William Kristol
Kristol in September 2011.
Chief of Staff to the Vice President of the United States
In office January 20, 1989 – January 20, 1993
Vice President	Dan Quayle
Preceded by	Craig L. Fuller
Succeeded by	Roy M. Neel
Personal details
Born	(1952-12-23) December 23, 1952 (age 59) New York, New York
Spouse(s)	Susan Scheinberg
Children	3
Alma mater	Harvard University
Occupation	Publisher Professor Pundit
Religion	Jewish

William Kristol (born December 23, 1952) is an American neoconservative^[1] political analyst and commentator. He is the founder and editor of the political magazine The Weekly Standard and a regular commentator on the Fox News Channel.

Kristol is associated with a number of prominent conservative think tanks. He was chairman of the New Citizenship Project from 1997 to 2005. In 1997, he co-founded the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) with Robert Kagan. He is a member of the board of trustees for the free-market Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, a member of the Policy Advisory Board for the Ethics and Public Policy Center, and a director of the Foreign Policy Initiative. He is also one of the three board members of Keep America Safe, a think tank co-founded by Liz Cheney and Debra Burlingame, and serves on the board of the Emergency Committee for Israel and the Susan B. Anthony List.

Personal life[link]

Kristol was born on December 23, 1952 in New York City into a Jewish family. His father, the late Irving Kristol, served as the managing editor of Commentary magazine and has been described as the "godfather of neoconservatism".^[2] His mother Gertrude Himmelfarb was a scholar of Victorian era literature. He graduated in 1970 from The Collegiate School, a preparatory school for boys.

In 1973, Kristol received an A.B. from Harvard, graduating magna cum laude in three years. In 1976, he worked for Daniel Patrick Moynihan's successful U.S. Senate campaign, serving as deputy issues director during the Democratic primary. Kristol received a Ph.D. in government from Harvard in 1979. During his first year of graduate school, Kristol shared a room with fellow government doctoral candidate Alan Keyes. Kristol was the campaign manager for Keyes' unsuccessful 1988 Maryland Senatorial campaign against Paul Sarbanes.

Career[link]

After teaching political philosophy and American politics at the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, Kristol went to work in government in 1985, serving as chief of staff to Secretary of Education William Bennett during the Reagan administration, and then as Chief of Staff to the Vice President under Dan Quayle in the George H. W. Bush administration. The New Republic dubbed Kristol "Dan Quayle's brain" upon being appointed the Vice President's chief of staff.

He served as chairman of the Project for the Republican Future from 1993 to 1994, and as the director of the Bradley Project at the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation in Milwaukee in 1993. In 1993, he rose to fame as he led conservative opposition to the Clinton health care plan.

In 2003, Kristol and Lawrence F. Kaplan wrote, "The War Over Iraq: America's Mission and Saddam's Tyranny", in which the authors analyzed the Bush Doctrine and the history of US-Iraq relations. In the book, Kristol and Kaplan provided support and justifications for war in Iraq.

He also served as a foreign policy advisor for Senator John McCain's presidential campaign.^[3]

Kristol is a harsh critique of Texas congressman and presidential candidate, Dr. Ron Paul-(R)and his supporters, he has been quoted as stating that he "would be happy if Paul ( and his supporters) were purged from the GOP".* He is a sharp critique of anyone who questions the distributions of taxpayer money to Israel.

Media commentator[link]

After the Republican sweep of both houses of Congress in 1994, Kristol established, along with conservative John Podhoretz, the conservative newsmagazine The Weekly Standard. Rupert Murdoch, Chairman and Managing Director of News Corp., financed the creation; Kristol is its current editor.

In the 1990s, Kristol was a panelist on the ABC Sunday news program This Week.

Kristol currently^[when?] serves as a political commentator on Fox News. He is a regular panelist on Fox News Sunday and often contributes to the nightly program Special Report with Bret Baier.

Kristol was a columnist for Time in 2007.^[4] He wrote a weekly opinion column for The New York Times from January 7, 2008^[5] to January 26, 2009. His very first column misattributed a quote to Michelle Malkin that was actually made by Michael Medved. Several days after Kristol's hiring, Times public editor Clark Hoyt called his hiring "a mistake", due to Kristol's assertion in 2006 that the Times should potentially be prosecuted for having revealed information about the Terrorist Finance Tracking Program.^[6]

Political views[link]

Kristol was key to the defeat of the Clinton health care plan in 1993. In the first of what would become legendary^[who?] strategy memos circulated among Republican policymakers, Kristol said the party should "kill", not amend, President Clinton's health care plan. Kristol's memo immediately united Republicans behind total opposition to Clinton's reform plan. A later memo advocated the phrase, "There is no health care crisis", which Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole used in his response to Clinton's 1994 State of the Union address.

Kristol was a leading proponent of the Iraq War. In 1998, he and other prominent foreign policy experts sent a letter to President Clinton urging a stronger posture against Iraq. Kristol argued that Saddam Hussein posed a grave threat to the United States and its allies: "The only acceptable strategy is one that eliminates the possibility that Iraq will be able to use or threaten to use weapons of mass destruction. In the near term, this means a willingness to undertake military action as diplomacy is clearly failing. In the long term, it means removing Saddam Hussein and his regime from power. That now needs to become the aim of American foreign policy."^[7]

In the 2000 Presidential election, Kristol was a supporter of John McCain. In response to a question from a PBS reporter about the Republican primaries, he stated, "No. I had nothing against Governor Bush. I was inclined to prefer McCain. The reason I was inclined to prefer McCain was his leadership on foreign policy."^[8]

After the Bush administration developed its response to September 11th, 2001, Kristol said, "We've just been present at a very unusual moment, the creation of a new American foreign policy".^[8] Kristol ardently supported the Bush administration's decision to go to war with Iraq. In 2003, he and Lawrence Kaplan wrote The War Over Iraq, in which he described the reasons for removing Saddam.

As the military situation in Iraq began to deteriorate in 2004, Kristol argued for an increase in the number of U.S. troops in Iraq. In 2004, he wrote an op-ed strongly criticizing Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, saying he "breezily dodged responsibility" for planning mistakes made in the Iraq War, including insufficient troop levels.^[9] In September 2006, he wrote, with fellow commentator Rich Lowry, "There is no mystery as to what can make the crucial difference in the battle of Baghdad: American troops".^[10]

This was one of the early calls for what became the Iraq War troop surge of 2007 four months later. In December 2008, Kristol wrote that the surge was "opposed at the time by the huge majority of foreign policy experts, pundits and pontificators," but that "most of them — and the man most of them are happy won the election, Barack Obama — now acknowledge the surge’s success."^[11]

Kristol was one of many conservatives to publicly oppose Bush's second U.S. Supreme Court nominee, Harriet Miers. He said of Miers: "I'm disappointed, depressed, and demoralized. [...] It is very hard to avoid the conclusion that President Bush flinched from a fight on constitutional philosophy. Miers is undoubtedly a decent and competent person. But her selection will unavoidably be judged as reflecting a combination of cronyism and capitulation on the part of the president."

He was a vocal supporter of the 2006 Lebanon War, stating that the war is "our war too", referring to the United States.

Kristol was an ardent promoter of Sarah Palin, advocating for her selection as the running mate of John McCain in the 2008 U.S. Presidential Election months before McCain chose her.^[12][13]

In response to Iran's nuclear program, Kristol supports the strong sanctions. In June 2006, at the height of the Lebanon War, he suggested that, "We might consider countering this act of Iranian aggression with a military strike against Iranian nuclear facilities. Why wait?"^[14]

In 2010, Kristol criticized the Obama administration and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Admiral Mike Mullen for an unserious approach to Iran. He wrote, "The real question is what form of instability would be more dangerous--that caused by this Iranian regime with nuclear weapons, or that caused by attacking this regime's nuclear weapons program. It's time to have a serious debate about the choice between these two kinds of destabilization, instead of just refusing to confront the choice."^[15]

In the 2010 affair surrounding the disclosure of U.S. diplomatic cables by WikiLeaks, Kristol has spoken out strongly against the organization and suggested using "our various assets to harass, snatch or neutralize Julian Assange and his collaborators, wherever they are".^[16] In March 2011, he wrote an editorial in the Weekly Standard arguing that the United States' military interventions in Muslim countries (including the Gulf War, the Kosovo War, the War in Afghanistan, and the Iraq War) should not be classified as "invasions", but rather as "liberations".^[17][18] Kristol has also backed President Barack Obama's decision to intervene in the 2011 Libyan civil war and urged fellow conservatives to support the action.^[19][20][21]

References[link]

Books[link]

• Johnson, Haynes and David Broder, David. The System: the American way of politics at the breaking point. Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 1996.
• Current Biography Yearbook, 1997.
• Nina Easton, Gang of Five, Simon & Schuster, 2002.

Bibliography[link]

• The Weekly Standard: A Reader: 1995-2005 (Harper Perennial, 2006). ISBN 0-06-088285-9
• War Over Iraq: Saddam’s Tyranny And America’s Mission (Co-author Lawrence Kaplan) (Encounter Books, 2003). ISBN 1-893554-69-4
• Bush v. Gore: The Court Cases and the Commentary (Co-editor E.J. Dionne) (Brookings Institution Press, 2001). ISBN 0-8157-0107-1
• Homosexuality and American Public Life (Introduction by Kristol, Editor Christopher Wolfe) (Spence Publishing Company, 1999). ISBN 978-1-890626-23-5

External links[link]

Find more about William Kristol on Wikipedia's sister projects:
	Definitions and translations from Wiktionary
	Images and media from Commons
	Learning resources from Wikiversity
	News stories from Wikinews
	Quotations from Wikiquote
	Source texts from Wikisource
	Textbooks from Wikibooks

• Biography and column archive at The Weekly Standard
• William Kristol Archives at UNZ.org
• Biography at the Project for the New American Century
• William Kristol at the Internet Movie Database
• Appearances on C-SPAN
  • C-SPAN Q&A interview with Kristol, April 9, 2006
• Works by or about William Kristol in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• [1]

Shelby Steele (born January 1, 1946) is an American author, columnist, documentary film maker, and a Robert J. and Marion E. Oster Senior Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, specialising in the study of race relations, multiculturalism and affirmative action. In 1990, he received the National Book Critics Circle Award in the general nonfiction category for his book The Content of Our Character.^[1]

Biography[link]

Steele was born in Chicago to a black father and a white mother. His father, Shelby Sr., a truck driver, met his mother, Ruth, a social worker, while working for the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). His twin brother is dean of the School of Education at Stanford University, Claude Steele.

Shelby Steele received a B.A. in political science from Coe College, an M.A. in sociology from Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville, and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Utah. Steele met his wife, Rita, during his junior year at Coe College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where he was one of 18 black students in his class. Steele was active in SCOPE, a group linked to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and he met Rita at an activist meeting. In 1968, Steele graduated from Coe and went on to earn his master's degree in sociology from Southern Illinois University–Edwardsville. Steele attended the University of Utah, where he taught black literature and studied for his Ph.D. After earning a Ph.D. in English in 1974, Steele was offered a tenured position at the university but turned it down owing to hostility encountered as part of an interracial couple in Utah. Steele accepted a position at San Jose State University as a professor of English literature, teaching there from 1974 to 1991.^[2]

Political opinions[link]

On race relations[link]

Steele is a self-described "black conservative".^[3] He opposes movements such as affirmative action, which he considers to be unsuccessful liberal campaigns to promote equal opportunity for African Americans. He contends that blacks have been "twice betrayed": first, by slavery and oppression and, second, by group preferences mandated by the government that discourage self-agency and personal responsibility in blacks.^[4]

Steele believes that the use of victimization is the greatest hindrance for black Americans. In his view, white Americans see blacks as victims to ease their guilty conscience, while blacks attempt to turn their status as victims into a kind of currency that will purchase nothing of real or lasting value. Therefore, he claims, blacks must stop "buying into this zero-sum game" by adopting a "culture of excellence and achievement" without relying on "set-asides and entitlements."^[4]

On Barack Obama[link]

Steele wrote a short book, A Bound Man: Why We are Excited about Obama and Why He Can't Win, published in December 2007. The book contained Steele's analysis of Barack Obama's character as a child born to a mixed couple who then has to grow as a black man.^[5] Steele then concludes that Barack Obama is a "bound man" to his "black identity." Steele gives this description of his conclusion:

After Obama won the 2008 U.S. presidential election, Steele defended his analysis and claimed that the subtitle of the book was simply a marketing device that he had only put "about 30 seconds" of thought into.^[6] He explains Obama's victory by likening him to Louis Armstrong, donning the "bargainer's mask" in his bid for white acceptance. In his analysis, he takes whites—whom he claims have for decades been stigmatized as racist and had to prove they are not—"off the hook." On Uncommon Knowledge, an interview program for the Hoover Institute hosted by Peter Robinson, he said "White America has made tremendous moral progress since the '60s... And they've never given themselves credit for that. And here is an opportunity at last to document this progress".^[7]

On Israel[link]

Steele has been critical in what he describes as the "world opinion" of Israel.^[8]

Works[link]

Books[link]

• Steele, Shelby (1991-09-01). The Content of Our Character: A New Vision of Race in America. Harper Perennial. ISBN 0-06-097415-X. 
• Steele, Shelby (1998-11-01). A Dream Deferred: The Second Betrayal of Black Freedom in America. Harper Perennial. ISBN 0-06-093104-3. 
• Steele, Shelby (2006-05-02). White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era. HarperCollins. ISBN 0-06-057862-9. 
• Steele, Shelby (2007-12-04). A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can't Win. HarperCollins. ISBN 1-4165-5917-5. 

Documentary films[link]

• Steele, Shelby (narrator) (1990-05-11). "Seven Days in Bensonhurst". Frontline. PBS. WGBH, Boston. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/programs/info/813.html. 
• Steele, Shelby (writer, narrator) (2000-05-02). "Jefferson's Blood". Frontline. PBS. WGBH, Boston. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/jefferson/. 

Awards[link]

• National Book Critics Circle Award (1990) in the general non-fiction category for the book The Content of Our Character.^[1]
• Emmy and Writers Guild Awards for his 1991 Frontline documentary film Seven Days in Bensonhurst.^[9]

References[link]

1. ^ ^{a b} "Past winners of the National Book Critics Circle Award". National Book Critics Circle. Archived from the original on 2007-01-01. http://web.archive.org/web/20070101094452/http://www.bookcritics.org/?go=pastAwards. Retrieved 2007-01-21. 
2. ^ [1]
3. ^ Steele, Shelby (1991-09-01). The Content of Our Character: A New Vision of Race in America. Harper Perennial. ISBN 0-06-097415-X. 
4. ^ ^{a b c} Steele, Shelby (2006-05-02). White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era. HarperCollins. ISBN 0-06-057862-9. 
5. ^ Shelby Steele, The Obama Bargain, The Wall Street Journal, March 18, 2008
6. ^ Cohen, Noam (2008-11-10). "‘Why Obama Can't Win' Author Defends Analysis". The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/10/business/media/10book.html?ref=politics. Retrieved 2010-05-23. 
7. ^ http://tv.nationalreview.com/uncommonknowledge/post/?q=YmM5NDRhMjRhMWNmMjBhODBiZTBhZDhiYmI5OTc0OTQ=
8. ^ http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704198004575311011923686570.html?KEYWORDS=SHELBY+STEELE Israel and the Surrender of the West
9. ^ "Brief information about Shelby Steele". PBS. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/jefferson/etc/steele.html. Retrieved 2007-01-21. 

External links[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Shelby Steele

• Shelby Steele's biography in the African-American Literature Book Club
• Audio interview with National Review Online
• In depth essay on Shelby Steele's "A Bound Man" by Noel Pearson, May 2008, The Monthly
• Exhaustive biography of Shelby Steele
• Shelby Steele at the Internet Movie Database
• Booknotes interview with Steele on A Dream Deferred: The Second Betrayal of Black Freedom in America, December 6, 1998.
• In Depth interview with Steele, April 2, 2006

The Weekly Standard is an American neoconservative^[2][3][4][5] opinion magazine^[6] published 48 times per year. Its founding publisher, News Corporation, debuted the title September 18, 1995. Currently edited by founder William Kristol and Fred Barnes, the Standard has been described as a "redoubt of neoconservatism" and as "the neo-con bible".^[7][8] Since it was founded in 1995, the Weekly Standard has never been profitable, and has remained in business through subsidies from wealthy conservative benefactors such as former owner Rupert Murdoch.^[9] Many of the magazine's articles are written by members of conservative think tanks located in Washington, D.C.: the American Enterprise Institute, the Ethics and Public Policy Center, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and the Hudson Institute. Some individuals that have written for the magazine include Elliott Abrams, Peter Berkowitz, John R. Bolton, Ellen Bork, Ed Gillespie, Roger Kimball, Harvey Mansfield, Joe Queenan, Wesley J. Smith, David Brooks and John Yoo. The magazine's website blog, titled the "Daily Standard", is edited by John McCormack and Daniel Halper and produces daily articles and commentary.

Ownership change[link]

Although the publication had, as of 2006^[update], never been profitable and reputedly "los[t] more than a million dollars a year", News Corporation head Rupert Murdoch had previously dismissed the idea of selling it.^[10] In June, 2009, a report circulated that a sale of the publication to Philip Anschutz was imminent, with Murdoch's position being that, having purchased The Wall Street Journal in 2007, his interest in the smaller publication had been less forceful.^[11][12] The Washington Examiner reports that the Examiner's parent company, the Anschutz-owned Clarity Media Group, has since purchased the Standard.^[13][14] Since the sale to the Clarity Media Group, the Standard has increased its paid circulation by 39 percent between its June 2009 and June 2010 BPA statements.^[15]

Masthead[link]

Editorial staff[link]

• William Kristol, Editor
• Fred Barnes, Executive Editor
• Richard Starr, Deputy Editor
• Claudia Anderson, Managing Editor
• Christopher Caldwell, Andrew Ferguson, Victorino Matus, Lee Smith, Senior Editors
• Philip Terzian, Literary Editor
• Stephen F. Hayes, Matt Labash, Jonathan V. Last, Senior Writers
• Matthew Continetti, Opinion Editor
• Jay Cost, Staff Writer
• John McCormack, Online Editor
• Daniel Halper, Deputy Online Editor
• Kari Barbic, Emily Schultheis, Kelly Jane Torrance, Assistant Editors
• Michael Warren, Editorial Assistant
• Philip Chalk, Design Director
• Barbara Kyttle, Design Assistant
• Carolyn Wimmer, Executive Assistant

Contributing editors[link]

Business staff[link]

• Terry Eastland, Publisher
• Nicholas H.B. Swezey, Advertising Director
• Catherine Lowe, Marketing Director
• Richard Trocchia, Fulfillment Manager
• T. Barry Davis, Senior Advertising Manager
• Todd A. Miller, Senior Advertising Manager
• Kathy Schaffhauser, Finance Director
• Taybor Cook, Office Manager
• Andrew Kaumeier, Staff Assistant

Commentary[link]

The Weekly Standard lists testimonials from various sources on its website:

• WeeklyStandard.com – "Press"

References[link]

1. ^ BPA Worldwide
2. ^ McConnell, Scott. "The Weekly Standard's War". November 21, 2005. The American Conservative
3. ^ Smith, Ben. "Weekly Standard may have been shooter target" June 11, 2009. Politico.
4. ^ Magolick, David. "The Return of the Neocons" January 22, 2010. Newsweek.
5. ^ Carr, David. "When this weekly speaks, White House listens" March 12, 2003. The New York Times.
6. ^ "Ten years ago, The Weekly Standard debuted, a conservative journal of opinion [f]rom Washington, D.C., edited by William Kristol". October 24, 2005. National Review: "The Week".
7. ^ Max Boot. "What the Heck Is a ‘Neocon’?". December 30, 2002, Wall Street Journal: "the Weekly Standard, ... is known as a redoubt of ‘neoconservatism’".
8. ^ Thoma, Mark. "The Current Debacle in Iraq is ...", (quoting Rachman, Gideon. "The neo-cons’ route to disaster". January 15, 2007. FT.com: "Neo-Con Bible".) January 15, 2007. The Economist.
9. ^ http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/03/business/media/03standard.html
10. ^ Cassidy, John. "'Murdoch's Game'". October 16, 2006. The New Yorker.
11. ^ Carr, David. "Will The Standard Pass From Murdoch to Anschutz?", (citing Flint, Joe. "... talks to unload Weekly Standard to Anschutz". June 9, 2009. Los Angeles Times: "Company Town".) June 10, 2009. The New York Times: "Media Decoder". Retrieved 6/15/09.
12. ^ Worden, Nat. "News Corp. Close to Selling Weekly Standard". June 11, 2009. Wall Street Journal. Retrieved 6/15/09.
13. ^ "Weekly Standard sold to Washington Examiner parent company". June 17, 2009. Washington Examiner.
14. ^ Corcoran, Michael. The Weekly Standard’s War: Murdoch sells ..." September, 2009. Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting.
15. ^ Mickey, Bill. "[1]". October 6, 2010. "Audience Development".

External links[link]

• Official website