During his early reign, Podhoretz was a patron of the intellectual left. Probably no other American magazine, beyond those targeted toward a Black readership, was as full-throated in its support for the civil-rights movement. (Podhoretz’s characteristically quixotic and unintentionally revealing intervention was called “My Negro Problem—And Ours,” in which he admitted his own racism and suggested that intermarriage was the solution to America’s most profound social ill. Rabbis denounced him from the pulpit for it.) Whereas Commentary was founded in the spirit of Cold War liberalism, Podhoretz’s magazine ran essays skeptical of containment, hostile to the war in Vietnam. He published James Baldwin, Susan Sontag, and Hannah Arendt. Even though it never fully joined the New Left, it anticipated it—and briefly served as its fellow traveler.
Like his erstwhile friend Norman Mailer, Podhoretz wrote with uncomfortable intimacy about his personal flaws. He was alert to every slight, eager to shove down rivals, and unable to resist the temptation of a biting quip. Podhoretz made enemies as if they were a biological necessity. (He eventually wrote a memoir called Ex-Friends.) Allen Ginsberg had been a friend of his at Columbia during their undergrad days, but Podhoretz attacked the poet and his fellow Beats in an essay called “The Know-Nothing Bohemians.” At a gathering at Mailer’s, Ginsberg accosted Podhoretz and called him a “dumb fuckhead.”
Enmity emerged as the master narrative of Podhoretz’s life. After the hostile reception to Making It, he began to turn against the New York intelligentsia. This wasn’t just wounded pride. Like other Jewish intellectuals, he felt a deeper attachment to Israel after the Six-Day War—and felt betrayed by his old friends on the left who began to denounce the Jewish state as a colonial outpost. In 1972, he voted for Richard Nixon, and Commentary was well on its rightward path.
Along with Irving Kristol—another gifted magazine editor—Podhoretz began to self-consciously identify as a leader of a movement of disillusioned liberals who had been mugged by the reality of the Great Society’s failures. The socialist Michael Harrington branded the group with the epithet neoconservative, which it wore as a badge of honor. Neoconservativism exuded Podhoretz’s sense of enmity. His magazine became a scourge of the left-wing intelligentsia that it once nurtured, an organ of Kulturkampf.
Much of this cultural commentary, filled with nasty insinuation, makes for difficult reading. Podhoretz’s wife, Midge Decter, wrote an unapologetic attack on gay culture called “The Boys on the Beach.” The magazine’s writing about AIDS, which dismissed the epidemic as “overstated,” is a stain on its reputation that can never be wiped away. In the 1970s and ’80s, the magazine’s signature essays on crime and “the culture of poverty” disdainfully depicted Black people as the source of their own misery, deploying gross generalizations and the crudest stereotypes. In pompous prose, deploying dubious sociology, Commentary mounted a highbrow defense of base prejudices.