Legendary Commentary editor and author Norman Podhoretz died last night at the age of 95. John Podhoretz pays first tribute to his father here.
Mr. Podhoretz served as an inspiration to me for-roughly-ever. His turn to conservatism and support of Ronald Reagan made Commentary a magazine of world-historic import. When Power Line had a moment in the sun after Rathergate, I expressed the debt I felt to him in a post I called “I got my job through Commentary magazine.” Which reminds me. Jeane Kirkpatrick got her job as United States Ambassador to the United Nations in the Reagan administration as the result of her 1979 Commentary essay “Dictatorships and double standards.”
We met Mr. Podhoretz when we sponsored our first and only Power Line Book of the Year dinner in New York City. The year was 2008. The book we selected was his World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism. The war on us persists, but not through any failure on his part to sound the clarion or define the battle.
Mr. Podhoretz’s late wife, Midge Decter, and my mom, Rivian Johnson, were high school classmates and friends at St. Paul’s Central High School. Midge’s sister Connie hosted a gathering of old friends for Midge in the fall of 1968 when she briefly visited St. Paul to write an essay on “going home” for Harper’s. My mom let me come along with her to meet Midge.
Midge was Harper’s managing editor for Willie Morris at the time and actually made Harper’s worth reading for the few years during which she commissioned the articles. At Connie’s gathering I asked her what the trashing of Podhoretz’s memoir Making It was all about. She sighed, “Oh, that’s water under the bridge.” (John’s beautiful eulogy for Midge, by the way, is accessible here.)
In 2017 New York Review Books published a fiftieth anniversary edition of Making It. It is a classic autobiography — an American classic. I did my best to say why I thought so and to explain the astonishing nature of the NYRB edition in the City Journal essay “If Making It Can Make It There.”
As soon as City Journal published it I sent it to Mr. Podhoretz with the message that I hoped he would enjoy it. He wrote me back later that day: “Only every word.”
Thank you, Mr. Podhoretz, thank you for everything.
