Russell Jacoby acquired his credentials by writing a book called "The Last Intellectuals," which bemoaned the vanishing "public intellectual." This was a label he gave to intellectuals who worked outside the academy, wrote lucid prose and influenced the public debate. The very title of his book was an expression of progressive arrogance. What Jacoby really mourned was the disappearance of the left-wing public intellectual, a direct result of the conquest of American liberal arts faculties by the political left and its distribution of academic perks and privileges to comrades among the politically correct.

Jacoby was well aware that a consequence of this takeover was that almost all contemporary conservative intellectuals were (of necessity) public intellectuals. (Thus the familiar ad hominem trope of leftist discourse which attacks them as "bought" by their sponsors. Jacoby cannot mention Kramer's magazine the New Criterion, without adding that it is "funded by a conservative foundation." Of course the Nation for which Jacoby regularly writes is funded by rich leftists and leftist foundations. So what?)

The reason conservative intellectuals gravitated to think tanks like Heritage, American Enterprise and Hoover, and to magazines like Commentary and the New Criterion was because of their de facto blacklisting from the leftist academy. It was precisely the public influence of these conservative intellectuals that Jacoby was lamenting. Yet the pull of the academy's privilege and security is so great that even Jacoby has succumbed to its lure. Since writing his assault on what he once derided as the "obscurantist" university, Jacoby has given up his own independent existence, swallowed his radical principles and accepted an appointment from his political comrades in the history department at UCLA.

While lack of self-reflection and self-irony are indispensable characteristics of the left in general, Jacoby's attack on Podhoretz and Kramer is extraordinary in its abuse of them. Not only was his attack directed at two intellectuals who, for political reasons, were denied a platform in the Times, but they were also denied the very academic patronage that Jacoby himself enjoyed. "What can he mean?" Indeed.

Jacoby's attack was actually one of four non-fiction reviews the Times featured on its cover. Three of these features were of conservative books, all of which were attacked from the left. The fourth was a review of two books on Clinton, both written by leftists, both praised by reviewers from the left.

This issue of the Times happened to be for May 9, 1999, but it could have been any date. In December 1997, the same book review ran the Times' 100 best books of the year. The list was made up of excerpts from previous Times reviews, and most were a familiar sampling of the literary left, and even of the true believing left (Saul Landau, Martin Duberman, Robert Scheer, and Ellen Willis for example). Among all of them, however, the only reviewer I could detect with the slightest claim to a conservative profile was Walter Lacquer, an academic who had no obvious association with conservative politics, in the way the aforementioned leftists were connected to radical politics.

I learned how the 100 best books were picked shortly after the issue appeared, when I had lunch with Steve Wasserman, the newly appointed editor of the review. I knew Wasserman as a former Berkeley radical and protégé of the Times' contributing editor Bob Scheer who, in the days of the "revolution," was promoting the party line of Kim Il Sung and plotting to overthrow the American empire as a member of the red family. Scheer's politics were still to the left even of the socialist rants of Senator Bullworth in the film he made a cameo appearance in courtesy of friend Warren Beatty. After the 1960s, Scheer had ingratiated himself with Hollywood's bolsheviks, married a top editor at the Los Angeles Times and become a figure of influence in the Times' hierarchy, all of which enabled him to secure Wasserman his job.

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