Norman's conquest: why Rudy Giuliani loves Norman Podhoretz

Washington Monthly, Dec, 2007 by Jacob Heilbrunn

When Norman Mailer died in November, it was hard not to feel a twinge of melancholy and nostalgia for the vanished world of the New York Family of intellectuals. In the past decade, any of its most colorful members have passed away--among them Leslie Fiedler, Saul Bellow, and Seymour Martin Lipset. A surviving neoconservative remnant that includes Irving Kristol and Gertrude Himmelfarb has reached its dotage but is content to see its children carry on the battles and struggles it once waged. Only one original representative of that fractious group of intellectuals remains in the fray. That is Norman Podhoretz, who, at the age of seventy-seven, has recently--and improbably--reached the height of his celebrity and notoriety.

Podhoretz was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2004, and he has been in the forefront of support for the Iraq War. In the late spring of 2007, he met with President George W. Bush and Karl Rove to urge Bush to bomb Iran. His son, John Podhoretz, was recently chosen to be the next editor of Commentary, the magazine that Norman himself headed for several decades. Impressive as this reach may be, however, it is Podhoretz's newest sphere of influence that has most vexed--and frightened--his detractors. He is a close confidant of leading Republican presidential candidate Rudolph Giuliani.

In June, the former New York City mayor named Podhoretz a senior advisor to his campaign. It is no ceremonial post. Podhoretz speaks regularly with the candidate and trumpets their association. "As far as I can tell there is very little difference in how [Giuliani] sees the war and how I see it," Podhoretz told the New York Observer in October. And indeed there isn't much daylight between what Podhoretz has written and what Giuliani is saying on the stump. Podhoretz has judged the war in Iraq an "amazing success"; Giuliani in November declared that he "never had any doubt" about the wisdom of invading Iraq. On Iran, Podhoretz has said, "The choice before us is either bomb those nuclear facilities or let them get the bomb." Giuliani told an audience in October: "If I'm president of the United States, I guarantee you we will never find out what [Iran] will do if they get nuclear weapons, because they're not going to get nuclear weapons."

As a foreign policy guru, Podhoretz is hardly an obvious choice for Giuliani. The mayor has virtually no direct foreign policy experience, and neither does Podhoretz--he is an editor, polemicist, and literary critic who has never worked in government. Podhoretz is certainly a prominent hawk, and Giuliani needs hawks in his camp to help insulate him from attacks on the right, particularly from social conservatives. But there are plenty of foreign policy heavyweights who could play that role, from Henry Kissinger to Robert Kagan. And if the candidate wished to put some distance between himself and the unpopular current occupant of the White House, Podhoretz is no help; his son-in-law, Elliott Abrams, is Bush's deputy national security adviser.

But the choice of Podhoretz seems to have little to do with Giuliani trying to position himself politically or sit at the feet of an experienced master. Rather, what draws Giuliani to Podhoretz, I think, is something else--a very human quality that the former mayor sees in himself: an unrelenting, us-versus-them bare-knuckledness that one seldom encounters in the oak-and-port world of the Council on Foreign Relations. I myself encountered this quality when meeting Podhoretz for the first time, at a Manhattan Institute gala dinner for William F. Buckley Jr. at which Giuliani hailed his championing of conservative values. Podhoretz expressed his disappointment at the evenhanded tone of a review I had written in the New Leader of his memoir My Love Affair With America. "My friends, I expect to go all out for me," he said, noting with pride that the historian Ronald Radosh had called him a "national treasure." After acknowledging that we didn't really know each other personally, Podhoretz continued, "My enemies, I expect them to hit me as hard as they can. That's the way it should be."

I don't mean to make too much of a single encounter. However, having spent several years subsequently interviewing leading neoconservatives, including Podhoretz and his wife, Midge Decter, as part of a history of the neocon movement, I can say that the rules of book reviewing that Podhoretz set out at that party do rather nicely sum up an intellectual philosophy he has developed over a lifetime. It's one of unremitting combativeness, rooted as much in temperament as in a worldview. It's also a philosophy that strikes a deeply responsive chord in Giuliani, who, like Podhoretz, is a Brooklyn-born street brawler who started out on the left and moved steadily to the right. A good place to look for hints of what a Giuliani presidency might offer, then, is in the life of that last active New York Family intellectual, Norman Podhoretz.

Podhoretz was born in 1930 into a lapsed Orthodox Jewish family, the son of a sixty-dollar-a-week milkman. He grew up in Brownsville, a Brooklyn neighborhood that profoundly shaped his character. In his book Ex-Friends, Podhoretz describes Norman Mailer, who grew up near him and attended the same high school, as a similar product of the local street culture: "Like me, and practically every Brooklyn boy I had known, he was direct and pugnacious and immensely preoccupied with the issue of manly courage." Podhoretz was a member of a gang called Club Cherokee and hung out with gamblers and other riffraff as a child. It was an environment in which, he recalled in a 1999 television interview, "the main desideratum was to be tough and not to back down from a fight. And to be a sissy, as people used to say, or a coward was probably the worst possible condition into which you could fall." It was the credo Podhoretz would follow all his life.