Elliot Cohen had been so disabled throughout 1959 that Marty Greenberg was the one who got Commentary out each month, and now that Cohen was dead, Greenberg naturally expected to be named his successor. The AJC, however, wanted to consider a range of candidates. Kristol, Kazin, and Daniel Bell said they preferred not to apply, but Leslie Fiedler, teaching at Montana State, declared himself open to a “Visiting Editor-in-Chief” appointment. When the magazine's publication committee failed to confirm him as quickly as it might, he lost interest and recommended Podhoretz, whom it had approached independently. It is significant that Fiedler, the enfant terrible of American Studies (his Love and Death in the American Novel would be a sensation in 1960), regarded Podhoretz as an ally. They were both firmly anticommunist, on the one hand, and, on the other, would turn out to be thoughtfully enthusiastic about three things: Mailer's talent as a novelist, Norman O. Brown's breakthrough as a psychoanalytic theorist, and Paul Goodman's insight as a critic of education and culture.

No credible intellectual in that year was looking for a revolution in the streets, but many were looking for a revolution in consciousness – which vaguely meant a change in the ways people thought and felt about sex, race relations, hallucinogens, juvenile delinquency, and the Cold War.