Extract
The enduring Irving Kristol: Wilfred M. McClay remembers the skeptical yet hopeful father of neoconservatism.
I cannot claim to have known the late Irving Kristol very well. But each encounter was memorable, and none more so than the last, in May of 2009. It was at a crowded and noisy reception at the Warner Theater, prior to Leon Kass' presentation of the annual Jefferson Lecture for the National Endowment for the Humanities. Irving's health had been gradually declining for a long time, and he was by then wheelchair-bound and sitting on the sidelines. But he would not have missed the occasion of his close friend's important lecture and clearly was enjoying himself, even though he was nearly deaf.
He seemed to accept such symptoms of physical decline with remarkable equanimity, even humor. As his son Bill relates in his lovely foreword to The Neoconservative Persuasion, a posthumous selection of his essays, when Irving would lunch with his colleagues Irwin Stelzer and Charles Krauthammer, sometimes at the end of one of their debates he would advise them, "I can't hear what you're saying. So I make it up. And," he added, smiling, "sometimes you disappoint me." I knew conversation with him on this occasion would not be easy and might end up disappointing us both. Still, I had a feeling the opportunity might never come again, and so I presumptuously knelt down at his side and spoke directly into his ear....See the full content of this document
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