Norman Podhoretz, contentious and influential neo-conservative, dies at 95

Norman Podhoretz, a boastful, hard-line editor and author and a leader of the neo-conservative movement, has died.

NEW YORK — Norman Podhoretz, the boastful, hard-line editor and author whose books, essays and stewardship of Commentary magazine marked a political and deeply personal break from the left and made him a leader of the neo-conservative movement, has died. He was 95.

Podhoretz died “peacefully and without pain” Tuesday night, his son John Podhoretz confirmed in a statement on Commentary’s website. His cause of death was not immediately released.

“He was a man of great wit and a man of deep wisdom and he lived an astonishing and uniquely American life,” John Podhoretz said.

Norman Podhoretz was among the last of the so-called “New York intellectuals” of the mid-20th century, a famously contentious circle that at various times included Norman Mailer, Hannah Arendt, Susan Sontag and Lionel Trilling. As a young man, Podhoretz longed to join them. In middle age, he departed. Like Irving Kristol, Gertrude Himmelfarb and other founding neo-conservatives, Podhoretz began turning from the liberal politics he shared with so many peers and helped reshape the national dialogue in the 1960s and after.

The son of Jewish immigrants, Podhoretz was 30 when he was named editor-in-chief of Commentary in 1960, and years later transformed the once-liberal magazine into an essential forum for conservatives. Two future U.S. ambassadors to the United Nations, Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Jeane Kirkpatrick, received their appointments in part because of essays they published in Commentary that called for a more assertive foreign policy.