When my mother died, the doctors pumped my father so full of tranquilizers and mood elevators that he lumbered through the funeral like a representative of the living dead.  He had awakened one morning to discover his wife dead beside him, and, since he was a heart patient, the doctors were afraid that he could not survive the shock.  In a real sense, he did not.  Neither the pills that took away his humanity nor the surgeries that turned him schizophrenic could prevent his body from complying with the decision his spirit had made on the day his wife died.

My mother’s funeral was the usual modern farce.  My parents had liked to travel, and, although they still had old friends in Charleston, where she was to be buried, they were old friends, by and large, with whom she had lost touch.  The priest, whom my father had known as a ballplayer, had never met my mother, but that did not keep him from descanting on what a “byudeeful, byudeeful” person she was.

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Norman Podhoretz, Doris Day, and Arnold Palmer were among the recipients of the Presidential Medal of Freedom on June 23, and it is by no means easy to say who deserves the award the most—or, for that matter, the least.  Most people probably were not aware that Miss Day was still alive but were happy to learn she was.  The same cannot necessarily be said of Mr. Podhoretz.

The Pod, as he is not very affectionately known to his critics, is, of course one of several neo-conservative “godfathers,” a term especially resonant when speaking of the mafia of Zionists, Social Democrats, defected Trotskyists, Straussian eggheads, and any number of other apparatchiks of one description or another who compose the “neoconservative movement.”  Mr. Podhoretz, as editor of Commentary from 1960 to 1995, was one of the movement’s godfathers not only because he presided over its formation in his magazine but through his vast family connections.

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