The Hill News

The greatly influential part of the post-war liberal ethos came from a handful of very intelligent and committed New Yorkers â€" from Brooklyn, primarily â€" that split into two teams; the Norman Mailers and the Norman Podhoretzes. They had an astonishing influence on modern times. I had the occasion to correspond with Mailer over 20-some years and it was much fun, much talk about drinking and play. Felt it wasn’t so much their ideas as their energy, intelligence and willfulness that carried that day. When the conservative Jews in this group moved to Washington, it perhaps more than anything formed modern conservatism. Liberalism at its worst perhaps from that period can be seen in Mailer’s novels in the ’70s like An American Dream (1965), and at its best in his journals like The Armies of the Night (1968) and elsewhere in a kind of intellectual majesty that Alfred Kazin brought to every task, including his autobiography, New York Jew.

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