Bill Kristol

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William Kristol

Born December 23, 1952 (1952-12-23) (age 55)
Flag of the United States New York City
Occupation Magazine Publisher, Author
Spouse Susan Scheinberg
Children 3

William Kristol (born December 23, 1952 in New York City) is an American political analyst and commentator. He is the founder and editor of the political magazine The Weekly Standard, a regular commentator on the Fox News Channel, and an Op-Ed columnist for the New York Times.

Kristol is associated with a number of conservatively aligned think tanks: he cofounded the neoconservative Project for the New American Century (PNAC) in 1997 with Robert Kagan, he is a member of the board of trustees for the free-market Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, and he is a member of the Policy Advisory Board for the neoconservative Ethics and Public Policy Center. Kristol has also been an attendee at Bilderberg Group conferences.

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[edit] Biography

Kristol was born to Irving Kristol, one of the founders of the neoconservative movement, and Gertrude Himmelfarb, a scholar of Victorian era literature. He graduated in 1970 from The Collegiate School, a preparatory school for boys located in Manhattan.

In 1973, Kristol received an A.B. from Harvard, graduating magna cum laude in three years. He received a Ph.D. in government, also from Harvard, in 1979. During his first year of graduate school, Kristol shared a room with a fellow government doctoral candidate, Alan Keyes, whose unsuccessful 1988 Maryland Senatorial campaign against Paul Sarbanes Kristol would later run in.

Kristol is married to Susan Scheinberg.

[edit] Career

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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 Bush Administration. The New Republic dubbed Kristol "Dan Quayle's brain" upon being appointed the Vice President's chief of staff.

He served as chairman of the Project for the Republican Future from 1993 to 1994, and as the director of the Bradley Project at the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation in Milwaukee in 1993. 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 opinion maker during the battle over the Clinton health care plan.

In the 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. The success of the Clinton proposal, he warned, would “re-legitimize middle-class dependence for ‘security’ on government spending and regulation,” and “revive ... the Democrats, as the generous protector of middle-class interests.” Kristol's memo immediately became important in uniting Republicans behind total opposition to Clinton's 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.

In 1994, after Republicans gained a majority in the House and began to institute the Contract with America, Kristol said, "The fact that government is no longer going to be so generous with taxpayers' money may be Scrooge-like, but it strikes me as rather responsible behavior. For too many years, some liberals have felt they were doing good by generously spending taxpayers' money. Now Americans, want to take a much harder look at what really does good and what does harm."[1]

He currently serves as a foreign policy advisor to Senator John McCain's presidential campaign.[2]

[edit] Media commentator

After the Republican sweep of both houses of Congress in 1994, Kristol established, along with conservative John Podhoretz and with financing from Rupert Murdoch, the conservative periodical The Weekly Standard. Kristol is currently editor of The Weekly Standard.

He is currently a visiting professor at Harvard University, where he is teaching a course in the school's Government Department with Professor Harvey Mansfield entitled "The Mirror of Princes" on Xenophon, a Greek philosopher and soldier known for his writings on the history of his own times, the sayings of Socrates, and the life of Greece. Kristol also taught a course entitled "Can America Be Governed?" at the Kennedy School of Government. 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. He is also a patron of the British think tank the Henry Jackson Society, based at the University of Cambridge.

Kristol is interviewed in Why We Fight, a 2005 documentary film by Eugene Jarecki on the military-industrial complex in the modern United States.

On December 29, 2007, the New York Times announced that Kristol would write a weekly column for its Op-Ed page beginning on January 7, 2008.[3] He had previously worked as a columnist for Time during 2007.[4]

[edit] Political views

Kristol was "perhaps the most outspoken supporter of the Iraq War".[5] 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."[6]

However, Kristol has not always fallen in line behind the Bush administration, and has on occasion criticized George W. Bush for not being conservative enough. In 2004, he wrote an op-ed strongly criticizing Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.[7] 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."

He has also 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 imposing sanctions on Iran.[8]

[edit] Criticism

  • In 2005, the liberal organization Media Matters criticized Kristol for 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 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.[9]
  • On January 2, 2007, David Corn of The Nation, posted a list of Kristol's pre-Iraq war statements "about the justification for the war, the costs of the war, the planning for the war, and the consequences of the war."[10] Corn concluded that "Kristol displayed little judgment or expertise ... [I]n an effectively functioning market of opinion-trading, Kristol's views would be relegated to the bargain basement."
  • On March 17, 2008, Kristol was widely criticized for poor journalism due to his reliance upon an unreliable news source. On August 9, 2007, Newsmax freelance reporter, Jim Davis, reported that Barack Obama was in attendance on July 22, 2007 during a controversial sermon giving by the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr. at Trinity United Church of Christ in South Chicago, Obama's place of worship.[11] The claim that Obama was in attendance for this particular sermon was repeated by Newsmax as fact again on March 16, 2008.[12] Kristol relied upon the erroneous NewsMax articles in his op-ed article in the New York Times on March 17, 2008.[13] This prompted the following retraction and apology by Kristol later in the day, "In this column, I cite a report that Sen. Obama had attended services at Trinity Church on July 22, 2007. The Obama campaign has provided information showing that Sen. Obama did not attend Trinity that day. I regret the error."[14]
  • On January 28, 2008, The Daily Show host Jon Stewart once quipped "Oh Bill Kristol, are you ever right?", alluding to Kristol's many inaccurate predictions about American domestic and foreign policy, and the Iraq war in particular.[15]

[edit] References

  1. ^ Lacayo, Richard. "Down on the Downtrodden", Time Magazine, December 19, 1994. Retrieved on 2007-07-22. 
  2. ^ Strobel, William. "What would President McCain's foreign policy be?", McClatchy Washington Bureau, 2008-02-08. Retrieved on 2008-02-10. 
  3. ^ Kristol, William. "The Times Adds an Op-Ed Columnist", New York Times, December 28, 2007. Retrieved on 2007-12-31. 
  4. ^ Koblin, John. "Kristol, Krauthammer Are Out of Time", New York Observer, December 18, 2007. Retrieved on 2008-01-16. 
  5. ^ Dana Milbank, Homo Politicus, Chapter 12, pg 254
  6. ^ William Kristol : NPR
  7. ^ The Defense Secretary We Have (washingtonpost.com)
  8. ^ 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 2006-12-14. 
  9. ^ "Kristol, Krauthammer lauded Bush inauguration speech without disclosing their role as consultants", Media Matters for America, January 24, 2005. Retrieved on 2006-12-14. 
  10. ^ "Kristol Clear at Time", The Nation, January 1, 2007. Retrieved on 2007-07-19. 
  11. ^ Obama's Church: Cauldron of Division
  12. ^ Newsmax.com - Obama Attended Hate America Sermon
  13. ^ Generation Obama? Perhaps Not. - New York Times
  14. ^ Bill Kristol, New York Times Hack, UPDATE - Political Machine
  15. ^ Jon Stewart: "Oh, Bill Kristol, Are You Ever Right?", Huffington Post, January 24, 2008

[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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