Corks must be popping these days in the Kristol household. Irving Kristol,
the long-reigning doyen of the neoconservative movement, has just published
a broad-ranging anthology of writings from his 50-year career. His wife,
historian Gertrude Himmelfarb, last January published her own book and has
emerged as an intellectual spokeswoman for the Republican Revolution's
return to 19th-century moral codes. Their son Bill, after stints as Dan
Quayle's chief of staff and Republican party memo-master, has launched from
shore his new magazine The Weekly Standard, steering it into the thick of
Washington political punditry. This whirlwind of family publication, you
might say, amounts to a veritable Kristol gale.

The story of the Kristols turns out to be more than a family saga. As
Father Irving's new tome makes clear, his own personal ideological
trajectory--from youthful Troskyist in the 1930s to anti-Communist liberal
in the '50s neocon sachem in the late '60s and '70s--stands as an emblem
for the rightward drift of a small but significant segment of public
intellectuals. Playfully titled Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an
Idea, Kristol's book tells this tale in two ways: First he offers us "An
Autobiographical Memoir," a jaunty and unembittered recap of his
professional and ideological peregrinations, from his Jewish upbringing to
his days cavorting with the Paris Review set to his founding of The Public
Interest with such other disaffected liberals as Daniel Bell and Nathan
Glazer. Then, in the bulk of the book, he tells it again through
well-selected essays that exhibit a nimble intellect and breadth of
interest; he takes on Freud and Einstein, Adam Smith and Machiavelli, the
problems of the campus and the perils of the city. In the tradition of the
great public intellectuals of his day, left and right, he didn't confine
himself to politics but explored literature, religion, philosophy.
Reshuffling these essays into chronological order, you can clearly limn
Kristol's darkening worldview, from his disdain for utopia-seekers to his
final declarations about the inherent bankruptcy of liberalism.

If Kristol's Trotskyist-to-neocon evolution is familiar fare,
Neoconservatism adds a denouement to this story, previously unchronicled.
In the final stage of Kristol's journey, he becomes a decided conservative.
The swerves and turns and detours that made his earlier writing so original
straighten out, and he rides fast and free into the heart of the
conservative camp, leaving behind the neo- prefix like training wheels.
Biographically, this change is demarcated by his and Himmelfarb's move to
Washington, DC, first for a year in 1976-1977, then for good a decade
later. During that time, Kristol recounts, he lunched regularly with, and
grew close to, future judges Robert Bork, Antonin Scalia and Laurence
Silberman and economics writer Jude Wanniski--right-wing ideologues all. He
embraced supply-side economics and other doctrines that he never quite felt
comfortable with, as his retrospective makes clear. This self-surrender to
the conservative camp also reveals itself in selected essays in the book,
which grow more dogmatic, more propagandistic and less nuanced in the later
years. Indeed, Kristol's grumblings about AIDS and contemporary gender
relations in the 1990s seem so cranky that the reader can't help feeling
that his best years are behind him.

Gertrude Himmelfarb remains deft in her political opinion writing. But she,
too, has surrendered a measure of her intellectual purity to advance Newt
Gingrich's agenda. An accomplished historian, author of works on Lord Acton
and John Stuart Mill, she has happily employed her new book, about morality
in Victorian times, in the service of the Republican party crusade. Last
January, on the occasion of the publication of The De-Moralization of
Society: From Victorian Virtues to Modern Values, Himmelfarb penned a piece
for the New York Times op-ed page. In it, she defended Gingrich's
off-the-cuff crack that orphanages should supplant the welfare system.

To be sure, all authors spin off excerpts and opinion pieces to promote
their books. Yet there was something especially sad and opportunistic about
this much talked-about piece. Himmelfarb glibly celebrated not just
orphanages but also the other repressive values of the era, such as Scarlet
Letter-style humiliation of women for their sexual activity. (Nor would it
have been so easy in Victorian times for Himmelfarb to have retained her
own surname--or to have published ten books, for that matter.) This is
exactly the sort of use to which history should not be put. Indeed, it's
not even history Himmelfarb invokes but glossy nostalgia; a real historical
analysis would have acknowledged the roughshod rampage of corporate
capitalism, the immiseration of industrial workers, the ubiquity of
prostitution, and white society's primitive views of blacks. Most historians
would scoff at the very idea of appropriating such facile "lessons" from an
entirely different era and imposing them on our age. Once upon a time,
the historian Himmelfarb might have analyzed how and why the Victorian
moral codes crumbled, or what benefits they brought to their own day.
Today, the pundit Himmelfarb pastes them slapdash into the pages of the
Gingrich reader.

Has conservative intellectualism given way to punditry? In Neoconservatism,
Irving Kristol writes of founding The Public Interest in 1965, the height
of the Great Society. He saw in the publishing world a barren landscape of
conservative thought. (William F. Buckley's National Review he deemed
"insufficiently analytical and 'intellectual,' too stridently hostile to
the course of American politics ever since 1932.") A similar dearth,
apparently, impelled Bill Kristol to publish The Weekly Standard in 1995,
the supposed year of conservative ascendance. The very name of the son's
magazine, however, evokes images markedly different from the civic
responsibility of The Public Interest. It conjures up scenes of the cavalry
carrying the flag into battle in the name of a crusade; it suggests
conventionality, ordinariness and normalcy, as well as a disdain for
left-wing cultural and moral relativism. It implies that Kristol and
company are on the side of the winners.

Off to a good start, The Standard promises to matter. It's already
attracted lots of top-flight conservative names and some fine younger
writers. Yet it's sure to be riven by divisions eventually. Those staffers
who are journalists first and conservatives second, such as longtime
Washington Star and New Republic correspondent Fred Barnes, and those who
seem to place their journalism in the service of the cause, such as former
Bush speechwriter John Podhoretz (himself son of another neocon pathfinder,
Norman Podhoretz), will doubtless clash. The magazine's early issues
contain healthy portions of both solid reporting and Rush Limbaugh-style
ranting.

In the evolution of neoconservatism, though, most interesting is the maiden
effort by Bill Kristol in The Standard's first issue. Entitled "President
Powell?" it is a piece of pure speculation and punditry, utterly worthless
unless you're dying to know what yet one more person thinks of a Colin
Powell presidential bid. Like the memos Kristol wrote after the Bush-Quayle
administration was evicted from office, it's all about political
positioning and strategy, not actual ideas. It supports the harsh assertion
by journalist Michael Lind that the career of "the younger Kristol [is]
part of the history, not of American thought, but of American public
relations." Fred Barnes-style reporting on the doings of the Republican
Congress can inform a readership. Patient cogitation about values and
ideology of the sort Irving Kristol once offered can shape intellectual
debate. Responsible history of the ilk Gertrude Himmelfarb wrote can
provide, in a loose-fitting way, a perspective on contemporary politics.
But the speculation that Bill Kristol serves up in the premiere of The
Standard is as perishable as a "McLaughlin Group"-soundbite. As if to
confirm suspicions of the son's aspirations to pundit status, ABC-TV
announced last week that it was hiring him on as a sort of roving analyst,
to weigh in with snippets of wisdom on "Good Morning America" and "This
Week with David Brinkley." That's making it in Washington.

The saga of the Kristol family, then, tells two stories. First is the story
of neoconservatism. As an ideology, neoconservatism is now dead. But it is
dead in the way that Freud and Marx are dead: just as those thinkers
continue to affect our view of human nature long after particular theories
of theirs have faded, so the success of neoconservatism in influencing the
right culminated in its absorption by the Republican party. Having
succeeded, it extinguished itself. Like Freud and Marx, in its death it is
vitally alive. In this respect, it's possible to concur with the conclusion
of Irving Kristol's autobiographical memoir: "So I deem the
neo-conservative enterprise to have been a success, to have brought
elements that were needed to enliven American conservatism and help reshape
American politics."

But the second story does not end so happily. Versatile writers who could
address literature and psychology, history and religion, culture and
politics give way to politicos obsessed with finding a winning strategy for
the cause. The public intellectual dies and the pundit rises. The
discussion of ideas turns into the exploitation of ideas for cynical ends.
In the Kristols' moment of celebration, then, there is cause for tears.

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