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

Washington Monthly, Sept, 1994 by Jon Meacham

Needless to say, this kind of candor did not endear Kristol to his West Wing counterparts. "You're heralded as a genius if you admit the obvious, even when admitting the obvious hurts the president," says Ed Rogers, a former Sununu deputy. "People in the White House who have access and information with no responsibility or authority can very often use that position to be unhelpful - but still be called a genius by the press, because all the press wants is controversy." True to form as an unapologetic tactician, Kristol shrugs off the criticism. "I actually regret not being more of a pain-in-the-neck," he says now. How did he get away with it? Kristol was justly credited with keeping Quayle from more disasters ("potatoe," "happy campers") than the vice president got into anyway. As long as Kristol kept Quayle in line - and he usually did - he was too valuable to get rid of.

After the election, the defeated Bush began weighing a pardon for Iran-contra figures. At first, the president was interested only in pardoning Caspar Weinberger, but Kristol pushed for more - including a pardon for former Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams, who is a friend of Kristol's and the son-in-law of Norman Podhoretz, the old neocon ally of Irving Kristol's. [Bill] Kristol was very helpful on the whole issue of going beyond just Weinberger," recalls C. Boyden Gray, Bush's White House counsel. This has a political implication as well: Abrams and others had been convicted for misleading Congress about the Reagan administration's role in aiding the contras; in short, for running a hard-headed, ideologically driven operation. It is the sort of undertaking - the sort of game - that Kristol, as a tactician, appreciates. (Kristol, too, had been an architect of the GOP argument that the Walsh prosecution was out of control and leading to "criminalization of policy differences," a strategic line, of course, intended to deflect attention from the crimes that had unquestionably been committed.) On Christmas Eve 1992, Kristol prevailed, and Abrams and others were pardoned.

That essentially marked Kristol's first foray as an out-of-power operator. His next splashiest undertaking - the Project for the Republican Future - is the site of his most striking achievement: creating and sustaining the GOP opposition to health care reform.

Offensive Plays

On December 3 of last year, Kristol faxed a five-page memo, unsubtly entitled "Defeating President Clinton's Health Care Proposal," to Republican offices across the land. Bob Dole read it; so did the rest of the capital, and Senate and House candidates far and wide.

At the time, Republicans were contemplating their own versions of large-scale reform of the nation's troubled system. Long before Clinton, Dole had been talking about a crisis in health care: "Mr. President, yesterday, President Nixon sent to Congress a comprehensive health message," Dole said on the floor of the Senate on February 19, 1971. "This message recognizes the present health care crisis in our nation." On June 6, 1991, he did it again: "Mr. President, yesterday the Majority Leader, joined by four of his colleagues, announced their solution to certain aspects of the health care crisis confronting this nation. They are to be commended for helping to begin and shape a long overdue debate on access to health care." Today, the problems are even worse: The system costs $1 trillion a year, leaves millions of people out in the cold, and costs are rising so fast that in a few years paying for health care may be untenable.