William Kristol - Biography

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 and a regular commentator on the Fox News Channel.

Kristol is associated with a number of prominent conservative think tanks. He was chairman of the New Citizenship Project from 1997 to 2005. In 1997, he co-founded the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) with Robert Kagan. He is a member of the board of trustees for the free-market Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, a member of the Policy Advisory Board for the Ethics and Public Policy Center, and a director of the Foreign Policy Initiative. He is also one of the three board members of Keep America Safe, a think tank co-founded by Liz Cheney and Debra Burlingame, and serves on the board of the Emergency Committee for Israel and the Susan B. Anthony List.

Personal life

Kristol was born on December 23, 1952 in New York City into a Jewish family. His father, the late Irving Kristol, served as the managing editor of Commentary magazine and has been described as the "godfather of neoconservatism." 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.

In 1973, Kristol received an A.B. from Harvard, graduating magna cum laude in three years. In 1976, he worked for Daniel Patrick Moynihan's successful U.S. Senate campaign, serving as deputy issues director during the Democratic primary. Kristol received a Ph.D. in government from Harvard in 1979. During his first year of graduate school, Kristol shared a room with fellow government doctoral candidate Alan Keyes. Kristol was the campaign manager for Keyes' unsuccessful 1988 Maryland Senatorial campaign against Paul Sarbanes.

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. In 1993, he rose to fame as he led conservative opposition to the Clinton health care plan.

In 2003, Kristol and Lawrence F. Kaplan wrote, "The War Over Iraq: America's Mission and Saddam's Tyranny," in which the authors analyzed the Bush Doctrine and the history of US-Iraq relations. In the book, Kristol and Kaplan provided support and justifications for war in Iraq.

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

Media commentator

After the Republican sweep of both houses of Congress in 1994, Kristol established, along with conservative John Podhoretz, the conservative newsmagazine The Weekly Standard. Rupert Murdoch, Chairman and Managing Director of News Corp., financed the creation; Kristol is its current editor.

In the 1990s, Kristol was a panelist on the This Week Sunday program.

Kristol currently serves as a political commentator on Fox News. He is a regular panelist on Fox News Sunday and often contributes to the nightly program Special Report with Bret Baier.

Kristol was a columnist for Time in 2007 and wrote a weekly opinion column for The New York Times from January 7, 2008 to January 26, 2009. His very first column misattributed a quote to Michelle Malkin that was actually made by Michael Medved. Approximately 10 weeks later, he incorrectly wrote that presidential candidate Barack Obama had attended a sermon by Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Early in Kristol's tenure, Times public editor Clark Hoyt called his hiring "a mistake."

Political views

Kristol was key to the defeat of the Clinton health care plan in 1993. In the first of what would become legendary strategy memos circulated among Republican policymakers, Kristol said the party should "kill," not amend, President Clinton's health care plan. Kristol's memo immediately united 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.

Kristol was a leading proponent of the Iraq War. In 1998, he and other prominent foreign policy experts sent a letter to President Clinton urging a stronger posture against Iraq. Kristol argued that Saddam Hussein posed a grave threat to the United States and its allies: "The only acceptable strategy is one that eliminates the possibility that Iraq will be able to use or threaten to use weapons of mass destruction. In the near term, this means a willingness to undertake military action as diplomacy is clearly failing. In the long term, it means removing Saddam Hussein and his regime from power. That now needs to become the aim of American foreign policy.".

In the 2000 Presidential election, Kristol was a supporter of John McCain. In response to a question from a PBS reporter about the Republican primaries, he stated, "No. I had nothing against Governor Bush. I was inclined to prefer McCain. The reason I was inclined to prefer McCain was his leadership on foreign policy.".

After the Bush administration developed its response to September 11th, 2001, Kristol said, "We've just been present at a very unusual moment, the creation of a new American foreign policy." Kristol ardently supported the Bush administration's decision to go to war with Iraq. In 2003, he and Lawrence Kaplan wrote The War Over Iraq, in which he described the reasons for removing Saddam.

As the military situation in Iraq began to deteriorate in 2004, Kristol argued for an increase in 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 insufficient troop levels. 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."

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."

Kristol 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.

Kristol was an ardent promoter of Sarah Palin, advocating for her selection as the running mate of John McCain in the 2008 U.S. Presidential Election months before McCain chose her.

In response to Iran's nuclear program, Kristol supports the strong sanctions. In June 2006, at the height of the Lebanon War, he suggested that, "We might consider countering this act of Iranian aggression with a military strike against Iranian nuclear facilities. Why wait?"

In 2010, Kristol criticized the Obama administration and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Admiral Mike Mullen for an unserious approach to Iran. He wrote, "The real question is what form of instability would be more dangerous--that caused by this Iranian regime with nuclear weapons, or that caused by attacking this regime's nuclear weapons program. It's time to have a serious debate about the choice between these two kinds of destabilization, instead of just refusing to confront the choice."

In the 2010 affair surrounding the disclosure of U.S. diplomatic cables by WikiLeaks, Kristol has spoken out strongly against the organization and suggested using "our various assets to harass, snatch or neutralize Julian Assange and his collaborators, wherever they are". In March 2011, he wrote an editorial in the Weekly Standard arguing that the United States' military interventions in Muslim countries (including the Gulf War, the Kosovo War, the War in Afghanistan, and the Iraq War) should not be classified as "invasions," but rather as "liberations." Kristol has also backed President Barack Obama's decision to intervene in the 2011 Libyan uprising and urged fellow conservatives to support the action.

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.

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 978-1-890626-23-5

External links

• Biography and column archive at The Weekly Standard
• Biography at the Project for the New American Century