November 2023
On The Controversialist: Arguments with Everyone, Left Right and Center by Martin Peretz.

Martin Peretz’s memoir, The Controversialist: Arguments with Everyone, Left Right and Center, is at once deeply interesting and profoundly sad. Interesting because, in his long career at the center of America’s most elite culture-shaping institutions—he was the owner, publisher, and editor-in-chief of The New Republic for thirty-seven years and, for nearly half a century, a teacher and later the head of Harvard’s Social Studies program—he taught, mentored, and employed a constellation of notables from Al Gore and Lloyd Blankfein to Stanley Crouch and Charles Krauthammer to Andrew Sullivan and Michael Kinsley. His journal became, as he rightly boasts, “the most influential political magazine in Washington,” a fixture at “the center of American political discourse.” His sketches of the personages he encountered are pungent, his account of the political and cultural currents of his era thoughtful, his formula for lively and serious journalism well worth heeding. And he has insider’s gossip to dish.

Yet he relates, with pained bemusement, how it all ended badly. His magazine began hemorrhaging money, and he had to sell it. The jeers of a know-nothing mob brought down the curtain on his Harvard career. His once-happy marriage failed. The improvements he sought to make in the America he loved didn’t materialize as he’d envisioned, and the culture and politics that emerged have instead filled him with misgivings.

But the sadness the reader feels on closing the book doesn’t spring only from the memoirist’s regrets. It rises as well from the growing realization that the narrowness of Peretz’s elite vision, for all his gifts, made some of his judgments wildly wrong, tarnishing his contribution to the national debate. And several of the people he chose to mentor and support don’t inspire respect. Continue reading →