In the summer of 1975, my father decided that we were going to take a drive. Across America. He and I. My mother, who had a deadline, was going to stay behind in New York and meet us in Denver two weeks later. So he rented a car from Avis, we put our bags in the trunk, and off we went.
I wish I could tell you this was a revelatory road trip that changed everything, that turned us into American patriots and lovers of this great wide broad capacious land. It wasn’t, because my father was determined to get across this great wide broad capacious land as fast as possible. His goal—drive 500 miles a day. Find a motel. Eat at a rib joint. Go to bed. Wake up. Do it again. 500 miles. We didn’t necessarily complete the task, but if we fell short, we fell short by, let’s say, 22 miles. So we would only make 478 that day.
Norman Podhoretz may have been one of America’s foremost anti-Communists, but this was a form of Stakhanovite tourism that would have made Stalin proud. Sitting back and smelling the roses, just hanging, feeling the vibes—such was not his way. This was not a man who took vacations. Ever. This was not a man for whom “relaxation” was an aim. Relaxation was the enemy. Achievement—those 500 miles, every day—that was the purpose. It was like being a decathlete, only like the true Jewish American Prince that he was, Norman Podhoretz did it sitting.
Once we were south of DC, the AM radio featured two and only two kinds of stations. One was devoted to Christian evangelism. The other to country music. You’d search the dial for a signal amid the static and you would either hear Olivia Newton John begging “Please Mr. Please, don’t play B 17. It was our song. It was his song. Now it’s over.” Over. And Over. Then, one day, we hit gold. A voice emerged from the fuzz declaring “And now it’s time for Plano’s favorite radio show, The Christian-Jew Hour.” We listened in fascination. They liked us! They really liked us! It was the first moment either of us understood we had friends out there, Christian Zionists who prayed to Jesus on the radio.
We stayed at the Chattanooga Choo-Choo Hilton Inn, which was made up of 20 separate train cars in the now-abandoned Tennessee train station. Each was a room. I was excited. We opened the door, turned on the light switch, and a spark shot out of a light fixture and set a curtain on fire. We closed the door.
In West Texas we spotted a tepee in front of which sat what we used to call an American Indian. He wore a headdress. With native paint. He was selling moccasins. I wanted the moccasins. My dad discovered he was out of cash. Remember, this was the middle of nowhere in 1975 in a teepee. The man grunted, then leaned behind him and pulled out an American Express card panel, placed a charge receipt on a plate, and presented it to my dad. Transaction completed. In a town called Alpine, Texas, we played bingo with 250 other people for an hour. He won four dollars, and you would have thought his ship had come in. Then we saw the one movie in town—Murph the Surf, a pretty good B movie I have to say, the true story of two guys who rob a diamond from the American Museum of Natural History. The museum in question was a 25 minute walk from our apartment. I wanted to climb into the screen and walk home. We were getting on each other’s nerves.
Eventually we got to Santa Fe, and from there drove to Taos, where there was an exhibition of the paintings of D.H. Lawrence. The last thing this man ever, ever, ever did was go to art exhibits. I think this was the first time we’d ever even gone to a gallery. And why this one? Because D.H. Lawrence had written Sons and Lovers, and his Cambridge teacher FR Leavis had declared Lawrence one of the four canonical writers of the English novel. Could Lawrence paint? How would either of us have known? My dad was basically color blind. But that Lawrence—he sure could write.
When we left the gallery, I found I was gasping for breath. My dad, who was sick of my whining about maybe we could drive a little less and see a little more, thought I was faking it or something. By the time we got back to Santa Fe, I really couldn’t breathe. He said he knew I was genuinely sick because I told him I couldn’t go to the pool since it would mean I would drown. I got into bed and fell asleep and the next thing I knew, hours later, the room now dark, I was being baptized. Smelly freezing liquid was attacking my body. What had happened was my father had put his hand to my forehead and found I was burning up. He had no idea what to do. He called my mother. She told him to go get some rubbing alcohol at the drug store. He went. He came back. She told him to cool me off with the rubbing alcohol. So he…poured it all over me.
He was 45 years old. He was maybe the most intelligent person in America. But he didn’t know to take a washcloth, put the alcohol on it, and apply it thus. This made sense within the context of being Norman Podhroetz, who didn’t know how to use a screwdriver. I mean this. He didn’t. But he was frightened and he was sad and my mom said to cool my body with the rubbing alcohol and he did what it came to him to do. It was one of the sweetest moments I have ever experienced.
Turned out I had a fever of 105. Altitude sickness. I stayed in bed for two days. We had to go pick up my mother in Denver. I said maybe I should go home from there and they could journey on. He agreed. She arrived. I flew back. We spoke little of this excursion over the course of the next half century.
Now here’s why I’m telling you this story.
We had nothing to do on this Stakhanovite drive but listen to Olivia Newton John and hope to find another variant on the Christian-Jew Hour. So, at some point, we began kidding around. And he told me this:
Two men are in front of a firing squad. The captain asks if there are any last requests. One man says, in a Yiddish accent, “I would like please a blindfold.” And the other says, “Sam. Don’t make trouble.”
I burst into laughter. That’s a Jewish joke, he said. What’s a Jewish joke, I said. Well, he said, it’s a particular form of humor very hard to describe or define. So let me tell you another one and maybe you can figure it out.
A man decides he wants to join the dining club down the street from his office. He asks to see the membership director, who asks him what his name is. “Finkelstein,” he says. The director says, “I’m sorry, we don’t take Jews here.” He walks out, furious. He goes and gets elocution lessons. He gets bespoke tailored clothes. He reads the Wall Street Journal. He attends charm school. Two years later, he returns and introduces himself as Throckmorton Bates IV. The membership director says, “It’s lovely to meet you. Can you tell me something about yourself.” Finkelstein says, “Well, I prepped at Groton, I attended Dartmouth where I rowed crew, and then went to work at Smith and Smith.” “I see, that’s all wonderful,” says the membership director. “And your religion?” “Oh, um, goy.”
Though there were not enough Jewish jokes to pass the entirety of the time in that car, there were plenty. Had I known he was funny before this? I don’t remember, to tell you the truth. I knew he was loving, because he was always loving. I remember him kissing me on the top of my head as I sat on his lap around the age of six and him saying, ruefully, that there would come a time I wouldn’t sit in his lap and I wouldn’t let him kiss me, and I said that would never happen, but of course it did. And of course, as he lay dying, it was I who held his hand and kissed his head because who could ever have deserved it more? This person the obituaries tell you was pugnacious and sardonic and had a boxer’s taste for pugilism was at heart a man of profound kindness and an almost endless generosity of spirit.
And he was witty. So witty. And a generator of wit as well. What he loved, what he treasured, was cleverness—an unexpected turn of phrase, a surprising off-kilter observation that reframes the truth in the right way. That is the glory of the Jewish joke he could not quite figure out how to explain to me. It is an act of reversal, in which either an undeservedly proud person is laid low by reality or in which a shlemiel gets one over on the big guy. Or when the shlemiel thinks he’s gotten one over on the big guy, he gets crushed, thus revealing again his essential shlemielhood. If you try to trick the world, the Jewish joke says, the joke’s on you. But here’s the thing: Norman Podhoretz never tried to trick anyone. He was the opposite of a shlemiel.
He began his hundreds if not thousands of public speeches with the same joke every time, so I’m guessing many of you might have heard it. A great rebbe is dying, and his disciples are weeping at his bedside. “Oh our master is leaving us, he was the wisest of men, who will instruct us in wisdom?” “Oh our master is leaving us, he was the most pious of men, who will instill in us a love of Ha Shem?” “Oh our master is leaving us, he was the holiest of men, who will guide us on the path to righteousness?” The old man uses his last ounce of strength to pull himself up and look them all in the eye and say, “And about my humility you have nothing to say?”
Both his friends and his enemies would say, even now, that my father was far from humble. Yeah, OK, sure. But the joke’s deeper meaning, its profound wisdom, is that humility itself is often performative rather than real. So it might be better to say Norman Podhoretz was not self-effacing. He was, instead, the opposite: He put himself front and center in the middle of the great battles of his time. And he drew fire. Who does that? He wanted nothing more than to be loved, but he did not flinch when he felt compelled to express thoughts and ideas that made those people whose love he craved the most turn away from him and reject him. That rejection hurt, and it never stopped hurting.
So many nice things have been said about him the past couple of days that my sister Naomi pointed out it was a genuine shame he wasn’t here to read them and hear them, because you just cannot imagine how much he would have enjoyed it. How much he would have enjoyed the tributes from Senator Cotton, and Ruth Wisse, and Jonathan Tobin, and Abe Greenwald, and Noah Rothman, and Matthew Continetti, and Elliot Kaufman, and Barton Swaim, and Yuval Levin, and Kathryn Jean Lopez, and Tevi Troy, and Seth Mandel, and Meir Soloveichik. He. Loved. Praise. But there was something in him, some iron in him, some deep well in him, that did not allow him to trim his sails or maintain the reputation that meant so much to him by acting with a careerist’s prudence.
That’s why his greatest flaw, or at least the quality that caused him the most unnecessary pain, was how much he continued to value or judge himself by the cultural settings established by the same fashionable folk who had rejected him for holding fast to his love of country and love of tradition and love of his faith—in Billy Joel’s words, “the people that he knew at Elaine’s.” I once told him that he didn’t know who he was, by which I meant, he had no idea how many people had been influenced by him, who viewed him as a titanic figure, who saw him as one of the great men of our time. He had no idea, really, because while he had contempt for the New York City bubble, he remained inside it for most of his life, and couldn’t find his way out, even after the bubble itself lost control of things.
But not always. In 2004, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In his room at the Hay-Adams Hotel the morning of the ceremony, he sat on his bed as he began to get dressed and began to sob and could not stop sobbing. He was 74 years old at the time. His father had been a milkman. He had shared a pullout couch with a very young uncle in the living room of the family tenement flat until he was 18. His magazine never had more than 30,000 real subscribers. He hadn’t published a bestseller. But there he was, a first-generation Jew whose parents were never fully fluent in English, who never took the easy path, and in a matter of hours the president of the United States would be garlanding his neck with the nation’s highest civilian honor. He wept with gratitude. As he said in his book, My Love Affair with America, “What America has done for me could not have been done for me alone, and could not have been done at all if the institutions, ideas, and attitudes that grew out of its founding assumption had not been in place and applicable to all who were lucky enough to live under them.”
What was this, really, but humility in its highest form? It was the humility that said what has happened to me in my life, the greatest gifts of my life, were gifts—gifts from the Almighty, gifts from the founder, things he did not do for himself but that America “has done for me.”
But there are things he did for himself, and by himself, that marked him as a great-souled person, and they are matters he did not write about, nor did he seek celebration for. If I am a good man, and I hope I am, it is because of the gift he gave me of showing me what it truly means to be a man. Not because he was tough, or intellectually honest, or brave, or possessed of good views. It’s because of what he did for my sisters.
I have three sisters. Ruthie and I are his issue. Rachel and Naomi were not. They were the children of our mother’s first marriage. Norman married Midge when Rachel was 5 and Naomi was 4. Rachel and Naomi had a father. Norman was determined not to interfere with the parental rights or paternal connection between Rachel and Naomi and their biological father. And yet. That man would miss his child-support payments. And that man would skip out on some of his time with them. And when they did have time with him, the girls would often come home from their visits sad or upset or gloomy. A lot of this took place before I was born. Rachel was 10 when I was born and Naomi was nine. And I swear to you. I swear to you. This is my truth, as they say. I never, ever, ever, ever, felt that he was any more of a father to me than he was a father to Rachel and Naomi. Whom he at some point determined he was simply going to have to raise, and care for, and succor, and support, and love.
He became their father. This was a choice he made. It was a choice that, in some fundamental sense, he did not have to make. What he was obliged to do was to be kind to Rachel and Naomi, and be friendly to them, and treat them well. He was a nice guy, so of course he’d be nice and friendly to his wife’s daughters. And they were smart and charming and cute, I assure you, and so, that being nice and friendly to them would not have been hard duty. Besides which, he was a kid. He was 27, 28, 29 when this challenge was presented to him. The challenge to stand up and man up and take responsibility.
So he clasped them to his heart. In a million ways great and small, he made certain that Ruthie and I knew we were not to view ourselves as different from them in his eyes. More important, we felt it. It was inhered in us. The only difference I could discern is that Ruthie and I called him Daddy and Rachel and Naomi called him Normie.
Of course the psychological story for all concerned was more complex than this, as I have come to understand as we all grew and we all aged and we lived through crises and disappointments and then through the horror and heartbreak of our Rachel’s passing 13 years ago, which tore a hole in our family that could never be mended, and then through the final years of our mother’s life. Through it all, we have always been close, closer than most, and more than our mother, more than our shared love for all our children and nieces and nephews and grandchildren and grand nieces and grand nephews, all 29 of them, this was possible because of what he did. He made that happen. He made Ruthie and me feel that Rachel and Naomi belonged to us and we belonged to them, because it could have been otherwise. But it wasn’t otherwise, because he looked at these two girls and he said, “You are mine too.”
On her deathbed, Rachel told Norman that he had made her feel safe. That phrase has been poisoned over the past decade or so, made political and false, but what she meant by it was that he had made the world under her feet feel steady. And what greater tribute could there be to his actions than the fact that it has been Naomi, whom he did not even meet until she was 3, who has been the primary provider of his care and attention these past three years? Ruthie and I owe her a great debt—but then, Naomi and Rachel alike were the greatest rewards we received from him in any case. They were ours because he made sure they became his.
So yes, he was a wonderful writer. And yes, he was a brilliant editor. And yes, he changed the world for the better. And I hope the world will remember him for all of that.
But the man I hope my children will emulate, and that their children will emulate, and all his grandchildren and great grandchildren here in this room—that man is the one who said I will be the father that my God and my wife and my honor demand that I be for these two little girls.
That is the greatest moral success story I have ever known.
That is making it.
Delivered December 19 at Riverside Memorial Chapel in New York City.
