In 1967, Norman Podhoretz, then the 34-year-old editor of Commentary, published a memoir, Making It, in which he confessed to a powerful drive for status, money, and other conventional forms of success. What’s more, he asserted that other New York intellectuals, who customarily disclaimed interest in such matters, secretly felt exactly as he did. The book was a minor scandal: Podhoretz spoke a forbidden truth. As he should have known, a good deal of an intellectual’s cultural capital comes from his implicit claim to be more high-minded than other people. In revealing that the residents of Ivy League English departments and the offices of “serious” magazines were made of essentially the same human material as advertising executives and bond salesmen, he had given away the game. Yet much as they hated to hear it, few people from inside those worlds could bring themselves to say that Podhoretz was wrong.
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