And so we lose another giant. A self-identified liberal "mugged by reality", Irving Kristol, commonly heralded as the godfather of 'neo'-conservatism, has died. Hillel Italie gives an account of his life for RealClearPolitics.com: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 left home, first politically, then physically, moving to Washington in 1988. ... his turn to the right joined by countless others, including such future GOP Cabinet officials as Jeane Kirkpatrick and William Bennett and another neoconservative 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.
Among the host of publications he is credited as founding and/or editing was Commentary magazine (from 1947 to 1952); The Public Interest (from 1965 to 2002) and The National Interest from 1985 to 2002.
Kristol's life, along with that of his fellow "New York intellectuals" Irving Howe, Daniel Bell, and Nathan Glazer, was the subject of the 1998 documentary, "Arguing the World". In July 2002 he was awarded the Medal of Freedom by President George W. Bush, the highest civilian honor in the United States.
