Above: Fox News commentator and Weekly Standard contributing editor John Podhoretz

From Ann Louise Bardach’s “Moonstruck: The Reverend and his Newspaper.” (Article canned from Vanity Fair in 1992 due to lawsuit jitters, but appears in the new book Killed: Great Journalism Too Hot Too Print.)

Notably among the [Washington Times's] first staffers were the children of conservative luminaries, a group dubbed the “mini-neocons.” They included John Podhoretz, whose parents Norman Podhoretz and Midge Dexter are veritable conservative institutions, Liz Kristol, Irving’s daughter, Danny Wattenberg, son of Times columnist Ben, and Dawn Weyrich, daughter of conservative icon, Paul Weyrich.

Podhoretz says he had little patience with colleagues who complained about the Church owners, who, he says stayed clear of the editorial side “99 percent of the time. There was exceptional freedom at the paper, but the price of working there was that you sometimes had to carry water for a madman.”

Podhoretz spent time with the “madman” on four separate occasions, including the July party when Moon spoke for forty-five minutes.

[...]

Podhoretz describes his decision to leave the Times as a “personal one which I will not discuss.” However, some of his colleagues say that he was deeply troubled upon his return from an Alaskan fishing trip he took with Moon last August. Moon used the occasion, say sources, to expound on his “Zionist conspiracy theories” and what Podhoretz perceived to be undiluted anti-Semitism. Indeed, some of Moon’s teachings contend that Jews have “suffered four thousand years of punishment for killing Christ.”