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good," and would I write something for
PR
about this issue? I did not
know William then, but I knew enough about him to understand that a
grade of "good" or "very good" was high praise indeed. I was honored.
I took his call and our conversations in Boston and on Cape Cod as an
invitation to join a great tradition of liberal political commentary
extending from George Orwell and Raymond Aron through William's
own essays. William expressed his admiration for my willingness to
publicly express my unfashionable thoughts and offered his moral and
intellectual support.
To receive such support from someone who had worked with the
great liberal intellectuals of the United States and Europe over half a
century was one of the most important moments of validation and
respect I could imagine. To get that gesture of solidarity at a time when
I was truly sailing against the current meant all the more. At a time
when the intellectual scene was dividing into a well -entrenched Left and
Right, he gave me room to publish views that were a melange of both.
Thereby, William continued the magazine'S tradition of a disillusioned,
tough-minded yet kind liberalism that defied easy political labels.
William understood the risks I was taking in saying anything good
about American foreign and military policy and thus committing the sin
of "moving to the Right." He put it well in "Stalinism of the Right," a
1985
essay in
PR:
The sin of moving to the right is, of course, an invention of the left,
and often has nothing to do with the classic meaning of either right
or left....
It
is true that in the last few years our political emphases
have shifted, but that is because the political situation has changed.
In the last decade the ideology of pacifism and neutralism has
reached staggering proportions, in a way somewhat reminiscent of
the thirties when fellow travelers and liberals were taken in by pro–
Soviet propaganda, and the media and the universities were liter–
ally swamped with illusion and lies about the promise of
communism. There is, however, this difference today: few illusions
remain about the nature of the Soviet Union; nevertheless most left
intellectuals, the left and liberal professors in the universities, and
a number of media pundits, have been receptive to ideas that ques–
tion the need to resist Russian aggressions and machinations. ...
In this situation,
Partisan Review
and other publications have felt
that this new ideological tide should be combated, just as the fel–
low-traveling of the thirties had to be countered by those intellec–
tuals who did not jump on the bandwagons. But this does not mean
now, any more than it did then, that we must abandon our criticism
