The Return of the Neocons

Neoconservatives, their backers, and detractors: (clockwise from top left) neocon sympathizer Dick Cheney; William Kristol; Norman Podhoretz; movement critic George Will; Dan Senor; and Fred Kagan.

Neoconservatism was once deemed dead—'Buried in the sands of Iraq.' But it persists, not just as the de facto foreign-policy plank of the Republican Party but, its proponents assert, in Obama's unapologetic embrace of American military might.

By David Margolick | NEWSWEEK
From the magazine issue dated Feb 1, 2010

For all his eminence—or maybe because of it—the funeral for Irving Kristol this past September was an understated affair. Some thought Dick Cheney might show up, but neither he nor any other Republican leader did; it seemed almost ungrateful, given Kristol's extraordinary contribution to the GOP—how he'd brought intellectual legitimacy and heft to what he himself had once called "the stupid party." None of the Republican congressional leadership was there, nor any of the would-be candidates for 2012—not even Sarah Palin, whom Kristol's ubiquitous son, Bill, had helped turn into a political phenomenon.

The assemblage of about 200 people wasn't exactly small, but in the gargantuan sanctuary of Adas Israel Congregation, built at a time—1951—when American Jews of Irving Kristol's generation wanted to proclaim they'd finally arrived and planned to stick around awhile, it was dwarfed by its surroundings; the burgundy back benches were empty. Adas Israel is Washington's most powerful Conservative congregation, the one to which every Israeli ambassador to the United States in history has belonged. Instead of the usual parade of celebrity eulogists, though, only two people—the rabbi and Bill Kristol—spoke, and briefly at that. In 40 minutes or so it was over.

But the strength of neoconservatism, the intellectual and political "persuasion" (as he once called it) that Irving Kristol launched and led, has never been in its numbers but in its firepower and ferocity. And had the elder Kristol—whose shrouded coffin sat inconspicuously below the stage, nestled between the American and Israeli flags—been able to survey the crowd, he'd have been pleased. For filling the pews were his progeny, not just biological but intellectual, and they were an impressive lot.

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