Many readers will remember what The New York Review of Books was like in the late 1960s and 1970s. It carried many thoughtful articles on a wide variety of literary and intellectual matters. It also promulgated a virulently anti-American species of (in Tom Wolfe’s perfect epithet) radical chic. Left-wingers like Stokely Carmichael, Noam Chomsky, Tom Hayden, Andrew Kopkind, Mary McCarthy, Jerry Rubin, and I. F. Stone contributed incendiary articles denouncing just about every aspect of American life. The nadir came in August 1967 when the Review published on its cover a large diagram instructing readers on the exact construction of a Molotov cocktail.

The Review never abandoned its programmatic left-wing bias. In the 1980s bitter and contemptuous articles about Ronald Reagan and Bush I were a regular feature; today the same sorts of things are directed at the younger Bush’s administration. Nevertheless, if the Re ...