Good evening, everybody. Good evening. Im eric the executive director of the. [inaudible] and behalf of the society i am pleased to represent tonight in conversation our chairman robert should be giving this introduction and i know this would have meant a great deal to him. Unfortunately, hes a bit under the weather and he sent me instead. Its a great honor to make the introduction. Its been said that theres the story and then the real story and then the story of how the story came to be told. The book 50th anniversary we celebrate tonight making it by our guest of honor Norman Podhoretz is an important story in any way you look at it. Good promotion there. [laughter] tonight will tell the story behind the story. In his book, norman says all writers become famous go through ups and downs. These fluctuations reveal less about the writers actual work than they do about the changing fashions of the time. Heres how he put it in his own words 50 years ago every morning a stock Market Report comes out on reputations in new york. It is invisible but those eyes to see can read them. Soandso did have dinner at Jackie Kennedys apartment up five points. Soandso not invited by the locals to meet the russian poet . Down and eight. Did soandsos vote book get nominated for the National Book award . Up to a half. Little did norman know when he wrote those words that his own stock was about to experience an incredibly fair market increase of its own. The early signs were disappointing, even before the book is published. Imagine that your prospective publisher, has given you a happy advance and after reading your manuscript they tell you, keep the money, keep the book and under no circumstances are we going to publish it. The advice from normans best friend from columbia, jason epstein, was to throw the whole thing in the garbage. Lionels mentor from columbia told his publication would be a gigantic mistake and would take ten years to live down. All this for a single reviewer had trashed the book which happen fast on the heels of publication. As the saying goes, if you live long enough you see everything. Norman podhoretz has lived long enough that his book has now been dubbed one of the 20th centurys classics by no less than the new york review report. Its their 50th anniversary reissuing under their classics imprints. Hold up the book again. [laughter] we celebrate this tonight. See for yourself, get your very own copy right here in the lobby what an incredible reversal. Just goes to show that all truth passes through three stages first, ridicule. Violent opposition and then acceptance is selfevident. When you read the book today it feels as relevant as it did when it first came out. Human nature doesnt change except that back then people didnt reveal their private feelings and aspirations publicly the weight norman did. He such a good writer that then or now no ones cell productions carry as much punch as his due. Tonight, will tell the story about why was it that normans candidness and honesty created such an incredible start and who better to talk about it than podhoretz and podhoretz. That is norman and his son john the distinguish editor of commentary. While normans classic taking it is a book about ambition, i stand here with great humility in the presence of true intellectual excellence. When people ask how to understand political thought, some might say read strauss, to understand politics and culture, read crystal, Foreign Policy, kissinger, the hebrew bible but if someone were to ask you to read to understand all of these disciplines, the answer is read Norman Podhoretz. All the rest, is dare i say it. [inaudible] [laughter] [applause] this is the first time that we have ever appeared in public together. I am turning 56 and a couple of weeks, you are 87. This book which was published in 86 is dedicated in part to me, my sister lucy, my sister naomi and my late sister rachel. It is described in the dedication to whom this is in a way a letter. I think its a letter to all of us, now, from the past and a very vanished past. Thats my experience of having read this book again after maybe 25 years. The world that you are describing is so thoroughly gone from us that the idea that it could have stirred the kind of passionate opposition and hostility will strike anyone who reads it now as being absolutely baffling. Its very sharp but rather gentle set of ambiguity about what it means to be a success in america, what it means to pursue a career in the United States and the brutal bargain as you call it. The tradeoff that is required of you in the course of your life, in order to achieve success will not strike anyone as being particularly controversial. Id like to start and then ask you to reflect on the passage at the end of the second chapter. You have just its a peculiar memoir. Its not a personal account but it is a memoir. You make yourself the object, or the sort of, the object of your analysis of how a wife pursuing excess success in america is led so at this point you are graduating from college and heres what you write. Its very striking. Quote, in any event while i myself from a very early age and knew everything there was to know about jealousy and from both sides of the fence, i knew almost nothing about and be having experienced so little of it either. Not only did i not recognize it when i saw it but i was scarcely aware of such a thing existed and this remarkableobtuseness was of course compounded by the adored childhood illusions that the world around me would declare a holiday whenever i won a prize. Hence, my incredibly stupidity and failing to anticipate that my friends at Columbia University would be envious when after observing the blow he won a scholarship to go to Cambridge University they would also have to endure seeing me when the only film right any of us was. Hence, to my incredibly sensitivity and expecting them to be happy for me and my amazement when i realized they were not and hence, finally, my inability to understand the intention behind the effort to persuade me that adaptability would be speaking farming is the sole was any virtue are mine or character accounted for my success. Not perceiving the envy of this assault, taking it indeed just as my friends and themselves did for the honesty of a courageous love. We were great believers and telling each other the truth i was altogether helpless before it in before the guilt and selfdoubt it aroused. It was the first time i had ever experienced the poisoning of success by envy because it was the envy not of enemies but a friends and because it came at me not naked and disguised but posing as love and masks in the ideologically possible as late as asian. [inaudible] and harder still because of my instinctive terror of the community object was appropriating and cannibalistic passion. I was unwilling to appear to myself that it was in fact directed against me. I think thats a pretty fair description of what happened when this book came out there is a critics diaries came out after his death and theres a passage in one of them in which he remarks i remember edwin wilson is a very little kid and being over my apartment and doing a magic trick of spinning a plate on his nose. He was over at our apartment and maybe that very night he went home and wrote this vicious diary entry about how how he heard you got a big advance and who the hell were you. This young with whippersnapper getting all this money, everyone in town is talking about how awful it was. Basically, you are set up to fail two years before the book came out once people knew that you had hit this mark. How do you feel 50 years on even then having written this passage , this very passage, you had absolutely no idea that you would have basically a giant boulder dropped on your head . Thats an understatement. I was absolutely flabbergasted by the response to this book. I was very proud of it. I was very happy that i had managed to write it. Incidentally, people called it a memoir but i call it in auto case history thats an ugly and unyielding phrase. In fact, as john pointed out i was using myself as a case study of the scene of the ambition for success and whether it fails and how people feel about it. So little was this understood that one of the many attacks on this book said this man is such a brutal, insensitive character that theres not a single word in it about his children of whom he has for. The things that were said about this book are hard for me to even paraphrase. I can tell you the measure of that response was a story in Newsweek Magazine which went Something Like this and i fully almost exactly last week in new york dinner tables a new subject eclipsed vietnam as the subject of the general outrage. A book called making it. Imagine eclipsing vietnam. In 1967. [applause] it was amazing. I was, of course, deeply hurt as well as baffled but what could i do. The i had written the book and i certainly didnt want to throw it in the garbage, as my best friend suggested. I hope he is having indigestion over the fact that the new york review is reissued it under its classics. The. The new york review was edited for decades by his exwife. Jason epstein was married for 30 some odd years and she was one of the editors of the magazine. Yeah, and i can only hope that jason is suffering from a severe case of indigestion. [laughter] my main feeling is about the reissue is one of almost equal astonishment at the original reception. I certainly never thought id live to see the day that i would be vindicated. There it is. I tell the editor of the new york books, new york review books, edwin frank, i havent told him this but when he called to tell me i had just read this book for the first time and [inaudible] i thought it was a practical joke. [laughter] i said when i discovered that it wasnt a practical joke i asked him whether the late bob goldberg had he was the sole editor of the new york review books for 54 years until he died a couple of weeks ago. Anyway, i wondered what might happen when he heard about this. Edwin frank assured me that he had editorial independence so there was nothing to worry about i wont make any connection between the sudden death. [laughter] its a weird coincidence. [laughter] just to give you a sense of how times have changed a lot of people in this room know there was a long profile of the New York Times a couple weeks ago by john leland as part of the series called, lyons of new york, which leland sat down with you and discussed this vanished world of the new york intellectual that the family and the outpouring, enthusiasm about the world that evoked in this world peace. It was 10000 times more powerfully. The bookwas such that a friend of mine who is a movie producer sent me a text saying can we talk i happen to be in the San Francisco airport at the time waiting for a bag and i said sure, call me and i have five minutes. He calls me and says, i was just texting this young movie star a and young movie star a read this piece in the New York Times and he is very excited about the possibility of making a tv series out of this world where people are arguing about books, drinking, theyre having fights, its like madmen with books. [laughter] when i was a teenager, one day at my sisters apartment, we sat down and we wrote out this immensely long cast list of characters should play parts in the film version of making it. We had decided this wouldve been in the late 70s, we decided that Richard Dreyfus should pay you. Laurence olivier who had just been in, the jazz singer, giving an absolutely horrendous performance of a yiddish speaking holocaust survivor cancer should play your father. This should give you a sense of the seemingly, absurdity notion of very cerebral, very intellectual book about intellectuals. It you might evoked this kind of response. You know, in the world of Popular Culture. Yet, reading it, as i thank you all would find when you read it, if you havent read it yet, there is a real glamour that is adjust the glamour that you as an immigrant kid getting interested in the son of an immigrant, son of a milkman, very poor, growing up in brooklyn, finally having access to a world in which the mind is central. A lot of people werent really all that glamorous and reallife in their own person and i dont think philip rob was a particularly glamorous person, yet, he had very many affairs that would be a fine character on a tv show but the glamour is very real because this is a book about people who take something with events seriousness. Right . Interestingly, virginia, zero very well known libertarian, wrote a book on glamour in which she says her idea of glamour came out of a book called making it. That was the world in which she wouldve wanted to participate. It was certainly glamorous to me it was also very dangerous. A scene in which i there were always a lot of parties and if you happen to be at the wrong side of the room for lets say mary mccarthy, you are in danger of being excoriated with a brilliance. Does that name mean anything to anyone . She was a critic and a novelist of famous wit was about ten years, 15 years older than you, right mark she wouldve been from a previous generation. The founding generation, as it was called, family. She was rare in this case because she was a catholic. Most of the new york intellectuals were jewish but a surprising number were not. When the world. [inaudible] this group always identified as jewish and some of the most important members were not jewish though. It was a little complicated. In any event, it was a world which is hard to imagine in todays climate. As i say in the book, people actually came to blows over disagreements on art, fistfights over whether it was a great novel or not. I wrote a critical review of that book by paul gallo in 1963. I was just a kid, 23 years old and at one of these big parties, a very drunken gentleman came up to me and i didnt know who he was but he turned out to be John Berryman who was the famous poes but certainly an eminent american poet. When he says will get you for that if it takes ten years. You say that thats a very interesting. [inaudible] you do not name berryman and for a book that is viewed or was viewed as being bold girly gossipy, you, in fact, indulge in shockingly little gossip because, as you said, this is not what it was for. In fact, had it, had you been more. [inaudible] about it in had named names and been more open about the anecdotes the negative anecdotes are about. You dont even name even your great antagonist in the book, twin editors of commentary in the mid 50s when the editor in question, eliot cohen had had a nervous breakdown, you simply call this tandem, these twins, the boss. What in fact, one of them was the eminent art critic pretty much in american history, greenberg. You dont even say that it was greenberg. This is a book that is elevated from gossett. Its deliberately not gossipy. The thing with greenberg he is was very eminent, still is in the art world. He was a champion of Jackson Pollock and is often said he discovered Jackson Pollock. His rhizome was Harold Rosenberg who roundup writing art criticism for the new yorker which when i first came into this world was an inconceivable that someone like Harold Rosenberg would rise at all. In any case, they were the two rival sensors of power in the art world. Rosenberg was a. [inaudible] the crooning, pollock rivalry led to fistfights. He actually had a fistfight in our living room when someone who said the wrong thing about Jackson Pollock or the other painter and its hard i was watching on television a series called, the west, by ken burns disciples and it was very pro indian american. Theres a scene in which we see sitting bull, chief sitting bull , say, i was a great chief and i had these lands and i had these followers and now where are they all. I have to tell you that since making it was reissued, i feel like sitting bull. [applause] [laughter] i wrote a book in which i do name a lot of names and i did emit that as much as i have suffered from that world, i missed it. I miss the intensity, the fashion, it wasnt just about literature it was also about politics. Not everybody in that world was on the left. The right was off the radar. It didnt exist. It was a question of where you a trotskyite or a stalinist or anti stalinist or social democrat and so on. Those were the factions and they were taken deadly seriously. Was marx responsible for the wars of stalinist russia . However, i would like to quote from page 116 your initial entry into the world basically, in the offices of commentary for which you had started to write in 1952 as a 22 yearold, friended by probably the best essayist whoever wrote for commentary outside of the two of us sitting here. [laughter] robert who died tragically, probably the best writer in Popular Culture that the United States ever produced, died in his late 30s of a heart attack and he friended you and heres a sentence here Clement Greenberg was not so generous. That is the only indication of this thing that i said about Clement Greenberg. I said i was anatural. [inaudible] irving howe, another famous socialist selfdescribed socialist, literary, intellectual figure later created a magazine called the sense which is still he was expressing concern over the neoconservatism of the Younger Generation on the basis of one of my reviews. Neoconservatism appears in this book in 1967, long before anybody thought to adopt the term and apply it to you. Though, i will say, toward the end of this book, there are hints of. [inaudible] the change that you are about to go through in which you start to complain about how the new left, which you as an editor had started champion in the early 1960s, had stopped dealing with the difficulty from social problems of the United States in the 1950s which is largely being racial and had started delving into the ideas of the 1930s meaning, communism, support for socialism, someone who had clung to anti communism that you have never fallen prey to. They are, interestingly enough, theres a hint of maybe what it was that you didnt even understand it was going to invoke this rage reaction to the book. Thats a very important point i never looked at making it after it was published. It was only two weeks ago that i reread it for the first time in 50 years. Frankly, i confess that i was afraid to read it because down deep i thought maybe they were right. Maybe it is a lousy book. One of the things that was said about it that the book was no literary distinction whatsoever. I thought it was nicely written, myself. You can tell from the passage that any such claim is preposterous. In any event, i was also told that the book was humorless when i thought it had was funny in some places and there were other things when i reread the book for the first time it was a strange experience. I tried reading through the eyes of someone else, which is not that hard because in 20 years you change a lot and the author of this book was not someone i recognize that easily. I was able to look at it with an abnormal degree of objectivity and when i mostly came away with was not the reassurance that i had written a classic but how crazy all those people were. They were demented. They were derangements, that virtually everything they said about this book was not only wrong but the opposite. You could have made a very good case against this book on serious grounds, i suppose but nobody did and everyone who wrote about it said things that were so blatantly untrue. I was the wilderness i now, did, however, that may have accounted for the rage and rage it was. It was something i myself did not realize until i reread it a few weeks ago. There are hints and germs here of what was to follow. I wrote this book thinking of myself as a man of the left and i was a fully accredited, intellectual to the left even in some extents, a leader who had no notion of being, of committing any apostasys or blasphemies against the religion , political religion that i belong to. Reading this book i could see that there were how shall i say it a number of issues that was to come and i think that many of my friends especially my friends, know this apostasy being born. Let me read the passage. It was one thing to say that the program of the oldline Civil Rights Organization had not been adequately responsive to the needs of the negro masses. It was another to accuse them of being in secret coalition with the racist to keep the negroes down. It was one thing to say to the American Educational system was failing in its responsibility to the poor and another two sentimental eyes dropping out of school as an act of social progress. It was one thing to be critical of American Society institutions of Foreign Policy and another to be dismissive of the democratic system as a total fake. When i thought of these ideas and attitudes it was repressed cliches of the 30s repressed because of the trials and the percentage speech of the revelations of the horrors of communism my interpolation i meant that they seem to have no idea proving how rotten american was. Whether the stalinist adopted the same tactics, at least they gave the beliefs that they thought the tactic would bring the revolution closer. This was written in the middle of the 60s when it was triumphantly devastating that a particular act of legislation did not go far enough or the american policy be given with stupid assumptions with no revolution strategy was about. [inaudible] they wanted to prove that american was racist, or revolutionary. You may not have known it. [laughter] hardly enough, anybody said that in attacking the book. Again, you have to understand this is an easier to understand from the perspective of todays cultural climates that it would have been then that everything was being politicized. Politics was a black hole sucking everything into its core to Say Something positive about success, about the ambition of success that i can tell you there was nothing wrong with it. That was one of the main points i was making in the book. To extol what would have been called the middle grass values, the bourgeoisie life was about as far this was an explosive idea i dont know why i was so naive and stupid. Ill say in my own defense, i was raised intellectually with the ideas that the single greatest virtue of literature was honesty. Especially, honesty that disclosed qualities in oneself. Like the underground man or that kind of thing. Here i had written a book of a very faithful to that precept of honesty. One of the most important teachers i had who had instructed me in these virtues of honesty advised me not to publish the book. What the hell is going on here . I can see now that the dissent of the boards was way of life was the main source of the outrageous against the book. To some reason no one wanted to say that so they kept picking on other things that were as i said , mostly untrue. However, it is not in untrammeled defense of success. Or even that you simply say it as, the nature of human conditions for people to seek power and authority and to have success and success can be defined in many different ways, it cant simply be defined as monetary success. That wasnt anything even as you say what spoke to you, in fact, you did so much better than your own parents had done and jumped classes ahead of them would have seemed sciencefiction to even take those other leaps. But that theres all kinds of tradeoffs in achieving the success. This includes the alienation of your family, having to acknowledge that you were outdistancing your beloved childhood friends socially and that the people whose orbit you wish to live were mean, savage, hostile to each other, blunt, brutal but very, very clever. Right this is a world in which what mattered was being clever. The brainpower in that world was explosive. Its like nothing ive seen. Nothing ive seen before or since. I later wrote an attack on a lady in jerusalem who was a close friend of mine at the time and she became one of my early ex friends. I subtitled it that these notes on the perversity of brilliance. If anyone who ever lived was brilliant than what to that brilliance bring them to but extremely perverse conclusions about a very difficult subject. It was true of a lot of these people. They were wrong about practically everything but they were brilliantly wrong, and it was worth your life to take them on. There were dangerous, youd walk away humiliated within ten minutes unless you are really good at it. That was one of the great lessons that i learned from living in that world and it took me a long time to absorb it and fully understand how much it meant. I think, the only real theory of the criticism that you had to knowledge was correct in the case of this book was a line by the colonist at new york city wagon, mary kempton who was in fact, named of the family who described it new york intellectual world that you mentioned. He said only Norman Podhoretz could consider living at a hundred and fifth on broadway making it. [laughter] im sorry but there is a lot of truth to that. Considering how frequently we were mugged. I can tell you a great story about mary kempton. He lived on a hundred and third and broadway. Its not like he was speaking from a great perch. He came from a highly aristocratic society in baltimore. His grandfather had been chief justice in the Baltimore Justice system in Maryland Supreme Court and so on. When he was young he was a communist and he got himself arrested in a mayday demonstration. All these kids were hauled up before this judge and the judge gave them a very stern lecture and sentence them to whatever it was, ten days in the county jail and then he said not you, murray , not you. Im surprised to see you here a kempton in this courtroom and i have to just assume that it was a wayward impulse that brought you here. Murray kempton not never got over that. As you can imagine, he too, was very brilliant. Its true that there was a lot of ambivalence in my, what should i call it justification of the ambition for success. The fact is and i see now clearly there wasnt much you could say in the year 1967 in new york or in the United States generally that would be more offensive than its better to be rich than to be poor and its better to be powerful than powerless and that the light, life lived by those who are successful and which generally was the middle class in those days was to be commended. There was nothing more steerable than what is called middleclass valuable values of that period. I started writing this book in 1965 when things were on the balance with the Antiwar Movement and that had not yet come to real fruition. The civil right movement had not turned violent and by the time i finished the book in 1967, i had run into a perfect storm. Everything that was going on in the culture was inimical to the spirit of this book and the substance of this book. In a sense, i deserved what i got. I dont really mean that but its not in inexplicable. Id if youve never read the book or heard about it, read it now, whether you like it or dont like it, i think, would be quite puzzled by the storm it aroused. Let me read the first paragraph and then well get to questions. It invokes a strange tone in which you are criticized for the vulgar enunciation of your own hunger for success and the pursuit of it which is entirely the opposite the book begins making fun of that. Let me introduce myself. Im a man with the precocious age of 35 experienced an astonishing revelation that it is better to be a success than a failure. Having been penetrated by this great truth concerning the nature of things my mind was now open for the first time to a series of corollary perceptions, each one as dizzying as the original revelation itself. Money, i now sought, no one had ever seen it before but it was important. It was better to be rich than to be poor. Power, i now saw, moving on to higher syntheses, was desirable. It was better to be to give orders and take them. Fame, i now saw how courageous of me not to flinch with unqualified. It was better to be recognized and to be anonymous. This book represents an effort to explain why it has taken someone like myself so long to arrive at such an apparently elementary discovery because in the world in which you lived, those discoveries because of the perversity of brilliance, these very simple home truths had to be buried under a set of intellectual presumptions that contradicted them. I just want to throw in a little story about my mother. John made reference to the alienation of ones family. It involves. [inaudible] there is a good selling book called hillbilly elegy,. [laughter] he goes on to great detail about the saying of how he got himself separated from his youth. My mother could never understand what i was doing. [laughter] what is he . A journalist . Mrs. Soandso on the second floor her son is a doctor, no problem there. Another one was a lawyer, but what exactly she knew that i was making some kind of reputation and that my name was in the paper but when people and relatives asked what is he exactly, she couldnt answer. My father could but he was too snobbish to get into these discussions. My mother once said wistfully, here you have in this remark encapsulated a huge sociological theory. She said wistfully, i should have made him for a dentist. The laugh isnt big enough. A lot of you dont know what that means. A dentist was a kid who had failed to become a doctor and even though he might make a lot of money and visit his mother every sunday, drive her out to his mansion in long island, nevertheless, he was a failed doctor. That she could understand. That she could understand. She had made me a dentist, theyre one to have been this problem. I wouldnt be living in this weird world one other anecdote that i have a memory of that is telling because this would have been around when you are in your early 50s and so there you were an eminent american pretty much for 25 years though you had been of born child of immigrants , jewish home, spent their lives speaking in jewish accents and the mother had only died 20 years, and your father was a milkman was a terrible failure in life in the terms in which making it is described. There you were, you made yourself famous, notorious, whatever you were. I was home from either college or i was home from washington for the weekend, i was going out at night and i had on a suit, a suit or something. And brown shoes. You said to me youre wearing brown shoes. [laughter] i said, yeah. I never had the social selfconfidence to wear brown shoes. When i was a kid and we would go on saturdays and sundays we would go walk from her house to go to the movies in midtown or Something Like that, you always wear a jacket and tie and i always assumed what that was about the shoes, the jacket, the tie was somebody was going to find you, look at you and if you are wearing just a shirt with an open collar and send you back to brownsville. The brown shoes has a story. I was once again, accusedin this times of dropping names and i will now drop a name. Jackie kennedy. There was a period in which i became very friendly with jackie kennedy. Wilson made a nastyremark in his journals and i lost her friendship incidentally because of making it. She said a man who brags about his grades in school, that was her. We went to a party at their house we were living on the west side and we needed a visa practically to get across and i was wearing brown shoes with a blue suit. Or maybe it was even a brown suit. I had broken my ankle or Something Like that and in any case, i walked in and jackie looks me overand said you scooted across the pond in your little brown suit and your nice brown shoes. I wont tell you what i said in response to that scatological. But thats where this session from brown shoes came in. It has remained, to this day. I dont own a brown pair of shoes. Does anybody have any questions. We have a microphone, so please wait if you wish to we have a gentleman over here. I would like to thank you for your comments and recollection. Youve given many reasons for the response to your book but you never mention possibly the fact that you are jewish had anything to do with it. Am i wrong to have a feeling that that might have been a factor . I dont think so i was nakedly jewish in the fact that the mostly the people who attacked the book were themselves jewish. Doing being jewish was becoming fashionable in society. It was not a disability, so to speak to be jewish. It is possible, now that you mention it, that all that nakedly jewish might have offended some people. Yeah. Theres nothing in the book where you begin talking about having this High School Teacher mrs. K who is one of the authors of your alienation from your immigrant family and the idea that you could set your sights very high. She wanted you to go to harvard. She wanted to train you in the proper behavior and her constant indication to you was, dont be a dirty little slum child. Is that what youre going to be . A dirty little slum child was mark on the one hand, the savagery of that but on the other hand, a world in which no one has this idea, the world we live in now in which no one sees even if its out of snobbery there are people mired in a world would be helped along by the notion that the world in which we live is not a world out of which we should aspire to grow because to stay in that, is to be mired in it. I think dirty little slum child, she was married to a jew it was a euphemism, even for her. You wouldnt say dirty little jew boy but thats probably what she meant, right bismarck. The kind of juice she was married to was not the kind of do i knew. It was a german jew. He was also a hater of roosevelt very un jewish. Wait for the mike, if you would. May i give you a fastball down the middle . Do you see any parallels between the intelligentsia of the mid 1960s and the intelligentsia of today from a political perspective . Yeah. Well, i could spend hours answering that question. The answer is the political intelligentsia of the day is the product of the degradation of the political intelligentsia of the 40s and 50s. I can sum it up in a little anecdote that i tell in the book i once was invited i was ambivalent about vietnam and and the union called with a radical leftist and i went there with one of my colleagues, the late marian who had a wicked tongue and we walked in and there were about 20 people scattered in this Big Union Hall and she said to me, do you realize every Single Person in this room is a tragedy to some family or other. [laughter] well, they took over america in the next ten or 20 years, these people. , these attitudes. The malice spoke of the long march of the institution, the long march through the institution led by americanism resulted in my opinion, first of all in the takeover of the Democratic Party by mcgovern and followers. Then finally, jumping ahead to the election of barack obama and also someone like the mayor of new york. I may offend some people here, if i say that i have described what we are going through while obama was president we have. [inaudible] i apologize. [laughter] i would say one thing on this topic which is comparing on the one hand, the new left of the 60s was on the one hand, far more serious in some ways than the left is today. That is to say they were so serious that they embraced totalitarianism and in some cases following the logic of their thinking to and open to conclusions they embraced the violence openly and apologized for it in a way that people dont do now. On the other hand, today, they were more serious the intellectuals of your day who were not them but were there teachers and forebears were vastly more literary serious interested in ideas. Into the mainstream. They were incredibly respectful but certainly the most important country in the world so its intellectual too, just like europe and we have the novelist distinction just like europe. Now not like there is any place in the world more than like the United States because that would be hard to argue with a dot discussing ideas thats controversial and if you Say Something clever that is out of the realm of what is deemed to be appropriate to. The country is coming apart because of something you wrote 22 years earlier. The. It is the intellectual responsibility by this class when the more violent and more romantic and r. Since romantic left of the 1960s began to take over the lost confidence in the old approach. Roof and then michael. My experience with the book has been commented on about five times since 1990 i gave a course on the new york intellectual. I would say by far the most interesting students by ever attracted to the courses were on the new york intellectuals. One of my favorite moments was a very bright student shaking her head like this and i say this something the matter and she said we will never write like that. It always aroused so much discourse and attention and i was so grateful to you for coming to that course once in a while. What i wanted to say is ironically enough it destroyed the possibility of a cohort. Have they ever gone through a phd it wouldnt have happened so there is something very sad about that because of the students would have wanted to break out this kind and they would have chose editors. One of the things you talk about there was a kind of weird window that the only way to live your life as a person engaged with the same literature was to become a university professor. You were going to go o go on anu wento menuinto cambridge and yoe going to write a dissertation and then you realized that it was too far removed. What did kissinger said that the states wer were so low you wane in a place where did i hear into just so happens that this will open up that there was a possibility of making a living like this. There isnt really any more. Most people who do this stuff for a living stitch together the university jobs. But do you feel that you missed out on educating the young who spent so many decades . I have a very low opinion of the american university. I think the its degraded and it will take some kind of revolution to recapture the glory that it once enjoyed. In the 18th century it became placing of the aristocracy and lost the intellectual heft of. If you look at the great intellectual of the early 18th century in london, one of them even went to the university of and i think we are seeing Something Like that now that the best people intellectually have come out of think tanks like charles burka rather than the universities. He heard hed gotten a phd in princeton and i said to my wife on zero no they are about to be bright. One of them is looking for the passage but i cant quite find it at columbia where he went that had a famous course that every student has to take and the purpose was to introduce and two n. Roll everybody at the college in western civilization. Its the repository of the greatness this is where it comes from. You come up to the present day and everything that we have and everything that we are enemies from this. And this is a teaching that is no longer acceptable to. It was even beyond that we are not disagreeing with you live in dark times. I wonder if we can observe tho those. The article at times evoked such a strong response i wonder if maybe the bad times if you live long enough coming to live through everything i feel that way myself shortly in light of these coincidental events [inaudible] how different would the family existence be if the internet and social media existed at that time . Obviously very different although it is impossible to imagine. Im not a great photo of social media and the internet. Im on the internet for seven hours a day or Something Like that and i think there is a lot to be said for it. But certainly the effect on the intellectual discourse, not at all. The one term that has been missing about this discussion there was a distinction in those days there was little communication among these fears for better or for worse. It has to do the particular quality of the highbrow world. I mentioned Howard Rosenberg before. When he was asked to write about the new yorker that seemed to be a great turning point in the culture and in a certain sense it was. When he told what they called in one day i dont know what youre talking about fears of [laughter] one of them had to post contempt and yet it turned out it was this idea of people who believe they should be in some proximity even if they had no standards that the collapse of the middlebrow collapsed as well and they supported the highbrow and then everything became. So thats the oddity. There is no highbrow left in the United States. I rise at the end and i want to report on an experience i had yesterday to lay out the consideration of everybody here at the end of his life i became a very good friend and contributed small amounts of the documentary film which i had the privilege yesterday of viewing a. I dont think the film is going to attract any oscars. But i want to raise again in your mind the memory of a person i know and i commend to all of you who to come into to any of you that are interested in what he had said while trying to change society so that black families wouldnt be destroyed. I have to interrupt you now because i have to tell of a tale. I just want to make you aware i need to share a piece of gossip with everybody. You know the International Reputation of, he wrote a spee speech. Cspan now knows one of the most important political speeches was written. He was a very close friend of mine for the period of over ten years and we became strange in the later years. He was a highbrow intellectual. From that point of view i came to regret that he had chosen a political career because it cut the edge off some of the things. He was a great friend. Im going to buy this and i have a perfect First Edition and i want to thank you because i can now add it to my bank statemen statements. We scurried around the issue you a little bit in the great universities of today and i will say that as a number of faculty that there is a more general point ive always thought he meant when he said he would be governed by the first three pages by the harvard faculty. There is precious correlation at the inverse relationship between the intellectual prowess and good sense judgment and certainly the ability to govern. So it would seem. [laughter] thank you very much. [applause]