The GOP's master strategist - William Kristol - Cover Story

Washington Monthly, Sept, 1994 by Jon Meacham

In the summer of 1984, when William Kristol was a young assistant professor at Harvard's Kennedy School, he visited Washington to write about how Reaganites were running the agencies they had so long reviled. Fatefully, Kristol chose William Bennett, then chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, as one of his subjects. In an article for Policy Review, Kristol used the outspoken Bennett to illustrate how a realpolitik conservative should operate: "... [I]n politics, unlike football, there is no referee who makes sure you have a turn on offense. ... One implication of this perspective is that the political executive ought not to be afraid of publicity - or controversy."

The point: Politics is a game, and what matters is offense, crushing your opponents, carrying the day. The piece impressed Bennett, who was even more impressed by young Kristol, the son of two prominent intellectuals who had recommended Bennett for the NEH job - Irving Kristol and Gertrude Himmelfarb. So when Bennett, a master at rhetorically skewering his opponents, moved to the Department of Education, in 1985, he called Bill Kristol and asked if he'd come to work for him. "I knew his DNA pretty well," says Bennett now. "Bill [Kristol] wanted to apply what he had been teaching, and that was what I had wanted to do, too."

Once in the capital, Kristol rose rapidly through the GOP ranks, becoming Bennett's chief of staff and, later, "Dan Quayle's Brain" (as The New Republic dubbed him in 1990). In both jobs, he quickly shed any academic reserve and executed famous conservative blitzes - with Bennett, against the education establishment; with Quayle, against "the cultural elite"; and, with both, against supposed enemies of family values, including the media, Hollywood, and liberals in general. Today, as head of a small think tank called the Project for the Republican Future, Kristol has expanded his brief and is masterminding nothing less than the GOP opposition to Clinton and the Democrats. "Bill really loves the stimulation of Washington - all the phone calls, all the maneuvering, the latest bit," says Kenneth Adelman, a Reagan arms control director and friend of Kristol's. "He loves the operational game."

There's no more important player in that game right now than Kristol. "He's the most learned and intelligent political advocate the Republicans have had in a long, long time," says R. Emmett Tyrrell, editor of The American Spectator. Mississippi Senator Trent Lott observes: "Kristol's always pushing the envelope, keeping Republicans focused on what's possible if we stick to our line." Adds Linda Chavez, a conservative columnist and former Reagan official: "He's the only game in town in terms of ideas."

To understand why Washington is so sharply divided on major issues, left, right, and center - why, for example, no Republicans voted for the president's budget in 1993 and why so few are even slightly inclined to cooperate on significant health care and welfare reform - it is essential to understand Kristol, the party's leading in-house strategic thinker.

Kristol's power comes from an understanding that in politics, what you say matters as much if not more than what you actually do. One May Sunday in 1993, for example, Kristol was a guest on CBS' "Face the Nation" and weighed in on the prospects for the Clinton economic plan. The next day, the Los Angeles Times ran a story on the plan, quoting the titans of the Democratic party - Bentsen, Panetta, Mitchell, Rostenkowski. The only opposition voice in the piece was Kristol's, who had wittily and memorably remarked on the show, "The Clinton budget is like a giant pasture full of sacred cows, cheerfully mooing and contentedly munching at the federal taxpayers' expense." This from a man who served in two GOP administrations that actually asked for more money than the Democratic Congress agreed to spend.

But Kristol got his shot in at the president, and nobody's better at taking those anti-Clinton shots than he is. A smart man (no one in Washington since Kissinger is so universally regarded as "brilliant" by friend and foe alike), Kristol's strategic moves are informed by a grasp not only of tactics but of theory. Now 41, he finished Harvard College in three years, carefully studied de Toqueville, and wrote his doctoral dissertation on the philosophical antecedents of the American judicial system, drawing heavily on The Federalist Papers - itself a conservative, 18-century case study, of course, on how to check popular impulses for radical change. Kristol later taught political philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania and at Harvard.

Sitting in his downtown Washington office one July morning, talking about politics and philosophy, Kristol could be conducting an especially interesting seminar: soft-spoken, funny, apt to smile genially at the conclusion of a point. In the span of an hour, he mentions Aristotle, Richard Weaver, the Founding Fathers, and thoughtfully muses about the state of the country. "People aren't happy with the way things are going. Two-thirds of the country think the country is on the wrong track, which is really a mind-boggling statistic, though from a partisan point of view I suppose it's good for Republicans," he says. "But it's really worrisome: The country has never been wealthier or more physically secure, and yet people are genuinely unhappy."