The Times ran a long flattering obit of the late Irving Kristol by a neolib, Barry Gewen. Kristol lived a long life, 89 years. Good for him. I hear he was charming, too. Here is something Gewen left out that I think is important, about Kristol’s transformation in the 70s. In 1973, as I’ve reported before, Kristol wrote for the Congress Bi-weekly, a publication of the American Jewish Congress:
Senator McGovern is very sincere when he says that he will try to cut the military budget by 30%. And this is to drive a knife in the heart of Israel… Jews don’t like big military budgets. But it is now an interest of the Jews to have a large and powerful military establishment in the United States… American Jews who care about the survival of the state of Israel have to say, no, we don’t want to cut the military budget, it is important to keep that military budget big, so that we can defend Israel.
This was a sincere expression of Kristol’s Israel-firstism, that his brother-in-law Milton Himmelfarb and his son Bill Kristol also have espoused. You’d think that or something like it should have been in there, as a core of neocon ideology that would play a large part in events that followed, and that have helped to bring our ship on to the rocks in the last few years.
Something else. Gewen notes wisely that Kristol never produced books. He was just an intellectual leader, in little magazines. I have to get down my copy of the Neoconservative Imagination, the book of Irving’s periodical writings that his son published a few years ago; but my memory of it is that it is a little disappointing. Not all that much there. I had a similar feeling of disappointment from the book of Milton Himmelfarb’s periodical writings that his sister Gertrude, Irving Kristol’s widow, lovingly helped to publish a year or two back: Jews and Gentiles. (Milton was as obsessive as moi.) And as for Bill Kristol’s writings, they’re a complete disappointment. He had a pitiful column at the Times for a while, and his book supporting the Iraq war, written with neolibcon (who can keep this straight) Lawrence Kaplan of the New Republic, The War Over Iraq, was also forgettable.
What I’m driving at here is that Gertrude Himmelfarb, the scholar and historian, is the most productive of the bunch, and the one you’ve heard the least from. She’s written lots of books, and supposedly, good books. She’s made a real contribution to expanding human knowledge, which I don’t know that you could accuse Irving of having done. Yes he was an intellectual leader, but an ideologue, an operator focused on changing policy, a goal he did achieve. His son has been even more of an instrumentalist. That doesn’t make him an intellectual or a scholar.
So my sympathies to the Kristol family, but also let me salute The Neocon Women. Where are they? How come we don’t see more of them? Are they the true brains? Are they mousy and studious and terrifyingly smart? Sort of like rock and roll wives, the real powers? I wonder.
