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KRAMER: Cite them.
HOWE: It leads to Irving Kristo!'
It
leads to Eliot Cohen and
Commen-
tary
in the I950s.
KRAMER: And what was that precisely?
MIDGE DECl'ER: Names are not examples, Irving Howe.
HOWE: All right, wait a moment, I didn 't bring my file of
Com–
mentaries
with me. I always carry it around but tonight I didn 't
bring it.
KRAMER : You certainly carry it into your book reviews.
HOWE: Now just a moment. Irving Kristol and other writers in
Commentary
in the 50s-and this has been docume(lted and I've
cited examples in my own writing-clearly tended not to defend
McCarthyism, but
to
deprecate the threat of McCarthyism, to insist
that the danger at that time came from the other side, from the
people who were being harrassed, rightly or wrongly, by McCarthy...
KRAMER: Well, from where do you think the danger was coming in the
50s?
HOWE: I think the danger in American power, in terms of American
power, came from McCarthyism. I think that in terms of the
intellectual struggle in America and in the world-it came from both
sides. I think the Stalinists were also a major danger in the 50s in that
they were supporting totalitarian societies throughout the world.
The Stalinists were not supporting totalitarianism in America
because there wasn't any yet.
NORMA PODHORETZ: Irving Kristol wrote a single article in
Commen–
tary
in 1952, the thesis of which was that the support that McCarthy
was getting-the popular support McCarthy was getting-he was
getting through the unwillingness and the inability of the liberal
community to face up
to
the seriousness of the chall enge of com–
munism. And if the liberal community according to Kristol had done
so honestly and without obfuscation, McCarthy support wou ld have
been undercut. To refer
to
such an article, as is frequently done, as
support either overt or covert for McCarthy, is itself a (orm of
McCarthyism.
HOWE: Well, Norman, I said this, I said exactly these words in the
magazine that you edit in an article that you accepted for
publication.
PODHORETZ: No, you did not.
HOWE: Yes I did. I absolutely did, in my essay on the New York
intellectuals I said just this.... What Irving Kristol said was the
American (now I'm going to put it almost word for word) the
American people know about McCarthy what they don't know
