Trilling and Podhoretz were exactly a quarter century apart – the one's 1935 was the other's 1960 – and the younger critic was naturally struck by the differences as well as the similarities between their eras. A partner in his revision of “revisionist liberalism” (to stick with Podhoretz's somewhat vague label) was Willie Morris (1934–1999), whom we have already met. A Mississippian, a Rhodes Scholar, a star editor for the crusading Texas Observer in Austin, and then an associate editor at Harper's, Morris in 1967 was named editor-in-chief of that “bastion of middlebrow gentility.” Like Podhoretz at Commentary seven years before, he turned Harper's into a hot book by chasing and defining the emerging Zeitgeist.

When his appointment was made public, Podhoretz telephoned with good wishes and a caution: “They all love you now. Just wait.” Editorial honeymoons are brutish and brief, and Morris was fortunate to have designated Decter, then forty-one, as his executive editor.

Morris was fond of his bottle, and, like Podhoretz, who he remembered could down thirteen martinis at a sitting, he considered it a point of literary pride to drink like a Russian – which is to say like a Southern novelist, citing Faulkner's cracker-Dionysian remark that “There's a lot of nourishment in an acre of corn.” At the huge parties Norman and Midge threw in the mid-sixties, Morris would be among the company who “had a habit of passing out peacefully sometime in the early morning hours and then being awakened and taken home by his wife or a friend as the last guests were leaving” – or emerging on Sunday afternoon from the maid's room, politely wondering whether the party was “over already.