Forty good years

Public Interest, Spring, 2005 by Irving Kristol

BACK in 1965, in New York, my old friend Daniel Bell, then a professor of sociology at Columbia University, and I, then vice-president of the publishing firm Basic Books, were deeply troubled. The source of our discomfort was the mode of thought that was beginning to dominate political and social discourse in and outside of academia--an ideological mode that made nonsense of the existential reality of American life.

One of the most egregious examples of this ideological nonsense, popular among sociologists and dramatized by the press, was the idea that the way for the poor to escape from poverty was to organize to "fight city hall" and "gain power." This seemed plausible at a time when socialist and quasi-socialist ideas were still very much alive, prompting many to believe that the cure for poverty was political activism (relying upon the state) rather than economic activism (encouraging entrepreneurial energy in markets).

Both Dan and I had come from poor families, had gone through radical phases in our youth, and were appalled to discover that ideas we thought discredited had acquired a new lease on life. Dan, in those days, described himself as a democratic socialist (he still does, incidentally), while I was a somewhat skeptical liberal. We certainly thought there was a role for government in moving people out of poverty--a much larger role than conservatives thought appropriate. But we did not believe that political activism (a.k.a. "the class struggle") could deliver people from poverty.

Then, there was the scholarly nonsense, promoted by the Ford Foundation and echoed by most of the other major foundations, that "automation" threatened to abolish people's jobs, while at the same time throwing them into a life of affluent leisure for which they were intellectually and morally unprepared. Obviously, these foundations, and the universities and media as well (the media by then being populated by college graduates), had a crucial role to play in rescuing the American people from this ghastly fate. The result was a plethora of conferences on the imminent problem of mass leisure, out of which emerged a plethora of big books.

Dan, who knew more economics than I did, was infuriated by the basic ignorance this episode revealed, an ignorance of how an economic system copes with innovation. I was astounded by the ease with which Marx's description of the idyllic life under socialism had been unwittingly transformed into a nightmare by persons mainly on the Left. President Johnson lent credibility to the issue by appointing a Commission on Automation, which included Dan and a brilliant young M.I.T. economist, Robert Solow. Together they helped write so sobering a report for the Commission that it succeeded in making the topic a deadly bore.

THESE were the kinds of issues that provoked the founding of The Public Interest. Financially, it was made possible by a $10,000 grant from a friend, Warren Manshel, who was promptly designated publisher, with Dan and myself serving as co-editors. The journal's first home (with the benign approval of another friend, the president of Basic Books) was my modest office at Basic Books, and the entire staff consisted of my secretary-assistant Vivian Gornick, a talented young woman who was soon to launch her own career as a feminist and a writer for the Village Voice. Dan and I named the magazine, designed it, and printed (as I recall) some 1,200 copies of the first issue. For articles, we simply rang up friends and acquaintances whom we believed to be on our "wave length." The first issue featured articles by Pat Moynihan, Robert Solow, Robert Nisbet, Jacques Barzun, Nathan Glazer, Martin Diamond, and Daniel Bell, among others. The second and third issues introduced such other notable contributors as James Q. Wilson, Earl Raab, Milton Friedman, and Peter Drucker--not all of them so very notable at the time.

We made one easy editorial decision at the outset: no discussion of foreign policy or foreign affairs. Vietnam was arousing a storm of controversy at the time, and we knew that our group had a wide spectrum of opinion on the issue. We did not want any of the space in our modest-sized quarterly to be swallowed up by Vietnam. The simplest solution was to ban foreign affairs and foreign policy from our pages.

We also made a financial decision: The co-editors would not be paid. Our reasoning, again, was simple. Because the subsidy to the magazine (with the increase of circulation it quickly went up to several tens of thousands of dollars a year) came from the pocket of a friend, we did not want to be in the position of taking his money for ourselves. This principle survived until today, despite significant changes in the magazine's circumstances. Among those changes were the renting of a sliver of office space in a nearby office building, losing Vivian Gornick to the world of journalism, and acquiring a new secretary-assistant, Rita Lazzaro, who spent the next 18 years presiding admirably over our office. In 1987, we made what may have been the most significant change: moving to Washington.