Norman Podhoretz

Norman Podhoretz is considered to be a "neo-con" (neo-conservative). He is connected with the Project for the New American Century.

He is the former editor-in-chief of "Commentary" (1960-95). From 1981-87, Podhoretz served with the U.S. Information Agency. He is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute.

---

Giuliani foreign policy team

On July 10, 2007, Rudolph W. Giuliani announced the "line-up" of his foreign policy team, which included Podhoretz, Ed Lasky wrote in the American Thinker. Podhoretz "has argued for a forthright approach toward Iran and Islamic extremism. Republicans increasingly measure their leaders by this yardstick: will they appease Islamic extremists or defend America from them?"

Podhoretz will serve as a member of the Senior Foreign Policy Advisory Board.

"godfather of the neo-con movement"

The following comes from (and was adapted from) the March 9, 2003, Jim Lobe article "Family ties connect US right, Zionists":

"As godfather of the [neo-con] movement, Irving Kristol played mentor to Norman Podhoretz, the long-time but now-retired editor of Commentary, the influential monthly publication of the American Jewish Committee (AJC). Originally identified with the anti-war left in the mid-1960s, Podhoretz converted to neo-conservatism late in the decade and transformed the magazine into a main source of neo-conservative writing, despite the overwhelming majority of the Jewish community itself rejecting those positions.

"Podhoretz and his spouse, Midge Decter, a polemical powerhouse in her own right, created a formidable political team in the 1970s as they deserted the Democratic Party, and then, as leaders of the Committee on the Present Danger -- like (Project for the New American Century) PNAC a coalition of mainly Jewish, neo-conservatives and more traditional right-wing hawks like Defence Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld - helped lay the foreign-policy foundation for the rise of Ronald Reagan. After Reagan's victory, Decter and Rumsfeld co-chaired the international offshoot of the committee, called the Coalition for the Free World.

"Podhoretz is the father of John Podhoretz, a columnist for the Rupert Murdoch-owned New York Post, who also acts as a ubiquitous booster of the hawks. And his son-in-law, Elliott Abrams, who held a number of controversial posts in Reagan's State Department and was eventually convicted in the Iran-Contra scandal for lying to Congress, now serves in George Walker Bush's National Security Council as his top Middle East adviser.

"At Commentary, Podhoretz offered considerable space to such rising lights of the neo-conservative movement as future United Nations (UN) ambassador Jeane J. Kirkpatrick (whose late husband Evron Kirkpatrick was a long-time collaborator of Irving Kristol); Richard Pipes, a Harvard University Soviet specialist and top Reagan adviser; Pipes' son, Daniel Pipes, a staunch Likud supporter who has long argued that Washington has been too complacent about the threat of Islamist radicalism both overseas and at home; and all of the Kristols and Kagans."

Note: The Kagan reference is to Robert Kagan, Donald Kagan, and Frederick Kagan.

Resources and articles

Related SourceWatch articles

• Project for the New American Century, PNAC, original signer
• Rudolph W. Giuliani: U.S. presidential election, 2008

External articles

• Norman Podhoretz, The Neo-Conservatives", IPA Review, Institute of Public Affairs, Volume 36, No 1., January-March 1982, pp 21-26. (This is extracts from a talk given by Podhoretz at an Institute of Public Affairs event in Melbourne).
• Norman Podhoretz, How to win World War IV, Commentary Magazine, February 2002.
• Nick Juliano, "Top neocon urged Bush to bomb Iran during private White House meeting," The Raw Story, September 24, 2007.
• Satyam Khanna, "Podhoretz Granted Secret Access To Lobby Bush On ‘The Case For Bombing Iran’," Think Progress, September 24, 2007.