I am eric the executive director and on behalf of of the society i am pleased to welcome tonight our chairman should be giving this introduction and i know this evening would amend a great deal to him. Unfortunately, hes under the weather and send me in his stead. I am honored to make the introduction. Its been said that theres the story and then the real story and then the story of how the story came to be told. The book anniversary we celebrate tonight, making it is an important story anyway you look at it. Tonight we will tell the story behind the story. In his book, norman says that all writers become famous grow through ups and downs. These fluctuations reveal less about the writers actions than they do about the changing fashions of the time. Here is how he put it in his own words 50 years ago every morning the stock Market Reports comes out on reputations in new york. It is invisible to those who advise to see can read it. Its soandso have dinner at Jackie Kennedys apartment last night was marked up by points. Was soandso not invited by the locals to meet the latest russian poet . Down in eighth. Did soandsos book and nominated for the National Book award . Up to and a half. Did review neglect . Down to. Little did norman know when he wrote those words that his own a stock about to experience an incredibly fair market of its own. The early signs lead up to disappointing even before the book was published. Imagine that your prospective publisher has given you a hefty advance and after reading your manuscript they tell you, keep the money, keep the buck and under no circumstances are we going to publish it. The advice from normans best friend from columbia, Jason Epstein, was to throw the whole thing in the garbage. Lionel his mentor at columbia told him its publication would be a gigantic mistake and would take ten years to live down. All this, before even a single reviewer had trashed the book which happened fast on the heels of publication. As the saying goes, if you live long enough, you see everything. Norman tonight has lived long enough that this book has now been dubbed one of the 20th six by no less than the new york review of books. With their 50th anniversary reissuing under their classics and prints hold the book up again. We celebrated tonight. See for yourself at your very own copy right here in the lobby. What an incredible reversal. It just goes to show that all truth passes through three stages first, ridicule then violent opposition, and then acceptance of self evidence. When you read the book today it feels as relevant as it did when it first came out. Human nature doesnt change except that back then people didnt reveal their private feelings and aspirations publicly the way norman did. Hes such a good writer that then or now know when self reflections carries as much punch as his due. Tonight will tell the story about why was it that normans candidness and honesty created such an credible stir and who better to talk about it then podhoretz in podhoretz. That is, norman and his son john, that he was editor of commentary. While normans classic is making it is about ambition i know i stand here, like you, with great humility in the presence of true intellectual excellence. When people ask how to understand political thought, some might say read strauss and understand politics and culture, read crystal, foreignpolicy, henry kissinger, the hebrew bible, joseph, but if someone were to ask you who should you read to understand all of these different books read answer read Norman Podhoretz. John and norman. [applause] this is the first time that weve appeared in public together. I am turning 56 and a couple of weeks, you are 87. This book was published in is dedicated in part to me, to my sister ruth, my sister naomi and my late sister rachel. It is described in the dedication to whom this is, in a way, a letter. I think its a letter to all of us now from the past and the very banished past. That is my experience of having read this book again after maybe 25 years. That the world which were describing so thoroughly gone from us that the idea that it could have stirred the kind of passionate opposition and hostility will strike anyone who me that now is being absolutely baffling. Its very sharp but rather gentle set of ambiguities about what it means to be a success in america and what it means to pursue a career in the United States and the brutal bargains, the tradeoffs that are required of you in the course of your life in order to achieve success. It will not strike anyone as being particularly controversial and id like to start and ask you to reflect on the passage at the end at the end of the Second Chapter its a peculiar memoir, its a memoir but its not a personal account. You make yourself the object with the object of your analysis of how a life pursuing success in america is led. So, at this point you are graduating from college and heres what you write. Its striking in any event while i myself from a very early age knew everything there was about jealousy and from both sides of the fence i knew almost nothing about nb having experienced so little of it. Not only did i not recognize it when i saw it but i was scarcely aware that it existed. This remarkable of justice was compounded by my childhood illusion that the world around me would declare a holiday whenever i won a prize. [laughter] hence, my incredibly stupidity in going to anticipate that my friends at Columbia University would be envious when after absorbing the blow of the. [inaudible] it was a scholarship that you want to go to cambridge university. That they would endorse the fulbright hence, to my incredible insensitivity and expecting them to be happy for me and my amazement when i realized they were not and hence, finally my inability to understand the intention behind the effort to persuade me that glibness and adaptability to be speaking five minutes of soul rather than any virtue or a mind accounted for my success. Not perceiving the nb in this assault, taking it indeed just as my friends themselves did for the honesty of a courageous love, we were great believers and telling one another the truth. I was altogether helpless before it and for the guilt and selfdoubt it was the first time i had ever experienced the political success of envy because it was of friends and it came with me not naked but an undisguised but massed in the ideological rationalization that is hard to identify and harder still because of my instinctive terror it was a cannibalistic passion that i was unwilling to look to myself that it was in fact been directed against me. I think thats a pretty fair description of what happened when this book came out. There was an admin wilson, his diaries came out after his death and theres a passage in one of them in which he remarks i remember him as a little kid and hes over at apartment doing a magic trick like spinning a plate on his nose. He was over at our apartment and maybe that very night he went home and wrote this vicious diary entry about how we heard you got a big advance and the hell were you . This young whippersnapper getting all this money and everyone in town was talking about how awful it was. You were set up to fail two years before the book came out once people knew that you had hit the smart. How do you feel 50 years on at the notion that, even then having written this package on the passage, you have absolutely no idea that you would have basically a giant boulder dropped on your head . Thats an understatement. I was absolutely fabulous in by the response to this book. I was part of it and i was very happy that i managed to write it. Incidentally, people called it a memoir or biography and i call it auto case history. Its an ugly and unwieldy phrase so i never took verbally but, as john pointed out, i was using myself as a case study is the theme of the ambition for success and what it entails and how people feel about it. So little was is understood that one of the many attack from the book said this man is such a brutal, insensitive character that theres not a single word in it about his children of whom he has four. So, the things that were said about this book are hard to me to paraphrase. I can tell you that the measure of that response was a story in Newsweek Magazine which went Something Like this and im quoting almost exactly, last week at the new york dinner tables a new subject eclipsed vietnam, as the subject of the general outrage. A book called 28. Imagine equipping vietnam. [laughter] in 1967. [laughter] it was amazing. I was, of course, deeply hurt, as well as baffled. What can i do respect the book i had written and i wasnt going to throw it in the garbage as my best friend suggested. I hope he is having indigestion over the fact that the new york review has reissued it under the new york review was edited for decades by his exwife, Jason Epstein was married for 30 odd years and she was one of the editors. I can only hope that jason is suffering from a severe case of indigestion. So, my main feeling about the re issue is one of almost equal astonishment that the original reception. I certainly never thought id live to see the day that this book would be vindicated but, there it is. I tell the editor of the new york review of books, and frank, is here and i havent told him this but what he called to tell me that he had just read the book for the first time and he like to publish it as the new york i thought it was a practical joke. [laughter] when i discovered it wasnt a practical joke i asked him whether bob, the late bob felber, had. He is the coeditor and the sole editor of the new york review of books for 54 years, a couple weeks ago. I wondered what might happen when bob heard about this and edwin frank assured me that he had an editorial so there was nothing to worry about. I wont make any connection between the sudden death of bob. Its a weird confidence. [laughter] back just to give you a sense of how times have changed, a lot of people in this room know there is a long profile of the New York Times a couple weeks ago by john leland as part of the series called lyons of new york in which leland sat down with you and discuss this vanished world of the new york intellectual, which you call the family. The outpouring and enthusiasm about the world that is invoked in this, its 10000 times more powerful and the book is such that a friend of mine who is a movie producer sent me a text saying can we talk . I have to be in the airport at the time waiting for a bag and i said sure, call me, i have five minutes. He calls me and says so, i was just texting with a young movie star a and a young movie star a read this piece in the New York Times and he is very excited about the possibility of making a tv series out of this world where people were arguing about books and drinking in their having fights and its like mad men but books. [laughter] when i was a teenager, and my sisters apartment we sat down and we wrote out this immensely long cast list of characters should play parts in the version of and eight. This would have been in the late 70s and we thought that Richard Dreyfus should play you. [laughter] and that Laurence Olivier would just done a tremendous performance as a yiddish speaking holocaust survivor should plate your father. It should give you a sense of the absurdity of the notion that this very cerebral, very intellectual book about intellectuals might evoke this kind of response in the world of popular culture. Yet, reading it, as i thank you all would, when you read it, if you havent read it yet, there is a real glamour that is it is the glamour that you as a immigrant kid getting interestef immigrants, son of a milkman, very poor, growing up in brooklyn, finally having access to a world in which the mind is central as opposed to simply survival in the glamour of it. A lot of people werent really all that gamblers in real life in their own persons i dont think it was a particularly glamorous person, he had many affairs and hed be a fine character on a tv show that the glamour is very real because this is a book about people take something with immense seriousness, right . Interestingly, a very wellknown libertarian, thinker and writer, wrote a book on glamour in which she says her idea of glamour came out of a book called making it and that was the world in which she wouldve wanted to participate. Well, it certainly was glamorous to me. It was also very dangerous. I had a scene in which there were a lot of parties and if you happen to be at the wrong side of the room for mary mccarthy, you were in danger of being excoriated with the brilliance that unequal. Does that name mean anything to anyone . She was a critic and a novelist in the famous put was about ten years15 years older than you . Right perspective she wouldve been from a previous generation, the founding generation as it was called the family. She was fair in this case because she was a catholic. Yet, most of the new york intellectuals were jewish but a surprising number were not. When the world got conscious of this group some of the most important members were not jewish. It was more completed than that. In any event, it was a world that is hard to imagine in todays climate as i say in the book, people actually came to blows over disagreements about works of art. I mean fistfights. Blows over whether it was a great novel or not. I wrote a critical review of that book by paul bello, 1963, i was a kid, 23 years old and at one of these big parties, a very drunken gentleman came up to me, i didnt know who he was and he turned out to be John Berryman who was a famous poet and he might still be famous, i dont know. He was an eminent american poet and he said will get you for that review if it takes ten years. Theres an interesting thing about the anecdote in the book is that you do not name berryman and for a book that is viewed or was viewed as being overly gossipy you, in fact, indulge shockingly little gossip because, as you said, this isnt what it was for. In fact, had you been more elitist and had named names and been more open about the anecdotes that you tell are about, the negative anecdotes, you dont even name your the great antagonist in the book twin editors of commentary in the mid 50s when the editor in question, ellie cohen had had a nervous breakdown. You call this tandem twins the boss but in fact, one of them was the most eminent art critic too much in american history. You dont even say that it was him. This is a book that is elevated from gossip and its deliberately not gossipy so the stories are there. He was very evident in the art world and he was a great champion of Jackson Pollock. He is often said to have discovered Jackson Pollock. His rival was Harold Rosenberg who wrote art criticisms for the new yorker when i first came into this world it wouldve been inconceivable that someone like Harold Rosenberg would write for the new yorker at all. In any case, they were two rival centers of power rosenberg was. [inaudible] mean and pollock privately led to greenberg like the sites and he had a fistfight in my living room because someone said the wrong thing about Jackson Pollock or i dont know another painter. I was watching on television the series called the west by ken burns disciples and was very pro indian and theres a scene in which we see sitting bull, chief city both, saying i was a great teeth and i had these lands and i had these followers but now where are they all postmarked i have to tell you that since it was reissued. [inaudible] [laughter] i wrote a book later called ask friends in which i do name a lot of names and i did admit that is much as i suffered for that world, i missed it. I missed the intensity, the passion and it wasnt just about. [inaudible] it was about politics. Everybody in that world is on the left. The right was off the radar. It didnt exist. So, it was a question of whether you are a stalinist or anti stalinist or social democrat. Those were the factions and those were taken deadly seriously. These arguments over whether marx was responsible for the horrors of stalinist russia. However, a quote from page 116 your initial entry into the world basically, in the offices of commentary for which you had started to write in 1952, as a 22 yearold and then were befriended by probably the best ses whoever wrote for commentary outside of the two of us sitting here. Robert died tragically and probably the best writer died in his late 30s of his heart attack and he had befriended you and hear his a sentence here he is not always so generous and that is the only indication of this thing. I was at. [inaudible] had been expressing concern over that neoconservatism of the Younger Generation on the basis of one of my reviews. Neoconservatism appeared in this book in 1967, long before anybody thought to adopt the term and apply it to you. Though, i will say, again, for the end of this book there are hints of applications of the change that you were about to go through in which you start complaining about how the new left which you, as an editor, had just started champion in 1960s had stopped feeling with the difficulties and social problems of the United States in the 1950s largely been racial and had started delving into that terrible ideas of the 1930s meaning communism, support from socialism, that you have clung to anti communism that you never fallen prey to. I think they are, interestingly enough, is a hint of maybe what it was that you didnt even understand that it was going to emote this enraged reaction to the book. Yeah, thats an important point. I never looked at turn after publishing it and it was only two weeks ago that i reread it for the first time in 20 years. Frankly, i confess that i was i thought down deep they were right. Maybe its a lousy book. One thing that was said about it is that it had no literary distinction whatsoever. I thought it was beautifully written myself. [laughter] you can tell from the passage that any such claim is absolutely preposterous. In any event, i was also told that the book was humorless where i thought it was pretty funny, at least, in places. There were other things when i reread the book for the first time it was a strange experience and i tried reading it through the eyes of someone else which is not that hard because in 50 years you change a lot and the author of this book was not the one i recognized that easily and i was able to look at it with an abnormal degree of objectivity. What i most came away with was not reassurance that i had written a classic but how crazy all those people were. They were demented. Virtually everything they said about this book was not only wrong but the opposite of the truth. Now, you could have made a good case that the book on serious grounds, i suppose, but nobody did and everyone who wrote about it said things that were so blatantly untrue that i was bewildered. Now, i did, however, detect something in there that may have accounted for the rage. Rage, it was. Its something that, i myself, did not realize until i reread it a few weeks ago. It had germs of what was to follow. I wrote this book thinking of myself as a man of the left and i was a fully accredited intellectual to even some extent in some eyes a leisure had no notion of committing apostasy is for blasphemies against the religion, political religion that i belong to but reading this book i could see that there were. [inaudible] of what was to come in i think many, most of my friends, especially my friends know this apostasy being born. Let me read the passage. It was one thing to say that the program would of the old civil rights was adequately responsive to the needs of the negro masses and another to accuse them of being in secret coalition with the races to keep any goes down. It was one thing to say that the American Educational system was failing in its responsibilities to the poor and another two sacraments lies dropping out of school with an active social process. It was one thing to be critical of American Society institutions of foreignpolicy and another to be flippant of the democratic systematic total fake. When i thought of the is ideas of the return of the oppressed cliches of the 30s, the show trials and the crews of speech of the revelations of the horrors of communism my interpolation they seem to have no purpose beyond proving how rotten america was. When in the pre popular front this town is adopted the same tactics and in at least been a belief that the tacit would help bring about revolution closer but this was written in the middle of the 60s and was triumphantly demonstrated that a particular act of legislation did not go far enough that the American Power would be given to the bid or assumptions the only purpose being served was to pile up fraudulent democratic processes of pretension. [inaudible] so, i think there is more in that passage. Oddly enough, hardly anybody said that in attacking the book. Again, you have to understand its easier to understand from the perspective of todays Cultural Climate than it would have been then. Everything was being politicized, everything. Politics was a black hole sucking everything into it whole. To Say Something positive about success, about the ambition of success, that there was nothing wrong with that and thats one of the point i made in the book was to extol what wouldve been called the middle class values or the bourgeoisie life was about as far this was an explosive idea and i dont know why it was so naive and stupid as to not realize how explosive it was. Ill say in my own defense i had raised intellectually with the idea that the single greatest virtue of literature was honesty. Especially honesty that had qualities in oneself that these underground man or kind of thing. Here i had written a book, a very faithful to that precept one of the most important teachers i had what interested me in the virtues of honesty advised me not to publish the book. What the hell is going on here . I can see now the defense of what wouldve been considered the push was the way of life was the main source of the outrage against the book. For some reason no one wanted to say that but they kept picking on other things that were, as i said, mostly untrue. However, you simply say that the nature of the human condition is for people to seek power and authority and have success but with success can be defined in many different kinds of ways. It cannot simply be defined as monetary success even as you say it spoke to you, you did so much better than your own parents had done and jumped classes ahead of them that wouldve seemed sign fictional to take those other leaps but that there are all kinds of tradeoffs in achieving the success including the alienation of your family, having to acknowledge that you are outdistancing your beloved childhood friends socially and that the people in whose orbit you wish to live were mean, savage, hostile to each other, drunk, brutal but very, very clever. This was a world in which what mattered was being clever. The brainpower in that world was explosive. It was like nothing id seen before or since. I later wrote an attack [inaudible] she was a close friend to me at the time and became one of my earliest acts friends. I subtitled it the notes on the perversity of billions. If anyone who ever lived was brilliant it was her. What did that brilliant spring or two . Extremely first, conclusions about a very delicate and difficult subject. That was true about a lot of these people. They were wrong about practically everything but they were brilliantly wrong. It was worth your life to take them on and it was dangerous because you walk away humiliated or else were really good at. That was one of the great lessons that i learned from living in that world but it took me a long time to absorb it and to fully understand how much it meant. I think the only serious criticism you have to acknowledge was correct. In the case of the book, was a line by the columnist in new york city bag, murray captain who named the family to describe the new york intellectual world in which he said only Norman Podhoretz would consider living at 105th and broadway making it back on. And when. [laughter] murray captain. He lived at 103rd and broadway. Its not like hes speaking from this great purge for him he came from a highly rustic credit family in baltimore. His grandfather was the chief justice of the baltimore Maryland Supreme Court and so on. When he was young he was a communist and he got himself arrested in a mayday demonstration. All these kids were hauled up for this judge and the judge gave them a very stern lecture and sentence them to whatever it was, ten days in the county ja jail. And then he said, not you, murray, not you. Im surprised to see you here, a captain in this courtroom and i have to just assume that it was the wayward impulse. Murray kempton never got over that. Imagine that he too was very brilliant. Its true that there was a lot of ambivalence in my justification of the ambition for success. The fact is i see now clearly that there wasnt much you could say in the year 1967 in new york or in the United States, generally, i think that would be more offensive to say that it is better to be rich and poor and it is better to be powerful than powerless. That the life lived by those lived successful in which generally in those days the middle class values was to be commended and not sneered at. There was nothing more steerable asset than what was called middleclass values in that. So, i wrote this book in 1965 when things were on the balance of the Antiwar Movement had not yet come to real fruition, the Civil Rights Movement had not yet turned violent, by the time i finished the book in 1967, i iran into the perfect storm. Everything that was going on in the culture was inimical to the spirit of this book and the substance of this book. In a sense, i deserved what i got. I dont really mean that but its not inexplicable but i daresay anybody would read the book or heard about it and reads it now, whether you like it or dont like it, i say, would be quite puzzled by the storm that aroused. Was unqualifiedly delicious. It was better to be recognized than to be anonymous. This book represents an effort to explain why it should have taken someone like myself so long to arrive at such apparently elementary discoveries. Because you in the world in whih you lived those discoveries, because of the perversity of brilliance, these very simple home truths had to be buried under a set of intellectual presumptions that contradicted them. Yeah. I just want to throw in a little story about my mother. John made reference to the alienation of ones family that was involved in moving from one social class to another. Theres a big best selling book now by j. D. Vance which is called hillbilly elegy. Some have called it the [inaudible] [laughter] he goes into great detail about the pain of having gotten himself separated from his, from his roots. This my mother could never understand what i was doing. [laughter] she, what is he, a journalist . I mean, mrs. So and so on the second floors son was a doctor. [laughter] no problem there. Somebody else was a lawyer and had a cadillac. [laughter] what exactly she knew that i was making some kind of reputation, that my name was in the papers occasionally, but and when people, especially relatives, asked what is he exactly [laughter] she said, she couldnt answer. My father could, but he was too snobbish to get into these discussions. My mother once said wistfully, and here you have in this little remark encapsulated a huge sociological theory. She said wistfully, i should have made him for a dentist. [laughter] now, the laugh isnt big enough, because a lot of you dont know what that means. A dentist was a kid who had failed to become a doctor. [laughter] and even though he might make a lot of money and visit his mother every sunday and drive her out to his mansion in long island, nevertheless, he was a failed doctor. [laughter] that, she could understand. That she could understand. So if she had made me for a dentist, there wouldnt have been this kind of problem. I wouldnt have been living in this, in this weird world that she could make no sense of. But, you know, one other anecdote you have no memory of but i think is telling because this would have been around when you were in your early 50s. So there you were, you had been an eminent american pretty much for 25 years though you had been, you know, kind of a boring child of immigrants who spoke yiddish at home, who spent their lives speaking in thick yiddish accents. Your mother died only 20 years ago, in her 90s. Father was a milkman, was a terrible failure in life as a person of, in the terms in which making it is described. And then you knew you had made yourself. You were famous, you were notorious, whatever you were. And i was home either from college, or i was home from washington for the weekend. I was going out at night, and i had on a blue, i had on a suit, i think. Either a suit or something. And brown shoes. And you said to me, youre wearing brown shoes . [laughter] and i said, yeah. Brown shoes. Like, i never had the social selfconfidence to wear brown shoes. [laughter] and when we, when i was a kid and we would go on saturdays or sundays, wed go walk from our house to go to the movies in midtown or Something Like that, you always wore a jacket and tie. And i always assumed that a what that was about, the shoes, the jacket, the tie was somebody was going to find you, look at you if you were wearing just a shirt with an open collar and send you back to brownsville. [laughter] well, the brown shoes has a, has a story. I was once again accused of, in this piece of the times of still dropping names. So i will now drop a name. Jackie kennedy. There was a period in which i became very friendly with jackie kennedy. Henry wilson made a nasty remark about that in another one of his journals. And i lost her friendship incidentally because in making it, she said a man who brags about his grades in school . That was her gripe. But we, we went to a party at her house. We were on, living on the west side and we scooted, went across needed a visa practically [laughter] and i was wearing brown shoes with a blue suit. Or maybe it was even a brown suit. Brown suit. And i had broken my ankle or Something Like that. In any case, walked in and jackie looked me over, and she said, oh, you scooted across the park in your little brown suit and your nice brown shoes. I wont tell you what i said in response to that. [laughter] scat logical. [laughter] but thats where the obsession with brown shoes came in. It has remained and stayed. I dont own any brown shoes. [laughter] so with that, does anybody have any we have a microphone, so please wait if you wish to, wait for the microphone. We have a gentleman over here. Okay. I would like just to thank you for your comments and recollection. You have given many reasons for the response to your book, but you never mentioned even possibly the fact that you were jewish had anything to do with it. Am i wrong that that was also a factor in. I dont think so. Because well, i mean, that i was so nakedly jewish may have been a factor. Most of the people who attacked the book were themselves jewish, and being jewish was becoming fashionable in American Literary society. It was the breakthrough of saul bellow and phillip ross. So it was not a disability, so to speak, to be jewish. But it is possible now that you mention it that to be all that, you know, all that nakedly jewish might have offended some people, yeah. You know, theres a thing in the book you begin talking about having this high school teacher, mrs. Kay who is one of the authors of your alienation from your, from your immigrant family and the idea that you could set your sights very high. She wanted you to go to harvard, and she wanted childless woman, she wanted to train you in the proper behavior. And her constant invocation to you was dont be a dirty little slum child, right . Youre a dirty little slum child. Is that what youre going to be . A dirty little slum child. Think about, on the one hand, the savagery of that, and on the other hand a world in which no one has this idea, the world that we live in now in which no one sees even if its out of snobbery that there are people mired in j. D. Vances world who would be helped along by the notion that the world in which they live is not in a world out of which they should attire to grow. Because to stay in that is to be mired in it. And i think dirty little slum child, because she was married to a jew. As you say, dirty little shut up child was a euphemism even for her. She wouldnt say dirty little jew boy, but thats probably what she meant, right . The kind of jew she was married to [laughter] he was a german jew, a yecca as was called. He wore [inaudible] [laughter] and he also was a hater of roosevelt. Very unjewish thing. So anyway. Sir . Wait for the mic, if you would. May i give you a fast ball down the middle . Do you see any parallels between the intelligent ya of the mid 1960s and the intelligent ya of today from a political perspective . Great question. Yeah. [laughter] you know, i could spend hours answering that question. The answer is the political intelligentsia of today is the degradation of the political intense ya of the 40s and 50s. I can sum it up in a little anecdote i think i tell in the book. I once was invited to debate vietnam, about which i was ambivalent. I was sort of against but not all that much. In the 14th street union hall with a radical leftist. And i went there with one of my colleagues, the late marion maggard who had a wicked tongue. And we walked in and there were about, i dont know, 20 people scattered in this big union hall. And she said to me, do you realize every Single Person in this room is a tragedy to some family or other . [laughter] well, they took over america in the next 10 or 20 years, these people, those attitudes. It was a, you know, the maoists spoke of the long march through the institutions. And the long march of the institutions of antiamericanism resulted, in my opinion, first of all in the takeover of the Democratic Party by mcgovern and his followers and then, finally are, jumping ahead to the election of barack obama and also someone like de blasio as mayor of new york. I may offend some people here if i say that i have described what were going through while obama was president as we have a sandinista in Gracie Mansion and a stalinist in the white house. [laughter] well i apologize. Thats okay. [laughter] i would say one thing on this topic which is that comparing, on the one hand, the left, the new left of the 60s was on the one hand far more serious in some ways than the left is today. That is to say that they were so serious that they embraced totalitarianism in some cases, following the logic of their thinking to its ultimate conclusion. They embraced the violence openly and apologized for it in a way that people dont do now. And on the other hand, today its even more serious. The intellectuals of your day who were not them, but were the, were there teachers and were therefore bears their forebears were vastly more interested in ideas than the sort of what would pass for the intelligentsia today which is very thin. I mean, i say this as somebody who edits what i hope is a formidable intellectual magazine. I do so in an atmosphere, in a culture in which, you know, the tone, the tenor of something that is really serious is something that does not speak to a great many people. And does not, in a funny way, intimidate people. One of the things that you describe in the book is how were the 960s as america achieved this primacy is and selfconfidence, it needed an intellectual Leadership Class as part of its kind of makeup. And so it simply summoned you and others into the mainstream. Right . So new yorker, time, all these places which were incredibly respectful, and it was sort of like, okay, were this beaming, shining new i leader country, the most important country in the world, so weve got intellectuals too just like europe, and we have thinkers too just like europe, and we have novelists of distinction too just like europe. And now, not that theres anywhere else in the world that is more serious than the United States because i think that would be hard the argue that European Countries are more intellectually serious than we are. They seem to be less. But discussing ideas is a very, you know, you discuss an idea thats too controversial, and, you know, they summon a mob to your house. I mean, literally. Or they publish your address online so that a mob can come storm your house. Or if you Say Something flippantly clever that is out of the realm of what is deemed to be appropriate, you know, you spend weeks and months apologizing. And dare you be Charles Murray and say, you know, that america and Say Something that no one disagrees with anymore which is that the country is coming apart socially and polarizing horribly because of something you wrote 22 years earlier that no one has read. [laughter] and has no idea what you actually say. That you were assaulted by a mob on a college campus. So its much worse now than it was then then, i think. I mean, a although it was terrible then in its own way and all the seeds of the degradation, part of it you write about in the followup to making it which is breaking ranks, a book about your political revolution, is the abdication of intellectual responsibility by this class when the war, violent war, romantic in the capital r sense romantic left sense of the 1960s began to take over. And people that you wanted to be in the fight with you against it simply refused or were too afraid or had lost confidence in the importance of their own approach. Right . Yeah. Michael . Oh, ruth. Im sorry. Ruth and then michael. Well, just to turn it, my experience with this book has been so different that maybe it would be worth commenting on. About five times since 1990, i gave a course on the new york intellectuals. I would say by far the most interesting students i ever attracted to courses were for this course on the new york intellectuals, because invariably they came, people who wanted very much to be new york intellectuals. So there is a hunger for that. And i think that one of my favorite moments from this course was a student, a very bright student who, shaking her head like this, and i said is something the matter . And she said we will never write like that, never, never, never, never, never. [laughter] with such longing. Now, your book was always on that course. It always aroused so much interest and attention and discussion. And i was so grateful the you for coming the that course once in a while. And you didnt feel, perhaps, that energy. But its still there. What i wanted to ask, say is that ironically enough it is university that in a sense destroyed the possibility of that intellectual cohort. Had they ever gone for a ph. D. , had they ever been in the university except antagonistically as they were, it wouldnt have happened. So theres, so theres something very sad about that. Because all these students would have wanted to break out into in this kind of many of them, by the way, have become editors and gone into journalism. I dont know if theres even one thats become a university professor. Of those particular students. You know amen. You know, one of the things that you talk about though because you could say that this is [inaudible] is you actually talk about there was this kind of weird window in which you lived in which you as minute who was interested in ideas simply presumed that the only way to live your life as a person who engaged with them, with books, with literature was to go out and get a ph. D. And become a university professor. And you were going to go, you went to came bridge, you were going to cambridge, you were going to write a dissertation on disraeli. Jewish, florida [laughter] and then you realized that this was not the way more you, that it was actually too far removed and that everybody says problems with universities. You know, what is it that kissinger said, the fights are so savage that because the stakes are so low . [laughter] you wanted to be in a place where the stakes were higher. And it just happened that this world opened up. There isnt really anymore entirely. That world kind of ceased to exist. Most of the people who do this stuff for a living do teach or make a living. You stitching together university jobs, but to you feel, do you feel that you, do you feel that you missed out on educating the young in the way that ruth whos spent so many year trying to do that well, i have a very low opinion of the american university. I think its degraded and degrading environment, and it will take some kind of revolution to recapture the glories it once enjoyed. This is not unique. In the 18th century, oxford and cambridge became placings of the aristocracy and lost the serious intellectual heft that they had carried so that if you look at the great intellectuals and artists of the early 18th century in london, not a one of them is a University Even went to a university. They were dr. Johnson and that whole group. And i think were seeing Something Like that now; that is, some of the best people intellectually have come out of think tanks like Charles Murray. Rather than, rather than the universities. I can tell you i was a great fan of general petraeus to begin with, and then i heard that he had gotten a ph. D. At princeton, and i said to my wife, uhoh [laughter] turned out to be right. But one of the things you talk about im looking for the passage, but i, i cant quite find it. Its the columbia where you went in 1946 in which this famous course that every student had to take. And the purpose of the core course was to introduce and to enroll everybody at the college in western civilization so that this is the repository of our greatness. This is where it comes from. You start with, you know, you start with plato and start with homer, plato and aristotle. You come up to the present day. Everything that we have, everything that we are emanates from this. Right . And this is, obviously, a teaching that is no longer acceptable. Well, hey, ho, western civs got to go. That was 30 years ago, that slogan. Were even beyond that. Thats unacceptably bourgeois, i think. Michael . Bill has it. Oh, wait. Wait for the mic. Im not disagreeing that we live in very dark times. I wonder we cant just observe, though, the very fact that your book has been republished and, by all imprints, the new york review of books. And article in the times that johns mentioned about you evoked such a strong, positive response, i wonder if these arent some portends that maybe the bad times are at least [inaudible] well, i would be delighted to be taken as a portend. [laughter] of things to come. But i wonder about it. Im an old guy by now, so theres a saying in yiddish [speaking in native tongue] how do you translate it . If you live long enough, basically, you live through everything. Right. I feel that way myself. Especially in light of these two coincidental events. I mean, everybody who lives here, here we are in midtown new york, would have to say if new york city can come back from where it was, you know, in the 70s and 80s, anything can happen pretty much, i think. Mr. [inaudible] can we just get how different would the family existence be if the internet and social media existed at that time . Well, obviously, very different. And its almost impossible to to imagine. I mean, im not you may be surprised to hear this. Im not a great foe with social media and the internet. I live on the internet seven hours a day. Something like that. And i think theres a lot to be said for it. But certainly, its not had a salutary effect on intellectual discourse. Not at all. And, you know, the one term thats been missing from this discussion about the new york intellectuals and the socalled family is the term highbrow. There was a clear distinction in those days between what was highbrow, what was middle brow, what was low i low brow. And there was very little communication among these fears. And for better or worse, those distinctions at some point disappeared. And i think that had a lot to do with the loss of the particular quality of the highbrow world of those days. I mentioned Harold Rosenberg before who made his reputation as an art critic. Although he was at polymass. He wrote about everything. And, of course, very brilliant. When he was asked to to write art criticisms for the new yorker, that seemed to be a great turning point in american culture. And in a certain sense, it was because he told me once that william with schoen, the editor of the new yorker, called him in one day, and he said i just read your latest piece, and i dont know what youre talking about. He said, well, dont worry about it, i know what im talking about. [laughter] but, you know, its interesting about the highbrow, middle brow and low brow, because if youd asked and i was certainly raised in this, bathed in this certain type of highbrow snobbery, lets say that the middle brow, the book of the month club, saturday evening post and, you know, foreign films and that sort of thing was manager for which high high something for which highbrows had the most extreme contempt. And yet it turned out that without this ballast, without this kind of world of what may be called sort of ideal worshipers or, you know, people who longed, who believed that they should be in some proximity to this even if they had no standards or they didnt have appropriately arch standards for it that the collapse of the middle brow collapsed the highbrow as well. Because each though the highbrow hated the middle brow, it was the middle brow who supported the highbrow. And then everything became low brow. So, you know, thats the oddity. And theres no define bl highbrow left in the, you know, in the United States. [inaudible conversations] oh, ken . Ken and then richard, and i think thatll i rise at the end because i sense youre ending. And i want to report on an experience i had yesterday which i simply want to lay out consideration for everybody here. It was a man named pat moynihan. You knew him, he was a friend of yours. At the end of his life, i became a very good friend and very interested. I contributed a small amount to an effort to produce a documentary film on his life. Which i had the privilege yesterday of viewing. I dont think the film is going to attract any oscars [laughter] but i want to raise again many your mind in your mind the memory of a person, you know, like the pat moynihan i know and knew, senator point hand. Senator moynihan. And i commend to all of you if the film does get to a moviehouse, which i doubt because artistic, professional quality of its production leaves a lot, moynihan was a man you know very well who was committed to reforming the negro race, the negro family. And he died without solving problem of poverty. And i just want to commend to any of you who are interested in what he has had said. He voted himself to trying he devoted himself to trying to change society so that the black family would not be destroyed. Okay. I have to interrupt you now, because i now have to tell gossip i just want to make you aware that that film may be coming, and you should see it. Right, okay. But i need to share a piece of gossip with everybody here, okay . Because you wont do it, and im going to do it. You probably might do it. But its enough gossip, im going to do it. You know the u. N. Speech, the thing that made moynihans international reputation, the one that says we will never acquiesce . He wrote it, okay . Thats the gossip. He wrote that speech, not pat. Just to let you know. [inaudible conversations] you did. But cspan now knows. Everybody out this now knows [laughter] one of the more important political speeches in the 20th century was written by or Norman Podhoretz. Not the whole speech. Only the part that everybody remembers. [laughter] [inaudible] that that stuff, he didnt write that stuff. Pat moynihan was a very close friend of mine for a period of over ten years, and we became somewhat estranged in the later years. Thats a long story. But pat moynihan was a highbrow intellectual, one of the very few things i dont know, john adams [laughter] he was able to make a career in american politics. He was absolutely unique in from that point of view. And it, i myself regretted, came to regret that he had chosen a political career which i had something to do with, by the way. Because it cut the edge off some of his salutary brilliance. He was, he was brilliant and right rather than brilliant and wrong. He was great. And he was a great friend. So when it comes to brilliant and right, making it. Thank you very much. [applause] quick comment, norman. When you said nice things recently about herman woak, i knew the new york review of books would bring backing making it. [laughter] second, im going to buy this just because i want to read [inaudible] i have a perfect first edition, and i want to thank you, because i can now add it to my Bank Statement probably six figures. [laughter] we have skirted around the issue a little bit. And we have properly trashed the great universities of today. And ill say that as a member of the faculty of one. But theres a more general point, and its ive always thought thats what bill buckley meant when he said that he would rather be governed by the first three pages of the boston Telephone Directory than the harvard faculty. [laughter] and that point is there is precious little correlation and maybe almost an inverse relationship between intellectual prowess and good sense, judgment and certainly the ability to govern. So it would seem. [laughter] [applause] thank you very much. [applause] booktv is in portland, oregon. Right behind me is powells bookstore, one of the largest independent new and used bookstores in the world. Come inside with us as we tour this citys landmark. We are located in whats now known as the pearl district. When powells first moved into this location in 1980, this was an abandoned used car dealership, and it was approximately 40,000 square feet all on one floor, and over the past 30 years we have built and expanded, and the neighborhood around us has changed dramatically. So it used to be a Light Industrial district. Its now a light retail district, and were surrounded by wonderful places like anthropolly and starbucks where we used to be surrounded by auto repair shops and ball bearin