Bill Kristol

For the American comedian, see Billy Crystal.

William "Bill" Kristol (born December 23, 1952 in New York City) is an American neoconservative thinker, inspired in part by the ideas of Leo Strauss [1].

Kristol 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. 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 University, graduating magna cum laude in three years; in 1979, he received a Ph.D. in political science, also from Harvard. During his first year of graduate school, Kristol was 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 Education Secretary William J. Bennett during the Reagan Administration, and then as chief of staff to Vice President Dan Quayle under the first President Bush.

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.

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.

Kristol has not always been accurate in his political predictions. 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.
— William Kristol, National Public Radio, 4/1/03

Some have noted that this "pop sociology" has ironically turned out to be remarkably accurate.

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.

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 [2]. He was also the first of many conservatives to publicly oppose Bush's second 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 is currently a visiting professor at Harvard University, where he is teaching a course in the school's Government Department entitled "Intellectual Foundations of American Foreign Policy". 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 invasion of Lebanon, stating that the war is "our war too," referring to the United States. Moreover, he is advocating US military strike against Iranian nuclear facilities (It's Our War). However, his influence over policy may have weakened after the Democrats' sweeping victory in the US midterm elections of 2006.

He is married to Susan Scheinberg, with whom he has three children. He lives in McLean, Virginia.

Trivia

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

As Quayle's speechwriter, Kristol would regularly sprinkle Quayle's speeches with numerous classical references; this stopped after a reporter discovered that Quayle had no idea where one citation from Plato had come from.

When voting in the 1984 November election in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Kristol inadvertently voted for the Communist candidate for Tip O'Neill's House seat, thinking that Tip's sole opponent was a Republican.

Kristol had a pie thrown in his face during a talk he was giving at Earlham College on March 29, 2005. The video is in External links section.

Kristol's son, Joe Kristol, attended Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology and is now a sophomore at Harvard University.

References

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.
Media Matters for America: Kristol, Krauthammer lauded Bush inauguration speech without disclosing their role as consultants.