# Norman Podhoretz Editor of *[[Commentary Magazine]]* from 1960 to 1995 and, with Irving Kristol, the founding figure of [[Neoconservatism]] — the man who took the magazine of the American Jewish Committee from the liberal-left intelligentsia to the hawkish right and carried a generation of writers with him. Born in Brooklyn in 1930 to Yiddish-speaking immigrants, a Columbia protégé of Lionel Trilling and a Cambridge student of F. R. Leavis, he was a literary critic in the *Partisan Review* circle before he was anything else. He died on **December 16, 2025**, at 95. ## The turn *Commentary* under the young Podhoretz published Paul Goodman, James Baldwin and Norman Mailer and was, for a few years, the magazine of the early New Left. His memoir *Making It* (1967) — an unembarrassed account of ambition as "the dirty little secret" of intellectual life — was savaged by his friends, and the wound is where the turn begins: he came to see the New Left, the counterculture and the Black Power movement as a repudiation of the meritocratic, assimilationist path that had lifted him, and by 1970 *Commentary* was attacking them monthly. *Breaking Ranks* (1979) is his own account. The magazine became the house organ of a movement — [[Neoconservatism]] — that was less a philosophy than a set of former liberals' reactions: to the McGovern campaign, to affirmative action, to détente, to the Third World's turn against Israel after 1967. Podhoretz's particular contributions were the foreign-policy hawkishness (*The Present Danger*, 1980, on the Soviet threat; the Cold War as World War III; the war on terror as World War IV) and the insistence that support for Israel be a test of American seriousness. His wife Midge Decter, his son John (who succeeded him at the magazine), and his son-in-law Elliott Abrams made the movement a family, and the family became the movement's staffing pool for the [[Ronald Reagan]] and second Bush administrations. ## In the vault He is where the [[Movement Conservatism Timeline]] and the [[Neoconservatism]] page meet: the [[Project for the New American Century]], [[Paul Wolfowitz]], and the second Iraq war are downstream of the foreign-policy argument *Commentary* made for thirty years; [[David Horowitz]] and the ex-radical genre are downstream of *Breaking Ranks*; [[Richard John Neuhaus]]'s *[[First Things]]* and [[The Public Interest]] were the movement's other organs, and the [[Helsinki Accords]] fight was its first foreign-policy campaign. George Nash's *[[The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945]]* treats the neoconservatives as the third strand that joined traditionalism and libertarianism; Podhoretz was its editor. He supported Trump from 2016 — to the dismay of most of the movement's second generation, who became the Never Trump wing — on the ground that the alternative was the left he had spent fifty years fighting. The [[New York History Hub]] has the Brooklyn-to-Columbia milieu that produced him and half the movement's founders. ## See Also - [[Commentary Magazine]] · [[Neoconservatism]] · [[Movement Conservatism Timeline]] · [[The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America Since 1945]] - [[Project for the New American Century]] · [[Paul Wolfowitz]] · [[Ronald Reagan]] · [[Helsinki Accords]] - [[David Horowitz]] · [[Richard John Neuhaus]] · [[First Things]] · [[The Public Interest]] · [[Palestine Liberation Organization]] - [[New York History Hub]]