In Woody Allen's movie, Annie Hall, Woody observes that two magazines, Dissent and Commentary, have merged, resulting in a new magazine called Dysentery.

It was an implausible idea. Dissent represented a particular view of American political culture. Commentary not only represented a different view, it helped change that political culture. It did so because it was led by Norman Podhoretz, who changed commentary because he had changed.

Norman Podhoretz grew up in a poor Brooklyn family where Yiddish was more common than English and then moved to the relatively un-Yiddish world of intellectual Manhattan. He got a scholarship to Columbia University even though its quota for Jews was a mere 17 percent. He then went to the entirely non-Yiddish world of Cambridge University, where he became, as he had been at Columbia, one of its most distinguished students.

But achieving these successes was nothing as compared to surviving the political and moral hazards of "The Family," that contentious group of writers in Manhattan each one of whom devoted his or her life to justifying their variety of leftist politics as against that of rival leftists.

It was as a part of that world that Norman became editor of Commentary magazine. There he found that he had to reconcile his own intellectual liberalism with the nastier--Norman later said "snarling"--politics of the New Left. It was no contest. The New Left lost, and not long thereafter the old left lost as well.

Perhaps the change might be attributed to Norman's time in the army. As a pitiful young soldier trying to endure the rigors of basic training at Fort Dix, he noticed that the platoon sergeants were remarkable men: "tough, erect, competent, and . . . physically strong." Norman knew he was smart, but he could not do what these men did. And then he realized: he had gone overnight from being a contributor to a magazine published by The Family to an exhausted and inept soldier, but there was never a chance that the good soldiers around him would ever write for the Partisan Review. "How come," Norman later wrote, "I had to go from there to here, when they never have to go from here to there?"

He ends his book My Love Affair with America with this secular version of an ancient Jewish hymn of thanksgiving: This nation gave to him the English language, and not content with that went on to admit him into a great university that his parents could not have afforded, and not content with that gave him a fellowship to study in England, and not content with that allowed him to become the editor of a great magazine, and not content with that allowed him to use that magazine for ten years to attack almost everything about America, and not content with that asked for no apology when he changed and defended the country with which he had fallen in love. And not content with that saw to it that he was awarded the Francis Boyer Award of the American Enterprise Institute.

Ladies and gentlemen, Norman Podhoretz.

James Q. Wilson is the chairman of the Council of Academic Advisers at AEI.