William Kristol

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William "Bill" Kristol (born December 23, 1952 in New York City) is an American conservative pundit, inspired in part by the ideas of Leo Strauss.[1] He is the son of Irving Kristol, who is considered to be one of the founders of the neoconservative movement, and Gertrude Himmelfarb, a scholar of the Victorian era in literature.

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[edit] Early history

Kristol graduated in 1970 from The Collegiate School, a preparatory school for boys located in Manhattan. In 1973, he received a B.A. from Harvard College, graduating magna cum laude in three years. Later, in 1979, he received a Ph.D. in government, also from Harvard. During his first year of graduate school, Kristol was fellow conservative and also government doctoral candidate Alan Keyes' roommate. Many years later, in 1988, Kristol would run Keyes' unsuccessful U.S. Senate campaign against Paul Sarbanes in Maryland. After teaching political philosophy and American politics at the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, Kristol went to work in government in 1985, serving as chief of staff to Secretary of Education William Bennett during the Reagan Administration, and then as chief of staff to Vice President Dan Quayle under the first President Bush.

[edit] Political career

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[edit] Project for the Republican Future

Kristol first made his mark as leader of the Project for the Republican Future, a conservative think tank, and rose to fame as a conservative opinionmaker during the battle over the Clinton health care plan. In his first of what would become legendary strategy memos circulated among Republican policymakers, Kristol said the party should "kill", not amend or compromise on, the Clinton health care plan. In doing so, Kristol presented the first public document uniting Republicans behind total opposition to the reform plan. A later memo advocated the phrase There is no health care crisis, which Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole used in his response to Clinton's 1994 State of the Union address.

[edit] Weekly Standard

After the Republican sweep of both houses of Congress in 1994, arguably a result of the debacle over health care reform, Kristol established, along with neoconservative John Podhoretz and with financing from Rupert Murdoch, the conservative periodical The Weekly Standard. In 1997, he founded, with Robert Kagan, the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), a movement credited in part for some of the foreign policy decisions of the Bush administration as evidenced by their 1998 letter to US President Bill Clinton advocating military action in Iraq, to "protect our vital interests in the Gulf". He is also a member of the conservative think tank the American Enterprise Institute from which the Bush administration has borrowed over two dozen members to fill various government offices and panels. Kristol is currently chairman of PNAC and editor of The Weekly Standard.

[edit] George W. Bush

As were other neoconservatives, Kristol was a strong advocate of the Iraq war. In 2003, just as the Iraq War was starting, Kristol appeared on the National Public Radio show "Fresh Air" and made the following statement: "There's been a certain amount of pop sociology in America ... that the Shia can't get along with the Sunni and the Shia in Iraq just want to establish some kind of Islamic fundamentalist regime. There's almost no evidence of that at all. Iraq's always been very secular." [1] Some have harshly criticized Kristol for these comments; for example Al Franken, Alex Koppelman, and Harold Meyerson [2].

However, Kristol has not always fallen in line behind the Bush administration. In 2004, he wrote an op-ed strongly criticizing Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.[3] He was also the first of many conservatives to publicly oppose Bush's second U.S. Supreme Court nominee, Harriet Miers. He said of Miers: "I'm disappointed, depressed, and demoralized. [...] It is very hard to avoid the conclusion that President Bush flinched from a fight on constitutional philosophy. Miers is undoubtedly a decent and competent person. But her selection will unavoidably be judged as reflecting a combination of cronyism and capitulation on the part of the president."

[edit] 2006

He is currently a visiting professor at Harvard University, where he is teaching a course in the school's Government Department entitled "The Mirror of Princes" on the philosopher Xenophon. In addition to his role as a political contributor on FOX News, Kristol was for a time a semi-regular guest on the now cancelled World News Tonight on Sky News, appearing live from the US. Most recently he has been a vocal supporter of the Israeli attack on Lebanon, stating that the war is "our war too," referring to the United States. He continues to back the Iraq war, and favors a war with Iran.[2] Kristol is a patron of the British think tank the Henry Jackson Society, based at Cambridge.

[edit] Controversy and criticism

In 2005, Kristol caused controversy by praising President George W. Bush's second inaugural address without disclosing his role as a consultant to the writing of the speech. Kristol praised the speech highly in his role as a regular political contributor during FOX's coverage of the address, as well as in a Weekly Standard article, without disclosing his involvement in the speech either time.[3]

On October 3, 2006 at the University of Texas Kristol was heckled with statements and asked questions regarding the Project for the New American Century and being labeled names such as "the new Joseph Goebbels", "Mr. Traitor", "liar", and "thief". Several student were escorted out for violating the preset rules of the talk, which were a format of a talk and Q&A. A producer also incorrectly identified Kristol's father as a prominent communist, when in truth he gave up his Trotsky stance in 1945 and fought an American soldier. He also went on to say that the threat of war against Iran is the only option and confrontation is the only way.

[edit] Trivia

[edit] References

[edit] Footnotes

  1. ^ "Leo Strauss' Lasting Influence on U.S. Policy", National Public Radio, October 25, 2004. Retrieved on December 14, 2006. William Kristol is interviewed about Strauss' impact on US policy.
  2. ^ Kristol, William. "It's Our War, Bush should go to Jerusalem--and the U.S. should confront Iran", Weekly Standard, July 24, 2006. Retrieved on December 14, 2006.
  3. ^ "Kristol, Krauthammer lauded Bush inauguration speech without disclosing their role as consultants", Media Matters for America, January 24, 2005. Retrieved on December 14, 2006.

[edit] Books

  • Johnson, Haynes and David Broder, David. The System: the American way of politics at the breaking point. Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 1996.
  • Current Biography Yearbook, 1997.
  • Nina Easton, Gang of Five, Simon & Schuster, 2002.

[edit] Bibliography

[edit] External links

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