Gang of Five

Chapter 1: ContrarianIt was in the nature of the times to talk back. Oratory as ridicule, the language of 1960s activists, troubled the Harvard University administration nearly as much as windows smashed and buildings blockaded. Even in the fall of 1970, with the decade officially closed, anti-war demonstrations ebbing, and the media declaring the death of the New Left, caustic retort (in reply to the Establishment version of truth) remained a highly developed art form inside Harvard Yard. William Kristol, Harvard class of '73, patently rejected the political ethos of his generation. He was, nevertheless, a master of its style, a first-rate smart aleck.He arrived that fall pumped full of trenchant ridicule for the anti-war activists who, just eighteen months earlier, had spilled blood on the steps of University Hall as four hundred helmeted police swinging nightsticks broke up their sit-in. Two-thirds of Harvard's students had protested the crackdown by boycotting class. But Kristol derided the "stupid, self-congratulatory" Leftists at Harvard and elsewhere who continued to attract attention and sympathy. Only seventeen, he wore the casual arrogance of a young man who had graduated at the top of his class from a rigorous Manhattan prep school and then qualified for an accelerated three-year track toward graduation from Harvard. He had playful eyes under a high forehead, and brows that seemed to carry on their own conversation as he issued barbed wit under his breath.From his surefooted start, Kristol would go on to become an intellectual Brahmin of the modern conservative movement, as confident in the superiority of his own thinking as any "liberal elitist" scorned by his populist friends on the Right. Rare was the right-winger who could talk the language of the New York Times editorial board, but this was the vernacular of Bill's upbringing. By the 1990s, he would become a practiced translator, relaying the Right's message through the house organs of the media establishment -- TV networks, eminent newspapers, foreign policy journals. He founded the Weekly Standard, an influential, and relentlessly irreverent, magazine. Behind the scenes, he helped shape some of the most important Washington policy battles of the era. But Bill's elite background also granted him license as an iconoclast inside a political movement that placed a premium on loyalty: He would confound and anger his loyalist allies on the Right, sometimes treating their cause (it seemed) with all the seriousness of a robust set of doubles.By the time he reached Harvard that first semester in 1970, it was clear Bill Kristol would cut his own direction in life. He arrived at the peak of youthful revolt, without ever having rebelled against parents, authority, tradition. He never holed up at the Fillmore East, as his Manhattan prep school buddies did, smoking pot while Jimi Hendrix worked his guitar. He didn't, as his buddies did, indulge in the sexual revolution unfolding around him. But he was, like his buddies, a contrarian. The difference was that Bill Kristol's parents provided their son with a built-in outlet for his contrarian energies. Essayist Irving Kristol and historian Gertrude Himmelfarb were leading figures in an intellectual circle of ex-socialists who by the 1960s had turned their indignation from capitalist bosses to the counterculture then engulfing America's youth. Called "neoconservatives," these former Leftists would go on to provide intellectual heft to a conservative movement they once spurned.Irving Kristol, who edited a journal of commentary, the...