Norman Podhoretz
THE FUTURE OF AMERICA
I am, frankly, at a loss in trying to answer the question
about how my ideas have changed over the past few decades. About
five years ago, in a political memoir called
Breaking Ranks,
I tried to
answer that very question in great detail. I gather from William
Phillips's more recent political memoir,
A Partisan View,
that he
found my account less than fully convincing . So, as he says in that
book, did "everyone" else . "Everyone" presumably means most of the
people who will be reading this issue of
PR .
What can I do by way of
clarification in two thousand words now that I was unable to do in a
hundred thousand five years ago?
Nevertheless I have decided to accept the invitation to write
this piece because in spite of everything (and "everyone"), I want
to participate in commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of
PR .
I
started reading
PR
in the late forties when I was still in my teens; I
began writing for it in 1953 when I was in my early twenties; and
I spent a goodly portion of my young adulthood in the company of
people who were part of the intellectual community out of which
PR
came. For a brief period, I was one of the few members of that com–
munity who remained on equally good terms both with William
Phillips and with Philip Rahv; at the same time, I was close to many
others whose talent for backbiting was of course less highly de–
veloped than Rahv's, but only slightly. I wish I could say that I de–
lighted in this brilliant company in spite of the backbiting, but the
truth is that the backbiting was part of the fun; in many instances, it
was inseparable from, and served as the driving force of, the
brilliance. In any case, as the youngest member of the group, I took
it all in with so large and eager an appetite that someone, I forget
who, and not meaning it as a compliment, once called me the
Boswell of
Partisan Review.
Intellectually, politically, socially,
PR
was my world. And when,
nearly twenty-five years ago, I became the editor of
Commentary,
I
still considered myself, and was considered by "everyone" else, fully
a part of that world.
It
wasn't until the late sixties that I found myself
"breaking ranks"; and even then, enraged as I was by what I regarded,
and still regard, as a betrayal by so many of my old friends and col–
leagues of so much of what had given honor and luster to their work
