Marty Peretz

Martin Peretz, who bought The New Republic in 1974, has today finally been forced out as Editor-in-Chief. His heiress wife divorced him a few years ago, so he doesn't have the kind of money to pour into the magazine as he once did. And, over the last year, during the Ground Zero Mosque brouhaha and the Arizona shooting freakout, Establishment opinion has crystallized around the idea that the Real Threat is not Muslims, but is instead the kind of people who object to Muslims, leaving Marty sounding so 2000s.

Hence, Peretz spends most of his time in Israel now, where he rails at the Black Hats who are taking over Israel demographically. (Marty, who has two kids, has certainly done more than could be personally expected of him for the secular side in the intra-Jewish demographic struggle.)

There have been two long recent profiles of Peretz:

Martin Peretz Is Not Sorry. About Anything. by Stephen Rodrick in the NYT

Peretz in Exile by Benjamin Wallace-Wells in New York

Gawker has an inconvenient question about these articles:

Why Won't Anyone Tell You that Marty Peretz Is Gay?

Well, that would raise questions about a long string of Peretz's bright young men, stretching through Andrew Sullivan all the way back to the 17-year-old Al Gore in 1965.

As I pointed out in VDARE.com in 2008 when Peretz's latest bright young man, Jamie Kirchik, was attacking Ron Paul for being making jokes about the 1992 South Central rioters:

This Peretz-Kirchick fiasco reminds me of one of the stranger stories of the 2000 election: Al Gore's claim that, when he was an undergraduate at Harvard, he and his wife inspired the bestselling 1970 novel Love Story. It was made into a huge hit movie starring Ryan O'Neal and Ali MacGraw in, according to Gore, the Al and Tipper roles.

In fact Love Story's author, Erich Segal, a Harvard professor of Greek and Latin literature, said that his hero Oliver, "the tough, macho guy who's a poet at heart," was not inspired by Gore, but by Gore's roommate, Tommy Lee Jones, the college football player who went on to win an Oscar in The Fugitive. According to Segal, only a bit of Oliver's character—the family baggage of being intimidated by a famous, domineering father—was drawn from the son of Senator Albert Gore Sr.

Yet, the former Vice President's assumption that Professor Segal must have been fascinated by his undergraduate self is understandable. Because at about the same time, another Harvard professor, Martin Peretz, was beginning a lifelong infatuation with Gore.

It all started in 1965 when Al was a 17-year-old freshman and Marty his 26-year-old political science professor. Bob Zelnick, Gore's biographer, wrote:

"Perhaps the most significant friendship Gore formed at Harvard was with his resident instructor, Martin Peretz …"

 

Of course, the depths of Peretz's passion can be exaggerated. After all, as late as 1968, Gore didn't make Peretz's all time Top Three list, according to radical muckraker Alexander Cockburn's book Al Gore: A User's Manual:

"By 1968 Peretz was telling the late Blair Clark that 'I have been in love only three times in my life. I was in love with my college roommate. I am in love with the state of Israel and I love Gene McCarthy.'"

Still, Peretz's feelings for Gore have certainly been enduring. In 2006, he endorsed Gore for President (for the third time, after 1988 and 2000), writing:

"Let me tell you a few words about the question as to whether Al Gore has changed. Actually, to me he is essentially the same young man I met in a Harvard freshman seminar 41 years ago…"

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer