BREAKING RANKS:A POLITICAL MEMOIR
Podhoretz, Norman
BOOKS A poisoned pen Alan Wolfe BREAKING RANKS: A POLITICAL MEMOIR by Norman Podhoretz Harper & Row. 375 pp. $15. Why is Norman Podhoretz so unhappy? After all, he wanted to "make it" so badly...
...his chosen field is the making of ideas, not money (although he is not embarrassed at having made a substantial amount of the latter, let me tell you...
...His world is a tight one, composed only of people who live in New York and who write for a living...
...Podhoretz, I would guess, is unhappy for three reasons...
...The book is mean, vindictive, without a trace of human compassion...
...But Podhoretz as a radical...
...His formative experience is World War II, not the Communist Party of the Depression...
...One cannot be an effective anti-communist unless one can testify from personal experience about "the other side," and this Podhoretz cannot do...
...It is a long wail of anguish by a tormented and confused man...
...It does not occur to Podhoretz that some may not like either the perspective of an elitist reactionary like Norman or an elitist radical like Jason...
...Podhoretz wrote his book as a long letter to his son...
...But it is also one of Podhoretz's objectives to be a man of power, an adviser to those in need, in short, a Machiavelli to some prince...
...Of course neither Trilling nor Hook would be Marxists for long, and both would become virulently anti-Stalinist...
...Although it is debating point number one among neo-conservatives that the Left is elitist while they represent the views— actually the biases—of the Common Man, there are no ordinary people in this book...
...There is no generosity that winners sometimes offer losers...
...If this is the best that neo-conservatism can offer, then the enemies of this latest form of reaction, including myself, need not fear...
...True, he did not make it as a literary critic, which had been his main objective...
...is unattractive...
...he did it to support his mansion in Delaware...
...The lies and distortions that fill this book may make it easier for Podhoretz to offer consoling thoughts to the powers that be, but they guarantee that he will not be taken seriously as a man of ideas...
...Without personal experience as a Stalinist, Podhoretz does the next best thing...
...His most recent book is "The Limits of Legitimacy...
...He is justified in doing so, he argues, because even though the New Left emphasized participatory democracy and liberation, its members were the children of Stalinists, and blood will tell...
...After all, he wanted to "make it" so badly that he wrote a book about it, and now, finally, he is at the top...
...His views are widely discussed, his magazine Commentary is read in the highest circles of power, and he has his own U.S...
...It is hard to judge which claim is more bizarre...
...America's leaders, to put the matter bluntly, need thinkers willing to lie, yet intellectuals, no matter how ambitious and fawning, will be judged by history on the basis of their closeness to truth...
...That is surely enough to contribute to his unhappiness...
...The dominant theme of Breaking Ranks is that Podhoretz, unlike his teachers (Lionel Trilling literally, Sidney Hook figuratively), was born at the wrong time...
...Snide, offensive, and cheap)—Podhoretz takes pleasure in showing the reader his least attractive qualities, apparently not even comprehending that his ignorant parochialism Alan Wolfe is on the staff of the Institute for the Study of Social Change at the University of California, Berkeley...
...This is one piece of mail that would have been better off left unopened...
...If Breaking Ranks offered some challenge to people on the Left, some hard truths that needed to be considered no matter how distasteful, I would recommend it in spite of the shrillness of its tone and the barbarity of its politics...
...Podhoretz may talk at people who do not inhabit the New York literary circles, but he does not talk to them...
...There is no humor here, nor irony...
...But does he want us to judge him guilty by association...
...First he claims that the New Left period was a Stalinist episode...
...The antiwar movement was not moved by a desire to see Communists come to power in Asia...
...Indeed, his failings as a critic are often a subject of party small-talk in the New York literary circles that Podhoretz generally confuses with the entire world...
...Scott Fitzgerald did not write Hollywood pap because serious writers could not make it in America, as Podhoretz claims...
...Those men had been able to have the one transcendent experience that Podhoretz would never know: membership in the radical movement of the 1930s...
...Podhoretz is caught between his desire for power and the fact that his vocation is ideas...
...But that is the point...
...Yet what is possible in the Florentine Renaissance is not possible in contemporary America, and this makes Podhoretz unhappy indeed...
...Senator from New York in the persona of Daniel Patrick Moynihan...
...His unhappiness is evident throughout his latest book...
...He was born at the wrong time, he cannot be an intellectual and a kingmaker at the same time, and the world is bigger than his vision...
...A second reason exists for Podhoretz's malaise...
...He resolves his dilemma by showing more respect for the former than the latter...
...There may, indeed, be people in the world who are not elitist at all, but one would not know this from Breaking Ranks...
...Radicals of the 1960s had no tolerance of Stalinists, with good reason...
...But it does nothing of the sort...
...He did publish some New Left thinkers in Commentary, like Paul Goodman and Staughton Lynd...
...Finally, Podhoretz is ill at ease because the world he knows is not the world as it is...
...The answer is yes, for Podhoretz is always a man who takes pains to make his associates known...
...When one has explored the differences between Podhoretz and his college chum Jason Epstein, for example, one has exhausted the debate...
...But he has made it, and big, as a neo-conservative...
...Barbara and Marcus Raskin are still married...
...And then he joins the New Left, claiming in the book that he was a radical, but one who suffered the trauma of "breaking ranks...
...Breaking Ranks is filled with false statements, from the trivial to the consequential...
...One would think that someone who has achieved a position of influence simply through the powers of his pen would be in danger of complacency, but not Podhoretz...
...It is very important to the man that he be considered an intellectual...
...There are cheap shots, including a tawdry attempt to assassinate the character of Noam Chomsky...
...The tone is maudlin, often grotesque...
Vol. 44 • January 1980 • No. 1
