Chapter 1: Contrarian

It 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 theNew York Timeseditorial 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 theWeekly 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, thePublic Interest,had spent the entirety of his son's adolescence issuing forth scornful wit against conventional (that is, liberal) wisdom. Irving had been a socialist as a college student in the 1930s, but he couldn't stomach the radicals of his son's generation. He ascribed 1960s activism to motivations no more grand than boredom -- "a radical mood in search of a radical program...the last, convulsive twitches of a slowly expiring American individualism."

Bill absorbed all of his father's salty opinions, so that by the time he arrived at Harvard, arguing with the Left came naturally. But not in a Republican/right-wing/Young Americans for Freedom sort of way. In fact, Bill didn't even know many conservatives; in 1970, right-wingers were still considered mostly philistines within his parents' intellectual orbit of Humphrey Democrats. Richard Nixon, Bill's father fretted in 1968, appealed to the wrong majority, whose dominant temper was "sullenly resentful" and "impulsively reactionary." Bill, a budding avatar of realpolitik, considered the Right practically irrelevant to American electoral politics; he recalled readingNational Reviewcolumns as a twelve-year-old that unabashedly, and wrongly, insisted that a silent majority of conservative Americans would sweep Barry Goldwater into the White House in 1964.

In the self-conscious world of New York intellectuals, the Kristols had achieved a measure of fame, with Irving Kristol broadcasting his opinions through theAtlantic Monthlyand theNew York Times.So their world offered an attractive safe harbor for a young man making his way in rebellious times. Harvard's eminent and diverse government department, which Bill was about to enter in 1970, included a number of his parents' friends and colleagues. Among them were James Q. Wilson, who headed the much reviled committee meting out discipline to Harvard's protesters; department chair and foreign policy scholar Samuel P. Huntington, whose 1969 report to the State Department on how to prop up the South Vietnamese regime in a postwar coalition had provoked the ire of campus Leftists; and Edward C. Banfield, the urban scholar whose exploration of a "lower-class" culture entrapping the poor sparked student protest. And there were sociology professor andPublic Interestco-founder Daniel Bell, government and sociology professor Seymour Martin Lipset, education professor Nathan Glazer, and government professor Daniel Patrick Moynihan -- then Nixon's chief adviser on urban affairs and Bill's boss during a White House internship in the summer of 1970. Philosophy professor Harvey C. Mansfield had been to the Kristols' apartment for dinner, concluding that Bill's dismissive description of his toney prep school was a sure sign the young man would fit in with the Harvard elites.

Months after arriving, Bill signed on as contributing editor to a start-up conservative magazine aimed at a national college audience, theAlternative.Edited by R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr., theAlternativein the 1970s offered young conservatives reinforcement and a place to air their unpopular views. (Later, the magazine broadened its readership and took the nameAmerican Spectator,publishing some of the most controversial and savage sallies against the Clinton administration.) Bill contributed a review to the magazine's November 1970 issue, castigating a book by Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas as "more than stupid, more than cliché-ridden, more than simple minded, more than an insult to almost any reader's intelligence....The book is, alas, neither serious nor humorous; it is merely pathetic." He compiled a droll holiday wish list asking for, among other things, "a few weeks of obscurity" for Spiro T. Agnew, "babies" for Women's Lib leaders, and "a success...some success...any success" for Richard Nixon. Later he wrote a column complaining that a purported Harvard-Radcliffe "charity" was in fact a solicitation for such political causes as the United Farm Workers and ethnic identity groups. That liberals would call this a charity, he wrote, was more evidence of their "facile ideological self-gratification."

On the Harvard campus itself that first year, leftist protests that might offer targets for Bill's poison pen were on the wane. Small groups of radicals still raised howls over American imperialism in front of the university's Center for International Affairs, the target of a violent Weathermen raid a year earlier. But the national Students for a Democratic Society, once the flagship of the New Left, had splintered internally into carping factions at Harvard and elsewhere.

During that first full academic year of the 1970s there was a sense that the winds had shifted, something was over. "As we rush off to the first day of classes this morning we might remember, if just for a moment, that this University is on strike. Remember...?" pleaded one commentator in theHarvard Crimson,the campus newspaper. The previous academic year had ended with a student protest against the U.S. invasion of Cambodia, with demonstrations sparked by the deaths of four students at Kent State, with a tense meeting at Harvard's Sanders Theater where students overwhelmingly voted to support a university strike. "Remember?" the commentator begged his readers as Bill began his first term.

Despite the lull in protests, Harvard's student body remained predominantly liberal and left, with conservatives viewed as curiosities at best, warmongers at worst. In the 1972 presidential election, 75 percent of Harvard-Radcliffe students would favor George McGovern over Richard Nixon. TheHarvard Crimson,which editorialized in support of Vietnam's Communist-backed National Liberation Front, was still a font of socialist wisdom. The faculty was more politically diverse, with a government department that served as a bastion of "neos," liberal and conservative. So Bill never felt constrained from offering his minority opinions in class. He took every chance he could to point out the "mindless conformism" of the Left: The kind of lazy thinking, for example, that would prompt theCrimsoneditors to make the leap from criticizing American military policy to supporting the Communists.

During Bill's first years at Harvard, conservative views frequently became the target of harassment by leftist radicals. The Harvard chapter of SDS, which had curbed its anti-war efforts, now picketed and stalked professors, such as Banfield, whose work was considered racist and reactionary. A pro-war "counter-teach-in," organized by Bill's friend Stephen Rosen under the guise of the Young Americans for Freedom, was cut short by hooting radicals. Kristol friend Jim Muller described toCrimsonreaders an encounter with an SDS activist who was urging fellow radicals to shout down supporters of Nixon's Vietnam policies. "I asked him whether or not he supported free speech, and here was his answer: 'I'm for it, as long as it isn't counterproductive.' " When Harvard President Nathan Pusey denounced the campus's leftist radicals as dangerous imitators of Joseph McCarthy, it struck a chord with broad segments of students, liberal and conservative.

Bill wasn't intimidated by the Left's pugilists. On the contrary, he sought them out. During his second year at Harvard, he would slip into his Spiro Agnew T-shirt and wander up to the Radcliffe campus to visit his former roommate Robert McTiernan. (Kristol didn't really like the crass vice president, but he couldn't resist promoting a politician who had dismissed anti-war leaders as an "effete corps of impudent snobs.") He'd take up a spot in McTiernan's dorm, or inside the dining hall, juicing casual talk into pointed political debate, his forehead crinkling, his eyes dancing in delight. Was Kristol kidding or not when he praised Nixon's 1972 bombing of the Haiphong Harbor, a wave of B-52 raids that set off another round of student strikes, as "one of the great moments in American history"? It didn't matter because the provocations had the intended effect, putting Bill at the center of the debate -- the practiced warrior alone among flailing liberals.

On a campus where liberalism was equated with enlightenment, Bill's conservative opinions stood out as strange, farcical, or daring, depending on his audience at any given moment. Susan Scheinberg, the attractive freshman who lived next door to McTiernan, was part of the tiny audience of undergraduates who categorized Bill's politics as daring. She was on her way to becoming a rising star in the classics department, ultimately graduating with honors and an award as Radcliffe's most promising humanities student. Like a good classicist, Susan didn't think much about contemporary politics, though she called herself a liberal Democrat when she did. At the time, she didn't believe conservatives could be erudite; like most Harvard liberals, she assumed they were all golf-playing executives, racists, or just plain ignorant. Until she met Bill.

Susan and Bill struck up a courtship that eventually would lead to the marriage of the brash fast-talking Manhattanite to the shy, scholarly daughter of a neurologist from Scarsdale, New York. The pair shared a love of high culture, discovering opera together, and a disdain for a youth culture that blithely dismissed the wisdom of age and the ages. Susan's view of the world blended more shades of gray than did Bill's. But she was impressed by Bill's political stamina, his imperviousness to insult or denunciation. "Like water off a duck's back," she'd say (and would watch with bemusement years later as Bill counseled their three children to do the same whenever their feelings were hurt). He welcomed attack and delighted in the gamesmanship of fierce political debate. He was fast on his feet, quick with the comeback, and had the demeanor of a young man convinced he'd already heard it all.

As Bill began his final year as an undergraduate in 1972, a number of professors from Harvard and elsewhere, as well as his parents, signed onto an advertisement in theNew York Timessupporting Nixon's reelection. Student radicals loudly protested, calling for the firing of Harvard professors who had advertised their support for this "war criminal." That activists would react with such extremist rhetoric to the prospect of professors supporting an incumbent president confirmed in Kristol's mind the growing intolerance of leftist thought. Free speech and the free speech movement had been pillars of 1960s activism; this protest, he decided, revealed the radicals as supporters of free speech only for those who agreed with them.

Bill could barely contain himself.

Inside a Radcliffe dining hall, he provoked a vociferous argument with one of the protest's instigators. The two young men debated for hours, back and forth, thrust and jab, the activist denouncing Nixon for war crimes, Bill defending the Nixon administration and questioning his opponent's commitment to academic freedom. Susan stood in awe of her boyfriend, not for his forensic skills, but for his audacity: Bill harbored his own doubts about America's military policy in Vietnam. And he hadn't even supported Richard Nixon. In the spring of 1972, he'd been the chief Harvard organizer for the presidential primary bid of Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson, a military hawk, but also a Democrat.

But he never let on.

* * *

One could make the case that Harvard's radicals, in their ardor and anger and grand certitude, were no different than Irving Kristol and his cadre of Trotskyist friends in the 1930s, gathering in Alcove 1 of New York's City College lunchroom to "argue the world" with the Stalinists in adjoining Alcove 2. One could assert that Bill was prematurely adopting the pose of a famous father who had drifted rightward to become a middle-aged crank, ignoring his own past to denounce the new generation of radicals as "a mob who have no real interest in higher education or in the life of the mind." Hadn't Bill sadly skipped a beat in his own development when he leapfrogged the progression from youthful utopianism to the mature skepticism that had shaped his father?

One could make that argument, and many a liberal adversary would. But it would miss the core of the Kristols: Like father, like son, and like mother and daughter, this was about as bourgeois a family as they come. Even in the days when twenty-two-year-old Irving and eighteen-year-old Bea Himmelfarb, the girl with the shiny brown eyes who would become his wife, were dutifully attending Brooklyn branch meetings of the Young People's Socialist League -- Fourth International (where Trotskyists nourished the fanciful notion of organizing local blacks), radicalism was not a natural fit for Bill's parents. If there was such a thing as a conservative temperament, "cool and critical in respect of change...unadventurous, that has no impulse to sail unchartered seas" (to borrow the words of political theorist Michael Oakeshott), the Kristols embodied it. In the 1930s, with the world's economies in depression and fascism's shadow looming across Europe, "it was very easy to be radical, particularly if you were Jewish," recalled Irving Kristol. "The only question was what kind of radical you'd be." Along with fellow CCNY students such as Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer, Irving Howe, Melvin Lasky, and Seymour Martin Lipset, Kristol opted for the Trotskyist brand, which had fewer sins to disguise than the Stalinists, who were forced to defend the Soviet Union's despotic leader.

The Kristols were drawn to socialism as much by the swirl of brainy energy behind the Trotskyists' relentless theoretical arguments as by the prospect of an egalitarian future. (Politics and study, Kristol once wrote, were outlets for the sexual energies of young men at the all-male City College.) "It was very stimulating intellectually to be a Trotskyist," Bea, who attended Brooklyn College, would later recall. "They were simply the smartest people around." In their lunchroom debates, these radical polemicists learned what Howe would famously call the "uses of the appearance of a coherent argument."

There was nothing personally rebellious in the Kristols' short foray into socialism, nothing suggesting disdain for their parents, their professors, their communities or universities. As noted by historian Alexander Bloom, the immigrant world in the 1930s was full of radical literature; the city's socialist college students "planned to be emissaries from their parents' worlds, not exiles." What would horrify the Kristols three decades later was the passionate bad manners of 1960s activists who spurned their parents, violently stormed campus offices, and shouted down police officers as "pigs" and government officials as "war criminals." "Our objections to 'the system' focused on issues, not individuals," Himmelfarb insisted. Neither could the Kristols countenance a political movement as determined to upset society's social order -- marriage and sex and gender roles -- as its economic order.

Irving asked Bea to marry him after four dates (foreign movies only for these cafe radicals), and waited a year for her parents' consent, as he sought to assure them that his future was brighter than his $13.89-a-week apprentice machinist job. The pair was never tempted to pursue the Bohemian lifestyle that captivated some young radicals. Irving "wanted a girl to love and marry," not free love. Politically, what Irving Kristol aspired to, what most of these precocious Jewish sons of East European immigrants in the 1920s and '30s aspired to, was less to upend the American way of life than to become the social conscience of the nation's thinking elite. The college diploma, to New York's radicals in the 1930s, was a ticket to American nobility. They faced rampant anti-Semitism and the systematic exclusion of Jews at preeminent universities such as Harvard and Columbia, but remained convinced of their rightful place at the top of the American pyramid. They self-consciously titled themselves "intellectuals" -- as if that were a career description -- and busily started up journals and magazines aimed at a thinking elite.

Unlike the 1960s radicals, Irving Kristol didn't harbor a natural aversion to authority. In fact, he rather liked it. After he was drafted in 1944, seeing action as an infantryman in Europe, he gained new appreciation for "army vigilance," which, he asserted, was the only check on his fellow soldiers, who "were too easily inclined to loot, to rape, and to shoot prisoners of war." He was an unabashed urban elitist who once wrote of the group of midwestern soldiers in his unit, "I can't build socialism with these people. They'll probably take it over and make a racket out of it." (A generation later, his urbane son Bill would leave office colleagues snickering behind his back after regaling them with an awestruck description of a Texas truckstop -- a thoroughly alien dining experience for him.)

Irving recalled that "it would never have occurred to us to denounce anyone or anything as 'elitist.' The elite was us -- the 'happy few' who had been chosen by History to guide our fellow creatures toward a secular redemption." Even Irving's attraction to Bea bespoke an inclination towardancienne noblesse:Both were children of immigrants -- his father a garment subcontractor, hers the owner of a small glass manufacturing business. But Bea's quiet sophistication -- she would later describe herself as an "unregenerate prig" -- suggested an upbringing, in contrast with Irving's, of strong intellectual roots. Bea's grandfather had been a Hebrew teacher and her brother Milton became a leading religion commentator; her parents always expected her to attend both college and graduate school. Bea also attended the Jewish Theological Seminary as a college student and was trained in the faith's rigorous intellectual traditions. Moreover, like other learned New York Jews of the era, she had a keen interest in matters European, particularly British.

By age twenty-two, Irving Kristol was ready to leave the Trotskyists and nurse his ambition to become both an "intellectual" and a "writer." Like their comrades, the Kristols had opposed U.S. involvement in the "imperialist" war looming in Europe. Stalin's 1939 nonaggression pact with Hitler, freeing German tanks to roll across Europe, changed their minds. When Bea earned a fellowship to pursue graduate studies at the University of Chicago, Irving followed and took a part-time job as a railroad freight handler while awaiting the draft. He also attended classes at Chicago, and thus was introduced to a vibrant academic atmosphere that focused more on classics than radical politics. After the war, the Kristols' traditional marriage continued building on untraditional gender roles. When Bea was offered a scholarship to pursue a dissertation on Lord Acton in England, Irving again followed, busying himself with work on a novel. When they returned to New York in 1947, Irving joinedCommentary-- an anticommunist, culturally highbrow Jewish magazine -- and within five years rose to managing editor.

Bea Kristol was, in the work she authored, Gertrude Himmelfarb. She kept her own name professionally, though insisting that this was no feminist statement; she was simply too lazy to change the paperwork. (Intimates, on the other hand, saw it as a calculated decision to maintain a voice independent of her more polemicist husband.) Himmelfarb's attitude toward work would be something difficult to grasp for those in the modern feminist era: She never envisioned herself pursuing a "career" even though she went on to write nine books, becoming a leading Victorian scholar. "It never occurred to me that I might become a professor," she said later. "I went to the university not to become 'credentialed' but to get educated. I chose the University of Chicago because I was told it was intellectually exciting. I got my graduate degrees by default, as it were. In order to get fellowships, I had to do the right things -- take courses, pass exams, write dissertations. In the process of doing those things, I somehow acquired the degrees."

The best way to understand Gertrude Himmelfarb is to place her in the same category as eminent Victorian women she studied, such as George Eliot or Charlotte Bronte, who opposed women's suffrage and thought it quite appropriate that men and women keep to their separate spheres in life. While Himmelfarb might not oppose the women's vote today, she became a vigorous critic of feminist politics in academia, and she defended the centrality of what multiculturalists deride as "Dead European White Males" in the curriculum. She criticized the feminist movement for promoting "equality rather than liberty" and "not the equality of opportunity for individuals but the equality of results for groups as a whole." Of modern women, she would say, "It's very sad, women who feel under this pressure to be a 'career' mom."

Himmelfarb was a working mother herself. But in her mind, she was merely pursuing her scholarly interests while tending her family. She worked at home, writing, and in university libraries, researching. When her two children, Bill and Liz, were born in the 1950s, she hired au pair girls to help out while they lived in London ("English girls from the countryside -- Mind you, all my English friends had proper nannies, and thought it rather outré only to have an au pair") and a housekeeper when they moved back to New York. She didn't go "to work" -- in the sense of having an outside-the-home job -- until Bill was twelve and Liz was nine, when she became a professor at City University of New York's graduate school and began teaching a couple of courses each week.

Quiet in demeanor, meticulous in her work, ever fretful of saying something publicly that might be factually precarious or misconstrued, Gertrude Himmelfarb never achieved the high profile of the vocal polemicists who populated the neoconservative movement. Nevertheless her tiny voice in person could slash opponents in print.New Republiccontributor Roy Porter once described her as a historian who "has made it her mission to lay bare the pretentions of the founding fathers of modernity; her forte is exploding their pretentions with deadly elegance." The work she produced from the 1940s on, particularly her controversial studies defending the Victorian era, would lay much of the scholarly foundation for the conservative "family values" movement in the 1980s and 1990s. (What other college kid would get the opportunity, as Bill did, to cite his mother's work in the footnotes of his senior thesis?)

Timing and bloodlines practically ensured that Bill would be born with the soul of a contrarian. In December 1952, the month he was born in a New York City hospital, his mother was outlining a book challenging conventional wisdom about Darwin's legacy, and Bill's father had just earned widespread notoriety as an apologist for Senator Joseph McCarthy. In the years following the war, Irving Kristol was still a liberal, but -- like many other liberals of the era -- he was also staunchly anticommunist. In 1952, as McCarthy was blindly accusing hundreds in government, Hollywood, and academia of Soviet sympathies, Kristol wrote an essay condemning not McCarthy, but liberals defending the civil liberties of his victims. Although he labeled McCarthy a "vulgar demagogue," what his readers would always remember was his defense of the demagogue: "There is one thing that the American people know about Senator McCarthy: He, like them, is unequivocally anticommunist. About the spokesmen for American liberalism, they feel they know no such thing. And with some justification."

Later, Kristol would express regret at not further disassociating himself from McCarthy. And, in fairness, Kristol was far from the only New York intellectual with a fuzzy position on McCarthy: Nathan Glazer later echoed regrets that he and other New York anticommunist liberals never articulated a respectable and moral position. But the McCarthy essay, Kristol's first serious plunge into political writing, set a pattern in the coming decades -- a poison pen that would take a fabric of truth and stretch it, his critics asserted, beyond the tent-poles of supportable fact -- just as he had in the McCarthy essay by ignoring widespread anticommunist sentiment among leading American liberals.

By the time Bill was five months old, the Kristols were back in England, where Irving co-editedEncounter,a start-up magazine funded by the Paris-based Congress for Cultural Freedom, a collection of anticommunist intellectuals. Their six years in London were intoxicating. By day, Bea wrote her study of Darwinism. By evening, both Kristols mingled with prominent literary lights. For the first time in their lives, they met elected politicians, mostly deeply learned liberal Members of Parliament and their conservative counterparts. The latter revealed to the Kristols another world to which they'd never been exposed: vibrantly intellectual conservatism.

Their circle of friends included homosexuals as well, such as poet W. H. Auden. No one, said the Kristols (who would later become open critics of the gay rights movement) made a fuss, or frankly paid much attention, to sexual orientation. "We knew [Auden] quite well," recalled Himmelfarb. "He was perfectly open about his homosexuality, very accepting of it for himself. But if you talked to him about it, he would say it's a great misfortune to be a homosexual." Their Manhattan friends were not immune to the changing cultural mores that troubled both Kristols and later emerged as major themes in their writings. But the Kristols were less judgmental of their friends than of society writ large. Widespread divorce, a few out-of-wedlock children, but "very few scandals" was how Himmelfarb described their circle.

The Kristols returned to Manhattan in 1959, renting an apartment on Riverside Drive, in a building overlooking the Hudson River. Within weeks of arriving in the States, six-year-old Bill had shed his British accent and was consuming baseball statistics like popcorn. The Kristols wanted their children to pursue old-fashioned classical educations, where respect, discipline, and Latin figured prominently. So when the rote lessons of the French Lycée proved insufficient, they enrolled Bill in the prestigious Collegiate School for Boys, a five-block walk from their West Side apartment.

Collegiate was, its granite facing explained, "a place to attend to your soul" -- Protestant style. With its accented masters determined to turn each year's crop of young boys into proper Renaissance men, Collegiate easily could be mistaken for a British school. In fact, it was Reformed Protestant Dutch, attached to the West End Collegiate Church. Bill went to a school with a glass crucifix overhanging one end of the Flemish-styled building (the church) and an American flag overhanging the other (Collegiate School). One morning a week, the schoolboys were ushered into the Christian chapel to hear a moral lesson from the pulpit.

Other Jewish boys attended this Protestant school, and some, as they grew older, were troubled that they had been schooled in a Christian atmosphere. Bill and his parents were not. "We had gone through public schools, we had sung Christmas carols, it didn't matter," recalled the senior Kristol. "We were so secure in our Judaism," added his wife. Secure enough, in fact, that Bill's mother saw to it that her son attended Hebrew school at the Orthodox Congregation Shearith Israel, which blended the traditions of Sephardic and Ashkenazic Judaism. As nonkosher Jews whose display of faith mostly consisted of observing the high holidays, the Kristols were not permitted to join the Orthodox temple. But Himmelfarb, attracted to its upper-class style and intellectual rigor, was determined that Bill pursue his bar mitzvah studies there.

As parents, the Kristols didn't issue rules so

Excerpted from Gang of Five: Leaders at the Center of the Conservative Ascendacy by Nina J. Easton
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