AN impeachment. An air war in the Balkans. Terror strikes on two U.S. embassies in Africa and an American naval vessel in Yemen. A disputed presidential election. The first act of war on American soil by a foreign enemy since 1812, with a death toll twice that of Pearl Harbor.
A war in Afghanistan. A war in Iraq. A presidential election with voter participation at historic levels. A tsunami that killed a quarter-million people in South Asia. A hurricane that submerged a great American city.
These have been the signal events of the decade during which I have been granted the rare and precious privilege of offering my perspective to New York Post readers.
I began my tenure in these pages in November 1997, during the same week that saw Rudolph Giuliani awarded a second term as mayor by the voters of this city. A few months later came eyebrow-raising word of the existence of a young woman once in the employ of William Jefferson Clinton named Monica Lewinsky.
News has run at a frantic gallop ever since, through events unimaginable and unforeseeable and unthinkable. And yet here we are on the cusp of a national election year – and the names on everyone’s lips are Giuliani and Hillary Clinton, as they were eight years ago when they were readying to face each other in a Senate race before Rudy’s cancer intervened.
Things change and things do not change.
9/11 seemed like a bolt out of the blue to most of us, but that is because America somehow forgot that eight years earlier the same buildings in New York were targeted for destruction by Islamist terrorists – and that hundreds died in al Qaeda attacks on American interests abroad in the interim.
Partisan rage here at home remains constant, even though the focus of it has shifted from the Baby Boomer Democrat in the White House (born in 1946) to the Baby Boomer Republican in the White House (born in 1946).
Republicans and conservatives who harnessed the power of talk radio to create a populist groundswell against Bill Clinton have given way to Democrats and leftists who’ve harnessed the power of the Web to rally against George W. Bush.
The word “liberal,” used as a pejorative, was guaranteed to turn a book into a bestseller in the 1990s so long as it was linked to an ominous photo of one or another Clinton. These days the bestselling pejorative is “Right,” and the horror-movie images of the Clintons have been replaced by the demonic Bush and the diabolical Cheney.
As the events of the ’90s flowed into the new millennium, it seemed as though each one that came along was sure to be the high-water mark for news in our time.
Could anything top the year of Lewinsky, with the Starr Report’s prurient narrative in the middle and a Senate trial of the president of the United States? Could there ever be a moment as unprecedented?
There would be another comparably unprecedented moment – the 36 days following Election Night 2000, when this country really had no idea who would serve as its next president. The Supreme Court decision that ended the 36 days offered only a conclusion, not a resolution.
The calm that followed in the first eight months of 2001 appears portentous in retrospect, but at the time it seemed to suggest a new quiet had descended on American politics and American life. But then, as George W. Bush said on Sept. 20 of that year before Congress and the American people, “came a day of fire.”
The attack on the United States and everything that has followed from it inaugurated a new era in our history. There is no consensus on what defines this era. For some of us, this is the era of a new existential struggle between the forces of political and individual freedom and the forces of ideological and theological chaos. For others, it is a moment of American overreach.
For those others, the era can be brought to a close with the conclusion of the Bush administration and the installation of a president whose views on the world struggle differ markedly from the current president’s.
I heartily wish it were true that we could be delivered from the dangers threatening us through the noble agency of a political transition here in the United States – that we could simply blame it on Bush and be done with it. But that is a false hope, and it proceeds from a false premise. That false premise is that we are fighting a war we have chosen to fight – rather than a war that has chosen us.
This is my final column as a member of the staff of this newspaper – the last of more than a thousand pieces I have written for the New York Post. It has been an unmitigated joy to occupy a front-row seat for some unexpected miracles, foremost among them the salvation and revitalization of my beloved native city.
And it has been a humbling honor to have played a small part, as a newspaper columnist, in writing what someone once called “history’s first draft” of 10 of the most important years in the history of this nation.
jpodhoretz@gmail.com
John Podhoretz is leaving The Post to become editorial director of Commentary magazine.