Bill Kristol

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William Kristol (born December 23, 1952) is an American neoconservative 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 a former op-ed columnist for the New York Times.

Kristol is associated with a number of prominent conservative think tanks: He was chairman of the New Citizenship Project from 1997 to 2005, he cofounded the 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 Ethics and Public Policy Center. He is also one of the three board members of Keep America Safe, co-founded by Liz Cheney and Debra Burlingame.

[edit] Personal life

Kristol was born in New York City. His father, the late Irving Kristol served as the managing editor of Commentary magazine and is described as the "godfather of neoconservatism."^[1] His mother Gertrude Himmelfarb was a scholar of Victorian era literature. He graduated in 1970 from The Collegiate School, a preparatory school for boys located in Manhattan. Kristol received a college deferment during the Vietnam war and did not enter military service^{[citation needed]}

In 1973, Kristol received a B.A. from Harvard, graduating magna cum laude in three years. In 1976, he worked as deputy issues director for Patrick Moynihan's New York Democratic primary campaign for a U.S. Senate seat. Kristol received a Ph.D. in government 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.

Kristol is married to Susan Scheinberg.

[edit] Career

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 the Vice President under Dan Quayle in the George H. W. 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."^[2] 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."^[3]

He also served as a foreign policy advisor for Senator John McCain's presidential campaign.^[4]

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.

Kristol is a patron of the British think tank the Henry Jackson Society, based at the University of Cambridge.

[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 the current editor of The Weekly Standard.

Kristol serves as a political contributor on Fox News. In addition, Kristol was for a time a semi-regular guest on the now cancelled World News Tonight on Sky News.

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

Kristol worked as a columnist for Time during 2007.^[5] Kristol wrote a weekly opinion column for The New York Times from January 7, 2008^[6] to January 26, 2009.^[7] The paper stated that the column was ended by "mutual agreement",^[8] although Scott Horton (citing an anonymous source) writes that the Times dismissed Kristol due to sloppy writing, conflicts of interest, and/or public "disloyalty" towards The Times (e.g., telling The Daily Show host Jon Stewart, "You're reading The New York Times too much.").^[9]

[edit] Political views

According to journalist Dana Milbank, Kristol was "perhaps the most outspoken supporter of the Iraq War".^[10] On September 18, 2002, he declared that a war in Iraq "could have terrifically good effects throughout the Middle East." A day later, he said Saddam Hussein was "past the finish line" in developing nuclear weapons. On February 20, 2003, he said of Saddam: "He's got weapons of mass destruction;... Look, if we free the people of Iraq we will be respected in the Arab world."^[11] On March 1, 2003 — 18 days before the invasion of Iraq — Kristol dismissed the possibility of sectarian conflict afterward. He also said, "Very few wars in American history were prepared better or more thoroughly than this one by this president." He maintained that the war would cost $100 billion to $200 billion (the cost is now about a trillion dollars). On March 5, 2003, Kristol said, "We'll be vindicated when we discover the weapons of mass destruction."^[11]

In 2003, just as the Iraq War was starting, Kristol stated, on the National Public Radio show Fresh Air, "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."^[12] Kristol also wrote a book The War Over Iraq with Lawrence Kaplan before the Iraq War and stated that: "The United States may need to occupy Iraq for some time. Though U.N., European and Arab forces will, as in Afghanistan, contribute troops, the principal responsibility will doubtless fall to the country that liberates Baghdad. According to one estimate, initially as many as 75,000 troops may be required to police the war's aftermath, at a cost of $16 billion a year. As other countries' forces arrive, and as Iraq rebuilds its economy and political system, that force could probably be drawn down to several thousand soldiers after a year or two." ^[13] (The war in Iraq currently costs approximately $12 billion a month, and American forces there number about 150,000.)

As the military situation Iraq started to deteriorate in 2004, Kristol became a strong proponent of increasing the number of U.S. troops in Iraq. In 2004, he wrote an op-ed strongly criticizing Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, saying he "breezily dodged responsibility" for planning mistakes made in the Iraq War, including lack of enough troops.^[14] In September 2006, he wrote, with fellow commentator Rich Lowry, "There is no mystery as to what can make the crucial difference in the battle of Baghdad: American troops."^[15] This was one of the early calls for what became the Iraq War troop surge of 2007 four months later. In December 2008, Kristol wrote that the surge was "opposed at the time by the huge majority of foreign policy experts, pundits and pontificators," but that "most of them — and the man most of them are happy won the election, Barack Obama — now acknowledge the surge’s success."^[16] Kristol's statements concerning Iraq are among those cited by progressives who criticize him for repeatedly being wrong.^[11]

Kristol has criticized George W. Bush and his administration. He was one 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 was a vocal supporter of the 2006 Lebanon War, 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, and suggested in June 2006 that, "we might consider countering this act of Iranian aggression with a military strike against Iranian nuclear facilities. Why wait?"^[17]

Kristol was among the most prominent conservative commentators to support John McCain's choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate in the 2008 U.S. Presidential Election. According to writer Scott Horton, he also played a part in her selection, by "arguing that she was young, popular, vigorous, unknown and had the right connections to the Religious Right bloc which had proven so important to Republican wins in 2000 and 2004." The Weekly Standard, which according to Horton served as "Palin’s chief defender" against attacks, hosted a cruise in June 2007, where Standard editors Kristol and Fred Barnes first lunched with Governor Sarah Palin.^[18]

[edit] Criticism

Eric Alterman wrote that "if one looks for a consistent pattern to Kristol's perpetual wrongness, it's not hard to discern. For Kristol is less interested in being correct than in advancing his side's interests. He's not a journalist; he's an apparatchik working undercover as a man of the press."^[19]

On March 17, 2008, Kristol retracted and apologized for the contents of a column written on the same day. On August 9, 2007, Newsmax freelance reporter Jim Davis reported that Barack Obama was in attendance on July 22, 2007 during a controversial sermon given by the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr. at Trinity United Church of Christ in South Chicago, Obama's place of worship.^[20] The claim that Obama was in attendance for this particular sermon was repeated by Newsmax as fact again on March 16, 2008.^[21] Kristol relied upon the erroneous NewsMax articles in his op-ed article in the New York Times on March 17, 2008.^[22] This prompted a retraction and apology by Kristol later in the day.^[23]

[edit] References

[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

• The Weekly Standard: A Reader: 1995-2005 (Harper Perennial, 2006). ISBN 0-06-088285-9
• War Over Iraq: Saddam’s Tyranny And America’s Mission (Co-author Lawrence Kaplan) (Encounter Books, 2003). ISBN 1-893554-69-4
• Bush v. Gore: The Court Cases and the Commentary (Co-editor E.J. Dionne) (Brookings Institution Press, 2001). ISBN 0-8157-0107-1
• Homosexuality and American Public Life (Introduction by Kristol, Editor Christopher Wolfe) (Spence Publishing Company, 1999). ISBN 978-1890626235

[edit] External links

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• Biography at The Weekly Standard
• Biography from the Project for the New American Century
• Columnist profile, The New York Times
• Discussion on the Iraq war with Daniel Ellsberg on C-SPAN
• Recipient profile of The New Citizenship Project at www.mediatransparency.org.