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The Neocons: First in War, Last in
Peace
By Murray Polner
I was hired in 1972 by the American
Jewish Committee to serve as editor of a new magazine I named Present Tense. My
vague assignment was to be more “Jewish” than the well-established and
influential Commentary magazine, which, while also parented by the AJC, had shifted
its primary attention to more worldly interests under Norman Podhoretz, its
smart and creative editor, who had abandoned his and the magazine’s traditional
liberalism and moved right, very far right, into the brawling territory of U.S.
foreign policy and national politics. From 1972 to 1990, when we were closed
down, my office was one flight below that of Commentary.
From the very beginning Present Tense
was “a sort of counter-Commentary,” even a “step-child” as Susan Jacoby, one of
our regular columnists, shrewdly noted in her illuminating book, “Half-Jew: A
Daughter’s Search for Her Family’s Buried Past.” Early on, a reader wrote us that we were
doomed to obscurity and worse because the further we veered left, the more we
became too liberal for the AJC’s conservative donors (they also had liberal
donors, equally unhappy with Commentary). Even so, we lasted for many years, sometimes
taking on the Israel Lobby, disdainful of
Reagan for Iran-Contra and his proxy war in Central America, while celebrating
his anti-nuke huddle with Gorbachev and
publishing all sides of the intractable Israeli-Palestinian conflict—and I mean,
all sides, including right, center and left.
We also refused to forgive and forget the ugly legacy of McCarthyism and
how its impact still blunted dissent in the American Jewish world, as the
novelist and journalist Ann Roiphe, another of our intrepid columnists, pointed
out in our final issue.
“Not since Holland’s Jews read
Spinoza out of the people have Jews so quickly drawn lines of who is outside,
and used these lines as political weapons, one against the other.”
But Commentary was the AJC’s star
attraction to the media and politicians. I often saw Pat Moynihan in our East
56th Street building in Manhattan during his dalliance with the neocons.
(In Jacob Heilbrunn’s “They Knew They Were Right,” the best book yet on the
neocons, he quotes Moynihan telling the New York Times’ Tom Buckley in 1975 that
“when it came to Zionism, Jewish history, anti- Semitism and related topics,
Podhoretz is Moynihan’s maven.”
Irving Kristol, the quintessential
neocon and Grand Master of the neo-conservative movement, would occasionally
visit Commentary’s suite of offices. More than most on all sides of the
perennial and bitter political clashes of those years, Kristol knew how to use
politics and power to grow his fledgling ideological enterprise. “Kristol’s
power is not in his visibility; it is his ability to guide ideas,” wrote
Geoffrey Norman in Esquire. Before too long he would lead the neocons away from
Henry Jackson’s Democratic hawks and into the Republican Party, aligning them
with the Imperial City’s War Party. Just as significant, he attracted a lot of
the super-rich interested in his ideas.
Still, despite our ideological
differences most of us had common backgrounds. We were the sons and daughters
of the working class. Our Yiddish-speaking East European Jewish immigrant
parents had been ardent FDR voters. Kristol, though, was a bit unique. While
still young, and at the urging of fellow CCNY student Irving Howe, he became a
follower of Leon Trotsky, Stalin’s most acerbic critic, who also had an
authoritarian streak a mile wide that Kristol and other young Trotskyists
seemed to have overlooked.
The neocon Founders and their
acolytes were largely Jews scarred by the Holocaust, much like the men and
women with whom I tended to associate. To their credit few of them had suffered
any illusions about Stalin’s Russia. But the same was true of those of us on
the non-Communist left. Irving Howe -- Kristol’s former pal and later his
bitter ideological adversary, who would write an introduction to a volume of
Present Tense profiles I edited-- loathed the neocons, and vice versa. He once
wrote a biting Op Ed mocking neocons for defending Reagan’s alliance with
Contra “freedom fighters” in its secret proxy war against
Nicaragua. Inspired, I assigned an amazing journalist, Tina Rosenberg, who
later moved on to the New York Times, to cover the troubles south of the
border, which she did in several impressive reports, none of which I imagine
the bellicose pro-Reagan neocons on the floor above appreciated After the
U.S.-favored Chilean-Pinochet coup against the elected Salvador Allende,
Rosenberg quoted a popular joke among Chileans. “Why is there no military coup
in America?” The answer: “There’s no U.S. Embassy.”
Kristol was drafted in World War II.
Unlike most second generation successor neocons who avoided military service in
wars they passionately supported, he saw combat in France and Germany as an
infantryman in the 12th Armored Division. After his discharge, he
and wife, Gertrude Himmelfarb, who would become a respected and distinguished
historian, moved to England where she had earned a scholarship at Cambridge
University. It was there Kristol started writing for the American Jewish
Committee’s new magazine Commentary, and when the couple returned home he
became its managing editor. By then he had abandoned the Trotskyists and moved
on to neo-conservatism or, as he explained, how a liberal’s politics shifted
after being mugged. In 1952, he continued his movement to the right. In his
Commentary article, “Civil liberties 1952-A Study in Confusion” he wrote, “For
there is one thing that the American people know about Senator McCarthy; he
like them, is unequivocally anti-Communist. About the spokesmen for American
liberalism, they feel no such thing.”
His break with liberals and moderates was now set in cement and he was
forever stigmatized by those who despised the fraud from Wisconsin. He then
returned to London to co-edit with Stephen Spender the journal Encounter, which
was later revealed to have been secretly subsidized by the CIA, which Kristol
denied knowing.
During the tumultuous Vietnam War era,
Kristol, a supporter of the war, began to draw the attention of wealthy free
marketers as well as incipient Wilsonians ready to reshape the world, by force
if necessary. His star was about to rise and the movement to take flight. When
Walter Goodman, a family friend who wrote for Commentary as well as Present
Tense, was preparing an article about Kristol for December 1981 publication in
the New York Times’ Sunday magazine, Walter told me Kristol announced he was
leaving Manhattan for Washington because that was where the real action was.
In all those years Commentary
continued to be the flagship for Kristol’s dream of a new (neo) conservative
politics. And we remained second stringers, barely noticed in the national
secular media until the Times ran one lone and favorable editorial reference to
us and then published a goodbye piece by Roger Cohen announcing the end of our
run. But long before then we added another editor, Adam Simms, and some of our
articles did, however, draw attention, especially in Jewish and liberal
publications, notably Robert Spero’s heavily documented and brave “Speaking for
the Jews,” a brilliant expose about “A growing number of American Jews, including
many inside the Jewish establishment, [who] are fed up with the hard-line views
of Jewish leaders whom they did not elect and whom, in any case, do not speak
for them.” Then we published Rabbi
Arthur Hertzberg, the preeminent American
historian of Zionism, on the “neoconning of America” in which he took direct
aim at its extremism: “American Jewish right-wingers are almost without
exception partisans of the Likud policy of de facto annexation of the West
Bank,” he wrote, adding “The hard-liners
are bad, very bad for Jews—and for all Americans….Jews have survived best, and
have been most authentically themselves, when they have practiced restraint,” a
la Maimonides’ “middle way.”
The middle road did not quite suit
Kristol’s contrarian, free-thinking nature, especially after he made Jacobo
Timerman and his 1981 book “Prisoner
Without a Name, Cell Without a Number,” a target. The book detailed his prison
experiences and the torture he was subject to in neo-fascist Argentina. Mario
Diament, an Argentine journalist and former executive editor of La Opinion when
the paper was taken over by the military in 1977, argued in our pages that
Timerman did not exaggerate as Kristol had alleged.
Alfred Kazin (Present Tense once
awarded him our annual “Lifetime
Achievement” award, which we sincerely meant and he deserved, but which also brought
us a bit of publicity), no friend of Communism, but very much an anti-fascist, blistered
Kristol’s declaration of war against Timerman in the Wall Street journal.
According to his biographer, Richard Cook, an incensed Kazin said, “It was not
enough for Timerman to have electrodes applied to his private parts, he must be
attacked in the Wall Street Journal.” Kazin, yet another son of the Jewish
immigrant working class, went on to call the Patron Saint of neo-conservatism “a
rightwing salesman.”
Anyway, Kristol had plenty on his
mind after the coup by fascist-minded generals in Argentina. In the Wall Street Journal in 1981, its
editorials as neocon as Commentary’s –- In 1987, the novelist Carol Ascher’s wrote
for us “Greed and Ambition on Wall Street: Can’t Anyone Tell Right From Wrong?,”
a prophetic warning of things to come—Kristol famously wrote “The military
regime in Argentina, for all its military aspects, is authoritarian, not
totalitarian,” sounding much like Jean Kirkpatrick’s neocon-ish adage in her 1979
Commentary piece that Red regimes were totalitarian and stable, frozen
in time and unable to change, while authoritarian governments were open to
change, which allowed neocons to justify
the Reagan administration’s defense of dictators in Guatemala, Argentina, the
Philippines, and UNITA in the Angolan civil war.
Kristol’s sort of, kind of, nice
words about the Dirty War and its principals, was a lame rationalization for the
junta’s butchering of political opponents and dissidents, its practice of
tossing people out of planes into the ocean and even snatching babies from new
mothers. But still, there was something his critics preferred to discount. In
the early nineteen seventies radical leftist Argentinean gangs killed and
kidnapped their “enemies,” frightening ordinary Argentineans and infuriating
and encouraging those who despised democratic rule. It may well have helped a bit to create the political climate which gave way to the road to fascism, Argentine-style, just as German Communists had
helped smooth the path for the Nazis in the infamous 1933 election by turning
on the Social Democrats and thus allowing the Nazis to win a plurality of the
votes and take total control.
Kristol’s loathed liberal and left
intellectuals who, he argued in his book “Reflections of a Neoconservative”--
and elsewhere, of course-- were alienated from “the American way of life,” unlike
the American people. Susan Jacoby in another of her important books, “The Age
of American Unreason,” took aim at Kristol’s “alienation” theory, the
forerunner of his “culture war” fixation. “One would never guess from this
passage,” wrote Jacoby, “that Kristol himself was a New York Jewish
intellectual through and through and that what separated him from those wrongheaded
other intellectuals so at odds with the American Way of Life was his embrace of
the Republican Party.”
Other than his short-lived venture
with Public Interest, a journal he co-edited with Daniel Bell, and which
concentrated on domestic affairs, most of today’s neocons have little or no
interest in domestic affairs, especially in reaching out to the poor and most
vulnerable among us. I’m not sure that even the most articulate among them have
had much to say about what happens here at home. The late Milton Himmelfarb,
Irving’s scholarly wife’s scholarly brother and a neocon Commentary
contributing editor--- the leading neocons were once and to an extent remain, a
family affair—wondered in Commentary (where else?) why “Jews earned like Episcopalians
and vote like Puerto Ricans.” A response
was offered by Earl Shores in his sharp-edged 1982 anti-neocon book “Jews without
Mercy: A Lament.” In it, he condemned the neocons and their “self-interest,
without mercy for the old or the poor, a movement that condemns oppression only
when it serves the interests of the movement to do so.” Shores would have been delighted
to have been at an AJC staff meeting, as I was, when Milton Himmelfarb insisted
that there was no such thing as social justice in Judaism. To which a leftist
staff member shot back, if there isn’t any social justice in Judaism there isn’t
any Judaism.
Most of the Founders are now dead or
retired. Their successors’ time to shine came during the Bush-Cheney era, when
they enthusiastically supported the invasion of Iraq. To the second generation
neocons who rarely if ever wore a military uniform or expressed any interest in
apologizing to the war dead’s families, the Iraq War was an integral part of
their unshakable faith that they and they alone knew how to reshape and inject democratic rule into the autocratic,
complex and chaotic Middle East.
Today, the spirit and message of
Kristol’s neocons live on, eagerly awaiting another Bush-Cheney White House.
Meanwhile, Washington is overrun with their well-funded think tanks,
publications, responsive pundits, politicians and lobbyists. Their official doctrine
is to push for more of the same, in Iraq, Syria, Iran, Ukraine, et.al. and lend
full support to the current Israeli government’s policy against Iran, who our
neocons hate as much as they once hated Saddam and the vast store of WMDs he
was hiding. I like to think that had Present Tense not been shut down we would
have gladly taken on the neocons and their sophomoric dreams of a Middle
Eastern cakewalk.
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