The Provocations of Martin Peretz.

• Author: Heilbrunn, Jacob
• Position: The Controversialist: Arguments with Everyone, Left Right and Center

The legendary editor shook up the political-media power axis. Was he a free-thinking iconoclast or an irredeemable bigot?

The art critic Harold Rosenberg once referred to the New York intellectuals as a herd of independent minds. It's not a verdict anyone would apply to Martin Peretz, the former publisher of The New Republic, which was founded in 1914. Peretz was the most influential intellectual impresario of the late twentieth century, a left-wing firebrand during the 1960s who ended up moving right but, unlike many of the neoconservatives, never abandoned the Democratic Party. Instead, he battled it from within.

After he acquired the venerable liberal publication for $380,000 in 1974, Peretz, an impassioned supporter of Israel and a foe of affirmative action, moved swiftly to reinvent it. He succeeded. By the early 1980s, TNR, as it was known to its staff and fans, became a hot number in Washington. It boasted some of the leading writers and editors in the business, including Michael Kinsley, Hendrik Hertzberg, and Leon Wieseltier, and attracted attention for its courageous--or, depending on your viewpoint, schizophrenic--stands, ranging from support for the Nicaraguan Contras to denunciations of Reagan administration domestic policy. Conservatives loved to hate it and liberals hated to love it. By the 1990s, the magazine could brag that it was required reading on Air Force One.

But as that decade wore on, the magazine began to attract attention for the wrong reasons--staff writer Stephen Glass, TNR's chief fact-checker, was outed as a fabulist, and writer Ruth Shalit exposed as a plagiarist. Next, the editors, consistent with their penchant for a hawkish foreign policy, embraced the George W. Bush administration's push for war in Iraq, while sneering at opposition to it. Readership plummeted. By 2010, when Harvard, where Peretz taught for decades, held a ceremony honoring a new research fund in his name, student protesters chased him through Harvard Yard, chanting that he was a racist. How did it all go wrong?

In his new memoir, The Controversialist, Peretz offers a gritty, propulsive, and fascinating account of his career. While Peretz may be known for his pugnacity, his memoir, it must be said, largely steers clear of cheap shots and tedious self-justifications. Instead, it carefully recounts his role in the rise of a Jewish intellectual movement that replaced an old and tired WASP establishment. What his memoir inadvertently makes...