Long Island Books

"My Love Affair With America: The Cautionary Tale of a Cheerful Conservative"

Norman Podhoretz

Free Press, $25

To criticize a book not for what it is but for not being a different book doesn't seem quite cricket. Sorry about that, for Norman Podhoretz's new book, his eighth, does engage one. All of his books do; his writing has vitality; his learning is deep, he's immersed himself in the intellectual currents of his time and comes out fighting.

Indeed, this book is a treasure house of anecdotes about the gaffes, the triumphs, the rivalries among the postwar intellectual combatants of America. Fun, especially his rich footnotes.

Yet in relieving himself of some bursting impulse to express gratitude for his lot in life, in his new book Mr. Podhoretz has forsaken, one hopes only temporarily, the soul of the role circumstances (and genes?) have endowed him with - a pundit, an acute social critic, a first-rank exemplar of the intelligentsia.

Making Of A Patriot

After a moving, nostalgic account (the whole first quarter of the book) of his immigrant Jewish family origins in Brooklyn and his transition from a wholly Yiddish environment to mastery of English and its literature, in particular of the rhetoric and discourse of literary-social commentary, Mr. Podhoretz puts up his dukes as always, attacking liberals (in his standard overkill rhetoric they are all "radicals who hate America") and of late even some right-wing reactionaries he now disavows as betraying the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Part Two of his book is titled "The Making of a Patriot" - how he evolved from alienation to adoration of America, sparked by his military service experience and a wrenching rejection of Irving Howe's left-wing critique of capitalist America.

Kristol's Gladiator

Part Three, titled "We Have Come Through," recounts his developing break with his liberal stance and his embrace of the Vietnam War effort as just another valid exercise in the successful containment policy of the cold war, and his attack on the Black Power movement (as he later stormed against affirmative action).

Part Four, "Dayyenu American Style," expresses his gratitude for all the blessings bestowed by his America.

Mr. Podhoretz notes his sea change from the liberal editor of the old Commentary so many of us admired and wrote for to become a remorseless neoconservative, a front line gladiator for the ideology of Irving Kristol et al.

Often telling in his assaults, he scores points as exemplified in such of his earlier works as "Breaking Ranks" and his most recent, "Ex-Friends." Yes, he does score.

Overkill Polemics

But one wonders if ever, on quiet reflection, Mr. Podhoretz would concede how too often he published, supported, in the post-liberal Commentary, pieces of triviality and worse strictly because they offered a peg to assault some liberal stance. Such overkill polemics like those in the periodical Midstream diminish an otherwise serious periodical.

Sure, he sometimes scores well. In, for instance, demolishing Gore Vidal for Vidal's absurd diatribe against American Jews in an article in The Nation charging them, as predatory people, with impoverishing the United States solely to propagandize for more aid money for Israel.

In "Ex-Friends" too he makes plausible attacks, for example against Allen Ginsberg and Lillian Hellman and Hannah Arendt. But why couldn't Mr. Podhoretz resist chiding his mentor Daniel Bell for Mr. Bell's allegedly not tempering his "self-importance"? - Mr. Podhoretz, of all people, to make this cheap jab.

So one is perplexed, at times almost embarrassed, by this "love affair" tone, puzzled why this pugnacious chap is so smitten with, yes, the status quo, virtually blessing it.

It is okay maybe to express thanks to America, as he does in spades, for his spiffy Manhattan apartment, the distinguished wealthy acquaintances and friends he came to mix with, his fine, unique job from the age of 30 as wholly independent editor in chief of Commentary.

It is another thing, though, to ignore America's critical deficiencies, especially when it is prospering, number one in the world, king of the mountain among all nations.

Ignores Our Failures

Self-affirmed intellectual that he is, a lifetime notoriously outspoken analyst of public affairs, how in evaluating and lauding America can he sidestep consideration of such manifest failures as the absence of health care for some 40-plus millions; its faltering and all-too-often-apartheid public education system; the centuries-long deprivations of our inner-city ghettos; the intractable poverty of our lowest-income citizenry; the growing disparities in income and wealth in America, gaps more extreme than in all other first world industrialized nations?

Never a word of dismay from Mr. Podhoretz, so ready to catch out other pundits if they err, over the inevitable social costs of our triumphant laissez-faire capitalist market system, and his acquiescence in the airhead Reaganist doctrine dear to his fellow conservatives that always "the government is the problem," an especially confounding tenet for such an avid patriot of our Republic.

Would Not Be Silent

As I have written elsewhere, worth repeating I believe, imagine rigorous scholars of the American sociopolitical culture devoted to responsive commentary such as Edmund Wilson, Lionel Trilling, Walter Lippmann, Reinhold Niebuhr, Daniel Bell, Murray Kempton, Arthur Schlesinger, even Irving Kristol carrying on about their "love affair with America."

Confident of their good will, secure in their learning, they simply would not be silent at the spectacle of any blatant social deficiencies.

The litany of these deficiencies now constitutes a staple in the press. Today's New York Times, on my lap, repeats such familiar statistics as that the bottom four-fifths of American households, some 217 million folks, earn a bit less in after-tax income than the richest 1 percent; that nine-tenths of the nation's income growth in 1999 went to the richest 1 percent of American households.

Not Much Gained

The centrist, respected Economic Policy Institutes' latest report (Cornell Press), after documenting the encouraging news about our generally booming economy, notes that the latest American national poverty rate (1998) is still a disturbing 12.7 percent, "just one-tenth of a percentage point less than in 1989 and one full percentage point higher than in 1979."

The economist Jeff Madrick, the brilliant economics correspondent of The New York Review of Books and chief editor of the economics journal Challenge, cites in a recent New York Times column that the typical (median) employed worker in the 25-34 age group earned 13 percent less in 1998 (latest data available) than did the median workers of the same ages in 1973, and that the 35-44 age group earned 9 percent less than their counterparts 25 years earlier.

Children In Poverty

It's comparatively not all roses for many Americans, especially for the outrageous five million children in poverty. And Mr. Podhoretz surely must know that datum. How can a responsible analyst ignore this? Nirvana, indeed.

Mr. Podhoretz is especially condemnatory of affirmative action, which his fellow conservative Colin Powell backs for helping thou-

sands of young blacks into the middle class. It would be interesting to have Mr. Podhoretz react to Mr. Powell's addendum about the "affirmative action" provided to lobbyists achieving discriminatory tax loopholes, tax relief, and government subsidies for private profit corporate ventures.

Similarly, given the universal consensus that our public education system suffers from too-large classes, a shortage of qualified, decently paid teachers, decrepit plants, and poor student performance, one would think Mr. Podhoretz might vent criticism of the fact that only 2 percent of federal government spending is applied to education, the buck passed to beleaguered, so-often-uneven local governments.

A Marshall Plan size national government investment is needed, irreconcilable with any massive tax reduction as advocated by Mr. Podhoretz's conservative confreres.

Unnecessary Trip?

Mr. Podhoretz tells us in his new book's introduction how he came to love America so much, especially after brief military service:

"America deserved to be glorified with a full throat and a whole heart . . . that is exactly what I want to do here . . . the story of how and why my love affair with America developed, how it ran through a rough patch, and how it then emerged with all doubts stilled and reservations removed."

Is this trip necessary or even sensible? I think not.

Edward T. Chase, who has had a house in East Hampton for over 50 years, is formerly the editor in chief of New York Times Books and New American Library and editorial vice president of Putnam and Sons.

Norman Podhoretz has a house in East Hampton.