Speaking to Power

Speaking to Power
Nathan Abrams assesses the changing fortunes of Commentary magazine
Nathan Abrams Spring 2006 - Number 201



Commentary magazine was launched in 1945 by the American Jewish Committee (AJC), the oldest and most conservative Jewish-defence organization in the United States. In sponsoring Commentary, the AJC aimed ‘to meet the need for a journal of significant thought and opinion on Jewish affairs and contemporary issues’.

Commentary’s first Editor, Elliot E. Cohen, was a Southern-born Jew who had gone to Yale and had previously edited the celebrated Menorah Journal. Under Cohen, Commentary was a general and authoritative journal of the highest quality that was lively and relevant to the basic and most pressing issues on the national and international scene and that reached a wide, if numerically small, audience. It covered matters of universal interest but also those of specifically Jewish concern, in a non-Zionist intellectual, broad-based Reform Jewish contemporary tone. Commentary discovered, published and nurtured novelists, poets, critics, journalists, politicians and thinkers. Names such as Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, James Baldwin, Bernard Malamud, Hannah Arendt, Norman Mailer, Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer, Daniel Bell, Dwight Macdonald, Lionel Trilling, Delmore Schwartz, Sidney Hook, Irving Howe, Leslie Fiedler and many more appeared on its pages. Cohen was a literary ‘godfather’ to such intellectuals, nurturing their nascent talents and encouraging them to publish in a Jewish magazine for the first time. It is doubtful that, without his influence, they would have even considered doing such a thing.

Uniquely for an institutionally funded Jewish journal in the 1940s, Cohen was granted editorial freedom. Although the philosophy of the Committee was to be implicit in the magazine’s contents

The sponsorship of Commentary by the Committee is in line with its general program to enlighten and clarify public opinion on problems of Jewish concern, to fight bigotry and protect human rights, and to promote Jewish cultural interest and creative achievement in America,
it was not intended to be a house organ, since

The opinions and views expressed by Commentary’s contributors and editors are their own, and do not necessarily express the Committee’s viewpoint or position.

It was intended to be non-partisan with regard to Jewish community politics and neither factional nor parochial in its approach, but broad and far-ranging. ‘With a perspicacity rare in voluntary organizations, Jewish or otherwise,’ wrote Norman Podhoretz, Cohen’s successor as Editor of Commentary,

the AJC understood that unless the editor of the new magazine were given a free hand and protected from any pressures to conform to the Committee’s own line, the result would be a pretentious house organ and nothing more.

And one which no one would read. The AJC had no intention of ‘doing anything that would parochialize the journal’ or limit its appeal. It never explicitly intended the magazine to function as a public relations journal, or as a forum for its philosophies. (‘Its pages will be hospitable to diverse points of view and belief.’)

This meant that the AJC concerned itself only with Commentary’s budget but generally did not interfere with the contents of the magazine. The journal has been seen as an exceptional enterprise in this respect, as no other organization has so generously sponsored a publication and then left it to operate independently.

Yet the term ‘editorial freedom’ belies the exact nature of the relationship between the magazine and the AJC: Cohen was carefully selected as Editor because of his views, which were in line with the AJC’s, and he regularly attended and contributed to AJC staff meetings, at which its position was spelled out. Furthermore, when Cohen did cross the line, as in 1949 with his publication of Isaac Rosenfeld’s Freudian interpretation of the kashrut laws, ‘Adam and Eve on Delancey Street’, the AJC intervened and issued a public reprimand.

Cohen guided Commentary from a small, unknown periodical in 1945 into a significant journal of opinion and influence. He established its main concerns and made Commentary the leading organ of liberal anti-Communist opinion in America during the late 1940s and 1950s. So much so, in fact, that Irving Kristol modeled Encounter magazine on Commentary. Cohen had set the precedent of an intellectual and Jewish magazine that spoke to power for the first time: it was read by successive presidents from Truman to Eisenhower. However, Cohen died in 1959 by committing suicide. His death left a gaping hole in the journalistic world and a vacuum at the magazine that had to be filled.

Cohen’s designated successor was the precocious Norman Podhoretz, who had begun writing for the magazine in 1953 and been Deputy Editor from late 1955 to 1957. When he took over in 1960, he set about remaking the journal in his own image. Where Cohen only hinted at the possibilities of an influential policy magazine, it was Podhoretz who took the hint and turned it into a full-blown reality. Thus it became an indispensable journal, a crucible in which neo-conservative arguments, especially on foreign policy, were honed. Commentary was the womb in which neo-conservatism was conceived and gestated. It became the hub of a neo-conservative imperium.

It was at Commentary that Podhoretz learned many of the elements that would form his neo-conservatism: staunch anti-Stalinism and liberal anti-Communism, pro-Americanism, pro-New Dealism, pluralism and secularism, iconoclasm, anti-Jewish Establishmentism, and, perhaps above all, confidence, because Commentary exemplified confidence and gave the young Podhoretz assurance. These provided the props for the neo-conservative model. Commentary took on Podhoretz’s outlook. Its history was tightly bound up with the personality of its Editor.
During the 1960s, Podhoretz claimed he had transformed Commentary into a focal point for the emergent radicalism of the decade, a magazine that questioned many of the shibboleths of the 1950s. While he did publish new voices such as Staughton Lynd and Paul Goodman who spoke to the New Left generation of that decade, he did not change the fundamentals of the journal except in one key respect: he turned it into a source of anti-liberal and anti-black conservatism, which was consolidated as the decade progressed.

The events of the 1960s provided the backdrop for the neo-conservatism that emerged in the 1970s as a direct consequence of Podhoretz’s war against the New Left and the counterculture – which he collectively dubbed ‘The Movement’. Ironically, given that Podhoretz went to some lengths to distance his magazine from that of Elliot Cohen, Podhoretz recycled ideas from the 1950s and returned Commentary to a position almost identical to that which it had occupied when he took over in 1960.

Under Podhoretz, Commentary created and courted controversy. In 1963, he published his now infamous essay, ‘My Negro Problem – And Ours’, a painfully honest exposé of the author’s feelings about blacks (based on his childhood experiences in integrated Brooklyn), which spawned a host of replies accusing him of racism. Homophobia was a constant drumbeat in the magazine from the 1970s onwards. Podhoretz’s wife Midge Decter lambasted Gore Vidal, identifying him as a chief purveyor of America’s moral corruption. Enraged by their homophobic attacks, Vidal shot back, penning an essay, entitled ‘The Empire Lovers Strike Back’, in the 22 March 1986 issue of The Nation. In the essay, Vidal similarly singled out Podhoretz and Decter as an ‘Israeli fifth column’ and Zionist ‘propagandists’. As a ‘retaliatory strike’, Podhoretz devoted the lead essay of the November 1986 Commentary to a response. In ‘The Hate That Dare Not Speak its Name’, he called Vidal’s essay ‘the most blatantly anti-Semitic outburst to have appeared in a respectable American periodical since World War II’. He continued: ‘His every word drips with contempt and hatred, and underlying it all is a strong note of menace.’
In doing all this, Podhoretz produced a magazine that spoke to power and became highly influential. Its success was measured in high-profile appointments to government following articles in the magazine, including Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Jeane Kirkpatrick as US ambassadors to the United Nations. When Moynihan rose to attack the infamous ‘Zionism is racism’ resolution, many believe they heard Podhoretz’s words in his speech. Commentary’s high-point came during the first Reagan administration when, it was said, Kirkpatrick’s 1979 Commentary article, ‘Dictatorships and Double Standards’, established Reagan’s human rights policy – which eventually led to the Iran-Contra affair, in which Podhoretz’s son-in-law, Elliot Abrams (another Reagan appointee), was a key player.

More recently, Commentary played a vital part in both neo-conservatism and the moulding of Bush’s post- September 11 agenda. The Bush administration found a ready-made response to the attacks on the World Trade Center in the sort of proposals that had been refined in Commentary more than ten years before. The magazine evoked a new category of threats: radical Arab nationalism and Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism, as well as their sponsors such as Iran, Iraq, North Korea and Syria. It focussed on the need to confront the new transnational enemy from the east, what Charles Krauthammer called the ‘global intifada’. As far back as 1989, Commentary argued that the terrorist threat posed by a radical, vengeful interpretation of Islam was the most urgent and ominous security threat and called for an immediate, intensified and global confrontation. It warned of the threat Islamic militant fundamentalists posed to Western values, as signaled by the Salman Rushdie affair. It pointed out that Mohammed Aidid’s successful defiance of the United States in Somalia in 1993 might be only a small taste of things to come. And, following the bombing of the World Trade Center in February 1993, it characterized Islamic fundamentalism as the clearest present danger and ominously predicted that, as the ‘fundamentalist struggle continues’, the ‘kind of vitriol [they preach] against America’ and the ‘systemic preaching of hatred eventually will produce violence’. Even more darkly prophetic was its observation: ‘Manhattan’s own nightmare could recur . . . ’, for

[the] World Trade Center bombing suggests[,] the conduct even of those fundamentalists who were once American allies and clients cannot be predicted, even in the short term.

Woodrow Wilson’s ideal of making the world safe for democracy found much support and space
in Commentary, which revived Wilsonianism in the mid-1970s long before others did so. In the wake of the Cold War, Commentary sought to ensure that the United States continued to play the part of a world power and remained involved overseas. It was part of a group of academics, intellectuals and commentators who styled themselves ‘democratic internationalists’, who emphasized the necessity of American leadership in a newly unipolar world to create the conditions for peace and security through the defence and advance of democracy, and who were sceptical of international organizations and institutions. They saw the post-Cold War task of the United States as to defend democratic allies and to resist aggression by fanatical states, promoting democratic transitions where possible and supporting democratic consolidation elsewhere. After the first Gulf War, in particular, Commentary pushed the United States to encourage liberalization and democratization in the Middle East in order to prevent the rise of another Saddam. It called for a refashioned crusade for democracy in which America would be globally active.

This remains a key theme. As Podhoretz writes in his contribution to a symposium on ‘Defending and Advancing Freedom’ in the November 2005 issue:
To his credit, President Bush has not made the most serious mistake of all, which would be to lose his nerve. His steely determination to stay the course, notwithstanding the baying of the press and the Democrats (forgive the redundancy), is giving Iraqis the breathing room they need to build political and security institutions that might be able to survive a drawdown (though not a total pullout) of US forces.

We’re finally on the right course in Iraq, though it has taken a while to get there. I am not so sure we’re on any course at all in dealing with the looming threat of the Iranian and North Korean nuclear-weapons programs. In both cases, the administration has so far been satisfied with toothless multilateral diplomacy that has merely bought time for atomic assembly lines to ramp up. There are no easy answers here, and military action is not a terribly palatable option.
But why hasn’t the US done more to try to bring about peaceful regime change? The President has talked eloquently about the ‘non-negotiable demands of human dignity’. I wish he had done more to promote those demands in the two remaining members of the ‘axis of evil’.

Yet, in his thirst for success, Podhoretz destroyed the magazine that Cohen had created. He may have achieved a higher circulation, a greater profile and more influence than Cohen would have, but he did so at the exorbitant price of sacrificing Commentary’s quality and critical intellectual independence. He compromised and dropped the magazine’s long-held standards that had originated under Cohen. The principles of serious journalism, policy and scholarship were abandoned, as Commentary became a spokes-journal for the Right. It was now something quite different from what it was originally conceived to be (and originally was), transformed from a journal of cultural and political life to a policy platform for increasingly strident and rigid conservative policymakers and would-be policymakers. This was clearly indicated by the AJC distancing itself further and further from the magazine, paying less and less attention to it, and ultimately setting up rivals to provide the sort of cultural and Jewish ideas that it had originally wanted to see in Commentary.

Since Podhoretz had enlisted the magazine in a conservative campaign, this cause, the holy war, had simply overridden more objective judgements of quality. Where the contradictory elements of the 1960s had led to the magazine’s highest ever readership, the drastic narrowing of focus into un-debated dogma accelerated its decline. Podhoretz could have sprinkled in articles from different points of view, but this would simply have undermined the crusade, especially if the pieces were really good. So it was a choice of priorities, and the political cause became the dominant imperative. Just as Cohen had purged the magazine of any writers who could not contribute to the hardline anti-Communist/pro-American stance of the late 1940s, so Podhoretz refused to publish anyone who wavered from his line. He felt sure he could develop first-rate writers who would pursue this point of view. But eventually the truth was clear: only substandard, mediocre writers were reliable enough to stick to the Commentary line. The magazine was unintentionally scuttled as the best writers were replaced by the most reliable writers, even if they were second- or third-rate. The perceptive pieces and serious argument of an earlier era were discarded and replaced with those written in anger.

There was a sense of extremism that ran through all Commentary’s more political and social pieces. Its energies were reduced to attacks on feminists, antisemites, Leftists, multiculturalists, environmentalists and anti-Zionists. Homosexuality was described as a ‘perversion or even a mental illness’, with warnings about a new wave of young boys being ‘encouraged and seduced’ into homosexuality because ‘feminism’ had made ‘young girls more formidably intimidating’.
Nowhere was there any chastening influence to soften this hard-line homophobia. Debate was excised as dissenting views disappeared from Commentary’s pages. It didn’t help that the tone was self-congratulatory and self-important and that Podhoretz cultivated anger in his writers.

Podhoretz himself had a tone of preaching, self-righteous rabbinic insinuation, as if pontificating from the pulpit. The magazine offered an insufficient variety of style, as if all written by the same hand. In 1981, Podhoretz had written of how the universities and the media were ‘mired in yesterday’s conventional wisdom’, having become
the repository of discredited ideas and shopworn attitudes, a kind of shrine at which the cultists of a dying religion gather to genuflect, chanting mindless invocations they imagine arise out of reason to a moribund god they still believe incarnates the living truth.

His magazine had now come to fit that description. Podhoretz suffered from what he himself had diagnosed in 1967 as ‘the intellectual rigidity to which the human mind is prone in politics’. The unprecedented attention and success of the Reaganites belied the stark poverty of Commentary’s thought, which became all too clear once Reagan had gone. Post-Reagan, Commentary continued pedalling a neo-Reaganite agenda that no longer seemed relevant because, once the Cold War was over, it had lost its motivating force.

Over the years, Podhoretz had been responsible for driving away many promising contributors, much to the magazine’s and neo-conservatism’s detriment. He closed his magazine to unwelcome guests, even those who had once been his closest comrades. The long list includes Hannah Arendt, Joseph Heller, Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, the Trillings. Podhoretz had severely disabled Commentary. Its circulation figures dropped from a peak of 60,000 in the mid-1960s to 25,000 in 2004.

After a lifetime spent at the magazine, Podhoretz handed the reins over to his protégé and successor, Neal Kozodoy, who took over as Editor-in-Chief in 2005 – thus becoming only its third Editor in the half-century of its existence. There was no major disruption since the Harvard-educated Kozodoy had been at Commentary since 1966 and had been schooled in its catechism. It was a seamless transition, as Podhoretz wrote,

I know from having worked closely with Neal Kozodoy for a very long time now that he feels much as I do about these matters. I also know that, while setting his own distinctive stamp on Commentary as he leads it into what I am certain will be a brilliant new period of its history, he will continue defending the dual heritage by which he too has been formed.
He added, almost as an order, ‘I expect the magazine to continue with the same point of view.’ Podhoretz was very proud of Kozodoy and had dedicated his book The Present Danger (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1980) to him. And, in turn, as his chosen heir, Kozodoy promised faithfully to maintain the Podhoretz tradition. Although Podhoretz retired as Editor-in-Chief, there was not a complete break – he would not let go entirely. He still retained the position of ‘Editor-at-Large’, serving in an advisory capacity, and he still contributes frequently.

On the occasion of Podhoretz’s departure from the magazine, Kozodoy observed, ‘This is a moment of transition for Commentary, a tricky moment.’ It was a statement of masterly euphemism; Podhoretz had left the magazine in a sickly state. He bequeathed Kozodoy the onerous task of breathing life into an ailing journal. Commentary was marginalized. It spoke only for a splinter group. It had even lost and alienated its core Jewish constituency. The years had taken its toll and American Jews were simply not prepared to read a magazine that consistently articulated positions contrary to their own. Podhoretz had singularly failed to break the paradigm whereby the great bulk of American Jews remain liberal Democrats and regard Jewish conservatives as, at best, an eccentric minority. To put it mildly, things weren’t looking too good. Podhoretz admitted that, although Commentary might still exist, it no longer comprised an intellectual focus in the way it once did. It had aged and was suffering from, as one former editor put it, ‘a slight arterial sclerosis’. Some of the names that appeared on the cover 20 years ago are still there on the October 2005 cover: Joshua Muravchik, Hillel Halkin, Jack Wertheimer, James Nuechterlein.

This is indeed a shame for, right or wrong, Cohen had established something that the Anglo-Jewish world had not seen before: an explicitly Jewish journal speaking both to its core constituency and to the wider community at large and achieving an unrivalled authority in doing so. Whether they agreed with it or not, Jews in America and elsewhere picked up copies of the magazine, read them, passed them around, discussed and debated the articles as if it were a secular Talmud. It appeared on the desks of almost everyone of importance both in America and Israel and even made a few guest appearances on film (most notably in Woody Allen’s Bananas and Annie Hall). Not many other magazines can make this boast. But today Commentary is but a shadow or shell of its former self.

Nathan Abrams is a Lecturer in History at the University of Aberdeen. His book Commentary Magazine 1945-1959: ‘A journal of significant thought and opinion’ is published by Vallentine Mitchell.