Bill Kristol

William Kristol (born December 23, 1952) is an American neoconservative writer.

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William Kristol was born on December 23, 1952, in New York City into a Jewish family, the son of Irving Kristol and Gertrude Himmelfarb.

Irving Kristol was an editor and publisher who served as the managing editor of Commentary magazine, founded the magazine The Public Interest, and was described by Jonah Goldberg as the "godfather of neoconservatism."

Gertrude Himmelfarb was a prominent conservative historian, especially of intellectual history in the U.S. and Great Britain.

Kristol attended Collegiate School for Boys in Manhattan.

In the summer of 1970, Kristol was an intern at the White House.

In 1976, Kristol worked for Daniel Patrick Moynihan's United States Senate campaign, serving as deputy issues director during the Democratic primary.

He received a bachelor's degree at Harvard University and also a Ph.D. in political science in 1979.

After teaching political philosophy and U.S. 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 United States secretary of education William Bennett during the Reagan administration, and later, as chief of staff to the vice president under Dan Quayle in the George H. W. Bush administration.

The New Republic dubbed Kristol "Dan Quayle's brain" when he was appointed the vice president's chief of staff.

In 1988, he was the campaign manager for Alan Keyes's unsuccessful Maryland Senatorial campaign against Paul Sarbanes.

Kristol played a leading role in the defeat of the Clinton health care plan of 1993, and for advocating the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

He has been associated with a number of conservative think tanks.

He served as chairman of the Project for the Republican Future from 1993 to 1994, and as the director of the Bradley Project at the Bradley Foundation in Milwaukee in 1993.

In 1993, he led conservative opposition to the Clinton health care plan of 1993.

After the Republican sweep of both houses of Congress in 1994, Kristol established, along with John Podhoretz, the conservative news magazine The Weekly Standard.

Rupert Murdoch, chairman and managing director of News Corp., financed its creation.

Beginning in 1996, Kristol was a panelist on the ABC Sunday news program This Week.

Following declining ratings, his contract was not renewed three years later.

He was chairman of the New Citizenship Project from 1997 to 2005.

In 1997, he co-founded the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) with Robert Kagan.

He is a member of the board of trustees for the free-market Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, a member of the Policy Advisory Board for the Ethics and Public Policy Center, and a director of the Foreign Policy Initiative.

In 2003, Kristol and Lawrence F. Kaplan wrote The War Over Iraq: America's Mission and Saddam's Tyranny, in which the authors analyzed the Bush Doctrine and the history of Iraqi-U.S. relations.

In the book, Kristol and Kaplan provided support and justifications for the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

He also served as a foreign policy advisor for Senator John McCain's presidential campaign.

Several days after he did so, Times public editor Clark Hoyt called his hiring "a mistake," due to Kristol's assertion in 2006 that the Times should potentially be prosecuted for having revealed information about the Terrorist Finance Tracking Program.

Kristol was a columnist for Time in 2007.

The following year, he joined The New York Times as a columnist.

Kristol wrote a weekly opinion column for The New York Times from January 7, 2008, to January 26, 2009.

For ten years, Kristol was a regular panelist on Fox News Sunday and often contributed to the nightly program Special Report with Bret Baier.

He is also one of the three board members of Keep America Safe, a national-security think tank co-founded by Liz Cheney and Debra Burlingame, and serves on the boards of the Emergency Committee for Israel and of the Susan B. Anthony List (as of 2010).

Kristol is a critic of former president Donald Trump, a supporter of the Never Trump movement, and a founder and director of Defending Democracy Together, an advocacy organization responsible for such projects as Republicans for the Rule of Law and the Republican Accountability Project.

In 2013, his contract with Fox News expired, and he became a much sought after commentator on several networks.

It was announced on This Week with George Stephanopoulos on February 2, 2014, that Kristol would be a contributor for ABC News and to that program.

Since the summer of 2014, Kristol has also hosted an online interview program, Conversations with Bill Kristol, featuring guests from academic and public life.

Conversations with Bill Kristol is an American interview program hosted by political analyst and commentator Bill Kristol.

The series features in-depth discussions with leading figures in public life, and spans topics from politics and political philosophy to history, foreign policy, economics, and culture.

The show aims to foster substantive and thoughtful discourse on pivotal issues facing the nation.

The series debuted in 2014.