It is so very revealing, and melancholy, that on the day Irving Kristol passed away, a tongue-wagging Glenn Beck stares at us from the cover of Time magazine. Ah, for a return to simpler, more civil times.
When I was growing up in New York, Irving Kristol was not some seminal thinker or “godfather” of any intellectual movement; at least not to me. It was many years before I had any clue about all that, or was unavoidably impressed.
Similarly, the adults whom I’d occasionally spy in the family’s characteristically modestly-appointed apartment at 90 Riverside Drive, sometimes playing poker, if I recall, didn’t mean anything to me. There was somebody named Moynihan, and somebody named Bell, both Daniels I’d realize years later.
I was a callow, private school youth who originally lived and went to school just down the block. It’s where I became close chums with Billy Kristol, Irving’s son (“I’ve never heard anybody call him Billy!” I still hear from people, looking a bit shocked, even dyspeptic). I’d drop by frequently; to play, do homework, or plot our next outrage for a satirical, if not outright subversive, magazine we co-edited in sixth and seventh grades. It was a world of simpler pleasures and diversions; one without the Internet, cable television, political talk radio, cell phones, and, come to think of it, electric typewriters.
And, more often than not, hovering somewhere in the apartment were “Mr. and Mrs. Kristol,” namely Irving and Gertrude Himmelfarb. They were simply the very understated, if clearly firm and disciplined parents of my partner in rebellion.
Billy was the smartest kid in our class, so I figured they were smart, too. But that was it. It would be years before I fully understood the brilliance around me, or had any inkling that, if truth be told, Mrs. Kristol was arguably the most potent, if not the most influential, of the bunch. They were just my buddy’s parents.
And, as I very much recall, they were faultlessly low-key and decent. And it wasn’t that they were lacking in opinions and tough-mindedness. Billy’s success clearly was in some fashion a function of a pretty structured upbringing in which standards were set distinctly high. I’d talk baseball a lot with Irving back in the days when the Yankees were in the dumps and the Mets were new and abysmal.
Even when I would belatedly realize the family’s collective intellectual achievements, I was struck by the parents’ quiet, decent ways. His mom would act, well, like a mom, wondering when I’d finally get married. There was never a hint of immodesty or showing off.
Which gets me back to Glenn Beck today and what Time’s cover terms “the angry style of American politics.” They call him, “The Agitator.”
Irving Kristol was an agitator, too, but the modus operandi was not a high-decibel, premeditatedly-provocative electronic megaphone. No, it was the scalpel of The Public Interest, the magazine he founded and laid to rest after an impressive 40-year run.
The aim wasn’t to stir passions and pander. It was to systematically, empirically win important arguments and elevate public discussion.
It seems so very quaint, does it not? Mr. Kristol, rest in peace.
James Warren, former managing editor of the Chicago Tribune, is a correspondent for The Atlantic Monthly and analyst for MSNBC.