Commentary In American Life

7. Norman Podhoretz and the Cold War

7Norman Podhoretz and the Cold War Richard Gid Powers Powers: To what extent was anti-Americanism an important part of the cold war? Podhoretz: Well, it was one of the crucial parts. Anti-Americanism was, I still think, even more important than pro-communism in determining the position of people who opposed us or who took a procommunist or neutralist position.1 I n my history of American anticommunism, I assigned Norman Podhoretz a leading part in the final scenes of the drama of the Cold War—I love the notion of being able to assign historical roles, like Peter Quince parceling out the parts in the “Midsummer Night’s Dream.” (“Strobe Talbott , you will present the Berlin Wall—don’t let anyone tear it down. President Carter, you will present the Man in the Moon.”) I wrote that after the catastrophes of Vietnam and Watergate—and after the repudiation of anticommunism in American leadership circles, symbolized by President Carter’s 1977 “freedom from the inordinate fear of communism” speech at Notre Dame—Podhoretz led the campaign to revive anticommunism as the basis of a coher134 Richard Gid Powers 135 ent American foreignpolicy. He gave fresh support to the old idea that communism was the true and central issue of a cold war against a Soviet Union that was as dangerous as ever and that had to be opposed if America were to survive as a free nation. I argued that Podhoretz significantly influenced the public debate that led to the election of an avowedly anticommunist president, Ronald Reagan—the first and only truly anticommunist president in our history.2 In this chapter I want to probe more deeply than before the reasons —intellectual but, more interestingly, I think, emotional—why Podhoretz adopted the positions he did during the Cold War, and I will argue that the basis for his anticommunism was his reaction to a phenomenon that, if anything, has become even more significant and dangerous today. Because at an early stage in his political evolution Podhoretz became convinced that an underlying issue in the Cold War was anti-Americanism, which he argues was almost as important as the nature and ambitions of the Soviet Union. Finally, that will lead to some speculations on my part about how the international crisis of today—Afghanistan, Iraq, and terror—has given rise to a form of anti-Americanism eerily similar in its psychology to the enduring insanity of anti-Semitism. “The Cold War is over,” Mikhail Gorbachev is supposed to have said soon after the collapse of the Soviet Union, “and it doesn’t matter who won or lost.” Jack Kemp, former congressman, cabinet secretary, and quarterback, used to bring down the house at banquets by retorting that “there’s only one kind of man who doesn’t care whether he won or lost—and that’s a loser.” There isn’t much debate about who lost the Cold War. There is no more Soviet Union, no more Warsaw Pact, and the rag-tag entourage of Soviet semisatellites around the world are now left to their own devices, their survival depending on coming to terms with the global free market system. As for who won it, that should be pretty obvious too, but it is not. Winners usually do some celebrating in the end zone, but the only victory parades were in Doonesbury, with crooked investment bankers doing the hokey-pokey around their office paper shredders, yowling for a general amnesty on tax fraud to mark the downfall of communism . 136 Norman Podhoretz and the Cold War It was as though any celebration of the victory over communism might have been misunderstood as an endorsement of anticommunism and all its sins (Many Were the Crimes, as one history of American anticommunism had it3 )—or even of McCarthyism, which is regarded in some quarters as much the same thing. In that sense, as I argued in Not Without Honor, the Cold War really is not over, not until historians agree on what it was all about—or whether it was about anything at all. At the moment, there are disturbing indications that the latter position—that the Cold War was not about anything in particular—is gaining ground, perhaps as a way of draining the moral content from current American foreign policy. Norman Podhoretz, however, never had any doubt, from beginning to end, that the Cold...