Irving Kristol did not coin the term neoconservative, but he was probably the only person fully happy to have it applied to him. In elegant essays published over half a century, Kristol argued the case for a pragmatic, empirical conservatism that could make its peace with the New Deal and the civil rights revolution.
Kristol, who died Sept. 18 at 89, once joked that when he had a problem, he started a magazine. The quarterly he co-edited, the Public Interest, subjected the bright new ideas of the Great Society to intense scrutiny--and opened the door for the conservative intellectual revolution of...