When Irving Kristol joined the new magazine Commentary, he distinguished himself from the other editors--Clement Greenberg, part-time then, Robert Warshow, and me. First, he had an interest in politics, real politics, electoral politics, and not just the politics of left-wing anti-Stalinists, mulling over what was living and what was dead in Marxism, the fate of socialism, the future of capitalism, communist influence in the intellectual world--no mean issues, but hardly ones to affect who won and who lost an election. So Irving discovered the wonderful political reporter and analyst Sam Lubell in the pages of The Saturday Evening Post, persuaded him to write for Commentary, and made me an enthusiast for his books, now hardly noted (although Sam Tanenhaus’s recently published The Death of Conservatism uses one of Lubell’s central theses as a guiding theme). None of the rest of us had ever read or noticed The Saturday Evening Post.