The Johnstown native is working on a fictional book that is, in part, set against the backdrop of the May 31, 1889 flood. It tells the story of a young Slovak immigrant – a character based on his grandfather – who lived in the area at the time of the disaster. The plot then moves forward to the character's granddaughter working as a reporter in Europe, covering the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Read MorePublished by Brian C. Anderson in The Washington Times on December 4, 2013
Catholic theologian, social thinker, diplomat, political speechwriter, journalist, influencer of prime ministers and popes, author of dozens of important books — Michael Novak has lived an extraordinary public life. "Writing from Left to Right" is his entertaining and wise memoir of that engagement with his age, and of his movement across the political spectrum.
Born in 1933 to a working-class Slovak family in Johnstown, Pa., Mr. Novak describes two stories from his childhood that colored his later politics. The first is of listening with his father to a crackling radio broadcast in 1939, announcing Nazi Germany's invasion of Poland. "Study all you can about the Nazis and the communists," his father advised. "These will be the two movements that will shape the next forty years." The second is of his Uncles Johnnie and Emil. Both worked at Bethlehem Steel and both offered a supply of gruff common sense. The adult Mr. Novak's anti-totalitarianism and distrust of out-of-touch elites found a source in these early experiences.
"Writing from Left to Right" briefly chronicles Mr. Novak's dozen years as a seminarian and his initial efforts, after leaving religious life, to become a writer, including publishing a first novel, "The Tiber Was Silver," which sold 30,000 copies.
Another chapter tells of his graduate-student days at Harvard University, where a moving encounter with the Catholic existentialist Gabriel Marcel gave him a lifelong interest in the human "person," a being "able to reflect on her own past, approve of some parts of it, disapprove of others, and choose among various roads into the future." The Protestant thinker Reinhold Niebuhr, relentlessly warning about the unintended consequences of human action, became a second enduring influence from this period.
The memoir really takes off when Mr. Novak enters the political arena. He wrote speeches for Democratic stars Eugene McCarthy, Sargent Shriver, George McGovern and Bobby Kennedy, all of whom come off as decent and impressive men. A Stanford professor at the time, Mr. Novak received an invitation from Kennedy, then seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, to fly to Los Angeles to be with him as the California primary returns came in — the very night the candidate was fatally shot.
Five years earlier, Mr. Novak had been in Rome, covering the unfolding of Vatican II, when John F. Kennedy was assassinated. That night, he and his wife Karen would dine with JFK friend John Cogley and "The Other America" author Michael Harrington, trying to make sense of the horror.
As these names attest, the Michael Novak of the '60s was on the left. Several things began to push him right. One was religious. Mr. Novak sympathized with Vatican II's progressives, who wanted to renew the Catholic faith, which they felt had become too defensive and closed to new insights into the truth. Mr. Novak's early book "The Open Church" embodied this vision.
Mr. Novak grew troubled as Vatican II began to be interpreted as calling for a complete transformation of the faith, along the lines laid down by secular elites. Such an agenda was distant from the "probing" traditionalism of Vatican II's leading progressives, future popes Karol Wojtyla and Joseph Ratzinger, Mr. Novak believed, and, in his view, calamitously misguided.
By the early 1970s, those secular elites were rubbing Mr. Novak the wrong way in other ways, too, he recounts. "I had begun to notice the appearance of two lefts — one that included my whole family and what it represented, and the other a 'new' left, based on a suddenly emerging 'constituency of conscience,' no longer rooted among people who worked with their hands and backs."
Wealthy, self-satisfied, partisans of a new, more "sensitive" and relativistic morality, the new leftists looked down on Mr. Novak's "unmeltable ethnics" — the working-class, predominantly Catholic, and culturally conservative Americans of Eastern and Southern European descent who'd eventually become the Reagan Democrats. Mr. Novak rejected the new liberalism's cultural and political views, though he still considered himself a man of the left.
Mr. Novak's rightward drift was complete after he immersed himself in the study of political economy and came out a partisan of the free economy — albeit an economy molded by a morally serious culture and robust democratic political institutions. Joining a right-of-center think tank, the American Enterprise Institute, in 1978, where he would remain until his recent retirement (and where I worked for him for several years during the 1990s), Mr. Novak read and read Adam Smith, Friedrich Hayek, Max Weber, Alexis de Tocqueville and a vast literature of other social thinkers.
The research culminated in one of his most audacious books, 1982's "The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism," a powerful defense of democratic capitalist societies based on the very real goods they provided, including the rule of law, respect for the person and widespread prosperity. Margaret Thatcher and Poland's Solidarity leaders, among many others, would draw inspiration from it.
"Writing from Left to Right" covers lots more: Mr. Novak's conflicted views on the Vietnam War; his late-'60s run-in with left-wing campus lunacy at the experimental college of the State University of New York at Old Westbury; his stints as Ronald Reagan's ambassador to the U.N. Commission on Human Rights; his tireless efforts during the 1980s and 1990s to build a consensus for welfare reform and to find new approaches to help the poor; and his profound respect for Pope John Paul II, whose encyclical on the free society, "Centesimus Annus," he clearly influenced.
Throughout, Mr. Novak's tone is conciliatory. He draws warm portraits of allies, but he's also magnanimous toward political opponents. This marvelous political memoir deserves the widest possible readership.
Brian C. Anderson is editor of the Manhattan Institute's City Journal and author of "Democratic Capitalism and its Discontents" (Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2007) and "South Park Conservatives" (Regnery, 2005).
Copyright © 2016 The Washington Times, LLC.
Published by Mark Michalski on September 4, 2014 in Real Clear Religion
When Michael Novak was writing The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism, I was fortunate to have worked as his assistant. I still remember very vividly, when Michael would emphasize the need to think clearly. He liked to put a twist on Jacques Maritain's famous dictum: "you must distinguish in order to discern."
Michael's magnum opus was published in 1982 and quickly became a bestseller, and quite distinguished.
When he worked for political candidates, Michael coined some great phrases, or sound bites, such as: "enlightened self-interest" and "New Frontier." Working on an ethos of a modern, democratic capitalism, he has not only refined the concept, but he recognized the critical role of the entrepreneur, the concepts of risk and reward, ethics and trust (he claimed: "bad people would make bad capitalists").
He introduced first the positive notion of "enlightened self-interest, in contrast to that of Adam Smith's sheer or brute "self-interest." Also, reading all of Pope John Paul II's ideas contributed immensely to the final shape of his grand book. Novak always sought diversity of views and opinions. During his three decade-long tenure at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), he started monthly discussions on current socio-economic, cultural, and philosophical issues. He invited leading experts in their field. He liked to have an agora -- or a market place -- for new ideas that brought about great debates. These discussions provided fertile ground for his creative writing.
His most recent book, Writing from Left to Right: My Journey from Liberal to Conservative is more than an honest memoir -- it is a story of transformation. Michael journeyed from a radical left-wing socialist in the 1960s to an architect of neoconservative movement of the 1980s. Some might compare his biography to Thomas Merton's Seven Storey Mountain for its insights and spiritual values. In his vivid and splendid narrative, Novak takes hold of a turbulent economic and spiritual era in the United States in which Novak explores the complex events of the 20th century -- forging into the new third millennium. "At eighty, I look back over the events I have witnessed," Novak writes, "and I revisit the lessons I learned the hard way. Events and facts forced me to change my mind about ideas with which my education imbued me."
With great honesty, humor, and humility Michael Novak shares his fascinating stories of a long and active life. Novak's passion, gentle joy and zest for life is impressive. His biography proclaims that we all could and should discover in this life something deeper and divine, something wonderful, even in daily, ordinary events -- only after we become fully engaged in it.
Michael Novak has been a theologian, philanthropist, and activist throughout his long life. But, ultimately, he has remained a great writer, teacher, theologian, and philosopher. Through his experiences, his humble beginnings and sensitive, poetic soul, he describes and explains the socio-economic, political and cultural marvels of our contemporary world. He taught at America's best universities (Harvard, Stanford), worked for some of the most respected politicians (Kennedys, Reagan) and became close friends with the most charismatic leaders (Thatcher, John Paul II). He represented the country at Geneva and Bern peace negotiations with the Soviet Union, working on his guiding passions -- fighting poverty and advocating for human rights -- through writing on virtues of market economy and enlightened democratic capitalism. In his eloquent and enthusiastic memoir, one cannot help but see a man of powerful mind, moral courage, and strong convictions well worth adopting and emulating for a good life.
"My dream was to write about the philosophy, the theology of American culture -- and not because it was American, but because there was something different here and unique," Novak writes. "It belonged to the whole human race, but we were pioneering it."
Michael Novak entered academic life after 12 years of preparing for the priesthood. He left the seminary just months before his scheduled ordination. He moved to the more radical political left while teaching at Stanford University, where he was voted "the most influential professor." He came to Robert Kennedy's attention during his 1968 run for the presidency, and worked on Kennedy's campaign. "I loved working for the Kennedys, even though I didn't appreciate at the time the Kennedys' personal life. No one said anything in those days."
He left Stanford for a new Experimental College of the State University of New York on Long Island. It was there, among "some real whacko students and some real whacko faculty" that his political right turn began. "I was radical, but they were destructive," he explained. "I supported very strongly the War on Poverty," he said, "and then it just went belly up. Crime went up 600 percent. Marriages fell apart at unprecedented rates. Marriages didn't even form. And I thought, 'This is crazy I can't keep supporting that.' So I became more conservative."
Through intense debates, experience and study, he came to adopt conservative economics. After studying the "Austrian School" of economics (Friedrich von Hayek, J.A. Schumpeter, and C. Menger), he perceived that a free-growth economy benefited not only the entrepreneurs, but the general population. In the 1970s and '80s, he became a strong supply-sider and Ronald Reagan supporter. "It just seemed to me that the 'preferential option for the poor' was just a disguised way of saying more government funds to give to the poor and keep them dependent. Keep them like on a plantation. Keep them like Animal Farm."
Changing slowly from left to right, Novak points out how he came to see the essential truths of life -- fighting poverty, advocating for human rights -- as better served by an enlightened capitalism and by democratic politics than any alternative social order, especially a heavy hand of the state-run enterprise. His conversion cost him some friends, who remained on the Left.
Novak: "I witnessed with my own eyes the almost immediate results of the switch from Carter's economic policies to Reaganomics. Entrepreneurship not only expanded dramatically, it boomed. Reagan's incentive tax with business friendly regulatory regime gave rise to numerous small businesses, with employment soaring. The favorable climate suddenly propelled both creative innovations with the emergence of new, high technologies." Novak's influence and recognition rose as well. So much so that, although his impressive writing continued, and he took yet on another career, that of a diplomat, an ambassador, negotiating with Russians on behalf of President Reagan, and later also for President Clinton.
Writing as if to a very close friend, Michael Novak shows how Providence placed him in the middle of many crucial events of his time: a month in wartime Vietnam, the student riots of the 1960s, the Reagan revolution, the collapse of the Berlin Wall, Bill Clinton's welfare reform, and the struggles for human rights in Iraq and Afghanistan. He also spent fascinating times, with inspiring leaders like Sargent Shriver, Bobby Kennedy, George McGovern, Jack Kemp, Václav Havel, President Reagan, Lady Thatcher, and Pope John Paul II, who helped shape -- and reshape -- his political views.
Yet through it all, as Novak's sharply etched memoir shows, his focus on helping the poor and defending universal human rights remained constant. He gradually came to see building small businesses and free democracies as the only realistic way to build free societies. Without economic growth from the bottom up, democracies are not stable. Without protections for liberties of conscience and economic creativity, democracies will fail. Free societies need three liberties in one: economic liberty, political liberty, and liberty of spirit.
"The only way the poor will be lifted out of poverty is if they can start businesses that bring economic growth to the bottom," Novak argues. But culture, he writes, is more important than either politics or even economics. Culture, more than the hot-button issues of the day, is what touches every heart and stirs every soul. Especially in its moral and ethical dimensions, culture is what animates the decisions of many people. After all, is not the Creed but a profound cultural statement?
Novak invites readers to see life as it is and can only be seen after years of contemplation, reflection, and long cumulative experience. He invites us to examine life, to see the world anew, and share his delight in aging, with the wonders of growing in wisdom and accepting life's good and bad moments.
He concludes the book by describing the role he played in helping clarify certain points in the Pope John Paul II's encyclical, Centesimus Annus. "When it comes to life the critical thing," G.K. Chesterton said, "is whether you take things for granted or take them with gratitude." Michael's story of his fascinating journey of life -- epitomizes this Chestertonian attitude of gratitude and wonderment.
Perhaps this is why Michael Novak's writing is so wonderful. Throughout this warm, witty memoir, he comes across as the happy human being, a magnanimous man interested in truth. Searching for the best in people, acknowledging it without regard to political affiliation -- and he teaches us do the same.
Michael Novak's journey from left to right can help us find our own moral compass in an increasingly complex, global world.
Mark M. Michalski, PhD lectures on international marketing at the Catholic University of America and management and business ethics at the University of Maryland University College.
[audio http://bowyerbriefing.com/upload/novak_final.mp3] You can also listen HERE
Transcript part 1 "The Memoirs Of Michael Novak: How The Democratic Party Moved From 'Tough Center-Left' To 'Brie And Chablis' (3/17/14)
Transcript part 2: "'Never Envy The Rich': What Michael Novak Can Teach Thomas Piketty About Income Equality" (5/09/14)
Transcript part 3: "Former Kennedy Advisor Says Obama Reminiscent Of Nixon" (5/22/14)
Transcript part 4: "How Margaret Thatcher Put Sexist Socialist President Of France In His Place" (6/09/14)
Transcript part 5: "Scholar Who Taught John Paul II To Appreciate Capitalism Worries About Pope Francis" (6/03/14)
Published at Forbes.com
One of the most fascinating and engaging political stories that I have read in years is the recently published book, Writing from Left to Right: My Journey from Liberal to Conservative (Image: New York, 2013). This unique memoir is written by Roman Catholic scholar Michael Novak. I found Novak’s memoir so deeply interesting, for both Christian and personal reasons, that I decided to write several blogs on the ideas of Novak, a foremost intellectual among serious social thinkers over the last four decades. -- John Armstrong, ACT3 Network
Published by Pete Socks at Patheos.com on January 5, 2014
PETE: In your latest book Writing from Left to Right you detail your personal experiences with some of the most important people and events in the past few decades. What thoughts came to mind as you wrote this book and pondered this?
MICHAEL NOVAK: My daughter Jana, the writer, urged me some years back, as my 80th birthday lay not too far ahead, that I should begin writing down a lot of the things that only I knew, about the episodes and adventures of my life. She even promised me that she would finish what I left unfinished, should a stroke or something stop me. She wisely advised me not to do any re-writing at first, just push steadily forward, so that what she wouldn’t otherwise know would be in her hands. This encouragement made the big job seem doable. I guess I got nearly 700 double-spaced pages done, the ending in sight, when I began serious re-writing. My first drafts always seem good to me as I saved them in the computer at night. But in daylight they look just awful. They need a lot of re-arranging and polishing, and above all cutting and tightening. I have had so many unexpected and exciting twists in my life that I began really to enjoy re-living them. Such wonderful, good people called me to meet them.
PETE: You have written many books but this is your first personal memoir. Why now?
MICHAEL NOVAK: I was almost 80 when I started work on it – well, 75ish. I have never promised myself another year to live. I have always thought I would die younger than 60 (maybe that’s why I wrote so fast and so much in my career, trying to get it all in before the buzzer). Besides, for old men reminiscing is a sweet, sweet pastime.
In volume I, as I call it, my editor wisely suggested I concentrate on the political and economic learning curve of my life, as more understandable and “objective” than my more personal and familial and religious story. Thus, I had to do a tremendous amount of cutting – more than a couple of hundred pages – to get volume I down to its current size. Some of my favorite parts – about my parents, my twelve years studying to become a priest of Holy Cross, meeting Karen and finding her the joy and axis of my life, our children and their sufferings and triumphs, my battles to engage the Catholic faith in public intellectual life, while making myself a radioactive nuisance to those “social justice” Catholics who (I thought) missed the great story of Catholic social and economic history – namely, how in America one of the poorest of Catholic bodies in the world, penniless immigrants (the “wretched refuse of the earth”) became in less than eighty years one of the most affluent and faithful.
PETE: What do you hope readers of your book Writing from Left to Right take away from it?
MICHAEL NOVAK: Maybe some will enjoy re-living the intellectual struggles of the last fifty years. Maybe others will enjoy discovering how many battles were won in the years since 1939 – and also how many things are now worse than then. The adventure of the Catholic faith in history is always tumultuous, and fraught with defeats and victories during the same historical period.
PETE: I would like to focus a bit on your experience at Vatican II. For those who have not read your book yet, you were there for the second session and your book The Open Church developed from it. How pivotal do you feel Vatican II was for the Church and do you feel the full effects of it have been seen or is there still more to come?
MICHAEL NOVAK: I was also at Vatican II for the Preparatory Session in its early part, and for the first weeks of the Third Session, while Karen stayed on for the full Third Session, working on her six etchings expressing visually each movement of T.S. Eliot’s “Ash Wednesday.” (At Ave Maria University in 2013, we had a reading of each stanza, with a brief commentary on each and then on Karen’s visual interpretation of it – a lovely event.)
We found the Second Session the most important, the spine of the whole. Karen enjoyed the whole experience as much as I did, the intensity of it, the triumph of the thing. The concentrated arguments, the bursts of news, the delays and the breakthroughs, the new things and the old. Much of this is expressed in my week-by-week account, The Open Church. Some other vivid detail and additional perspective fifty years later are offered in Writing from Left to Right. There will be more, from a more personal side, in volume II of WLR, if there is one.
One argument Karen and I used to justify our trip to Vatican II, just three months after our wedding, is that councils of the Church are held on average once every hundred years, and many of them have repercussions and transformative energies that last for centuries. We will be living with the energies from Vatican II for generations. Energies both good and flowing from “the smoke of Satan” (Paul VI).
PETE: In you impressive career you have had the opportunity to spend some time with a number of people that influenced the world as we know it. Of those, who most made an impact and why?
MICHAEL NOVAK: I love every one of those I worked with, from 1960 until the very end. I especially enjoyed meeting with Bobby Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy (a frequent guest at our home, and eloquent reciter by the hour of the lesser known odes of W.B. Yeats – it felt like listening to an after-dinner bard of long ago). Sargent Shriver was so deep a Catholic of faith and goodness that I often thought of him as one of those hidden saints unrecognized among us. George McGovern was also a really decent and brave man, an airman who faced immense dangers night after night over Germany in World War II. Bill Clinton seemed to me like the most talented “politico” of all American history, and jovial, and large-minded, even with all his faults and scandals.
But undoubtedly the three who affected me and changed me most importantly were that blessed threesome of the 20th century, Prime Minister Thatcher, President Reagan, and Pope John Paul II. I was very, very lucky to be asked to join them at significant points. In the memoir, those three get most attention, including the work on human rights that President Reagan assigned me. In the economics of joy, growth, opportunity, and the actual lifting of the poor, Jack Kemp and Steve Forbes brought me into many public policy “battles of ideas.”
PETE: This book covers your journey from liberal to conservative. Realizing multiple influences impacted your change in ideology, what were some of the greatest contributors to this?
MICHAEL NOVAK: The changes of direction by the political and cultural left from about 1968 on. The immense damage done to the family and young adults and children by the way the “War on Poverty” was carried out, especially in the moral and cultural sphere – even while great gains were made in reforms to help the elderly, who were much better off thirty years later than they had been in, say, 1960. The loss of will on the left to resist fighting for the advance of human rights and democracy in outlying vulnerable nations. I wanted to be loyal to John F. Kennedy’s “pay any price, bear any burden.” Many of my former companions started wilting away. They had some good reasons for doing this, while I thought (and think) that they were weakening just in the climactic moments.
I felt as if my Party, the Democratic Party, was pulling away from me, and going in new directions I didn’t always want to go. Suddenly, under Reagan some of my Republican friends seemed to become more internationalist, more eager fighters for human rights and democracy around the world, and much more practical about the economics of how actually to help the poor to rise, in dignity, self-worth, and working their way out of material indigence.
It seems odd, but I did think that the ground under my own feet stayed relatively constant, while the two political movements Left and Right virtually changed sides. By 2001, in the aftermath of the acts of terror on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and the flight taken down by American resistance in the air over Pennsylvania, I felt again the spirit articulated so well by JFK. Year by year, my Democratic friends again wilted away. Good people all, but disappointing.
In fact, of course, I did learn a lot from year to year, and watched my old ways of thinking fail, met new ways that struck me as more correct than my old ones, and tried to follow the lessons of our public experience. And I deepened my mind in studies of poverty and welfare, and human rights abroad, and the ideas and religious principles behind the American founding.
PETE: In your career, how has your Catholic faith influenced you?
MICHAEL NOVAK: I began my studies for the priesthood at the age of 14, entering high school at the University of Notre Dame. From very early on I committed my life, in my own location, to “instaurare omnia in Christo,” as St Paul puts it. In my young mind I translated this as “to re-found all things in Christ,” to penetrate every profession and environment in this world with the yeast of the gospels. I prepared myself for twelve years for a priesthood of doing this. Then, after a very dark night of two years or more at the end, I came to see (and at last so did my spiritual director and religious superiors) that the Lord wished me to labor in the lay world. I felt a vocation to the missions – not overseas, but in the secular world around us. I felt called to work outside Catholic institutions, at the heart and center of American secular intellectual life, in the university and in journalism, and in study of foundational political and economic ideas. Naturally, all this was too big for me, and I failed a lot. None of it would have made any sense if I had not had that underlying commitment to the Lord – the Lord here and now, in this country, in the battles of my generation – or rather three generations, for we inherit the struggles of the preceding and find ourselves drawn into the rapidly coming fresh battles of the next.
PETE: Time for my signature ending question. This is a blog about books, what is on your bookshelf to read?
MICHAEL NOVAK: At 80, I find that I cannot read for as many hours as before. Still, books keep flowing into my home in a stream and I am quite weak-willed about ordering others online – in tune with all the main passion of my past. Right now, a re-reading of Bridehead Revisted. Charles Murray’s Coming Apart, on the newly shifted class will dividing American society. A new collection of what appear to be brilliant and provocative chapters on Muslim perceptions of the Crusades, Sir Walter Scott’s Crusades and Other Fantasies by Ian Warraq. The superbly tender new biography of her two parents, one Jewish, one Catholic, during the agonies of the Holocaust, I Kiss Your Hands Many Times by Marianne Szegedy-Maszak.
Finally, since I am to teach a course on the philosophy of John Henry Newman next spring, I have a solid list of re-readings to do.
___________________________________________________________________________________________________
Michael Novak received the 1994 Templeton Prize, an award that has also gone to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Mother Teresa, and Charles Taylor. He has taught at Harvard and Stanford and has held academic chairs at Syracuse University and Notre Dame, and now holds the Jewett Chair in Religion, Philosophy, and Public Policy at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C. You can learn more about him and his work at his website http://michaelnovak.net
Published at Patheos.com by Pete Socks on January 1, 2014
Personal memoirs can be an engaging read if you have interest in a particular person. Some, however, do more than just tell you about the life of the writer. Sometimes they pull back the curtains on a particular period of time and relate details about historical events. Such is the case with Michael Novak’s latest book Writing from Left to Right : My Journey from Liberal to Conservative.
For those those unfamiliar with Michael Novak, he is an accomplished author of 45+ books as well as a journalist appearing in many notable magazines such as National Review. His career really took off with his book The Open Church, published in 1964 detailing the second session of Vatican II.
In Writing from Left to Right, Michael shares his experiences and thoughts on some of the major events that have occurred in the past 50+ years. The book on its surface is what the the title suggests, his personal story about his journey from liberal to conservative. Along the way Michael sheds some light on the people and events that caused him to switch his ideological views.
The book begins with the influence of his father, than moving on to his 12 years of study for the priesthood which he ultimately determined was not his calling and his time in Harvard. He discusses influences from his days there that would leave an impression on him forever. Gabriel Marcel taught him that “When someones ceases being just an “it” to you and appears, even for a moment, as a “thou”, someone already known to you in the slightest way, you have stepped from the realm of objects to the realm of persons.” Marcel among other influential persons at Harvard would plant the seeds for Michael’s future humanitarian efforts. Perhaps the greatest contribution Harvard made on his life was that is where he met his future wife, Karen.
Michael would next spend time at Vatican II from September to December 1963. While there, his work would result in the book The Open Church. He brings to light in Writing from Left to Right the struggle at Vatican II between the established “conservative” wing and the “progressive” wing. Essentially, as he puts it, the progressives were more traditionalist than the conservatives. Karol Wotyla and Joseph Ratzinger led this school of thought. It is telling that they would one day both become Pope. Another thing Michael points out is how humbling Vatican II was for bishops around the world. “We found it a bit comical to watch all these important bishops, princes of the Church in their own dioceses, used to being chauffeured in shiny black cars, now forced to climb in and out of crowded school buses with everybody else.”
A point he made about the early 60′s really struck me. As Vatican II progressed there was a general feeling of hope of a new era dawning for the Church. The same thought was going on in the United States with the presidency of John F. Kennedy. It was quite interesting how he managed to tie both these events together to illustrate not just a nation but a world that held great expectations for the period in time they were in.
At it’s heart this book is a political memoir. Michael moves on to talk about writing speeches for Eugene McCarthy, Sargent Shriver, George McGovern and Bobby Kennedy. Michael praises each as being a great man and his admiration for them all shines through.
By this time Michael was a professor at Stanford. The assassinations of JFK and RFK, and Martin Luther King are perhaps the most recollected events of the 60′s. Michael had a personal encounter with the the loss of Bobby Kennedy. He received an invitation from Kennedy, who at the time was seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, to fly to Los Angeles to be with him as the California primary returns came in (ultimately he did not go) — the very night the candidate was fatally shot. “An awful summer. An awful year. An awful five years.” as Michael states.
Perhaps what most shifted Michael from left to right was the economic debates of the 1970′s. This is when he realized the spending of Keynesian liberalism was not working and he came forward publicly as a supporter of capitalism. What follows I paraphrase from the book:
“I first realized I was a capitalist when all my friends began publicly declaring that they were socialists. Night after night I tried to persuade myself of the coherence of their logic. Nothing worked. Practical discussions seemed beyond the point. Finally I realized that socialism is not a political proposal, not an economic plan. Socialism is the residue of Judeo-Christian faith, without religion. It is a belief in the goodness of the human race and paradise on earth. That’s when I discovered I believe in sin. I’m for capitalism, modified and made intelligent and public-spirited, because it makes the world free for sinners. It allows human beings to do pretty much what they will.”
I found the closing chapters of this book to be the most interesting but perhaps that it because I am of the generation raised in the late 70′s and early 80′s. These chapters are spent dwelling on what Michael Novak has the called “The Big Three”: Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Pope John Paul II. You will read of Reagan’s appointment of Michael as the US Ambassador to the UN Commission of Human Rights. Admittedly Michael knew nothing of human rights law but it was a position he accepted and ultimately flourished at. As much as Michael has been influenced by those around him it must be said that he had just as much influence on them. From a story about his meeting with Margaret Thatcher: “She had turned from the hall to go back into her office. “Here, I want you to see this – it’s your book. All marked up.” She riffled through the book to show me underlinings and marginal notations on a great many pages. “I told you I was reading you. And I want you to believe it. There! You can see for yourself.”
Michael Novak has led quite a life. He has witnessed and played a part in many of the events of the past fifty years. His humbleness in all of this is one thing that shines through in every page of this book. It is also evident that his Catholic faith has played a major part in his role in everything he has done. This review only touches upon a few of the events and the people he discusses in these pages. I would encourage anyone interested at all in not only the political scene of recent years as well as those who have a desire to know more about events that have occurred in our lifetimes, to read this book.
I received a copy of the book for this review from Image Catholic Books. You can read more about the book at their website here.
Published by Noemie Emery in the Washington Examiner on December 31, 2013 Beginnings and ends of the years are for counting our blessings, and this year we have two -- Michael Novak and Charles Krauthammer -- who have given us books, Writing from Left to Right: My Journey from Liberal to Conservative and Things That Matter: Three Decades of Passions, Pastimes and Politics, both of which are about things that do matter, and both of which track the same starboard swing.
Each came to politics from a different profession (the priesthood and medicine), each lost a brave brother (to murder and cancer) and each began his career as a liberal writing for Democrats, only to end as a conscience for the modern conservative movement, a transition detailed in these works.
Now 80, Novak, who calls himself a "conservative temperament pushed to the left" by the Vietnam War and governmental mendacity, worked in 1968 for Robert F. Kennedy; in 1970 and 1972 for Sargent Shriver, and through him George McGovern, whom he admired more than the campaign run around him, which he found "disturbing" and a sign of the trouble to come.
In 1976, he supported Scoop Jackson, as did Charles Krauthammer, about 15 years younger, who a few years later would leave medicine for The New Republic (then the best political magazine in the country), leave TNR to write speeches for Walter F. Mondale, and then, when Mondale lost office, for TNR again.
He began his new gig the day Reagan took office, and, describing himself as a "Cold War liberal," spent his time there trying to infuse the spirit of Truman and Kennedy into the post-Vietnam War party, which he gave up as a lost cause soon after, loyally refusing to vote against Mondale but secretly hoping that Reagan would win.
He was four years behind Novak, who in 1980 attended a dinner of defense-minded Democrats at which Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan asked who was thinking of voting for Reagan, and nearly everyone raised their hands. Krauthammer and Novak put little trust in our "vacation from history" from 1989-2001, when we seemed to be without enemies, understanding that it was anti-historic and would certainly end, as it did.
"How do you go from Walter Mondale to Fox News?" Krauthammer says people ask him, and his answer is, "I was young once."
What he means is that liberals' plans, which work well on paper, seldom work well when put into practice, which tends to emerge over time. Krauthammer says he succumbed to "empirical evidence," meaning the change between Carter and Reagan, which Novak describes in detail: "The facts of America's rapid revival forced me to change," Novak tells us, from the Democrats' nostrums of welfare and handouts to the conservatives' goals of new jobs.
He saw the social good brought by the small business explosion, the technology boom, spurred by the capital gains tax cuts, the tide that, as Kennedy promised, lifted all boats. The numbers of the poor fell off and incomes rose, among them those of married black families. Social goals came about through sound fiscal policies. This wasn't supposed to grow out of conservative theories. But then it did.
Democrats, Novak says, speak more often and better of the needs of the poor, but since the mid-1960s, their efforts to help have frequently been counterproductive and the conservative methods of job growth plus the efforts of civil society have worked better. Small-state conservatism began with Goldwater, who lost, and didn't begin to win big nationwide until it won over those who supported and voted for Johnson, who gave up on the liberals' means of enactment, but didn't give up on their goals. Listening to these former liberals, now when it matters, just might help it win big again.
Noemie Emery, a Washington Examiner columnist, is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and author of "Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families."
Noemie Emery, a Washington Examiner columnist, is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and author of "Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families."
Throughout, Mr. Novak’s tone is conciliatory. He draws warm portraits of allies, but he’s also magnanimous toward political opponents. This marvelous political memoir deserves the widest possible readership.
Published by Brian C. Anderson in The Washington Times on December 4, 2013
Catholic theologian, social thinker, diplomat, political speechwriter, journalist, influencer of prime ministers and popes, author of dozens of important books — Michael Novak has lived an extraordinary public life. “Writing from Left to Right” is his entertaining and wise memoir of that engagement with his age, and of his movement across the political spectrum.
Born in 1933 to a working-class Slovak family in Johnstown, Pa., Mr. Novak describes two stories from his childhood that colored his later politics. The first is of listening with his father to a crackling radio broadcast in 1939, announcing Nazi Germany’s invasion of Poland. “Study all you can about the Nazis and the communists,” his father advised. “These will be the two movements that will shape the next forty years.” The second is of his Uncles Johnnie and Emil. Both worked at Bethlehem Steel and both offered a supply of gruff common sense. The adult Mr. Novak’s anti-totalitarianism and distrust of out-of-touch elites found a source in these early experiences.
“Writing from Left to Right” briefly chronicles Mr. Novak’s dozen years as a seminarian and his initial efforts, after leaving religious life, to become a writer, including publishing a first novel, “The Tiber Was Silver,” which sold 30,000 copies.
Another chapter tells of his graduate-student days at Harvard University, where a moving encounter with the Catholic existentialist Gabriel Marcel gave him a lifelong interest in the human “person,” a being “able to reflect on her own past, approve of some parts of it, disapprove of others, and choose among various roads into the future.” The Protestant thinker Reinhold Niebuhr, relentlessly warning about the unintended consequences of human action, became a second enduring influence from this period.
The memoir really takes off when Mr. Novak enters the political arena. He wrote speeches for Democratic stars Eugene McCarthy, Sargent Shriver, George McGovern and Bobby Kennedy, all of whom come off as decent and impressive men. A Stanford professor at the time, Mr. Novak received an invitation from Kennedy, then seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, to fly to Los Angeles to be with him as the California primary returns came in — the very night the candidate was fatally shot.
Five years earlier, Mr. Novak had been in Rome, covering the unfolding of Vatican II, when John F. Kennedy was assassinated. That night, he and his wife Karen would dine with JFK friend John Cogley and “The Other America” author Michael Harrington, trying to make sense of the horror.
As these names attest, the Michael Novak of the ‘60s was on the left. Several things began to push him right. One was religious. Mr. Novak sympathized with Vatican II’s progressives, who wanted to renew the Catholic faith, which they felt had become too defensive and closed to new insights into the truth. Mr. Novak’s early book “The Open Church” embodied this vision.
Mr. Novak grew troubled as Vatican II began to be interpreted as calling for a complete transformation of the faith, along the lines laid down by secular elites. Such an agenda was distant from the “probing” traditionalism of Vatican II’s leading progressives, future popes Karol Wojtyla and Joseph Ratzinger, Mr. Novak believed, and, in his view, calamitously misguided.
By the early 1970s, those secular elites were rubbing Mr. Novak the wrong way in other ways, too, he recounts. “I had begun to notice the appearance of two lefts — one that included my whole family and what it represented, and the other a ‘new’ left, based on a suddenly emerging ‘constituency of conscience,’ no longer rooted among people who worked with their hands and backs.”
Wealthy, self-satisfied, partisans of a new, more “sensitive” and relativistic morality, the new leftists looked down on Mr. Novak’s “unmeltable ethnics” — the working-class, predominantly Catholic, and culturally conservative Americans of Eastern and Southern European descent who’d eventually become the Reagan Democrats. Mr. Novak rejected the new liberalism’s cultural and political views, though he still considered himself a man of the left.
Mr. Novak’s rightward drift was complete after he immersed himself in the study of political economy and came out a partisan of the free economy — albeit an economy molded by a morally serious culture and robust democratic political institutions. Joining a right-of-center think tank, the American Enterprise Institute, in 1978, where he would remain until his recent retirement (and where I worked for him for several years during the 1990s), Mr. Novak read and read Adam Smith, Friedrich Hayek, Max Weber, Alexis de Tocqueville and a vast literature of other social thinkers.
The research culminated in one of his most audacious books, 1982’s “The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism,” a powerful defense of democratic capitalist societies based on the very real goods they provided, including the rule of law, respect for the person and widespread prosperity. Margaret Thatcher and Poland’s Solidarity leaders, among many others, would draw inspiration from it.
“Writing from Left to Right” covers lots more: Mr. Novak’s conflicted views on the Vietnam War; his late-‘60s run-in with left-wing campus lunacy at the experimental college of the State University of New York at Old Westbury; his stints as Ronald Reagan’s ambassador to the U.N. Commission on Human Rights; his tireless efforts during the 1980s and 1990s to build a consensus for welfare reform and to find new approaches to help the poor; and his profound respect for Pope John Paul II, whose encyclical on the free society, “Centesimus Annus,” he clearly influenced.
Throughout, Mr. Novak’s tone is conciliatory. He draws warm portraits of allies, but he’s also magnanimous toward political opponents. This marvelous political memoir deserves the widest possible readership.
Brian C. Anderson is editor of the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal and author of “Democratic Capitalism and its Discontents” (Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2007) and “South Park Conservatives” (Regnery, 2005).
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