WASHINGTON — Irving Kristol, the political writer and publisher known as the godfather of neo-conservatism whose youthful radicalism evolved into a rejection of communism and the counterculture, died Friday. He was 89.
“His wisdom, wit, good humor and generosity of spirit made him a friend and mentor to several generations of thinkers and public servants,” said the editors of The Weekly Standard in announcing Kristol’s death on its website. He died of lung-cancer complications.
A Trotskyist in the 1930s, Kristol would soon sour on socialism, break from liberalism after the rise of the New Left in the 1960s and in the 1970s commit the unthinkable — support the Republican Party, once as “foreign to me as attending a Catholic Mass.”
He was a New York intellectual who moved to Washington in 1988. He was a liberal “mugged by reality,” his turn to the right joined by countless others, including future GOP Cabinet officials Jeane Kirkpatrick and William Bennett and another neo-conservative founder, Norman Podhoretz.
“The influence of Irving Kristol’s ideas has been one of the most important factors in reshaping the American climate of opinion over the past 40 years,” Podhoretz said.
He was a flagship in the network of think tanks, media outlets and corporations that helped make conservatism a reigning ideology for at least two decades.
“More than anyone alive, perhaps, Irving Kristol can take the credit for reversing the direction of American political culture,” liberal commentator Eric Alterman wrote in 1999.
Active in publishing for more than half a century, Kristol wrote essays and reviews for The New Leader and Commentary; released several books; and co-founded a seminal neo-conservative journal, The Public Interest. He was also a contributor to The Wall Street Journal.
