MORNING GLORY: RIP Norman Podhoretz
The Shire.
That’s where I grew up, the American equivalent of the Shire. Its name is Warren, Ohio, and every other place in the U.S. like it. The American Shire was the set for television’s "The Wonder Years," and its kids were loosely patrolled — though we did not know it — because FDR and the Greatest Generation had made that blanket of safety possible for a time.
My part of the Shire let in very little noise from the much larger, far more dangerous world to interrupt its remarkable calm. My father, with his two brothers, had gone off to war in faraway places, but, as the cliché puts it, truthfully, "they didn’t talk about it" and they certainly didn’t want to relive it or let their children know what war was actually like.
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"Vietnam" passed by our family and those of our friends because Richard Nixon ended the draft and brought home the half million Americans at war there in 1969 when he took over from LBJ and JFK, who had sent them to Southeast Asia. My cousin was at Kent State on the awful day, and our next door neighbor is on Time magazine’s infamous cover. That was as close as reality got to me. Echoes of the domestic upheavals were around, and the civil rights riots reached even abolitionist land in northeastern Ohio. But still, my teachers would do their best to talk about communism and the world, but only a handful of them truly "got it." And the veterans among them, they’d rather burn their hands on a stove than talk about the big war or the Korean War.
It was very much Tolkien’s Shire, as was most of the United States, except for the families that actually fought in Vietnam. Not the protesters and the Woodstock party-goers, but the families who worried about their sons in the fight and especially those who bled and died there.
(This was not the case for my wife’s family and a small percentage of other American families — the "Warrior class" that had been "Born Fighting," as former senator and author James Webb so aptly described them. My wife’s mother, sister and brother had lost their husband and father when the destroyer he captained, the Twiggs, was stuck and sunk by a kamikaze pilot during the battle of Okinawa. My brother-in-law went from Annapolis to the Marines’ Basic School and then off to the jungles of Vietnam and went back a second time as a "Covan," in time for the "Easter Offensive" even as Richard Nixon had reduced our troops to a very low level. There were two Americas in the 1970s. Those that fought the U.S.S.R. and its proxies at the tip of the spear, and everyone else.)
So, college in the back half of the ‘70s had nothing more dangerous than disco to worry about. The SDS faded away quickly — the original cosplayers. Once their futures were safe, they took to comfortable lives and sought out tenure.
But, some voices even then worked harder than others — around the clock, really — to alert the naive Americans to the evils in the world. William F. Buckley, of course, and superb professors like Edward Banfield, Harvey Mansfield and James Q. Wilson, to name three who knew the score at Harvard. There were hundreds of other serious men and women teaching in those years. Many of the sports legends of that era — Washington Senators manager Ted Williams, for example — had fought in real wars (plural), not baseball fights or "gridiron battles." They knew too. But, the collective agreement not to talk about evil in the world suffocated much of the news about and debates raging around the real conflicts in the post-Vietnam era.
But, for me, who had cut his teeth on "One Day In the Life of Ivan Denisovich" when my oldest brother brought it home from college, there was Commentary Magazine and its editor, Norman Podhoretz. Through high school, National Review and Sports Illustrated had been my asks at Christmas. In college, I added Commentary.
Commentary has never not been a part of my intellectual life since learning of it in college. By the time Jeanne Kirkpatrick published "Dictators and Double Standards" in 1979, I’d been reading and learning from the magazine’s intellectual equivalents to the 1927 Yankees for years.
The year after Kirkpatrick blasted out her truth bomb, the editor of Commentary published a memoir, "Breaking Ranks," that finally put the puzzle together. How much the Hobbits didn’t know about the intellectual battles of post-World War II America.
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That editor/author was Norman Podhoretz, and in that book he spelled out that ideas mattered in the real world, that they had to be fought for, that communism was evil and could be contained and even defeated, and — something the always cheerful Buckley never quite spelled out, but Podhoretz did — ideological debates could be ferocious, meaning actual, heated arguments — not dorm room debates — and were worth losing friends over, even close friends. Ideas mattered because those ideas were about how countries would choose to live — or die.
I would eventually be lucky enough to interview, though not meet, Norman Podhoretz and his remarkable spouse Midge Decter. Their son John now captains Commentary and has kept it afloat with the help of a new generation of intellectual heavyweights, threading a fraught course through difficult times, especially in this era of Trump, even when it costs friends, even when you might get booed for pointing out that "Midnight Hammer" was the real deal and 45-47 delivered it, as well as the American Embassy to Jerusalem, when many others promised and didn’t deliver and still others simply retreated from reality.
Some Americans will look up at the announcement of the death of Norman Podhoretz and have no idea what he meant. It may, or may not, be true that "No Podhoretz, no President Reagan," but that it might be true is enough to say: What a great American Norman Podhoretz was.
Hugh Hewitt is a Fox News contributor and host of "The Hugh Hewitt Show" heard weekday afternoons from 3 PM to 6 PM ET on the Salem Radio Network, and simulcast on Salem News Channel. Hugh drives Americans home on the East Coast and to lunch on the West Coast on over 400 affiliates nationwide, and on all the streaming platforms where SNC can be seen. He is a frequent guest on the Fox News Channel’s news roundtable, hosted by Bret Baier weekdays at 6pm ET. A son of Ohio and a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Michigan Law School, Hewitt has been a Professor of Law at Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law since 1996 where he teaches Constitutional Law. Hewitt launched his eponymous radio show from Los Angeles in 1990. Hewitt has frequently appeared on every major national news television network, hosted television shows for PBS and MSNBC, written for every major American paper, has authored a dozen books and moderated a score of Republican candidate debates, most recently the November 2023 Republican presidential debate in Miami and four Republican presidential debates in the 2015-16 cycle. Hewitt focuses his radio show and his column on the Constitution, national security, American politics and the Cleveland Browns and Guardians. Hewitt has interviewed tens of thousands of guests from Democrats Hillary Clinton and John Kerry to Republican Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump over his 40 years in broadcasting. This column previews the lead story that will drive his radio/ TV show today.