President Bush's Neoconservatives Were Spawned Right Here in N.Y.C., New Home of the Right-Wing Gloat
by Joe Hagan
"It’s a small world," said William Kristol, editor in chief of The Weekly Standard, describing the intertwined world of the neoconservatives. And indeed it is, at least to Mr. Kristol: His father is the legendary New York intellectual Irving Kristol, who is widely considered to be the founder of neoconservatism, and Mr. Kristol now edits the magazine owned by the financial godfather of the movement, American citizen Rupert Murdoch.
Somewhere between Mr. Kristol’s ideas and Mr. Murdoch’s muscle, the modern neocon economy was built, complete with speakers’ bureaus, think tanks, magazines, newspapers, a television news network and, not to be coy, an official state residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
And that’s not even euphemistic! Years ago, during the Reagan administration, the neoconservatives had their first real shot at power after many years in the wilderness. The movement—built on the ashes of fallen heroes and villains like Barry Goldwater and Joseph McCarthy, stoked by urban ethnicity and Western political money, propelled by historical forces as varied as World War II and the states’ rights movement—found itself in power with a real President of the United States. Then it lost the football, first to a Republican moderate named George H.W. Bush, then to a clever Democratic moderate named Bill Clinton.
Now, after eight painful years, the neoconservative network is riding high, determined never to lose power again so easily, to make sure that its ideas are well distributed and that the distributors are well compensated, and that the current President of the United States and his aides—from Vice President Richard Cheney to National Security Advisor Condeleezza Rice—are inspired, cajoled, supported and, when memoir-time comes, well paid.
It’s the stuff that winners are made of.
Now they come upon their greatest triumph: a military victory in Iraq, conceived and wished for in neoconservative clubhouses and brilliantly supported during the course of the war by the neoconservative media.
"Yeah, I think we had some utility," said Mr. Kristol. "Bush could have come to it all without us, too. But it helped that we had already made these arguments. You feel some responsibility when things go well."
And Mr. Kristol couldn’t have done it without the New York firmament from which the movement came—from the right-wing think tank the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, to the op-ed pages of The Wall Street Journal, to the elemental neoconservative journal, Commentary, founded by the neocon patriarch and matriarch, Norman Podhoretz and his wife, Midge Decter. Their son, John Podhoretz, is a columnist and former editorial-page editor for the New York Post.
At the top of this neoconservative network, of course, is Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., home of the Fox News Network and the Post, both based on Sixth Avenue. Mr. Murdoch also owns The Weekly Standard.
"News Corp. should get a little spot on your map," said William Kristol. "Many people at Fox News have been supportive of Bush’s policy. They deserve a bit of a mention. And Murdoch personally."
But the neoconservative media is only a small part of the mechanism. New York is where the money comes from. "Most foreign-affairs thinking is done in Washington," explained Mark Gerson, president of the investor-relations company the Gerson Lehrman Group and editor of The Neoconservative Reader. "But the financing of neoconservatism doesn’t come from D.C."
Instead, said Mr. Gerson, it comes from New York moneymen like Bruce Kovner, chairman of the Caxton Corporation, and Roger Hertog, the vice chairman of Alliance Capital Management. Last year, both financiers helped fund a new newspaper, The New York Sun, now fighting its anti-liberal battle with its New York Times–counterprogrammed slogan, "A Different Point of View." Both Mr. Kovner and Mr. Hertog also chipped in to join neoliberal Martin Peretz as co-owners of The New Republic. Mr. Kovner and Mr. Hertog, as enlightened neoconservative businessmen-intellectuals, are also on the board of the Manhattan Institute, where Mr. Gerson and William Kristol are also trustees, as well as the Washington, D.C.–based American Enterprise Institute. The A.E.I., a favored neoconservative think tank, has recently served as a kind of human-resource office for the Bush administration. It’s the venue that President Bush chose to step up to explain his intentions toward Iraq on Feb. 26. As he stood before the A.E.I., he called the organization the home of "some of the finest minds in our nation" and said they’d done "such good work that my administration has borrowed 20 such minds." Lynn Cheney, the Vice President’s wife, is a board member, and Richard Perle, the former Defense Department adviser known as the "father of the Iraq war," is a resident fellow.
It’s easy to overgeneralize and get the idea that a small group of neoconservatives have worked some voodoo on a sitting President—you may remember Hillary Rodham Clinton’s initial reaction to Monicagate on NBC’s Today Show, that it represented "a vast right-wing conspiracy." It may be easy to insist that this small, concerted group of men and women have propelled an entire nation’s foreign policy toward the radical concept of "benevolent hegemony," wonk-speak for an American Empire that brings democratic ideals to dictatorships around the globe. But that, as the neoconservatives say themselves, would be simplistic.
"I have been amazed by the level of conspiracy-mongering around neocons," said David Brooks, an editor at Mr. Murdoch and Mr. Kristol’s Weekly Standard, and author of Bobos in Paradise. "I get it every day—the ‘evil Jewish conspiracy.’ The only distinction between ‘neoconservative’ and ‘conservative’ this way is circumcision. We actually started calling it the Axis of Circumcision."
That’s the kind of knowing humor that neoconservatives often allow themselves to indulge in; it’s almost impossible to imagine the embattled and shredded remains of the liberals having that kind of laugh on themselves! But political security breeds gentle good humor.
For instance, when asked if she was a neocon herself, the best-selling right-wing pundit Ann Coulter replied, "No, I’m a gentile. That’s only partially a joke. These days, the term ‘neoconservative’ is almost always used to insult someone. More recently, the term has become a liberal epithet to mean ‘Jew conservative.’"
That kind of brusque humor is endemic to the movement.
But occasionally—just in case it seems that hubris could be rearing its head—neoconservatives take care to disprove the influence of the movement, as John Podhoretz did in his Post column on Friday, April 18. "The president seems to have come to an understanding of these ideas almost entirely on his own," he wrote. "He didn’t need the books we wrote or the magazines we published."
Then he concluded: "Maybe our influence is really kind of an illusion."
But in truth, the neocons—an intellectual school with roots in the City College of New York in the 1940’s—have been astonishingly well-coordinated, organized and consistent in their message. Originally, a neoconservative was an anti-communist liberal who rejected the 1960’s counterculture. After the Cold War ended, neoconservatism came to be associated with an aggressive foreign policy. It was clearly defined by Mr. Kristol the younger and Robert Kagan, a contributing editor at The New Republic and The Weekly Standard, in the 1996 book they co-edited, Present Dangers: Crisis and Opportunity in America’s Foreign and Defense Policy, which warned of the growing threat of terrorism and suggested pre-emptive remedies. In December 2002, Max Boot asked in his Wall Street Journal column, "What the Heck Is a ‘Neocon?" His answer: "Neoconservatives believe in using American might to promote American ideals abroad." Not surprisingly, neoconservatism has since become the fast-and-loose, catch-all term for hawks—although the nuances between neocons and other varieties of conservatism remain stark on some issues.
Nor is it surprising that the movement which derived from both the disaffected New York left and the boardrooms of Western capitalism would be proficient and cohesive: In the wake of the war in Iraq, it’s now virtually impossible to tell a neoconservative from a regular old conservative—or, sometimes, even a fallen liberal. The neoconservatives in general don’t have much patience for squishy liberal columnist Thomas Friedman of The New York Times, but he was with them on the war, as was Newsweek international editor Fareed Zakaria.
And then there’s President Bush. One question that historians will be working on for a long time will be this: When did he receive his conversion on the road to Baghdad? Exactly what was the influence of the neoconservatives on this President’s thinking? Where did his nation-building, world-changing point of view start?
Was it here?
"I think what happened is that the United States of America got a President named George W. Bush, who believes in an American mission," said Midge Decter, a board member at the right-wing Hudson Institute and John Podhoretz’s mother. "That is why the neocons have acquired this reputation for power. My husband," Ms. Decter continued, speaking of Norman Podhoretz, "says no President can go beyond the point of where the culture has been prepared for his policy. So you can say that the cultural preparation was made for what George Bush wants. There’s nobody whispering in his ear. What you call neocons have prepared the culture for the making of this argument."
If history is any guide, she’s right on the money. America was well prepared for the Reagan administration by the previous 20 years of history. And the Bush Doctrine may have been churned exactly as Ms. Decter suggests. Which means—as the accompanying map suggests—it was churned right here.
"You have a whole debate about ‘What’s a neocon?’" said 33-year-old Max Boot, the former Wall Street Journal op-ed editor who is now the Olin Senior Fellow on National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. "A number of people I know object to being called neocons. I don’t particularly mind."
And neither do some old-line Republicans, if only for the patina it gives them. As Lucianne Goldberg, one of the doyennes of the movement (and Madame LaFarge during the near collapse of Bill Clinton), exclaimed: "You mean the people who like to kill people and break things. That’s me!"
In the end, the difference between neoconservative ideas and those who would be called neocons may be moot. We are, after all, on the ground in Iraq, and as Mr. Kristol writes (with Lawrence Kaplan) in the now well-established last line of his new book, The War Over Iraq: Saddam’s Tyranny & America’s Mission, that may just be the beginning. For the true believers, it’s the sweet smell of success.
"The neocons so overwhelmingly won," said Mr. Gerson. "The neocons more or less stayed true to their beliefs. Ideas rule the world, not marginal tax rates. And not politics."
The core of the neoconservative movement couldn’t be more precise. Take the beginning of Mr. Murdoch’s Weekly Standard, for example. It was founded, as so many New York ideas were, in a coffee shop on West 72nd Street—the very place where so many ideas were hatched by the progenitors of the neoconservatives, back when they were lefties in the 1930’s and 1940’s. And in an exquisite irony that would have been appreciated by that generation of ideologues—most of whom experienced their own conversion to the right, which then brought them to power and allowed them to make possible the current neoconservative moment—it had just the right name. Saul Bellow could hardly have done better: The Weekly Standard was spawned in the Utopia Coffee Shop.
<http://www.nyobserver.com/pages/frontpage6.asp>
Carl
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