalents of the Nixon-Kissinger policies and practices...
...It was this skill, I think, that inspired the Nixon-Kissinger-FBI-CIA to lap his phone during the Vietnam peace negotiations...
...In its absence, moreover, we would lack the integrity and self-confidence to hoot down the hooters-down that Romano declares to have been dignified when it took place just a short lime ago...
...For years, he combined the best in James Resion and Waller Lippmann...
...New York City Patrick J. Molloy John Romano's review of Norman Podhoretz' Breaking Ranks is the best I've read anywhere...
...The two of them, and the others I mentioned, no doubt believe they have become w ise conservative...
...Let me use Kraft as an example...
...Dostoevsky had a profound sense of Christ and a love of Russian saints that helped him even as a novelist...
...Minneapolis James C. White...
Vol. 62 • December 1979 • No. 23
