Before his sudden death in March 1997 at the age of forty-two, Eric Breindel has already done more--and suffered more--than many people twice his age. At his funeral his eulogists made up a who's who of power and influence: Mayor Ed Koch, Governor George Pataki, Norman Podhoretz, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Henry Kissinger, Rupert Murdoch, and Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who introduces this volume.
Breindel was a star early. He wrote editorials for the New Republic during his early years at Harvard College, where he was editorial chairman if the Harvard Crimson and graduated magna cum laude. He received graduate degrees from the London School of Economics and Harvard Law School before he was twenty-five--and all this despite a series of injuries and physical maladies that kept him in constant pain.
Caring deeply about politics--at the time he was a Democrat with neoconservative views on foreign policy--Breindel moved to Washington in 1983 and went to work for Daniel Patrick Moynihan on the Senate Intelligence Committee staff. At thirty he returned to journalism and was hired to run the New York Post's editorial and op-ed pages, also writing a weekly column called "Agendas." Over the next eleven years, in more than five hundred columns, Breindel came back relentlessly and passionately to only three topics: Communism, Israel and the fate of the Jews, and the fall and rise of New York City. All three were intimately connected for Breindel, the child of Holocaust survivors who made a new life for themselves in the United States.
In A Passion for Truth, John Podhoretz, Breindel's friend, colleague, and successor as the Post's editorial page editor, has selected sixty-nine of the "Agendas" columns, grouped them by major theme, and introduced and commented on them.
These collected columns, which show Breidel at his most intellectually, politically, and emotionally engaged, bring a special richness of insight, analysis, and emotion to some of our most important and compelling issues.
