For someone with an Ann Coulter blurb on his book cover, Ramesh Ponnuru '95 is surprisingly soft-spoken.
While Ponnuru — a senior editor at the National Review, frequent newspaper contributor and conservative talking head — might be more circumspect and cerebral than the average culture warrior, his words pack no less a punch.
In his new book, "The Party of Death: The Democrats, the Media, the Courts, and the Disregard for Human Life," a work that has landed Ponnuru recent guest spots on "The Daily Show" and "The Colbert Report," he takes aim at abortion, embryonic stem cell research, euthanasia and the American Left.
"The party of death started with abortion," he writes, "but its sickle has gone from threatening the unborn, to the elderly, to the disabled; it has swept from the maternity ward to the cloning laboratory to a generalized disregard for 'inconvenient' human life."
The book, unsurprisingly, has turned Ponnuru into a darling of the right and a nuisance for the left. As a former outspoken student and managing editor of a conservative campus magazine, though, he is no stranger to controversy.
"Fame and anonymity both have their attractions," he said in interview with The Daily Princetonian. "I took my nephew to a Chuck E. Cheese for his birthday and got interrogated about my position on the Iraq war. But things haven't reached the point where I have to wear dark sunglasses indoors."
Earlier this year, Ponnuru, who currently lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife and 16-month-old daughter, got approximately 13-and-a-half minutes of fame when he sparred with Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert on their respective shows.
"I enjoyed the Colbert show because Colbert's shtick doesn't allow him to be more adversarial," he said. "He has to say basically a right wing thing and then all you have to do is say that's not quite what you meant."
"Jon Stewart, meanwhile, has an extremely liberal Manhattan audience and he [was] coming at me with a little bit of an inquisitorial style and ended up doing most of the talking," he added.
Though the Comedy Central shows were tougher than previous programs Ponnuru had appeared on, he knew what he was getting himself into.
"You know the reason I went on those shows is I figured if one percent of the audience consists of people who would be interested in my book but never heard of it then I think it's worth it," he said. "I wasn't looking to win the crowd over."
From The Sentinel to National Review
Ponnuru grew up in Kansas City, Mo., in a family where medicine was the default career option. His parents were pediatricians, both his brothers and their wives are doctors and most of his uncles, aunts and cousins also went into medicine.
"I guess I am the token black sheep of the family, but I never felt a great deal of pressure to become a physician," he said. "In many Indian-American families it was just a template that you could easily follow."
When Ponnuru first arrived at the University, he was more libertarian in his views. Finding the College Republican ideology at the time unappealing, he joined Princeton Pro-Life, Whig-Clio, Princeton Voice in Action — which brought mostly conservative speakers to campus — and, most notably, The Sentinel, a now-defunct conservative campus magazine.
"I would say that when I was an undergrad, the political climate on campus was kind of apathetic liberalism and any political ideas people had were the same ones the professors had," Ponnuru said. "There just wasn't much interest. And Princeton — at least at the time, and for quite some time I think — has always been stylistically less bohemian than other campuses, so apathy and stylistic conformism was confused for conservatism."
Bryan Bradford '96 first met Ponnuru at a recruitment meeting for The Sentinel, where the latter was serving as managing editor. When it came time for Ponnuru to speak, he described his summer working on a campaign in Washington, D.C.
"It was amazing listening to him," Bradford said. "I had never heard anyone in my life who was that politically knowledgeable and so articulate."
Bradford joined the magazine and became close friends with Ponnuru. They were roommates in Washington, D.C., after college and Bradford served as best man at Ponnuru's wedding. He described Ponnuru as having a very different sort of tenacity.
"If he was sitting in an eating club and someone makes a lot of political comments, he's not going to stand up and argue, because he knows that he's not in that kind of setting to change the guy's mind," Bradford said. "But, he would go home and write an article about it and try to promote the issue in a different way ... He definitely is bold, but in a journalistic way and an intellectual way."
A hard-hitting thesis
Though it was written over a decade ago, politics professor Robert George said he remembers Punnuru's history thesis exactly, describing it as "superb."
The thesis, which was focused on an amicus curiae brief filed by 281 historians in the Webster v. Reproductive Health Services Supreme Court case regarding abortion. In it, Ponnuru argued that the brief was based on a serious misrepresentation of fact in that it contradicted the previously published scholarship of many of the signatories of the brief. This suggested that the brief's inconsistencies were not innocent mistakes and were fundamentally dishonest, George described.
"Ramesh wrote this incredible, especially for an undergraduate, incredibly good critique of what had gone on here, exposing the falsity of many of the claims and proving that the claims contradicted in some cases the public scholarship of people who had signed onto the claims," said George, who advised Ponnuru on the project. "It was the kind of work one expects from a young professor, and here he was not even in grad school yet and taking on some of the biggest names in the field of history."
Some of the signatories of the brief had connections to the University and were even members of the faculty, making Ponnuru's thesis choice that much bolder.
"It was very stressful for Ramesh," Bradford said. "Of course, it made him research and work all the harder so the document was probably one of the top 10 theses that came out that year in terms of how thorough and well-developed it was. He realized that it was for a different audience and that it had to be absolutely perfect."
Ponnuru's end product was so esteemed that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas asked for the full bound copy after reading an abbreviated version Ponnuru wrote for the National Review.
Ponnuru interned at the National Review the summer before his senior year and started working in its Washington Bureau about a month after graduation. He was accepted to law school but deferred for two years before deciding that he didn't want to go at all.
An agitator is born
Ponnuru may have impressed his professors, but he was not afraid to take them on in class.
"I certainly remember him arguing with me in precept," George said. "The way I conduct my precepts you never know what I will be arguing for or against. Of course, outside of class, people know what I really believe, but in the classroom I will take any side, the side not defended as well as it should. I'll defend that side as vigorously as I can. He would certainly not hesitate to get into a wrestling match with me and would always hold up his side very well."
"I'm very proud that he was my student. He's a brilliant young man, not only a person of the highest intellectual gifts but also one of integrity and personal rectitude," George said. "He is not afraid to criticize his own side ... He's extremely fair-minded."
Ponnuru lived in Rockefeller College his first two years and was later a member of Quadrangle Club. German professor Michael Jennings, at the time a master at Rockefeller College, remembered Ponnuru as a nice, engaging young man. They often had hours of conversations about political and cultural matters.
"He was obviously a very bright, very engaged young intellectual," Jennings said. "And since we disagreed on almost every political issue we discussed we had some very interesting conversations. That was the kind of conversation you'd want to have with any undergraduate, it's unfortunate that faculty don't have more conversations of that sort with undergraduates who are as intellectually engaging as Ramesh was."
Though Ponnuru impressed his professors and peers academically, he did admit to having his "fair share of evenings on the Street."
"Ramesh is a great guy to have a few drinks with," Bradford said, "And we certainly did that quite a few times at Princeton."
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