[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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