Yaddo's director was the Saturday Review critic Granville Hicks, who with his wife, Dorothy, would host a cocktail party before every supper. The writers-and-artists colony was openly awash in booze and, as guests visited one another after-hours, was also reputed to be awash in sex. The booze was the only distraction Podhoretz wanted, mainly in the desperate hope that it might help him finish his large tome about the sixties.

Donadio had sold it to Simon & Schuster, which had given Podhoretz a $35,000 (now $186,000) advance. He had used nearly half of the money to buy a country place near the Moynihans' up in Delaware County. Having driven three and a half hours to take a look, Podhoretz got out of his car and asked his friend to orientate him. “Right,” said Pat, “well, over there are the Catskill Mountains.” “Funny,” said Podhoretz after a pregnant pause, “they don't look Jewish.” It was the first real estate the Podhoretzes would own (they were renting their West Side apartment and the Fire Island cottage): twenty-eight acres, an old farmhouse, and, at Moynihan's insistence, a one-room schoolhouse, all for “practically nothing” – $15,000 (about $92,650 today).

From 1967 to 1973, it was to be the pastorally happy scene of many a school-year weekend, or many a summer week, with the Moynihans. “Those were wonderful times,” Podhoretz would remember, including a New Year's Eve they spent together.