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William Kristol is a key representative of U.S. neoconservatism, appearing frequently as a political pundit on Fox News and serving as editor of the Weekly Standard, which replaced Commentary (at one time edited by his father Irving Kristol) as the standard-bearer of neoconservatism during the George W. Bush presidency.

A relentless proponent of extremely hawkish, “pro-Israel” U.S. foreign policies in the Middle East, Kristol has helped create or advise nearly a dozen policy and astroturf groups since the 1990s, all of which have promoted militarist U.S. security policies. Among the groups have been the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), which Kristol cofounded with another neocon scion, Robert Kagan; the Liz Cheney-led Keep America Safe; the Foreign Policy Initiative; the Institute for the Study of War; and the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq.

Kristol has most recently been associated with the founding of the Emergency Committee for Israel, a Washington-based advocacy group established in mid-2010 that claims “to provide citizens with the facts they need to be sure that their public officials are supporting a strong U.S.-Israel relationship.” ECI board members include Kristol; Rachel Abrams, wife of notorious Iran-Contra veteran Elliott Abrams; and Gary Bauer, a well-know Christian Zionist who leads the lobby groups American Values and Keep Israel Safe and serves on the executive board of John Hagee’s Christians United for Israel. Although his name did not appear on the group’s website as of July 2010, Noah Pollak, a contributor to Commentary and former assistant editor at the Jerusalem-based Shalem Center, has been widely reported to be the group’s executive director.[1]

ECI’s first act was to run a controversial attack ad in Pennsylvania in July 2010 targeting the track record of Senate-candidate Rep. Joe Sestak (D-PA). The ad insinuated that he supported Mideast terrorists.[2]

Perhaps Kristol’s signature endeavor was the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), established in the late 1990s by a passel of prominent neoconservatives and hardline nationalists that promoted a "Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity." During the lead-up to the Iraq War, PNAC was one of several so-called letterhead groups led by neoconservatives—others included the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, for which Kristol served on the advisory board, and Americans for Victory over Terrorism—that helped promote public and official acceptance of an aggressive “war on terror” aimed at reshaping the Middle East.

Despite significant setbacks in the neoconservative agenda since the invasion of Iraq, Kristol has remained active creating and supporting pressure groups and think tanks that promote policies similar to those that shaped the “war on terror.” Kristol has been particularly busy since the election of President Barack Obama. In early 2009, he and Robert Kagan cofounded the Foreign Policy Initiative, which many observers regarded as an anodyne-sounding successor to PNAC. Like PNAC, the group is devoted to maintaining a U.S. military engagement abroad. And also like PNAC, the group is well represented among hardliners. Staff members have included Ellen Bork, a former PNAC director who was tapped to serve as FPI’s director of the democracy and human rights program, and Dan Senor, who is an FPI cofounder.

In late 2009 Kristol teamed up with Liz Cheney, daughter of Vice President Dick Cheney, to create Keep America Safe, which operates like a standard neoconservative pressure group working to build public support for militarist foreign policies and attacking “liberals” through TV adds and issue campaigns. Initial board members and staff included Cheney, Kristol, Michael Goldfarb, and Debra Burlingame, wife of one of the pilots who died on 9/11.

Kristol has also supported the work of the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), a Washington, D.C.-based think tank that advocates long-term U.S. military intervention abroad, particularly in Iraq and Afghanistan. Founded in 2007, the organization’s board (as of FY 2008) included Liz Cheney (chair); William Kristol; Jack Keane, retired four-star general who coauthored with Frederick Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute “Choosing Victory,” a 2007 study that served as a blueprint for the so-called surge in Iraq; and Dennis Showalter, a highly regarded military historian. ISW’s founding president is Kimberly Kagan, a military historian who is married to Frederick Kagan.[3]

At the New York Times

Kristol worked briefly as an op-ed writer for the New York Times. Added to the Times’s roster of columnists in December 2007,  Kristol penned his final column in late January 2009, concluding a turbulent tenure. His final column began, “All good things must come to an end. Jan. 20, 2009, marked the end of a conservative era.” It concluded, “[T]here will be trying times during [Barack] Obama’s presidency, and liberty will need staunch defenders. Can Obama reshape liberalism to be, as it was under F.D.R., a fighting faith, unapologetically patriotic and strong in the defense of liberty? That would be a service to our country.” A note at the end of the column unceremoniously stated, “This is William Kristol’s last column.”[4]

The decision by the Times to hire Kristol sparked a wave of consternation from liberal readers of the newspaper. As media reporter Charles Kaiser wrote: “Many Times readers consider Kristol a third-rate neocon apparatchik, a stark symbol of the steep decline of the Washington culture—and arguably the most consistently mean-spirited and wrong-headed pundit of our time…. Hence the outrage of that diminishing number of people who still think of the Times as the indispensable engine of American journalism.”[5]

Kaiser also highlighted the relationship between Kristol and Andrew Rosenthal, the Times editorial page editor: “Kristols and Rosenthals go back a long way together. Bill's father, Irving, and Andy's father, Abe—both charter neocons—were good friends, and Irving Kristol was a proud member of the ‘Rosenthal for President’ lunch club. ... And when Andy Rosenthal covered the Bush I White House with Maureen Dowd, Bill Kristol—then vice president Dan Quayle's chief of staff—was a source for both Times reporters.”

During Kristol’s stint with the Times, his columns were heavily scrutinized by media observers and bloggers, who often found fault with his work. Kristol’s sometimes sloppy writing didn’t help his cause. His very first column misattributed a comment made by conservative talk show host Michael Medved to ultra-conservative blogger Michelle Malkin.[6]

Political Trajectory

Kristol began his political activities early. At the age of 12, he served as an aide on the City Council election campaign of Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the future Democratic U.S. senator from New York whose writings on social issues were frequently published by William's father Irving, but whose relationship to neoconservatism soured by the late 1980s. In his 1993 book Pandaemonium: Ethnicity in International Politics, Moynihan wrote of the neocons: "They wished for a military posture approaching mobilization; they would create or invent whatever crises were required to bring this about."[7]

In 1968, while he was in high school, Kristol volunteered to work on the campaign of Hubert Humphrey. Four years later, in 1972, Kristol helped organize the Harvard-Radcliffe Students for Sen. Henry "Scoop" Jackson, the hawkish Democrat from Washington and fierce supporter of Israel around whom many neoconservatives organized in the early 1970s in a last-ditch effort to turn the Democratic Party away from the politics of what they saw as "appeasement" pushed by the McGovernites. When Jackson's presidential ambitions were spurned by Democrats, the neoconservative shift to the Republican Party began in earnest.[8]

During Ronald Reagan's presidency, Kristol worked on the staff of then-Secretary of Education William Bennett, a firebrand social conservative who went on to found a number of rightist letterhead groups, including Empower America and Americans for Victory over Terrorism. Kristol ran the unsuccessful 1988 U.S. Senate campaign in Maryland of Alan Keyes, a conservative Republican and Kristol's former graduate school roommate who was part of a team of rightists hired by Paul Wolfowitz to serve in the first Reagan administration's State Department policy planning staff. During the administration of George H.W. Bush, Kristol was chief of staff to Vice President Dan Quayle, earning the moniker "Quayle's Brain."[9]

By the 1990s, Kristol had become a staple of the Washington political scene. With support from Rupert Murdoch, he cofounded with John Podhoretz the Weekly Standard, which quickly became the core publication of so-called second-generation neoconservatives, displacing the role of the Norman Podhoretz-run Commentary. Kristol has explained his magazine thusly:

Some not insignificant number of people always assume that the Weekly Standard isn't really published in English, but in code—that its contents are designed to advance a surreptitious political agenda. The Weekly Standard is a conservative magazine, of course. We make no bones about it. And ours tends toward a particular kind of conservatism; our pages are its home, we like to think.[10]

Prior to co-founding PNAC in 1997, Kristol was involved in forming the Project for the Republican Future, an organization that was credited with helping shape the strategy that helped produce the 1994 Republican congressional election victory. Such was his stature by 2000 that the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz described Kristol as having "become part of Washington's circulatory system, this half-pol, half-pundit, full-throated advocate with the nice-guy image" who was "wired to nearly all the Republican presidential candidates."[11]

Kristol’s many affiliations illustrate just how tightly woven he is in the fabric of neoconservatism. He is a member of the board of advisors for Clifford May’s Foundation for Defense of Democracies (along with Gary Bauer, Frank Gaffney, Charles Krauthammer, Richard Perle, and others); is on the Policy Advisory Board of the Ethics and Public Policy Center (with Michael Novak and Lewis Lehrman, among others); and serves as a trustee for the Manhattan Institute (along with Bruce Kovner, Mark Gerson, Peggy Noonan, and others), among other activities. Kristol is also a frequent conservative pundit on Fox News, and he wrote regularly for Time magazine until he began his stint with the New York Times.

Writings

Kristol is coauthor, with the New Republic 's Lawrence Kaplan, of the 2003 book The War over Iraq: Saddam's Tyranny and America's Mission, in which the authors state that the "wisdom of regime change, the merits of promoting democracy, the desirability of American power and influence—these issues extend well beyond Iraq. So we dare to hope that this work will prove useful even after Baghdad is finally free."[12] (He also co-edited, with American Enterprise Institute president Christopher DeMuth in 2000, a volume of neocon love letters to his father, The Neoconservative Imagination: Essays in Honor of Irving Kristol.)[13]

Kristol also coauthored, with Robert Kagan, a notable 1996 Foreign Affairs article titled "Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy," which served as a precursor to the formation of PNAC and laid out the ideas for a new neoconservative agenda for the post-Cold War period.[14] Among the pillars of a neo-Reaganite foreign policy, Kristol and Kagan argued, was maintenance of a "benevolent hegemony" in global affairs based in part on a willingness to use force unilaterally and preemptively. What should the U.S. role be, they asked rhetorically? Their answer: A "Benevolent global hegemony. Having defeated the 'evil empire,' the United States enjoys strategic and ideological predominance. The first objective of U.S. foreign policy should be to preserve and enhance that predominance by strengthening America's security, supporting its friends, advancing its interests, and standing up for its principles around the world."

As for potential enemies, the article suggested that ultimately the United States would need to devise an "overall strategy for containing, influencing, and ultimately seeking to change the regime in Beijing." In the meantime, however, the main enemy was internal. Invoking past efforts to rally the U.S. populace to accept a leading U.S. role in international affairs—most notably, the campaign to push for the adoption of NSC-68, the early formulation for containing and rolling back the Soviet Union, in the early 1950s—the authors argued that "it is time once again to challenge an indifferent America and a confused American conservatism." They added:

In a world in which peace and American security depend on American power and the will to use it, the main threat the United States faces now and in the future is its own weakness. American hegemony is the only reliable defense against a breakdown of peace and international order. The appropriate goal of American foreign policy, therefore, is to preserve that hegemony as far into the future as possible.[15]

Kristol has used his position at the Weekly Standard to extemporize on everything from what he sees as the imperative of quickly pardoning I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff who was convicted in early 2007 in connection with the PlameGate investigation, to decrying the "idiocy" in Washington that he feels is evident in efforts to roll back troop levels in Iraq. Criticizing congressional legislation to set deadlines for withdrawing troops from Iraq, Kristol pointed to what he called the "sense of momentum" garnered by troops since the surge began.

However, he lamented, "In order to preserve the cosmic harmony, it seems the gods insist that good news in one place be offset by misfortune elsewhere. It may well be that Gen. David Petraeus is going to lead us to victory in Iraq. He is certainly off to a good start. If the karmic price of success in Iraq is utter embarrassment for senior Bush officials in Washington, DC—well, in our judgment, the trade-off is worth it. The world will surely note our success or failure in Iraq. It will not long remember the gang that couldn't shoot straight at the Justice Department—or, for that matter, the antics of congressional Democrats—unless either so weakens the administration as to undercut our mission in Iraq."[16]

Please note: IPS Right Web neither represents nor endorses any of the individuals or groups profiled on this site.