A PASSION FOR TRUTH

Nearly 70 columns from the New York Post’s late editorial page editor raise a conservative voice against perceived excesses of the progressive left. Podhoretz (Hell of a Ride, 1993), who succeeded Breindel at the Post, selected the essays, wrote the preface, and added commentary to each chapter. The book also contains tributes to Breindel, who died at 42 from Hodgkin’s disease in 1997, by political notables such as Henry Kissinger and New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Breindel actually worked for Moynihan, a Democrat, and we learn that this Harvard graduate and friend of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., began as a Democrat with neoconservative leanings. Breindel’s move further right in the mid-’80s was prompted by a variety of indignations on display here: the Soviet Union’s campaigns against Jews and Israel, and the alleged leftist coddling of Communists (masked as “liberals” ), criminals (treated as victims), and minority racists (like Louis Farrakhan). The columns” titles alone recall the combative tone favored during Breindel’s 11 years at the editorial page helm: “Nazis of the Left,” “Smearing Clarence Thomas,” “The Rosenbergs and Their Apologists,” “Kristallnacht in Brooklyn,” “White Guilt,” “Filling a Quota,” “The Shame of the United Nations,” and “What Jesse Jackson Didn—t Say.” Podhoretz sees Breindel’s obsessions as fitting for the child of Holocaust survivors who saw the totalitarian Soviets and their American apologists as the new Nazis and feared a progressive world where (white) victims (like the Central Park jogger) are blamed, and victimizers (like the shot mugger who successfully sued for $4.3 million) are lionized. One needn—t accept overstatements like “McCathyism is practiced most enthusiastically, and most efficiently, by those who dwell in the precincts of the Left” to agree with Podhoretz that Breindel offers a bracing counterpoint to the PC police. The collection ends with a tribute from New Republic editor Martin Peretz. Whether one finds Breindel’s pervasive anti-Communism neurotically obsessive or fiercely patriotic, his editorials make for powerful, historic reading.