Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea.

Although this is mostly a collection of previously published essays, it is notable because of the new "autobiographical memoir" that begins the book. I was especially interested in the memoir because Kristol is trying to use a life story to explain how ideas grow out of experience. I had made a similar attempt in my autobiography, Tilting at Windmills. Kristol and I have much else in common. We have both been accused of being "godfathers" of related movements: neoconservatism in his case, neoliberalism in mine. We have both founded publications that have as one of their purposes exposing the mushiness in liberal thought--his, The Public Interest, did it with essays and social science research; mine, The Washington Monthly, with journalism. Both of us have been called to this mission in considerable part by the influence of my teacher and his friend, Lionel Trilling. Both of us had contempt for the kind of liberal who thought it McCarthyite to suggest that Stalinism was evil or even to call a communist a communist. (That in expressing this contempt Kristol sometimes betrayed too little respect for the First Amendment was pointed out in cogent letters to Commentary from Alan Westin and Joseph Rauh in response to Kristol's famous--or infamous to many on the left--"Civil Liberties 1952--A Study in Confusion.")

We each had childhood experiences with religion that, in Kristol's words, which are equally applicable to me, "made it impossible for me to become anti-religious even though my subsequent intellectual commitment kept trying to steer me in that direction." Like so many other young people in the thirties and forties, we had adolescent flirtations with socialism. We also went through a period of intellectual snobbery that was characterized in both our cases by an avoidance of any movie that wasn't foreign. In fact, we almost certainly went to the same movie theater, the Thalia off Broadway on 95th Street. In the late forties, Kristol lived in an apartment above the 96th and Broadway Bickford's where I often had coffee because I lived a block or two away and they kept the price at a nickel long after most other restaurants had raised it.

But there our similarities end and the differences begin. Irving Kristol has come to stand for many things I think are wrong in today's politics. The contrast in our life experiences--and in the way we remember and think about those experiences--helps explain the way our ideas differ today. "Bohemia," Kristol writes of himself and his young wife, Bea, "had no attractions for us." It had immense allure for me. I devoted much of my energy to the pursuit of young women, and spent a lot of evenings in the jazz clubs of 52nd Street and in the neighborhood bars around Broadway and 96th--my devotion to these establishments is suggested by the fact that I can still remember their names: the Riverside, Neary's, and Quinn and Kling's--and had a number of friends like Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac who were considered by others to be somewhere between exotic and disreputable.

Although my views on values are now much more similar to the Kristols', I suspect that my experience during the forties has made me more tolerant of those who are different. Even our childhood experiences with religion can be distinguished in this regard. He says he, a Jew, was taught "to hate the goyim and to spit whenever we passed their churches." I, as a young Christian, was not taught to hate the Jews. My parents subscribed to the kind of moderate, if still far from admirable, antisemitism that kept Jews out of country clubs but treated them as equals in business and law and involved no hatred. In fact, by the time I was 12, in 1938, I was arguing in Sunday School that Hitler's treatment of the Jews was horribly un-Christian.

The most dramatic difference between us was in our reaction to fellow enlisted men in the U.S. Army during World War II. He saw them as "too easily inclined to loot, to rape, and to shoot prisoners of war." He believed the authority of the army hierarchy was the only force that could curb the evil he saw in the souls of these young men. "Again and again," Kristol writes, "I found reason to think better of the army and less well of my fellow enlisted men."

I liked most of my fellow enlisted men. In fact, to the extent that I had problems in the service, they tended to be with authority in the form of a series of first sergeants who suspected me of having an irreverent attitude.

A carryover of Kristol's disdain for enlisted men may have had something to do with the only time we ever tangled. The scene was a conference on neoconservatism that was held in Berlin a dozen or so years ago. Kristol suggested that what America needed was a nice little war that could be won with ease and would make the country feel good about itself. I argued that feeling good could not justify the loss of life, both in the population we attacked and among our own soldiers and sailors. Kristol was unpersuaded.

But then again, even though I had spoken with some heat, he didn't become angry. He is both highly rational and genial, a description that also applies to his wife, Bea, the eminent social historian who writes as Gertrude Himmelfarb. So it's impossible for me to think of him as a bad or evil man.

To some extent, I think our differences come simply from the fact that his base of experience is narrower than my own. For example, in the army, his regiment, he says, "was heavily populated by thugs or near thugs from Cicero, Illinois (Al Capone's old home)." My army experience involved me with four different groups for several months each. There were a few really bad guys in one of the groups. But for the most part, the men were decent and sensible, the kind of people who made me believe in democracy. Kristol, however, generalized his narrow experience and decided that looking at the common man as he "actually existed--as distinct from his idealized version" meant that "the prospects for democratic socialism were nil."

I share Kristol's scorn for the fantasy version of the common man that existed in the minds of many liberal intellectuals of the thirties and forties. The common man was not always as pure as they wanted him to be. But he wasn't as bad as Kristol came to think. The truth, it seems to me, lies somewhere between Rousseau and Hobbes. There are saints and sinners, geniuses and fools, throughout all levels of society, with enough rough-but-essentially-good characters like Huckleberry Finn and Jim to make the average quite acceptable.

Ten percent of Kristol's book is devoted to his life story, the rest to his ideas. In my book, the proportion was about three-quarters life, one-quarter ideas. This, alas, could simply reflect an excess of vanity or a poverty of intellect on my part. But it may also mean that I had a more varied life experience to tell about. I had worked in several summer theaters, a major advertising agency, a state legislature, a federal bureaucracy, and was a lawyer in the judicial system. I had run for office myself and had been active in the campaigns of others. And I had lived for more than 20 years in the kind of American town--definitely not a big city, and strongly influenced by both southern and midwestern culture--that Kristol has missed, living as he has in Washington, Chicago and, for most of his life, New York.

This does not necessarily make me wiser. But it does mean that I have a greater variety of experience to draw on. So does my career as a journalist compared to Kristol's as an essayist. The essay is written and researched in the library or the writer's apartment. A journalist must go out and interview and observe other people. I first became involved in this process 34 years ago when I began traveling to Peace Corps programs around the world to try to discover what we were doing right and wrong by observing the volunteers in action and talking to them and the people they were working with. Such human interaction means that the journalist's views are more likely to be tempered by what he has seen and heard in the course of reporting rather than determined almost entirely by the reading, arguing, and thinking that are the main sources for the intellectual essayist.

Another source the essayist relies on is memory. If he's very smart, he can usually get away with it. But occasionally the game is given away. Thus, I noticed that Kristol's galleys said that, "in 1968, only a few neoconservatives supported Barry Goldwater." Goldwater, of course, ran in 1964. When I checked the final bound book to see if the error had been corrected, Kristol's memory had caught it but failed him again in the words that followed, "while the rest of us went along with Hubert Humphrey." Humphrey ran in '68 against Nixon, not in '64 against Goldwater.

This kind of memory problem is not crucial. But the kind that is crucial is when the memory is based on experience that is too narrow. Remember how Kristol generalized from his unhappy army experience. How many World War II veterans have you heard describe their comrades as thugs? Kristol's kind of reasoning from thin experience is the classic conservative problem. They know the fellows at the country club or in the executive suite, or like Kristol, at think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute, where any disagreement is likely to be confined to the various shadings of right-wing ideology. Perhaps what's most maddening of all about these people is their smug sense that the experiences they haven't had aren't worth having.

Although there is still some life left in neoconservatism in its critique of liberal affirmative action programs and of liberal indifference to teaching values, the truth is that the "neo" is almost gone from Kristol's conservatism. He is just like the other conservatives: indifferent or hostile to protecting health, safety, and the environment, or to raising the income of those down below or reducing the obscene share of those at the top.

Perhaps the greatest irony lies in what Kristol's son, Bill, did to the Clinton health proposal. He told the Republicans not to try to reach a compromise on a good program, that Clinton had to lose in order for them to win. This is essentially the advice that Lenin gave to his followers about Kerensky's program: make it fail so that we can win.

Irving Kristol devoted much of his life to exposing just this kind of tactic and nothing is more revealing of his loss of faith in democratic government and the sensible compromises that make it work than his failure to repudiate the advice his son gave. It is clear from this book that Kristol and his son are ideological allies. Indeed, they are very much alike--brilliant, pretty nice guys who are terribly wrong about most of the main issues at this moment in history.