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Remarks, May 2, at a dinner honoring Norman Podhoretz on his retirement as editor of Commentary - William F. Buckley Jr. address - Transcript
National Review, June 12, 1995
REMARKS, MAY 2, AT A DINNER HONORING NORMAN PODHORETZ ON HIS RETIREMENT AS EDITOR OF COMMENTARY
Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen, Midge:
I remember spotting the item in Editor and Publisher -- after William Shawn resigned from, or rather was retired from, The New Yorker some years ago -- that I was now, as editor of NATIONAL REVIEW, the longest-reigning magazine editor in America. The ink was hardly dry on that announcement before I found myself propped up at a ceremonial banquet, retiring as editor, after 35 years of service. Norman and I have a lot in common, I like to think, but add to that list our inclination to orotund cycles. Thirty years as editor would have been a little on the frivolous side, forty years, a little topheavy -- lapidary.
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It has been a heady tenure, for Norman obviously, but also for the legions who have observed with admiration and awe the services he has performed so self-effacingly -- to be sure, occasionally extruding an autobiographical book that reminds us of the distance he has traveled. I say legions and I mean it. The gap between the circulation of Commentary and its influence does not surprise: The New Republic was the brain trust for the New Deal when its circulation amounted to 35,000, and NATIONAL REVIEW went to one of our subscribers, Ronald Reagan, when our circulation was a mere 15,000, and Reagan was still a mere Democrat.
But although we know that there is no correlation between the size of a magazine's circulation and its influence, it is nevertheless disappointing when now and again one bumps into the profundity of the ignorance of so many of our public men. This was brought to mind a year or two ago when Senator Moynihan was arguing the qualifications of Carol Iannone to serve on the board of the National Endowment for the Humanities. She was facing the charge that she had published "only" in Commentary. Senator Moynihan thought to tell his colleagues on the floor a little story. It was that hitching a ride with Vice President Mondale on Air Force 2 one afternoon in the late Seventies he had urged his host to read the current issue of Commentary for special insight into a then-burning question. The good news, said Senator Moynihan, was that Mr. Mondale had agreed to read the article. The bad news, that he had never before heard of Commentary. It is not politically correct to argue the need for a rudimentary public literacy. On the other hand, here Commentary had one fewer subscriber than it should have had, and the cost to the nation was the reduced vision of the Vice President of the United States.
Norman Podhoretz led the way to a new vision for his magazine. The itinerary is familiar to those who feel a special debt to him for endowing the movement he embraced with such strength and discipline. The movement he left behind is described in the current issue of Commentary. The author writes, "The trouble is that thirty years of shuffling have blurred the creed, so that liberalism now resembles a person who has undergone 27 face-lifts; the natural contours have disappeared. . . . Mainstream liberalism -- the kind that exists in national and local politics as opposed to university campuses -- has become vaporous. There are no deep channels of energy."
That review was written by David Brooks, whom I encountered as a very young student at the University of Chicago. He was then a liberal, but he declined the proffered face-lifts. And now he has been recruited away from the Wall Street Journal by Rupert Murdoch, as a part of the editorial nucleus that next fall will publish yet another conservative journal, a weekly. NATIONAL REVIEW is forty years old this fall, and to get where we are we were required to absorb a deficit of $19 million. Never mind. As a fraternal gesture, I promise Rupert that if the time comes, I shall happily teach him how to write Fund Appeal letters.
Norman Podhoretz's career brings to mind the comment by Phil Harris years ago when our first astronaut took flight. "What I admire about him," Harris said, "is that he did it without nets."
I don't mean to suggest that Norman was all alone when he spotted that great horizon and decided to pursue it. For one thing, who needs nets, who has Midge alongside? But he did need to take issue with many who were still engaged in face-lifting, and it must have been terribly hard, and very, very lonely: during those days it didn't seem right to extend one's hand spastically to those who had been adversaries. The ordeal of the convert is heroic -- a pain I never experienced, and for that reason, among others, so singularly honor. But the evolved Norman Podhoretz is, as always, a man of great brilliance and extraordinary erudition, with the skill of the devoted teacher but with a vision now that uses fully his skill. And he is, for all his passionate devotion to the cause of the Jewish people, genuinely ecumenical. It does not offend him, I am sure, that from time to time I have prayed, obviously with insufficient fervor, for the conversion of the Jews.
