A formidable intellect and personality whose effective work to strengthen resolve against powerful threats to core values will be missed.
In 1986, as Michael S. Joyce was just beginning his presidency of Milwaukee’s newly reconstituted Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation after the sale of the city’s Allen-Bradley Company, one of the foundation’s first big funded projects was a significant conference at Milwaukee’s Pfister Hotel put together by the neoconservative Committee for the Free World (CFW).
CFW was founded by Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz and Midge Decter five years earlier. Bradley supported both the CFW conference in particular and its general activities. Among others, the John M. Olin Foundation, from which Joyce came to Bradley, supported both, as well—and each supported Commentary, too.
The Milwaukee conference focused on many various anti-communist efforts around the world and the U.S.’s then-proposed Strategic Defense Initiative specifically. More generally, it considered ways in which to strengthen Western resolve, among both intellectuals and policymakers, against what was then the threat of Soviet Communist power to democratic values.
Other than Podhoretz, notable speakers and attendees included his fellow conservative intellectual Irving Kristol, Harvard Sovietologist Richard Pipes, Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle, and Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams.
It was not the normal sort of event held at Milwaukee’s Pfister, if I may say so as a lifelong local resident. I was proud to be from Milwaukee and newly on the program staff of Bradley—which an increasing number were coming to see would not, under Joyce, be the normal sort of philanthropy in America, either.
Joyce very much liked Podhoretz and Kristol and relied upon their thinking, which helped anchor and shape Bradley’s grantmaking for decades to come. Once proudly of the left themselves, Podhoretz and Kristol had the moral standing and substantial courage to so intelligently react against what they saw as its disdain for America and ordinary, everyday Americans beginning in the tempestuous 1960s.
Joyce would often cite, as Barton Swaim did in The Wall Street Journal earlier this week, Podhoretz’s summary of his own view of contemptuous intellectuals during a 2002 American Enterprise Institute speech—in which Podhoretz fondly recalls a line uttered by an aunt of Saul Bellow. Following a passionate clash about ideology at her own table between Bellow, the future Nobel laureate for literature, and radical friends from The University of Chicago, the aunt said: “Smart, smart, smart. … Stupid.”
Bradley’s grant program sought to bring more resources and structure to bear against that contempt on the part of distant elites, abroad and here at home in our own nation. Under the formidable Podhoretz, Commentary offered near-constant heterodox commentary against those elites, in a medium with which they were familiar.
We’re seeing a continuing reaction against elites and that which they’ve wrought in America, of course—including in and through philanthropy, to which we at The Giving Review try to pay heed—and we’ve benefited from Podhoretz’s insights in recent years about what to make of and how to navigate current tempests in politics overall and within conservatism.
His effective work to strengthen resolve against powerful threats to core values will be missed, and it must be remembered.
