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about the liberal intellectuals, namely that he is unambiguously
anticommunist.
KRAMER: Was that not true?
HOWE: No.
KRAMER: Did the American public know that the liberal intellectual
was anticommunist? No, the public did not.
HOWE:
It
depends whom you mean by liberal intellectuals.
If
you
meant the people writing in the
Nation
of course there was some
truth
to
that.
PODHORETZ: Irving Kristol was talking about a specific group of
intellectuals, including some writing in the
Nation.. ,The
point is
that the kind of characterization you have repeatedly made of that
article in
Commentary
in 1952 is itself a species of intellectual
McCarthyism. It shares the following characteristics with McCarthy–
ism: guilt by association, vague charges unsubstantiated, retreat into
large symbolic gestures in the face of challenge. These are not
charges that you or anybody else has ever responsibly documented.
They are false. They refuse
to
engage the seriousness of the issues
that were raised by Kristol and others.
HOWE: Let's let it go for a while.
PHILLIPS: I wanted to ask you a question, Hilton, that puzzles me. You
referred to the intellectuals as "them." There's some disassociation
here that puzzles me.
KRAMER: I think at the end of my piece I said that
we
were a disgrace.
PHILLIPS: All right:
we,
okay, I missed the "we."
GEORGE STADE: I find myself a little disturbed by the idea of New York,
which is never quite voiced, but somehow seems
to
lurk in the
distance that I think perhaps is the one thing the three speakers
share, and I wonder whether New York quite fits into the demonol–
ogy of the nation, as has been suggested tonight.
It
seems to me that
one of the things that happens in American cu lture is that it has been
predominately regional so that southern culture for example tradi–
tionally defined itself not in opposition to New York alone but in
opposition to all of the North and for that matter all of the West. It
defined itself in opposition which is what gave it I think its
distinctively tolerable voice, particularly in lit('rature. I wonder even
if the adoption of modernism or the relatioll"Ilip to modernism is
not ultimately in America a kind of regional relationship so that the
relationship, let's say, of a Robert Penn Warren for modernism is
somehow different from the relationship of a Meyer Schapiro but
they're both deeply affected by what we speak of as modernist
thought. I just wonder.. .it's not a question, it's a comment, whether
