Norman Podhoretz
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Norman Podhoretz (born January 16, 1930) is an American intellectual considered to be a prominent neo-conservative thinker and writer.
Norman Podhoretz was raised in Brownsville, Brooklyn, a low-income neighborhood in racial transition. Podhoretz's family was left-wing, with his elder sister joining a socialist youth movement.
Podhoretz received Bachelor's degrees from both Columbia—where he studied under Lionel Trilling — and the Jewish Theological Seminary. He later received a BA with first-class honors and MA from Cambridge. He served as an editor for Commentary Magazine and in 1960 he replaced Elliot Cohen as editor-in-chief. In 1963 he wrote the influential conservative essay, “My Negro Problem - And Ours."
From 1981-87, Podhoretz served as an adviser to the U.S. Information Agency. From 1995-2003 he was a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and is connected with the Project for the New American Century. He served as Editor-in-Chief of the American Jewish Committee's monthly magazine Commentary from 1960 until his retirement in 1995.
In 2004, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest honor the U.S. Government can bestow on a civilian.
Married to neo-conservative author Midge Decter, Podhoretz is the father of John Podhoretz, a right-wing syndicated columnist.
[edit] Interview on HARDtalk
In November of 2006, Podhoretz appeared on the BBC World interview show HARDtalk with journalist Stephen Sackur, where he claimed the Abu Ghraib torture scandal measured "0.5" on a one-to-ten scale of "overall significance." As the interview progressed, Podhoretz appeared to lose his composure, especially when presented with his own quote from the Wall Street Journal: "The only reason in my opinion that we're having as much trouble as we're having in Iraq is that we're not getting intelligence. You cannot fight a revanchist insurgency and certainly not one that uses terrorist tactics without good intelligence . . . and you can only get that kind of intelligence by squeezing it out of prisoners. That's all there is to it." Podhoretz strongly denied that this implied the use of torture; he then began attacking Sackur and "people who think like you." At the close of the interview, Podhoretz took particular umbrage at the suggestion that any of his foreign policy theories could possibly be wrong; the interview ended abruptly and awkwardly with Podhoretz's seemingly misplaced rejoinder "You're wrong too."
[edit] Books
- 1964: Doings and Undoings: The Fifties and After (essays on American writers)
- 1967: Making It (autobiography) ISBN 0-394-43449-8
- 1979: Breaking Ranks: A Political Memoir
- 1980: The Present Danger: "Do We Have the Will to Reverse the Decline of American Power?" ISBN 0-671-41395-3
- 1982: Why We Were in Vietnam (history and argument) ISBN 0-671-44578-2
- 1986: The Bloody Crossroads: Where Literature and Politics Meet (essays on Camus, Kundera, Henry Adams, Kissinger, Solzhenitsyn, Orwell et al.) ISBN 0-671-61891-1
- 2000: Ex-Friends: Falling Out With Allen Ginsberg, Lionel & Diana Trilling, Lillian Hellman, Hannah Arendt, and Norman Mailer (memoir) ISBN 1-893554-17-1
- 2001: My Love Affair With America: The Cautionary Tale of a Cheerful Conservative (autobiography) ISBN 1-893554-41-4
- 2002: The Prophets: Who They Were, What They Are (about the classical Hebrew prophets) ISBN 0-7432-1927-9
- 2003: The Norman Podhoretz Reader: A Selection of His Writings from the 1950s through the 1990s, edited by Thomas L. Jeffers; foreword by Paul Johnson ISBN 0-7432-3661-0
[edit] External links
- Norman Podhoretz, How to win World War IV, Commentary Magazine, February 2002.
- Joseph Rago, Unrepentant Neocon: Norman Podhoretz stands IV-square for the Bush doctrine, Wall Street Journal, August 12, 2006.
- "My Negro Problem - And Ours" [1]
