Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- Prologue
- 1 Brownsville
- 2 Columbia
- 3 Cambridge
- 4 The Family and the Army
- 5 The Practicing Critic
- 6 Boss
- 7 “This Was Bigger than Both of Us”
- 8 One Shoe Drops
- 9 Dropping the Other Shoe
- 10 Liberalism Lost
- 11 George Lichtheim, Pat Moynihan, and a Lecture Tour
- 12 Domesticities, Lillian Hellman, and the Question of America's Nerve
- 13 Moynihan, Podhoretz, and “the Party of Liberty”
- 14 Breaking and Closing Ranks
- 15 Present Dangers
- 16 “The Great Satan of the American Romantic Left”
- 17 Regulated Hatreds
- 18 Culture Wars
- 19 A Literary Indian Summer
- 20 Verdicts
- 21 New Wars for a New Century
- Epilogue
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
15 - Present Dangers
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 September 2011
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- Prologue
- 1 Brownsville
- 2 Columbia
- 3 Cambridge
- 4 The Family and the Army
- 5 The Practicing Critic
- 6 Boss
- 7 “This Was Bigger than Both of Us”
- 8 One Shoe Drops
- 9 Dropping the Other Shoe
- 10 Liberalism Lost
- 11 George Lichtheim, Pat Moynihan, and a Lecture Tour
- 12 Domesticities, Lillian Hellman, and the Question of America's Nerve
- 13 Moynihan, Podhoretz, and “the Party of Liberty”
- 14 Breaking and Closing Ranks
- 15 Present Dangers
- 16 “The Great Satan of the American Romantic Left”
- 17 Regulated Hatreds
- 18 Culture Wars
- 19 A Literary Indian Summer
- 20 Verdicts
- 21 New Wars for a New Century
- Epilogue
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The title piece for The Present Danger had appeared in the February 1980 issue of Commentary. If the United States is to survive as a free society, Podhoretz argued, it must reaffirm the Truman Doctrine of 1947, which pledged, in that president's words, “to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressure” and thereby to “contain” the spread of left-wing totalitarianism. The Truman Doctrine had been most eloquently articulated by George F. Kennan in “The Sources of Soviet Conduct” (Foreign Affairs, July 1947). Soviet expansionism was something that, Kennan said, “can be contained by the adroit and vigilant application of counterforce at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points, corresponding to the shifts and maneuvers of Soviet policy, but which cannot be charmed or talked out of existence.”
Counterforce had a military as well as political dimension, as was demonstrated by what Podhoretz called our “unremarkable” decisions to intervene in Korea and Vietnam. Our goal, in either instance, wasn't to roll back communism, as the doctrine's more hawkish right-wing critics wanted to do, but, by reestablishing recognized borders between north and south, at least halt it. And why was this America's job? Kennan's peroration was squarely within the tradition of the country's exceptionalism:
The thoughtful observer of Russian-American relations will find no cause for complaint in the Kremlin's challenge to American society. He will rather experience a certain gratitude for a Providence which, by providing the American people with this implacable challenge, has made their entire security as a nation dependent on their pulling themselves together and accepting the responsibilities of moral and political leadership that history plainly intended them to bear.[…]
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Norman PodhoretzA Biography, pp. 209 - 228Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010