The Civil War’s Inglorious Last Chapter

The Civil War’s Inglorious Last Chapter

Culture The Civil War’s Inglorious Last Chapter An October conference examined the legacy of the Siege of Petersburg, a grim episode in America’s “great single tragic event.” The late Gore Vidal once recounted how Norman Podhoretz, the neoconservative intellectual and longtime editor of Commentary, was flummoxed by Vidal’s persistent interest in the American Civil War, which to Podhoretz was “as remote and as irrelevant as the War of the Roses.…