Where is Irving Kristol?

One of the few benefits of the current crisis is the greater available time I have to read. On a recent Sunday an Observer article, “‘Rockers and spies’ – how the CIA used culture to shred the iron curtain,” piqued my interest. The article promoted a podcast launching on Spotify on May 11, “Winds of Change” which deals, yet again, with the salacious history of the CIA’s use of cultural diplomacy during the Cold War to decrease anti-American sentiment. The article provided the usual overview of the CIA’s ‘manipulation’ of American cultural products to gain foreign support, with little reflection on the more nuanced recent scholarship on the matter.[1] Yet, what was particularly surprising was the account’s history of the CIA’s funding of ‘little magazines’ through the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), in which the author named Stephen Spender as the sole editor of the Congress’ leading Anglo-American journal, Encounter, thus ignoring his co-editor, the American intellectual and so-called “godfather of neoconservatism,” Irving Kristol. The omission left me wondering, why wasn’t Kristol even mentioned?

It is true that Kristol served as Encounter’s editor for just five years from 1953-1958.[2]  Despite that, he was a co-founder of the magazine and was responsible for overseeing its political content during his editorship. The omission therefore seemed odd. Perhaps the oversight is a reflection of the editorial tensions between Spender and Kristol themselves? Kristol’s youth and editorial inexperience irked Spender, who was a well-established member of British literary elite. Spender even tried, unsuccessfully, to remove Kristol as editor. However, this seems unlikely. More probable is that Kristol’s own reluctance to discuss his involvement in the journal has led to his exclusion from its history and memory. Despite claiming to have retained a “special sense of solidarity with the magazine,” he made little reference to his time as editor in his memoirs.[3] In one essay he prefaced his discussion of Encounter by declaring, “It is not a particularly interesting story.”[4] Meanwhile, in another, he wrote about the journal only very obliquely: “The history of Encounter – including the CIA connection – has by now been well told by Peter Colman in The Liberal Conspiracy, and told less well by others, so I shall say little about it.”[5] Even so, this answer is still unsatisfactory. Why is the role he played at Encounter so often ignored?

This conundrum speaks to a wider issue I am confronting as I research Kristol’s life for my PhD project, which is an intellectual biography of him and his place in the Cold War intellectual world. In addition to his involvement in liberal publications such as Encounter, Kristol was pivotal in attracting popular support for the conservative movement through his writings for the Wall Street Journal and work for think tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute. He was also responsible for the founding of a further two influential journals: The Public Interest and The National Interest. Thus, rather than being a minor historical character, he was a crucial figure who allows us to better comprehend American intellectual trends, particularly the “conservative turn” of the Cold War years, during a period when intellectuals became less alienated from society and lent ideological support to national politics. However, despite the impact he had on politics, he is regularly overlooked, or merely appears as a cameo figure, even in the large extant literature on the New York Intellectuals.[6] As I continue to study Kristol, not only do I intend to rectify omissions such as the one I read in the Observer. I also seek to better understand Kristol’s relative side-lining in the world of American intellectual history.

[1] Initial accounts such as Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid The Piper? The CIA and The Cultural Cold War (London: Granta, 1999) have been widely criticised. See: Hugh Wilford, The CIA, The British Left and The Cold War: Calling The Tune? (London: Routledge, 2013); David Caute, The Dancer Defects: The Struggle for Cultural Supremacy During the Cold War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Sarah Miller Harris, The CIA and the Congress for Cultural Freedom in The Early Cold War: The Limits of Making Common Cause (London: Routledge, 2016).

[2] Melvin Lasky would replace Kristol and, later Spender, editing the magazine from 1958 until it folded in 1990.

[3] Irving Kristol, “My Cold War,” in Neo-Conservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea, ed. by Irving Kristol (Chicago: Elephant Paperbacks, 1999), 481.

[4] Irving Kristol, “Memoirs of a “Cold Warrior,”” in Neo-Conservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea, ed. by Irving Kristol (Chicago: Elephant Paperbacks, 1999), 457.

[5] Irving Kristol, “An Autobiographical Memoir,” in Neo-Conservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea, ed. by Irving Kristol (Chicago: Elephant Paperbacks, 1999), 23; Peter Coleman, The Liberal Conspiracy: The Congress for Cultural Freedom and the Struggle for the Mind of Postwar Europe, (New York: Free Press, 1989),

[6] For example, Alan Wald mentions Kristol seventeen times in the index compared to the thirty-four times his contemporary Irving Howe appears. Alan M. Wald, The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left from the 1930s to the 1980s, (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 429-431. Meanwhile, Alexander Bloom cites Kristol some eighty-four times in comparison to Howe’s 114 and, in Terry Cooney’s account Kristol appears just twice and Howe fifteen times. Alexander Bloom, Prodigal Sons: The New York Intellectuals and Their World, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 449-451; Terry Cooney, The Rise of the New York Intellectuals: Partisan Review and Its Circle, 1934-1945 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986), 340-341.