William Kristol

Early life and education

Kristol was born on December 23, 1952 in New York City, into a Jewish family. His father, Irving Kristol was an editor and publisher who served as the managing editor of Commentary magazine, founded the magazine The Public Interest and has been described as the "godfather of neoconservatism". His mother, Gertrude Himmelfarb, is a scholar of Victorian era literature. He graduated in 1970 from Collegiate School, a preparatory school for boys in New York City.

In 1973, Kristol received an A.B. from Harvard College, graduating magna cum laude in three years. He was a student of Harvey Mansfield. 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.

Career

In 1976, Kristol worked for Daniel Patrick Moynihan's US Senate campaign, serving as deputy issues director during the Democratic primary. Later, in 1988, Kristol was the campaign manager for Alan Keyes' unsuccessful Maryland Senatorial campaign against Paul Sarbanes.

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" when he was 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 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 (ISBN ), 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.

Kristol has been a harsh critic of former Republican congressman and presidential candidate Ron Paul of Texas and his supporters.

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.

Beginning in 1996, Kristol was a panelist on the ABC Sunday news program This Week. Following declining ratings, his contract was not renewed three years later.

Kristol was a columnist for Time in 2007. He joined The New York Times as a columnist the following year. Several days after he did so, Times public editor Clark Hoyt called his hiring "a mistake," due to Kristol's assertion in 2006 that the Times should potentially be prosecuted for having revealed information about the Terrorist Finance Tracking Program. Kristol wrote a weekly opinion column for The New York Times from January 7, 2008 to January 26, 2009. Many at the Times considered him "an unimaginative writer with a rancorous history of attacking the paper;" one veteran called his selection "an appalling choice."

For ten years Kristol was a regular panelist on Fox News Sunday and often contributed to the nightly program Special Report with Bret Baier. In 2013 his contract with Fox News expired and he became a much sought after commentator on several networks. It was announced on This Week with George Stephanopoulos on February 2, 2014 that Kristol would be a contributor for ABC News and to that program.

Since the summer of 2014, Kristol has also hosted an online interview program, Conversations with Bill Kristol, featuring guests from the academy and public life.

Political views

Kristol was key to the defeat of the Clinton health care plan of 1993. In the first of what would become many strategy memos written for Republican policymakers, Kristol said the party should "kill", not amend, President Clinton's health care plan. A later memo used 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 joined other foreign policy analysts in sending 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 supported John McCain. Answering a question from a PBS reporter about the Republican primaries, he said, "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 reasons for removing Saddam. Kristol rejected comparisons to Vietnam and predicted a "two month war, not an eight year war" during a March 28 CSPAN appearance.

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 strong sanctions. In June 2006, at the height of the Lebanon War, he suggested, "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 government with nuclear weapons, or that caused by attacking this government'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 spoke 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 civil war and urged fellow conservatives to support the action.

Throughout the 2016 United States presidential election, Kristol was a vocal supporter of the Never Trump movement. Although an ardent Republican in the past, Kristol has shown public concern about Trump's presidency and Republican support. In 2017, Kristol criticized the Trump administration: "Obviously strongly prefer normal democratic and constitutional politics. But if it comes to it, prefer the deep state to the Trump state."

Personal life

Since 1975, he has been married to Susan Scheinberg, whom he met while they were both graduate students at Harvard. Scheinberg holds a Ph.D. in classics. They have three children. His son-in-law is writer Matthew Continetti. One of William Kristol's sons is an infantry captain in the US Marine Corps, who served in Afghanistan.