RIP Midge Decter
My first thought on hearing that Midge Decter had died was mild surprise that she had still been alive. And yet it turns out she wasn’t all that old, just 94 – an age that sounds increasingly young to me. I’d not known all that much about her anyway, except that she was one of the original old-fashioned neocons and Norman Podhoretz’s wife and John Podhoretz’s mother.
I’d picked up a book of her essays in the 1980s. I think it was on a remainder pile, and it had some sort of title that intrigued me (I no longer remember what it was). I read it thinking it was pretty good, and only later learned that she’d been a political changer (a term I didn’t use at the time) and was on the right. Little did I know I’d follow suit in less than two decades.
In one of several essays in memory of Decter that I’ve read in the last few days, this statement of hers caught my eye and made me chuckle at its aptness:
The 1980 election was a watershed moment for Decter. She and Podhoretz supported Reagan, whom they had first met in 1978. By now, Decter had broken with the Left, and though she did not love the Republican Party, she recognized that it was more aligned with her worldview. “There comes a time when you need to join the side you’re on,” she said.
There comes a time when you need to join the side you’re on – that’s the way it finally becomes for left-to-right changers (neither Decter nor I were ever really on what you’d call the left, but I’ve used “left” as a convenient shorthand here). Many people cannot make that switch, however, as I wrote in this post about political affiliation as a sort of “birthmark.”
Decter also said this:
In 1983, when some of the old crowd tried to revive the CDM in advance of the 1984 elections, she was not interested: “We tried to wrest the Democratic Party back from the left, and we failed.”
Boy, did they ever.
RIP Midge Decter.
[NOTE: I was curious but unable to find anything about Decter’s opinion on Trump, but I recall that her husband was for him and her son mostly against him.]
I can’t be certain yet believe I first became aware of M. Decter as a questioner on Firing Line, in conversation with what Buckley guest I likewise can’t say for sure. I do recollect taking an instant liking to her, however. May she rest in peace.
I found most everything I read by her engaging. Although her subjects intersected with political life, she was an observer of social life armed with what liberal education she’d received up until age twenty, with her experience as an editor in a publishing house, and especially with her long experience as a wife and mother. Her daughter Naomi has some of these qualities in her writing. She was still doing editorial work as recently as 2013. She had 66 years with Norman Podhoretz and lived to see 13 of her great-grandchildren. A great life.
How memory is fragile: I have memory of Midge Decter being Secretary of HEW during the Carter administration. I even remember a Doonsbury cartoon referencing her in a conversation with Carter. This was back when Doonsbury was required reading.
None of this happened. But I remember it.
Thank you for explaining early on who Midge Decter was.
Other bloggers I have read simply launched into a eulogy for her, without clearly explaining that. A writer something. Podhoretz something.
I have memory of Midge Decter being Secretary of HEW during the Carter administration. I even remember a Doonsbury cartoon referencing her in a conversation with Carter.
She never in her life held a position wherein she would have had more than a few people working under her. She never held a public sector position. There were two occupants of that cabinet position during the Carter Administration and neither one had a biography resembling hers in any distinguishing way.
If you can remember the 60s and 70s you weren’t really there.
That would have been joe califano at hew or patricia harris at hhs
Yeah, Art. I looked it up myself. I don’t know why I remember it. But holy cow, eyewitness and all that.
The Doonesbury series was a riff on all the cabinet secretaries coming to Carter with what they wanted to order out of catalogs. Zbignew Brzezinski was begging to spend a little more on a “global vision.” Defense was willing to trade bombers for naval cruisers.
The one I (don’t) remember had Midge Decter cutting in on another cabinet member’s time to ask Carter, “Sir, can you approve this HEW order for coat hangers?”
Carter replies, “That’s not funny, Midge!”
“I couldn’t agree more, sir.”
I read as much commentary as national review when did neocons lose the plot?
Carter was basically the zombie version of mcgovern
I’ve got it. You’re remembering Midge Costanza, who was for a time a White House aide with the title ‘Assistant to the President for Public Liaison’. She worked in the PR apparat and was supposed to sell the administration to pressure groups. Elizabeth Dole held this job for a time in the Reagan Administration. In short order, Midge Costanza was weeks behind in her work. She also whipped up a small demo among dames on the White House staff to protest some remark Carter had made in passing in a press conference. Her position was reconfigured into something along the lines of ‘the president’s advisor on women’s issues’ and she was consigned to a White House basement office where no one talked to her. She resigned toward the end of 1978 and went back home.
Midge Costanza was born in my grandfather’s home town and lived most of her life in mine. She was primarily employed as a secretary in local real estate firms. She never married and had no children. Her hobby was the Democratic Party. From 1954 to the time she moved out on the west coast, she was a happy campaign hack, circulating petitions and passing out literature and what not. She did not have much of a head for policy and I’ll wager you that if you carefully questioned her you’d discover that what she thought about issues was derivative of the kultursmog in the Democratic Party. She was involved in one or another civic group and won election to the city council in 1973. In 1975, she fell for Jimmy Carter and was his pointman in much of the state, putting delegate slates together and organizing petition campaigns to get him on the ballot. That’s what landed her on the White House staff. The trouble was that she was Ms. Peter Principle and a bad fit for her job. There were knowledgeable Democrats in Rochester who could have warned the Carter people that Midge wasn’t suitable and one suspects that in fact they did warn them.
A couple of years after she returned to Rochester, she got some sort of job offer on the west coast and left town, spending the rest of her life in Los Angeles and San Diego. (She was the spinster daughter but evidently her siblings were planning on taking care of her elderly parents). In another piece of evidence that higher education by default is a patronage mill for the Democratic Party and associated NGOs, two state universities actually set up a grant money vent pipe with her name on it, that had some vague mission to encourage the young to be public nuisances. She lived a very ordinary and somewhat truncated life up to age 50, failed spectacularly at something outside her usual box, then has a series of odd employments (among them a stint as an aide to Shirley MacClaine), culminating with being honored by two of California’s research universities; she’d never had any tertiary schooling herself.
The idea of Midge Costanza running a cabinet department is a hoot. The seven other Democrats on the Rochester City Council were loath to chose her to preside over council meetings.
Dang, Art. I’m sure you’re right. It all makes sense now. Women’s issues = coathangers.
I just spent a couple of hours going through 44 year old Doonesbury archives.
You’ve saved me from a dementia exam.
But holee crap you know a lot about her.
“A lifelong champion of gay and women’s rights.”
Sounds like she played for the other team, so to speak. But back in those days no one made a big deal out of it although I imagine everyone in Rochester and DC knew.
Sounds like she played for the other team, so to speak. But back in those days no one made a big deal out of it although I imagine everyone in Rochester and DC knew.
No. No. No. She was an Italian cultural-Catholic spinster, the sibling tagged to take care of the parents in their old age. If she had any lesbian affiliations it was very much on the QT. Cannot say about her time in southern California, but she never made a public point of it in Rochester or in San Diego if there was any point to be made. (She lived in DC for less than two years).
There were two prominent politicians in Rochester in her era who were homosexuals. In one case it was known to people active in local politics, known to the state police, and known to people like my mother who were friends with active Republicans; he left the political world ca. 1960 and died ca. 1975. It was known because he was a pederast and had been arrested more than once, but never prosecuted. In the other case, it was merely suspected because he never married and did not date; he left town after being voted out of office in 1974, relocating to NoVa. He died of AIDS in 1990.
When Costanza got involved in local politics, the Democratic Party was organized in ward clubs and was fairly ineffective on the local level. However, both the culture and the demographics of the city were changing and they managed to win control of the city government in 1961, which meant patronage for the ward heelers. It wasn’t an issue-oriented organization back then. Costanza herself never had a public sector job for one reason or another, bar the elective office she held for three years. The Democratic Party was her club and she was a manifestation of its changing culture. If she’d landed in the Ladies Auxilliary of the Knights of Columbus, she’d have had a different set of views, less ardently held.
But holee crap you know a lot about her.
Rochester born and bred. Anyone reading the papers in Rochester ca. 1975 remembers her.
I remember the Dems jumping the shark in Ohio when ultraliberal Howie Metzenbaum called John Glenn a bum that never held down a job. Then the national Dems found Glenn to unpalatable in 1984.
Yes, Norman Podhoretz has been a vocal Trump supporter. I wish he could talk some sense into his son.
Another appreciation…
“Midge Decter, Force for Good”—
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/midge-decter-force-for-good/
I found a remark of Midge Decter that’s quite valuable, in that it gives you some sense of what to keep in mind in trying to understand modern man:
“the lives we lead are in respect of ease and comfort and confidence and good health simply unprecedented. Never have so many, even the poor among us, had so much. We are disoriented. We do not know whether to laugh or to cry; we do not know whom or what to thank; and we cannot think of what there might be to want next. And so we giggle and preen and complain and forget our debts and keep on seeking for things (and sometimes finding them). In short, there is no merely social cure for what ails us.”