Graying of the Intellectuals

In 1957 Norman Podhoretz participated in a symposium on “The Young Generation of U.S. Intellectuals.” He was 27 years old, already an editor of Commentary. He observed that his generation, which came of age in the Cold War, “never had any personal involvement with radicalism.” His peers breathed an atmosphere of “intellectual revisionism,” characterized by “an intensive campaign against the pieties of American liberalism, which, for reasons we all kno...