[Congressional Record Volume 155, Number 136 (Thursday, September 24, 2009)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page E2367]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


                      IN MEMORY OF IRVING KRISTOL

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                            HON. JOE WILSON

                           of south carolina

                    in the house of representatives

                      Thursday, September 24, 2009

  Mr. WILSON of South Carolina. Madam Speaker, I wish to recognize the 
life and work of Irving Kristol who died on September 18, 2009. An icon 
of the conservative movement, Kristol brought his intellect and 
enthusiasm to the many debates that spanned the nearly nine decades of 
his life. The Kristol Family has made a difference for America.
  Stephen Miller of the Wall Street Journal penned the following 
tribute to Mr. Kristol on September 19, 2009.

              Neoconservative Pioneer Paved Way for Reagan

                          (By Stephen Miller)

       Irving Kristol, who died Friday at 89, was an editor, 
     political essayist and provocateur universally known as the 
     ``Godfather of Neoconservatism.''
       In a six-decade career, Mr. Kristol's politics evolved 
     ever-rightward, most markedly in reaction to the Great 
     Society programs of the 1960s. As his opposition to what he 
     saw as excesses of the welfare state crystallized, he helped 
     provide the intellectual underpinnings of the Republican 
     resurgence that began with the 1980 election of President 
     Ronald Reagan.
       Neoconservatism became a Washington byword for supply-side 
     economics, defense-budget increases and entitlement cuts. The 
     neoconservative framework came to the fore again under 
     President George W. Bush, who awarded Mr. Kristol the 
     Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2002.
       ``America has lost one of its finest thinkers and greatest 
     patriots,'' House Minority Leader John Boehner (R., Ohio) 
     said in a statement Friday. ``Irving Kristol added 
     intellectual rigor and heft to the conservative movement by 
     redefining how we apply the values and principles our nation 
     was founded on to the challenges of the modern era.''
       Mr. Kristol was appointed an editor of Commentary magazine 
     in his 20s. But it was in his own tart essays and as an 
     editor of literary-political journals that he helped found, 
     including Encounter in Britain and the Public Interest in the 
     U.S., that he fostered his reputation as a public 
     intellectual.
       Later, he was a professor at New York University, an 
     executive vice president at Basic Books and a longtime 
     contributor to The Wall Street Journal's editorial page.
       Mr. Kristol at first resisted the label 
     ``neoconservative,'' but later accepted it. As much an avatar 
     as a progenitor of neoconservatism, Mr. Kristol once 
     described the credo as that of ``a liberal who has been 
     mugged by reality.''
       Mr. Kristol grew up in Brooklyn, N.Y. His father was in the 
     garment trade and Mr. Kristol, like many of his bright 
     contemporaries, attended City College of New York, then a 
     hotbed of student radicalism.
       He was a self-described student ``Trotskyist,'' but soon 
     after graduation rejected that label. Of his youthful 
     leanings Mr. Kristol later wrote, ``It was a useful 
     inoculation that rendered me not only immune, but positively 
     indifferent to the ideological chatter around me.''
       Any remaining faith in the masses was obliterated by his 
     experience serving in the Army during World War II alongside 
     ``thugs or near-thugs.''
       ``Again and again, and to my surprise, I found reasons to 
     think better of the Army and less well of my fellow enlisted 
     men,'' he wrote in 1993. ``The Army may have radicalized 
     Norman Mailer; it successfully de-radicalized me. It caused 
     me to cease being a socialist.''
       Energized by the writings of Lionel Trilling and Reinhold 
     Niebuhr--self-described liberals both, but thinkers critical 
     of the human capacity for perfection--Mr. Kristol became 
     managing editor of Commentary in 1947.
       In 1952, he left Commentary and traveled to England to 
     found Encounter with the British poet Stephen Spender, as a 
     counterblast to left-wing intellectual publications.
       He returned to the U.S., and in 1965 founded the Public 
     Interest, a quarterly journal he edited with Daniel Bell, a 
     sociologist and friend from his City College days. The 
     journal was hardly a bastion of right-wing thought, and Mr. 
     Kristol identified himself more as a moderate than as a 
     conservative.
       In his 1972 book ``On the Democratic Idea in America,'' he 
     wrote, ``I regard the exaggerated hopes we attach to politics 
     as the curse of our age, just as I regard moderation as one 
     of our vanishing virtues.''
       Later, though, his positions hardened. By 1993, he wrote, 
     ``What is wrong with liberalism is liberalism--a metaphysics 
     and a mythology that is woefully blind to human and political 
     reality.''
       Paul Wolfowitz, former deputy defense secretary, said Mr. 
     Kristol infused policy debates with a practical, ``more fact-
     based'' approach and showed thinkers that ``it's not enough 
     just to have a sense of what's right and what's wrong, you 
     also have to have a sense of how the world works.''
       Nathan Glazer, another of the founders of the Public 
     Interest, said Mr. Kristol had ``a wonderful way of 
     formulating things'' and that his Trotskyist years had helped 
     shape his work. ``I think his conservatism is clearly 
     inflected by where he came from and how he came to it,'' Mr. 
     Glazer said.
       Mr. Kristol is survived by his wife, Gertrude Himmelfarb, a 
     noted historian often identified with the neoconservative 
     movement, and his son, William Kristol, a former chief of 
     staff for Vice President Dan Quayle and editor of the journal 
     the Weekly Standard.

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