Irving Kristol, the Neocon's Neocon, Dead at 89

I was driving home from my youngest daughter's school on Thursday in Arlington, Va., and after turning onto a tree-lined street near the hospital where my older daughter was born, I noticed William Kristol, publisher of the conservative magazine The Weekly Standard, lingering in the front of a brick building. I slowed to say hello, but something stopped me. The facility he was standing in front of is called Halquist Memorial Inpatient Center – it's part of Capital Hospice – and when people go there to visit, it means a loved one is dying.

On Friday, Bill's father Irving Kristol passed away, succumbing at 89 years of age to complications from lung cancer. He leaves behind a grieving family, yes, but also a body of work that has stamped him as one of the leading conservative intellectuals in this nation's history, along with a generation of younger conservative thinkers and writers – including his son Bill – who have provided a counterweight to the liberalism that so dominates the world of American academe and letters.

Such testimonials can be found on the website of The Weekly Standard, which announced Irving Kristol's death. "His wisdom, wit, good humor, and generosity of spirit made him a friend and mentor to several generations of thinkers and public servants," eulogized the magazine's editors.

"He was truly a great man," added Robert Kagan, writing for The Washington Post. "He was also a unique inspiration, to me personally, and to untold thousands of other young people for whom he provided a model of the intellectual life well-lived. He was a deep and fierce thinker, who nevertheless delivered his thoughts in the most amiable fashion, without animus or bile. He was curious and invited others to be curious, to engage in serious dialogue on the important issues of the day."

Born in New York City in 1920, Kristol was a Jewish intellectual who became a Trotskyite as a young man. He broke away from communism, then socialism, and finally liberalism to become a loyal supporter of the Republican Party – ending up in a political movement he said was initially as "foreign to me as attending a Catholic Mass."

He had been a liberal, he said, "mugged by reality." In his case, the reality that he sought protection from was the intellectual incoherence of the New Left. In time, Kristol became disillusioned not just with the excesses of liberalism, but with its essence. He concluded that the Great Society worsened the problems of the underclass instead of solving them, and that the permissiveness of the Spock Generation led to drug use, family breakdown and other social pathologies.

"More than anyone alive, perhaps, Irving Kristol can take the credit for reversing the direction of American political culture," liberal commentator Eric Alterman wrote a decade ago.

The word "neo-conservative" was practically invented to describe Irving Kristol. He embraced it, even penning a book by that name, and never wavered from it, even as the long, hard U.S. war in Iraq, a policy pushed by "neo-cons" in the Bush administration, has tarnished the word. Kristol himself believed that "neo-conservatism" had been folded into the larger --- and, for a while, dominant – conservative movement. Many Reagan-era conservatives beg to differ, but in 2002, when "neo-cons" were riding high (and running the country) Kristol was in a distinguished class of recipients awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

"Irving Kristol is a wide-ranging thinker whose writings have helped transform America's political landscape," George W. Bush said that day. "As young men, he and his fellow student radicals in City College's 'alcove number one,' devoted themselves to solving the ultimate problems of the human race. Today, Irving Kristol is still grappling with ultimate problems, and in thinking them through, he has vastly enlarged the conservative vision."

One of the young conservative writers whom Kristol influenced worked in Bush's own White House at that time.

His name is Peter Wehner, and one of the first things he did after being hired was to invite Irving Kristol and his wife, historian Gertrude Himmelfarb, to the White House for lunch. It was Wehner's way of saying thank you -- for the intellectual contributions that helped make conservative presidents possible.

"He will be terribly missed," Pete wrote on Friday. "But his impact on generations of other thinkers, and on the intellectual and political life of the nation, will go on, and on, and on. 'To the man who pleases him,'the book of Ecclesiastes says, 'God gives wisdom, knowledge and happiness.' Irving Kristol must have pleased God. A lot."