Member In Brief   
Midge Decter

"The United States is the leading – indeed at the moment the only – major world power. It continues, as it always has done, to play this role reluctantly. Thus each international crisis is made to seem an entirely new and separate – and surprising – issue to deal with. Yet whether we take up the burden of our power willingly or reluctantly, it will remain our inescapable burden still. If we fail to act, that too will be an action. It is time for Americans to understand this and to be grateful that it is they, and not some monstrous regime, who have been chosen by Providence to play this role."

 		   Midge Decter
    


Biography   

 

 

 

Midge Decter is an author and editor whose essays and reviews, mostly in the field of social criticism, have over the past four decades appeared in a number of periodicals and newspapers, including Harper’s, The Atlantic, The New York Times, Newsday, USA Today, The Los Angeles Times, The American Spectator, First Things, The National Review, The New Republic, and The Weekly Standard.  She is a regular and frequent contributor to Commentary. 

She has published five books: The Liberated Woman and Other Americans, a collection of essays; an account of the founding of the Women’s Liberation movement titled The New Chastity; the story of the radicalization of the “kids” of the 1960s titled  Liberal Parents, Radical Children; a memoir titled An Old Wife’s Tale: My Seven Decades in Love and War; and, in 2003, Rumsfeld: A Personal Portrait.

As an editor, she has served in a variety of capacities, beginning with the Hudson Institute and CBS Legacy Books.  She has been the executive editor of Harper’s, literary editor of the Saturday Review, and a senior editor at Basic Books.

For ten years, from 1980 to 1990, she served as Executive Director of the Committee for the Free World, and from 1990 to 1995 she was a Distinguished Fellow of the Institute on Religion and Public Life.  She is now a free-lance author.

She is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Heritage Foundation, the board of the Center for Security Policy, the board of the Institute on Religion and Public Life, the Board of the Philadelphia Society,  and is chairman of the Clare Booth Luce Fund.

In 2003 she was awarded a National Humanities Medal.

She lectures widely on a variety of subjects from foreign policy to the family.  

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