Irving Kristol

Irving Kristol (1920-2009) was born in Brooklyn to Jewish immigrants and joined a small anti-Stalinist Trotskyist group as a student at City College of New York. After serving as an infantryman in Europe in World War II, he worked at Commentary, co-founded the British magazine Encounter and later ran Basic Books. In 1965 he co-founded The Public Interest, which examined the unintended effects of government programs, and in 1985 he founded The National Interest. He taught at New York University, wrote a monthly Wall Street Journal column and was a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2002.

Admirers credit Kristol with building the institutions and arguments that carried a generation of disillusioned liberals into the conservative movement, with promoting supply-side economics and with giving the Republican Party a governing philosophy that accepted a limited welfare state. Esquire called him the godfather of neoconservatism in 1979. Critics on the left, beginning with Michael Harrington, who popularized neoconservative as a pejorative, and Peter Steinfels in a 1979 book, saw the movement as a retreat from liberal reform. Paleoconservatives resented the influence of Kristol and his allies, who helped block Mel Bradford's nomination to head the National Endowment for the Humanities in the early 1980s. Opponents of the 2003 Iraq War blamed the neoconservative foreign policy that Kristol wrote the Bush administration had embraced. His Cold War involvement with Encounter also drew scrutiny after it emerged that its sponsor had received CIA funding.