The day in late 1981 on which Hilton Kramer decided to proceed with The New Criterion was one of the saddest of my life.
Earlier that year, my father had passed away. Not long after, my father’s parents, both in their nineties, died within the same week. Dressed in black, I came directly from the last funeral at the cemetery on Long Island to a meeting with Hilton that could not be postponed.
I was representing the Smith Richardson Foundation. Also there, more suitably attired, were Michael S. Joyce, executive director of the John M. Olin Foundation, and Irving Kristol, in his customary capacity as an intellectual matchmaker.
Along with other donors, the two foundations had given large sums to many of the organizations and scholars whose works were beginning to bear fruit in the policies of the recently elected Reagan administration. But they also understood what Daniel Patrick Moynihan would call the “central conservative truth”: that culture, not politics, “determines the success of a society.”
Yet, what to do about it? Fixing the economy seemed easy by comparison.
Enter Hilton Kramer. He was no conservative—meaning, in those days, traditionalist—in his artistic sensibilities. And while he had voted for Reagan, he believed that culture needed to be rescued from politics, not submerged more deeply.
To that end, he and others (including, importantly, Samuel Lipman) had the idea for a new magazine that would accept modernism in the arts, but reject the left-wing political
