But Kristol’s beliefs were fundamentally reactionary:

Over the decades covered in The Neoconservative Persuasion, the reader sees Kristol losing patience with liberalism, modern art, the welfare state, blacks and the civil rights movement, feminism, and gay rights. In each case, his initial sympathy or at least respect gives way to a disgusted sense that all these movements have gone too far, until the word liberal itself became a kind of imprecation to Kristol (as it did in American politics generally). By the time he wrote the essay “The Way We Were,” in 1995, he had given in to simple nostalgia: In his childhood, Kristol writes, “the reason there were no ‘troubled’ schools is that ‘trouble’ was not tolerated.”

Mugged by Reality

No one mastered these techniques of persuasion better than Kristol. You can follow the progress he describes in the pages of The Neoconservative Persuasion itself. The earliest pieces gathered here come from a tiny magazine Kristol launched in 1942, Enquiry: A Journal of Independent Radical Thought. The “independence” was from the official Communist line, and it signaled the anti-Communist direction his thinking would continue to take. It also suggests the quality that Kristol described, in An Autobiographical Memoir, as having “a ‘neo’ gene”: “I have been a neo-Marxist, a neo-Trotskyist, a neo-socialist, a neo-liberal, and finally a neoconservative. It seems that no ideology or philosophy has ever been able to encompass all of reality to my satisfaction. There was always a degree of detachment qualifying my commitment.”

That succession of “neos” can be mapped onto Kristol’s career as a writer and editor. In the 1940s and 1950s, he worked at Commentary and Encounter, both liberal anti-Communist journals. In the 1960s he launched The Public Interest, the original neoconservative magazine, dedicated to challenging the assumptions of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. Finally he became a key voice on the very conservative editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, during the height of its influence in the Reagan years.

The irony, which Kristol relishes, is that his “Leninist” path carried him ever further to the right. It was to capture this evolution that he coined the term “neoconservative,” the ambiguous label with which Kristol became so closely identified. (This is the third of his books to use the word in the title.) To anyone who followed political and foreign policy debates during the George W. Bush years, however, that term took on an ominous coloration. To put it crudely, after September 11, 2001, “neoconservative” often became a code word meaning “Jewish warmongers.” It was common for critics of the Iraq War to blame it on a “cabal” of neoconservative advisers in the Bush Administration, all of whom happened to be Jewish—Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, and Douglas Feith were the most frequently named.

The idea that a secretive group of powerful, behind-the-scenes Jews were running American foreign policy became an article of faith to many on the American, and especially the European, left—people either indifferent to the anti-Semitic tropes in this discourse or those who positively relished them. A common corollary to this idea was the belief that the neoconservatives were acting under the influence of Leo Strauss, a German-Jewish political philosopher who fled the Nazis and spent his last decades teaching at the University of Chicago. Strauss, according to the caricature, was an elitist enemy of democracy, whose thought encouraged the “neocons” (some of whom, like Wolfowitz, had been his students) to lie the country into war.

It is not surprising that, in the wake of these developments, the label neoconservative has been abandoned by most of those who used to claim it. Naturally, readers will turn to The Neoconservative Persuasion for enlightenment: What did the “godfather” of neoconservatism think of the ugly turn the term took in the last few years? But while the subtitle of the book promises “Selected Essays, 1942-2009,” it turns out that very few of these pieces date from the last decade of Kristol’s life. Perhaps this is only to be expected—after all, Kristol was already in his eighties when George W. Bush became president.

The one place where Kristol indirectly addresses the connection of neoconservatism with the Iraq War is in the 2003 op-ed that gives the book its title. And his main reaction is, surprisingly enough, surprise that any connection has been drawn: “And then, of, course, there is foreign policy, the area of American politics where neoconservatism has recently been the focus of media attention. This is surprising since there is no set of neoconservative beliefs concerning foreign policy.” Instead, Kristol says, there are at most a few neoconservative principles or intuitions: that American power should not be subordinated to “world government” or “international institutions”; that America’s national interest requires global engagement, not isolationism; and that “the United States will always feel obliged to defend, if possible, a democratic nation under attack from non-democratic forces.”

It was a little disingenuous for Kristol to deny that there is such a thing as a neoconservative foreign policy. After all, one of the eight sections of The Neoconservative Persuasion is titled “Foreign Policy and Ideology.” All but one of the essays in that group, however, were written during the Cold War, and it is fair to say that if neoconservatism—or Kristol himself—had a diplomatic philosophy, it was one totally shaped by America’s rivalry with the Soviet Union, with only limited application to the post-Cold War world.

Essentially, Kristol believed that America’s struggle with the USSR was the criterion by which everything else had to be judged. Anything that could hurt the United States or benefit the USSR was wrong, no matter how right it might seem on the surface. Perhaps the most uncompromising essay in the book is “ ‘Human Rights’: The Hidden Agenda,” in which Kristol totally rejects the idea of making human rights an American foreign-policy priority, as Jimmy Carter had done. His reason is that, if regimes are judged by human rights standards alone, many American allies—he is thinking particularly of right-wing regimes in South America—would come out quite badly. Rather than pick our alliances based on moral purity, Kristol writes, America should look to the differences between “authoritarian governments” and “totalitarian regimes.” The first—like, say, Pinochet’s Chile—may eventually evolve into democracies, and they pose no threat to America. The latter, like the Soviet Union, are inherently dangerous and must be opposed at all costs.

It’s true, Kristol acknowledges, that a torture victim in Chile has suffered just as much as a torture victim in Russia. But, he writes, “the perspective of the victim, whether in war or peace, is the stuff of which poetry (or perhaps theology) is made, not politics, and certainly not foreign policy.” This is probably the single sentence in The Neoconservative Persuasion that best captures Kristol’s entire worldview. Concern for victims—of war, of torture, of poverty, and of racism—is all well and good, but finally Kristol regards it as sentimentality. What really matters is power, and it would be suicidal for Americans to give up power in the name of sentiment.

For Americans, and also for Jews, Kristol famously joked that a neoconservative was a liberal who got mugged by reality, and the trajectory of his own thought was always in the direction of disillusionment. Over the decades covered in The Neoconservative Persuasion, the reader sees Kristol losing patience with liberalism, modern art, the welfare state, blacks and the civil rights movement, feminism, and gay rights. In each case, his initial sympathy or at least respect gives way to a disgusted sense that all these movements have gone too far, until the word “liberal” itself became a kind of imprecation to Kristol (as it did in American politics generally). By the time he wrote the essay “The Way We Were,” in 1995, he had given in to simple nostalgia: In his childhood, Kristol writes, “the reason there were no ‘troubled’ schools is that ‘trouble’ was not tolerated.”

But nothing in The Neoconservative Persuasion makes Kristol lose patience like the Jews. You can see it happening even in the titles of his essays: “The Political Dilemma of American Jews” (1984) gives way to “Why Religion Is Good for the Jews” (1994) and finally “On the Political Stupidity of the Jews” (1999). The stupidity Kristol has in mind can be summed up in the question his fellow neoconservative Norman Podhoretz asked in the title of a recent book: Why Are Jews Liberals? For it is unmistakable that, in every one of the movements Kristol deplores—modern art, civil rights, feminism, and so on—Jews have been enthusiastic supporters.

Once upon a time, Kristol grants, it may have been sensible for Jews to support liberal and progressive causes, “given the historic attitude of the European Right toward Jews.” But the same calculus of power and interest that he employs in foreign policy leads Kristol to conclude that Jewish interests now lie with the right, especially the Christian Right. Evangelical Christians are strong supporters of Israel; yet Jews, he complains, continue to pointlessly antagonize them by insisting so strongly on the separation of Church and State. Conversely, he argued several times in the 1980s, Jews continue to sympathize politically with African-Americans, even as black anti-Semitism and anti-Zionsim rise. In short, Kristol finds it absurd that Jews refuse to ask whether “a given turn of events or policy is ‘good for the Jews’ ”: “to ask that question in the United States today in Jewish circles is to invite a mixture of ridicule and indignation.”

Here, as so often in The Neoconsevrative Persuasion, Kristol seems to me to be right in part and wrong in greater and more significant part. Yes, Jews should be confident and realistic enough to ask what is in their best interest—just as Americans should apply the same standard to domestic and world politics. In each of these areas, we should not be afraid to identify our enemies as enemies and to oppose institutions and policies that sound virtuous but are actually harmful—one of Kristol’s favorite examples is the United Nations. The single best essay in the book, “The Myth of the Supra-Human Jew,” demonstrates the dangers involved in imagining Judaism as “a divinely intoxicated form of liberalism.” (That essay was written in 1947, and it is notable that Kristol’s most sophisticated and penetrating work was written in the 1940s and 1950s, before he became settled in his beliefs and began to write mainly op-eds: Op-eds are interventions, not explorations.)

But is it true, as Kristol believes, that American Jews would be better off in a more conservative, more Christianized polity—or, at the very least, that, since such a polity is certain to come, we had better reconcile ourselves to it? Is it true that an American foreign policy committed to human rights is shackled and enfeebled? Is it true that black and Jewish aspirations are now opposed? In his essays of the 1980s and 1990s, Kristol said all these things quite confidently. Yet despite the red/blue divide, the Moral Majority has not become a majority in America. In fact, contrary to the central premise of Kristol’s social thought, the most religious parts of America are now the parts most afflicted by divorce and teen pregnancy, while the most secular parts of America are the least afflicted.

Many of Kristol’s other premises have also been proved wrong. After the fall of the USSR, the American commitment to human rights led not to self-doubt and paralysis but to a more vigorous and interventionist foreign policy—in Bosnia, Kosovo, Somalia, and even Iraq. (Not to mention the fact, slighted by Kristol, that the human rights movement played a major role in bringing down the Soviet empire.) In a 1984 essay, Kristol lamented that “Jesse Jackson [is] the political leader of American blacks,” and that Jackson “stands for black nationalism”—indeed, he writes about Jackson as if he were Louis Farrakhan.

But a quarter-century later, the political leader of American blacks is the political leader of America, Barack Obama, and the main charge against him from the left is that he is too committed to consensus-building. Finally, Kristol saw the gay-rights movement as a sign of American decadence, part of the Sixties assault on bourgeois values; today, the major gay-rights issues are the right to serve in the military and the right to get married. In each case, Kristol’s hard-headed realism turned out to be a poor guide to reality. Perhaps the inveterate Jewish tendency to care about “the perspective of the victim” has something to be said for it after all.

Although we’ve never met, I’d like to take this opportunity to congratulate you for your pending purchase of Newsweek magazine.

I’m not assuming you’re hearing much by way of congratulations these days. After all, everywhere you turn, you come across another report of the magazine industry’s nearing demise: Circulations are down, advertising is down, U.S. News & World Report has abandoned its print edition, 279 magazines folded in 2009 alone, and TV Guide—a magazine that once boasted the highest circulation in the country—was sold for $1, the same price you paid for Newsweek. And yet, you chose to enter the industry at this tough time, and I won’t be surprised if some in your circle tried to talk you out of the move.

As one who has devoted his life to writing for, editing, and publishing magazines—including 30 years as editor and then publisher of The Nation, and now as chairman of Columbia Journalism Review—let me try to put your mind at ease. Magazine journalism, Mr. Harman, isn’t busy dying, it’s struggling to be reborn. And now, as it was in the golden age of magazines, it would likely be us Jews who’ll revolutionize this essential industry.

Jews, after all, have always had a special place in their hearts for magazines. Even at this difficult moment, there is Nadine Epstein’s Moment (“the independent national Jewish magazine”), there is Commentary, there is Tikkun (the anti-Commentary), there is The Jewish Review of Books, there is Lilith (“the American-Jewish feminist magazine”), there is Jewish Frontier (for organized labor), and for young, Holocaust-mocking hipsters there is even Heeb, along with many, many others. If you’re reading this letter, you’re surely also aware of Tablet Magazine, which represents, along with jewcy.com and several other Web sites, innovative attempts to carry on the magazine tradition on a new technological platform.

As you walk into Newsweek’s offices, and as you wonder in which direction to lead a great American magazine, let me share with you a bit of good advice I once received from an unlikely source. Although I disagreed with the late Irving Kristol, the so-called godfather of neoconservatism, on many things, I think he was onto something almost existential when it comes to magazine publishing. “A lot of New York intellectuals”—which is to say, Jews—“have roots in Eastern Europe, where, unlike in England or France, there was no tradition of civility,” he told me once when I was interviewing him about intellectuals and magazines. “In England or France, you operate within a framework of existing institutions. In Eastern Europe, we wanted to change existing institutions, to improve them. The Cossack was the existing institution, so ideas were more important than institutions. That is why if you disagree with someone, you stop talking to him and start your own magazine.”

I would add that, whatever one thinks of the neoconservative movement, one must concede that, for better or worse, it would not have come into being had it not been for magazines like The Public Interest (co-edited by Kristol), which in effect launched it, and Norman Podhoretz’s Commentary (now edited by his son, John), which nourished it. Most likely, you have no designs to turn Newsweek into an ideological organ; but you would do well to heed Kristol’s advice, and perceive of your magazine not just as a source for news but also as an institution for the manufacturing and dissemination of ideas.

Having sat on the publisher’s chair for enough time myself, however, I can guarantee that if you go on talking about ideas, someone is going to try to tell you that magazines have no place in the Internet’s age of immediacy. Simply remind these gloomy folks that the year’s biggest political story—the fall of the general who wouldn’t shut up, Stanley McChrystal—was caused by a magazine, Rolling Stone, one of the few media organs that still permit reporters to hang out with sources for long periods of time, and that still allocate 7,500 words or more for a worthwhile story. I’d like to see a Web site, or even a newspaper, have this kind of patience.

I am tempted to end my letter by citing any number of examples from the past glories of American magazine journalism. I’m tempted to remind you of Ida Tarbell’s exposé of Standard Oil Co. in McClure’s at the turn of the last century, of John Hershey’s “Hiroshima,” Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring,” and Hannah Arendt’s “Eichmann in Jerusalem” in The New Yorker. But instead, allow me to end with an anecdote that neatly captures what magazines, at their best, can do, and why we need them now more than ever.

Some years ago, when I was helping to put together a group of small shareholders to invest in The Nation, I was making a pitch before a group of well-wishers assembled by my friend Stanley Sheinbaum in his Brentwood, Calif., living room, when a middle-aged woman raised her hand and said, “Count me in. I can’t not invest.” When asked to say more, she told her story. Her father, she said, used to go to shul every Saturday with his father. And his father would sit there with a copy of The Nation on his lap, reading while the rabbi spoke. Why, her then-9-year-old father asked her grandfather, are you reading while the rabbi is talking? “Because,” said her grandfather, “what he is saying up there, I already know, but what this magazine is telling me down here, I don’t know.”

This, Mr. Harman, is our past. It is up to you to make it our future, as well.

It was not hard to find the common theme that connected all these allegations: A small group of Jews, working together and inspired by a sinister Jewish mastermind, had taken over the American government and was using its power to serve Jewish ends. In other words, the neocon myth—which began on the hard left but found subscribers on the isolationist right as well and became almost commonplace in Europe—was a 21st-century reprise of some old and very unpleasant ideas about Jewish power. It was not uncommon, five or six years ago, to hear warnings about the neoconservative “cabal”—a word with a long anti-Semitic history—or to find critics of the Bush Administration demonstratively making lists of its Jewish members.

There were many possible rebuttals to this kind of insinuation: for instance, that while there were prominent Jewish neoconservatives in the Bush Administration, the actual decision-makers—Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld—were neither neocons nor Jewish; or that many other leading neoconservatives were Catholic; or that the vast majority of American Jews are liberals who oppose the neoconservative agenda. But just as sunlight is the best disinfectant, so the best response to myths and rumors about neoconservatism is the truth about neoconservatism.

That is what Justin Vaïsse provides in his very intelligent and well-researched new book, Neoconservatism: The Biography of a Movement (Harvard University Press). More than a few books have already been written on this subject, and parts of the neoconservative story have passed into legend. The reader who once again encounters, in Vaïsse’s opening pages, the cafeteria at City College in the 1930s, where the Trotskyists of Alcove 1 debated the Stalinists of Alcove 2, might well heave a sigh; and it is possible to be less than fascinated by the finely discriminated stages of the ideological evolution of Norman Podhoretz.

But these things turn out to play a smaller role in Vaïsse’s book than in many studies of neoconservatism, because he is not primarily interested in what he calls the “first age” of the movement. This period, starting in 1965, was when a recognizable neoconservative tendency began to split off from the larger group known as the New York intellectuals. Those intellectuals, from Lionel Trilling to Irving Howe to Irving Kristol, shared a common background—they were mostly poor, first-generation American Jews, born in Brooklyn and the Bronx, who came of age during the Great Depression. And they shared a common political trajectory, from their early Marxist radicalism, through disenchantment with Stalinism and the Communist Party, to the anti-Communist liberalism of the 1950s.

Neoconservatism of the first age, as expressed in the work of Kristol, Podhoretz, and others, can be seen as the New York intellectuals’ response to the upheavals of the 1960s. Originally, it focused on domestic issues—in particular, criticism of the New Left, the counterculture, the Great Society’s welfare programs, and affirmative action. As Vaïsse writes, “the original neoconservatism of the 1960s had nothing to do with the muscular assertion of American power or with the promotion of democracy. It even took no interest in questions of foreign policy.”

This neoconservatism marks an important chapter in both American and Jewish-American intellectual history. But it would hardly be of compelling interest to a European political scientist, or a European reading public (Vaïsse’s book was published in France in 2008; this edition is translated, very well, by Arthur Goldhammer). What brought Vaïsse to the subject was, rather, foreign policy, which moved to the front of the neoconservative agenda in the late 1970s and became its exclusive focus in the George W. Bush years. Essentially, Vaïsse is reading the history of neoconservatism backward from the Iraq War, on the principle that “Bush’s failure in Iraq was also the failure … of a certain version of neoconservatism.” To explain this failure, he tries to understand how neoconservative ideas and personnel became influential enough by 2003 to play an important role in American foreign policy.

That story begins in the 1970s with the so-called “Scoop Jackson Democrats,” whom Vaïsse identifies as “second age neoconservatives.” These were Democrats who had once been classic Cold War liberals, supporters of John F. Kennedy in 1960 and Hubert Humphrey in 1968. But the Democratic Party’s move to the left, under the pressure of the Vietnam War and the social changes of the 1960s, left them feeling stranded, especially after the Democrats nominated the dovish George McGovern in 1972. In response, many of them rallied around Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson, a liberal hawk who became a patron saint of neoconservatism. One month after McGovern was routed by Richard Nixon, these Jackson sympathizers founded the “Coalition for a Democratic Majority,” a small organization that bulks very large in Vaïsse’s book. He charts its career through the rest of the 1970s, as it tried and largely failed to convince the Democratic Party of the need for higher defense spending and a more confrontational policy toward the Soviet Union.

As Vaïsse makes clear, this was initially a battle within Democratic ranks. Many foreign-policy neoconservatives remained liberals on domestic policy; even at the time of the Iraq War, there were neo-liberals or liberal hawks who held this same combination of views. For another, in the 1970s the Republicans were the party of Nixon, Kissinger, and “detente,” which were anathema to the neoconservatives. It wasn’t until 1980, when the Republicans nominated Ronald Reagan, that most of the neoconservatives migrated into the Republican Party, with some former Democrats taking jobs in the Reagan Administration. By that time, the Coalition for a Democratic Majority had given way to the nonpartisan Committee on the Present Danger as the main neoconservative pressure group.

Yet Vaïsse argues, convincingly, that Reagan’s foreign policy was never strictly neoconservative. Yes, he raised defense spending and called the USSR “the evil empire.” But in his second term, he reached out to Mikhail Gorbachev and negotiated arms treaties, which the neoconservatives deplored. Was it Reagan’s toughness or his openness that helped bring about the fall of the USSR? That question would have huge implications after September 11, 2001, when the “third age” of neoconservatism came into its own.

By then, Vaïsse notes, the neoconservatives had long since lost their early connection to the Democratic Party. On domestic issues, they were mostly indistinguishable from other Republicans. This meant that an aggressive foreign policy was the main identifying characteristic of a neoconservative; neocon had almost become a synonym for hawk. But Vaïsse shows that something still separated neoconservatives like Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle from more traditional hawks like Cheney and Rumsfeld, whom he calls simply “assertive nationalists.”

This was a belief, carried over from the Cold War, that the promotion of democracy was both in America’s national interest and an American duty. For ordinary hawks, invading Iraq was the right thing to do because it was necessary to disarm Saddam Hussein and stop him from spreading weapons of mass destruction (which almost all sources believed he possessed). For neoconservatives, invasion was necessary on these grounds, but it was also desirable on moral and ideological grounds: By replacing Saddam’s tyranny with a democracy, America could help spark a wave of democratic transformation in the Middle East. Just as in the Cold War, America was fighting for a freer world, which would also be a safer and more pro-American world. (A democratic Middle East would also, they presumed, be safer for Israel, a goal shared by both Jewish and non-Jewish neoconservatives.)

It is now pretty widely agreed that the invasion of Iraq was a failure and that this failure discredited the neoconservatives. But, as Vaïsse points out, neoconservatives themselves don’t necessarily see it that way. They had always argued that the invasion of Iraq would require massive forces and be followed by a long period of engagement. They were interested not just in victory but in democratic reconstruction. It was Rumsfeld, not Wolfowitz and Perle, who urged an invasion “on the cheap,” with the minimum number of American troops and with no post-invasion planning.

Vaïsse does not endorse this neoconservative defense. In the end, he is strongly critical of neoconservatives—for their hubris about American power, for their tendency to exaggerate threats and underestimate dangers, and for seeing states like Iraq as bigger threats than terrorist groups like al-Qaida. But unlike most critics, he sympathizes with neoconservative aspirations and anxieties. He recognizes that the neoconservatives—like liberals, realists, and other foreign-policy factions—are advocating what they believe to be the right and effective policy, not engaging in cynical or suspicious manipulation. And he is very tough on the canards that have grown up around the word “neoconservative”—in particular, the ludicrous overestimation of the influence of Strauss, which usually goes along with a malicious misreading of his work.

As a result, Vaïsse is perhaps even too careful to minimize the role of Jews, or at least of the Jewishness of Jews, in neoconservative thought. It is quite true, as he says, that it is not “ ‘in essence’ a Jewish movement”: not all neoconservatives are Jews, most Jews are not neoconservatives, and neoconservatives certainly do not place “Jewish interests” ahead of “American interests.” Still, I think that the appeal of neoconservatism to many Jews can be related to the lessons they draw from Jewish history. Neoconservatism can be defined as aggressive support for (classical) liberalism, and it is clear that the fate of the Jews has absolutely been connected to the fate of liberalism. Where free speech, the free market, individual rights, and tolerance flourish, Jews flourish; where they are destroyed, Jews are destroyed. This is one reason why American Jews tend to be truly patriotic, since America has the most durable and deep-rooted liberalism of any country in the world. The desire to defend and extend American freedoms is what leads many Jews to be left-liberals; a different interpretation of what that defense requires, and who freedom’s enemies really are, leads some Jews to be neoconservatives.

Timerman had brought out his book just as the President Ronald Reagan was assembling his new administration. The Argentinean newspaper publisher was seized upon by, or offered himself to, the left and was used to testify against Reagan’s choice for assistant secretary of state for human rights, Ernest Lefever. The left feared that Lefever would focus more on totalitarian communist regimes than the authoritarian regimes on the right that, for all their sins, at least allowed the practice of religion and travel and the owning of private property—and sided with the United States against the Soviet Union. Timerman’s testimony helped convince the Senate Foreign Relations committee to reject Lefever.

At around this time, an invitation to have lunch with Timerman went around editorial page of the Journal, where I picked it up. I’d been newspapering in the Third World for much of the past decade, and the struggle for press freedom there interested me. At the lunch, hosted by Robert Bernstein of Random House, I found myself seated between a lady and a gentleman who were having a conversation across my plate. I was trying to follow it when one of them said to the other that Timerman’s financial partner in his newspaper was David Graiver. “What?” I exclaimed. “Timerman was David Graiver’s business partner?” When she allowed again that he was, I said, “No wonder he was being tortured.”

I didn’t mean to suggest he deserved torture, which I am against. I meant that it was not surprising for authorities anywhere to be interested in a business partner of Graiver, who was one of the most notorious figures in Latin America and was being probed by American prosecutors for financial wrongdoing. When the lunch was over I went back to the newspaper and telephoned Timerman’s publisher, Alfred Knopf. I said I wanted to ask about some disturbing things I’d heard and invited Timerman to breakfast. An appointment was set up promptly for breakfast a day or two hence at the Carlyle. On the afternoon before the meeting, I mentioned to the editorial meeting, “Anybody want to join me for breakfast tomorrow with Jacobo Timerman.” Journal editor Robert Bartley’s eyebrows shot up. “You’re having breakfast with Timerman? Have you seen what Irving Kristol has just sent in?”

In fact I had not, and Bartley rushed over to his desk and returned with the foolscap of Kristol’s next column, a devastating dispatch that questioned Timerman’s bona fides on almost every level and situated the affair in the context of the global struggle with the Soviet Union. Kristol began with a reprise of the distinction between totalitarian and authoritarian regimes. “A major intellectual and propaganda campaign is now being mounted by the left and liberal-left against this distinction,” Kristol wrote. “Some of the active participants are simply human rights pundits. But there can be little doubt that the driving force behind this campaign is supplied by those who have more sophisticated political intentions.”

“They understand very well,” Kristol wrote, “that once the distinction between totalitarian and authoritarian nations is eliminated, most of our attention and energy are bound to be directed toward the latter, since in fact our State Department has more influence, however limited, on the governments of Argentina or Guatemala than on Cuba or Vietnam.” He drew a contrast between the different attitudes of human rights activists toward Timerman, on the one hand, and the Cuban democratic socialist, Huber Matos, who was held in one of Castro’s dungeons, and mistreated there, for nearly two decades.

Then he dug into Timerman himself, particularly for his failure to disclose in his book key facts. “The name David Graiver does not appear in Mr. Timerman’s book,” Kristol observed. He called it an “extraordinary omission” and stated flat out that Graiver was the “immediate cause of Mr. Timerman’s arrest and imprisonment.” He sketched Graiver’s responsibility in the collapse of two American banks, from which, Kristol wrote, investigators suspected he looted as much as $40 million. He reminded readers that even though a private plane in which Graiver was supposedly a passenger had crashed into a mountain in Mexico in August of 1976, Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau suspected that Graiver might still be alive.

It was some eight months after Graiver’s death that Argentine authorities, as Kristol put it, “disclosed that Mr. Graiver had been, among other things, the money manager for the Montoneros, the left-wing urban terrorists, who had accumulated a known $60 million in ransom money and who felt that it was a shame that so much capital should not be yielding revolutionary returns.” And, Kristol reported, it had also been disclosed that “Graiver owned a 50% interest in Mr. Timerman’s paper, La Opinion.” He pointed out that it was after those allegations were made public that Timerman was arrested, “along with members of the Graiver family.”

Kristol observed that Graiver’s own motives were unclear, since he was not particularly political. Graiver had been forced to pay ransom for a family member, and maybe his own services to the Montoneros were less than voluntary. Kristol also pointed out that there was no evidence that Timerman knew what Graiver was up to. But he argued that the absence of such evidence made Timerman’s “silence on the Graiver affair all the more inexplicable”—unless it were that Timerman was less interested in human rights and more interested in indicting the regime in Argentina and our own government in Washington.

Kristol then went into a review of Timerman’s own relations—or lack of them—with the Jewish community in Argentina. Kristol didn’t deny, indeed straightforwardly acknowledged, the problem of anti-Semitism in Argentina. But he pointed out that the man to whom Timerman dedicated his book, Rabbi Marshall Meyer, whom Kristol called “a distinguished fighter for human rights,” was building a major rabbinical seminary in Argentina. And the Jewish community, for all its serious troubles, was not fleeing the country, though it was largely keeping its distance from Timerman.

From this Kristol concluded that the Jewish community was “implicitly vindicating the Reagan administration’s prudent policy on human rights”—which involved using its influence to try to move the regime toward greater liberalization. He called the outlook “far from hopeless” and warned that were we to “write off” Argentina entirely the “more extreme right-wing elements in the Armed forces—the ones who illegally arrested and tortured Mr. Timerman—would surely take power.” And he suggested that there were those on the left who would like to see such a thing happen in order to provoke a crisis that would create for them an opportunity.

It was one powerful column. Bartley, who was nothing if not an editor who liked to stay on the edge of a story, remade that night’s editorial page and put Irving’s piece in the paper a day early. He didn’t want Timerman to get the first word in. And so it was that I personally hand-carried the edition containing Kristol’s attack on Timerman up to the Carlyle and handed it to Timerman over breakfast. After a cursory glance, Timerman tossed it aside. When I pressed him about David Graiver, he confirmed they were partners but complained about the interview. “The questions you are asking me,” he said, “these are the questions they were asking me when I was tortured.” To which Mark Falcoff, in a reprise of the Timerman case issued by Commentary magazine six months later, remarked: “Just so.”

Timerman eventually settled in Tel Aviv. A few months later, while on a visit to Israel, I had a cup of coffee with the scoundrel. Looking back, Timerman had one reaction to Kristol’s piece, which is that it had done wonders for the sale of his prison memoir. He had written a new book, attacking Israel for the war in Lebanon, and hoped that Kristol or the Journal would attack that volume, too. As I walked away from the coffee shop, I found myself marveling at how right Kristol had been—at what a magnificent newspaper columnist he was, a profound thinker and scoop artist all in one. On the great political confrontations of his time, he had x-ray vision. And I can’t help thinking how much America could use him today as a new president enters a new and equally dangerous era needing all the seichel he can get.

The Wall Street Journal, where Kristol wrote a monthly column for 25 years, carries an unsigned editorial pointing out that he “helped shape the basis for many opposition ideas to the modern political left, in both domestic and foreign policy. American politics rarely bends for long to the ideas of one person, a modest truth that Irving Kristol understood. So it should be noted that he enlisted a small army of similarly minded intellectuals (‘like-minded’ would be an oxymoron among this crowd) to carry the fight.”

James Q. Wilson in the Journal writes: “Irving Kristol’s talents were remarkable: He did for The Public Interest what he had earlier done for Commentary, the Reporter and Encounter—find good people and induce them to say important things even when it did not improve the revenues of the magazine. The Public Interest always relied on financial support from a few friends and rarely sold more than 12,000 copies. That didn’t bother Irving at all: What counts is who reads it, not how many read it. And for 40 years a lot of important people did read it.”

As for Kristol’s most memorable line—that a neoconservative is a liberal who’s been mugged by reality—Kristol’s friend and City Journal editor-at-large Myron Magnet observed: “What he really meant, of course, was simply a liberal who’d been mugged—who’d seen that all the liberal, welfare-state ideals for the uplift of the poor, and especially the minority poor, had in the end produced a criminal underclass, exactly the opposite of the intended uplift. The good intentions counted for nothing with him and even sparked a certain dry contempt; it was the result that mattered.”

Commentary Editor-in-Chief John Podhoretz remembers Kristol’s acumen as a fundraiser for little magazines. Having started the conservative college magazine Midway (later Counterpoint) at the University of Chicago in 1979, Podhoretz “called [Kristol], and he instructed me on the fine art of writing a grant proposal to a new foundation he had begun called the Institute for Educational Affairs. A few weeks later, he called me to report that a grant of $2,000 had been approved and, moreover, that he had used our little magazine as an example of what might be done on college campuses to encourage non-Leftist thinking among students. The board of the foundation found his pitch compelling, and it was decided that efforts should be made to encourage the creation of other publications like Counterpoint. From this seedling came a project that would, by the mid-1980s, lead to the creation of more than 50 college newspapers and magazines across the country engaged in a vital intellectual project to bring ideological diversity to campus life.”

Slate’s Christopher Hitchens recalls a dinner in Manhattan at which he and Kristol were in attendance and from which Hitchens took away the following: “Irving Kristol’s great charm … was that he didn’t care overmuch for the charm business. Most of his celebrated quips and interventions had a tough-guy street feel to them, a manner probably retained from his Marxist days. Typical of him (and I think also truthful) was the claim that he hadn’t known about CIA funding for Encounter but wouldn’t have given much of a damn if he had known.”

Damon Linker at The New Republic is less flattering: “What’s less often recognized is that while Kristol was growing more conservative he was also undergoing a different sort of transformation—from a dispassionate analyst of American politics and culture to a fully engaged advocate for a comprehensive political ideology. Lamentably, it is this change more than Kristol’s gradual drift to the right that may have done more to shape the contemporary conservative mind.”

The New York Times noted that Kristol “never sought celebrity; in fact, he was puzzled by writers who craved it…. He was happier consulting with a congressman like Jack Kemp about the new notion of supply-side economics and then watching with satisfaction as Mr. Kemp converted President Ronald Reagan to the theory.”

And The Washington Post quotes Karl Rove as saying that Kristol “made it a moral imperative to rouse conservatism from mainstream Chamber of Commerce boosterism to a deep immersion in ideas.”

Kristol was born in Brooklyn in 1920 to parents who had emigrated from Eastern Europe and worked in the garment industry. His turn from the labor socialism of his childhood to a new brand of conservatism crystallized in the 1960s, in opposition to Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs, and his ideas shaped the modern Republican Party under Ronald Reagan. Kristol once said neoconservatism was not a movement but an “intellectual current.”

“His wisdom, wit, good humor, and generosity of spirit made him a friend and mentor to several generations of thinkers and public servants,” wrote the editors of the Weekly Standard in a post on the magazine’s blog.

Irving Kristol, Godfather of Modern Conservatism, Dies at 89 [NYT]
Irving Kristol, Architect of Neoconservatism, Dies at 89 [WP]
Remembering Irving Kristol [Weekly Standard]

Still, Sanneh argues that underneath all the bluster Savage is still just a neurotic New York Jew: one who peppers his show with references to shaygitzes and Shabbes goys; who flinches when remembering the time his car backfired in front of a shul on Yom Kippur, and who used to drop by Chabad services; who is preoccupied with his father’s early death and his own mortality. So what’s the difference between Savage and his Jewish neocon comrades? In the podcast that accompanies the story, Sanneh says it’s simple: “He stayed weird.”

Party of One [The New Yorker (subscribers only)]
Alternative Conservative [TNY podcast]