William "Bill" Kristol (born December 23, 1952 in New York City) is an American political commentator and columnist. He is cast as a neoconservative for his passionate advocacy for Israel and strong advocacy for projecting American power and for a strong American presence in the Middle East. Starting with the 1991 Gulf War, he continuously called for the ousting of Saddam Hussein.

Kristol is the son of Irving Kristol, considered to be one of the founders of the neoconservative movement and Gertrude Himmelfarb, a Victorian scholar. Kristol graduated in 1970 from the Collegiate School, an elite preparatory school for boys located in Manhattan. In 1973 he received the B.A. from Harvard University graduating magna cum laude, and in 1979 the Ph.D. in political science, also from Harvard. During his first year of graduate school, Kristol was Alan Keyes' roommate; this is significant, because many years later, in 1988, Kristol would run Keyes' unsuccessful U. S. Senate campaign against Paul Sarbanes in Maryland. 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 Education Secretary William J. Bennett during the Reagan Administration, and then as chief of staff to Vice President Dan Quayle under the first President Bush. Later he became the leader of the Project for the Republican Future.

After the Republican sweep of both houses of Congress in 1994, Kristol established along with neoconservative John Podhoretz and with financing from Rupert Murdoch, the conservative periodical The Weekly Standard. In 1997 he founded, with Robert Kagan, the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), a movement credited in part for some of the foreign policy decisions of the Bush administration as evidenced by their 1998 letter http://www.theindyvoice.com/index.blog?entry_id=417960 to William Jefferson Clinton advocating military action in Iraq to "protect our vital interests in the Gulf". He is also a member of the long-time conservative think tank the American Enterprise Institute from which the Bush administration has borrowed over two dozen members to fill various government offices and panels. Kristol is currently chairman of PNAC and editor of The Weekly Standard.

Kristol is a regular political contributor to the Fox News Channel.

He is married to Susan Scheinberg and the couple have three children.

For the American comedian with a similar sounding name, see Billy Crystal.

Trivia

• Dubbed "Dan Quayle's brain" by The New Republic upon being appointed the Vice President's chief of staff

• As Quayle's speechwriter, Kristol would regularly sprinkle Quayle's speeches with numerous classical references. This stopped after a reporter discovered that Quayle had no idea where one citation from Plato had come from.

References

• Current Biography Yearbook, 1997.

• Nina Easton, Gang of Five, Simon & Schuster, 2002.

External links

• http://www.weeklystandard.com/aboutus/bio_kristol.asp
• http://www.mediatransparency.org/people/bill_kristol.htm
• Howard Kurtz: Bill Kristol, Keeping Iraq in the Cross Hairs (Washington Post, 2003-03-18) http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A43043-2003Mar17.html