Norman Podhoretz has made it. On Sunday, the pugnacious, proudly boastful and unquestionably brilliant writer and editor received an award named after one of a very few men, living or dead, whom he truly admires: the Theodor Herzl Prize, bestowed by the conservative Jewish Leadership Conference and named after the founder of Zionism.
His life holds a big lesson for young men and women wise enough to look back on it.
The 89-year-old Podhoretz — who resolved to climb from working-class Brooklyn to the literary heights of Manhattan, made it, then was booted by the smart set, only to leave his true mark as a right-of-center thinker — is a happy man. Yet as his son, John (a Post columnist), noted at the ceremony, Podhoretz’s idea of happiness isn’t the one shared by most people, especially not his fellow scribes.
“Norman Podhoretz wasn’t built for happiness,” his son said, “not in that way.”
Not that he didn’t taste that kind of happiness. Born in a cramped Brownsville flat in 1930 to a pair of Jewish immigrants from Galicia who never lost their accents, Podhoretz beat Columbia’s 16 percent Jewish quota, did a stint at Cambridge in England (not exactly a welcoming environment for a Brownsville Jew radiating precocity) and then spent two years in the Army before forcing his way into the inner sanctum of the New York intellectuals.
He published his first piece in Partisan Review at 24, his first in The New Yorker at 26. At 29, he was named editor of Commentary, then an organ of the American Jewish Committee (disclosure: I worked for a year at the magazine).
His first love was literature, and his critical voice was forceful — and withering. He trashed Saul Bellow. Ridiculed Herman Wouk’s “indigestible prose.” Took Faulkner down a peg or two. The sheer ballsiness — forgive my French — seemed to affirm the sharpness of his judgments. That, combined with his embrace of postwar American liberalism, won him the society of the likes of Norman Mailer and Jackie Kennedy.
Then he threw it all away: His 1967 memoir, “Making It,” detailed the “longest journey” — the one he’d taken. It was an ode to American ambition, but his friends didn’t like the window he’d opened onto their rarified world. Soon they became ex-friends; the invites stopped coming; he was outcast.
Yet the rupture had deeper roots. Podhoretz was becoming ever-more alarmed by the American left’s moral and political failings — its complacency toward the Communist threat, its excuse-making for rising crime and social collapse at home, its growing hostility to the Jewish state. He voted for Richard Nixon and later emerged as one of the guiding spirits of the Reagan revolution that sounded Soviet Communism’s death knell.
And herein lies the moral of his story for today’s budding thinkers: Making a mark takes stout-hearted, manly, Podhoretz-ian courage. As he told an interviewer during his period of exile: “I was raised intellectually to believe there was something admirable in taking risks” — even if that entailed social ostracism.
Nor was Podhoretz willing to polish his elders’ shoes in the hopes that they might do him a favor down the road; if he thought a book or essay was lousy, he’d say so, even if the author was a Big Name who kept an important gate. If the conventional wisdom was endangering America, Israel and the West, he’d call it out, even if the wisdom was dearly held in high places.
Today, the Soviet Union is no more (with his intellectual labors and that of his allies deserving part of the credit), and our nation faces different crises. But the tendency of journalists and intellectuals to uphold polite hypocrisies, to roam in packs, to mindlessly echo each other and chase each other’s approval, now instantly registered on Twitter, is the same as it ever was.
As his son put it at the ceremony, “Even from a very young age, Norman Podhoretz showed a heedless determination to say what needed to be said without qualification.” And that’s how he really made it.
Sohrab Ahmari is The Post’s op-ed editor. Twitter: @SohrabAhmari