WILLIAM KRISTOL, EDITOR, WEEKLY STANDARD; CHAIRMAN, PROJECT FOR THE NEW AMERICAN CENTURY: I’m not sure I ever decided, you know, it sort of happened. I was teaching at Harvard and my friend Bill Bennett, acquaintance really, Bill Bennett, got offered the Education Secretaryship by Ronald Reagan. He called me up a little while later and said, ”Why don’t you come down for a year to Washington and help me, you know, write some speeches, do that sort of thing?”

And Susan and I discussed it and we had one little kid and another one on the way, it was a pretty good time – no one in school yet it was a pretty good time to move. I didn’t think my prospects at the Kennedy School at Harvard for tenure were that great so I thought it would be interesting to test – see what Washington was like. And we came for a year and one year became two, and two years became 20, so here we are.

LAMB: How long did you teach at Harvard?

KRISTOL: I taught for two years at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard after teaching five years in the Political Science Department at the University of Pennsylvania. So I had seven years as a young academic and I guess I decided at the end of that that I wasn’t really cut out to be a scholar. I respect scholars, I admire scholars, I’m just not – I’m not one.

LAMB: When you were at the Kennedy School were you out of step with the rest of the place?

KRISTOL: Yes, I was the token conservative there. They like to have one at all times, you know, it’s useful when the students know what one looks like when they get out and have to look for a job or something. But I – they treated me fine, you know. The Kennedy School is a very sort of a pleasant place and respectful of diversity of opinions, at least it was then and I think it still is now. And I enjoyed the two years there. But there wasn’t ultimately – the idea was to bring in someone who taught political theory, political philosophy to these public policy students at the Kennedy School, sort of deepen their understanding of the issues. But I was a little bit of a fish out of water and as I say, though, it was pleasant it didn’t really – it wasn’t really going anywhere.

LAMB: How did you become Alan Keyes’ roommate?

KRISTOL: I became Alan Keyes’ roommate because we were in graduate school together and graduate students need to room – you know need to share apartments because we were poor and we liked each other. And so three of us, Alan and Steve Rosen, who now teaches at Harvard, and I roomed together for a year. And I guess that was my first year of graduate school, 1973-1974. We were all students in the Government Department at Harvard together.

LAMB: How hard was it for him to talk you into running his campaign for the Senate in what, ’88?

KRISTOL: That was in ’88. Well we had stayed in touch, we were friends. He had served in the State Department, I had come to Washington to work for Bennett. Bill was – it was near the end of the Reagan administration. Bill, in fact, left a few months later also and Alan got drafted kind of late to run for the Senate in Maryland. I think the original candidate dropped out for some reason. And Alan said, this will be interested, probably won’t win but we have an outside shot that you’ll learn about politics and it’ll be fun. And it was fun actually.

It was a little harrowing, you know, running an under funded campaign against a popular incumbent, Paul Sarbanes. And we lost but we didn’t do any worse than the preceding candidate had done against Sarbanes or than the succeeding candidate did against Sarbanes. It was – in fact it was Alan Keyes best electoral performance ever, he got 38 percent of the vote in that Senate race in Maryland. And four years later I think he got 27 percent of the vote and he drew the logical conclusion from that that if you’re getting 38 percent of the vote and 27 percent of the vote in Senate races you should then run for President so then he did that a couple of times.

LAMB: Did you find the two of you falling away on politics at all during this process? Did you change you mind about the two of you have different points of view?

KRISTOL: Well, I think in ’88 we were both supporters of Ronald Reagan, you know, the conservatives were united in being Reaganites then I think so we didn’t have many differences. Over the years we’ve had some differences, we’re on cordial terms but, yes, I don’t know that we agree on as many policy issues now as we did back then.

LAMB: Who was the first person to write that you were Quayle’s brain?

KRISTOL: I think that was in the New Republic. I don’t – was it Hanna Rosen I think maybe wrote a – there was a story in the New Republic that I could have done without or maybe it was just the editors. Any some cleaver New Republic editor or writer decided to call me Dan Quayle’s brain, which was both unfair and inaccurate and made my life slightly difficult for a few weeks there in the White House.

LAMB: In what way …

KRISTOL: Well, actually …

LAMB: … did it make it difficult.

KRISTOL: … Dan Quayle was great about it. I mean he knew that I hadn’t, you know, put anyone up to this and he was used to – at this point he was used to being unjustly accused and he was gracious about it. But, you know, other staffers, you know, couldn’t help but make fun of me a little bit and I don’t – I don’t blame them. No people were tolerant of it, did no great damage.

LAMB: When did you first meet Rupert Murdoch?

KRISTOL: I think I first met Rupert Murdoch when we got voted – when the Bush administration got voted out of office in November ’92 and we all vacated the White House in January of ’93.

I did a little project for the Bradley Foundation for a few months and then decided maybe I could start something called the Project for the Republican Future which I did and ran it for about a year and a half and through ’94 and early ’95. Rupert gave some money to the Project for the Republican Future in ’94. And as I recall, through a mutual friend of ours over in Selzer (ph) I was able to go see Rupert Murdoch and ask him for some support for this effort to revitalize the Republican Party and defeat Hillary Clinton’s health care plan and help Republican’s possibly win a majority in Congress in ’94, which worked out OK. And so he was a donor to the Project for the Republican Future. I think that’s when I first met him.

LAMB: Is he a Republican?

KRISTOL: You know we’ve never discussed that. I sort of – he may be registered as an Independent but he’s – as he himself as said he’s moderately conservative. I think his political heroes are Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher so.

LAMB: So how then did it lead to the Weekly Standard publication and what year did you start that?

KRISTOL: We started the Standard in ’95. The first publication, the first issue, was Labor Day of 1995.

I went to Rupert – well Fred Barnes who was then at the New Republic and was interested in the idea of a new conservative weekly based in Washington; John Podhoretz who was then at the New York Post and had a lot of magazine and newspaper experience and I got together and thought well let’s take a shot at a new conservative weekly magazine based in Washington, basically a conservative version of the New Republic.

And I guess I went to Murdoch originally thinking perhaps he would give money to a not-for-profit foundation that would publish the magazine. I would raise money from six, or eight or 10 wealthy individuals and put it together, and get them to support it.

And he said, well, look I have some experience in publishing, maybe I’ll just publish it – we’ll just publish it out of News Corp. And so that worked out well and we got editorial independence and the support of News Corp and it’s been a happy marriage for over 10 years.

LAMB: Has it ever made any money?

KRISTOL: No.

LAMB: Did you know Norman Podhoretz when you were growing up?

KRISTOL: Yes, I knew Norman Podhoretz and his wife, Mitch Decter (ph), they were friends of my parents. I actually didn’t know – John’s younger than I am so I didn’t know the kids – we kids didn’t know each other particularly well. I’m sure we met a few times but no, so I met John again really as an adult in Washington.

LAMB: And he’s now at the New York Post.

KRISTOL: He’s a columnist at New York Post.

LAMB: Your mother appeared on Booknotes a couple of years, I don’t remember the exact date. But let’s see what she looks like and what she was talking about there.

(BEING VIDEO CLIP)

LAMB: And your son is?

GERTRUDE HIMMELFARB: Any my son is Bill Kristol, William Kristol otherwise known as Bill Kristol – always identified as a DE (ph) Republican strategist.

LAMB: Did …

HIMMELFARB: I’m not sure I know what that means.

LAMB: And your husband you give a lot of credit to in this book as you started out saying you almost can’t give him enough credit. And who is your husband?

HIMMELFARB: Irving Kristol, who is a writer and editor and publisher and who’s acquired the tag, the label of the godfather of neoconservatism.

LAMB: So what does that make you?

HIMMELFARB: It makes me the wife of Irving Kristol and the mother of Bill Kristol is what it makes me.

LAMB: Are you a Republican strategist or a …

HIMMELFARB: I’m not …

LAMB: … neoconservative?

HIMMELFARB: I’m not a Republican strategist. I’m – in private life I supposed I’d be a neoconservative. In my – as far as my writing goes I’m simply a historian.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

LAMB: What impact did Gertrude Himmelfarb have on your life?

KRISTOL: Well, I’m sure a lot, obviously. It’s so hard, you know, to disentangle impact on one’s own life and many people have paid psychiatrists huge amounts of money to establish that.

No, I think a real respect for serious intellectual pursuits. My mother was and is a very distinguished historian and really wrote – especially when I was growing up she didn’t write about contemporary issues at all. She wrote about intellectual history of the 19th century, John Stewart Mill, Darwin, Lord Actin, a huge volume – two major volumes on the idea of poverty in late 19th century Britain.

So I think a respect for the life of the mind, for serious scholarship, for real intellectual work.

LAMB: Last week on this program we had Karen Kwiatkowski, a retired lieutenant colonel in the Air Force who worked in the Pentagon in the South Asia Near East Policy Group from – and we asked her to talk about being in the movie ”Why We Fight.” You were in there and we showed some clips from that, we’re going to show more today, but why did you participate in that movie and did you have any idea what the results were going to be?

KRISTOL: Yes, I don’t – I haven’t seen the movie. I participated – I think someone called and said would you do some interviews with this filmmaker, you know, I can’t remember who it was now but it was someone who was a mutual friend.

LAMB: Gene Jarecki.

KRISTOL: No – yes, Gene Jarecki was the filmmaker …

LAMB: Yes.

KRISTOL: … but it was a mutual friend I think who sort of introduced him said, you know, he’s trying to do a movie on sort of the debate of ideas about the Iraq war and the broader questions of American foreign policy and would you be interviewed with him.

And I actually don’t really remember it but I think he came to the office and interviewed me for half an hour or 45 minutes.

LAMB: Do you ever worry about what’s the end result of all that is?

KRISTOL: I tend not to. I probably should worry more, I don’t know. I figure, you know, look I’m editing a magazine, I’m on television, I feel within the obvious restraints of schedule and reasonableness that one should be more available than not if someone is making a good faith effort to explain certain ideas or represent a certain point of view.

And so I think in this case it may have been a mutual friend, I can’t remember who it was who called and said, you know, he’s a reputable fellow why don’t you do this interview.

LAMB: Let’s listen to the trailer that they put out to advertise the movie because it gives you a sense of what they think the movie’s about and get your reaction to it.

KRISTOL: OK.

UNIDENTIFIED PARTICIPANT: From the White House we present Dwight D. Eisenhower.

DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER, 34th PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Good evening my fellow Americans. In the councils of government we must guard against the military industrial complex.

UNIDENTIFIED PARTICIPANT: The United States is the greatest force for good in the world. We have not an obligation to go out and start wars but certainly to spread democracy and freedom throughout the world.

UNIDENTIFIED PARTICIPANT: The defense budget is three-quarters of a trillion dollars. Profits went up last year well over 25 percent. When war becomes that profitable you’re going to see more of it.

UNIDENTIFIED PARTICIPANT: There is a huge flow of cash into defense industries.

UNIDENTIFIED PARTICIPANT: $66 billion for our men and women in uniform.

UNIDENTIFIED PARTICIPANT: $100 million to upgrade 10 additional B-1 bombers.

UNIDENTIFIED PARTICIPANT: You do have to follow the money.

UNIDENTIFIED PARTICIPANT: It’s the representatives duty to bring home the bacon.

UNIDENTIFIED PARTICIPANT: God bless our contractors.

UNIDENTIFIED PARTICIPANT: Now kids are dying, billions are being spent every month.

UNIDENTIFIED PARTICIPANT: And the American people are scratching their heads going ”how did we get here.”

UNIDENTIFIED PARTICIPANT: This is not about one president or one party.

UNIDENTIFIED PARTICIPANT: When does the United States go from a force for good to a force of imperialism.

UNIDENTIFIED PARTICIPANT: We’ve got an empire. There is no excuse for 725 American military bases in 130 foreign countries.

UNIDENTIFIED PARTICIPANT: I think numbers almost are distracting.

UNIDENTIFIED PARTICIPANT: 9/11 showed us war can be privatized.

UNIDENTIFIED PARTICIPANT: Destruction can be privatized.

UNIDENTIFIED PARTICIPANT: What we are risking is the republic itself.

UNIDENTIFIED PARTICIPANT: Collusion is our business, collusion with the military.

UNIDENTIFIED PARTICIPANT: We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes.

UNIDENTIFIED PARTICIPANT: It is nowhere written that the American empire goes on forever.

LAMB: What are you hearing and seeing there?

KRISTOL: Well, insofar as the thesis seems to be that the powerful military industrial complex drove us to war I think it’s just crackpot. I mean the war in Iraq may or may not have been a good idea – I think it was necessary and right. And there have been – may have been many different forces, ideological and others driving us to war but the idea that this is powerful military industrial complex in the U.S. that’s driving decisions is ridiculous.

It’s – I think in Eisenhower’s day military spending was what eight-nine percent, 10 percent perhaps of gross domestic product. It was three percent when Bush took over and now it’s about four percent. It’s – I mean look at the defense companies they’ve all merged and are much smaller compared to their, you know, civilian counterparts than they used to be.

So the idea that there’s this, you know – that this was done for this money as didn’t someone say in the trailer, ”follow the money,” that really is ridiculous. And the idea that a president of the United States and Senators and Congressmen would vote – would go to war for the sake of what enriching some friends of theirs who are contractors that’s really both childish and kind of obscene I think.

LAMB: From our program last week Karen Kwiatkowski talked about neoconservatism and mentions you. Let’s listen to what she had to say and then get your reaction to that.

KWIATKOWSKI: Neoconservatism does not have its roots in conservatism and I think Bill Kristol would probably be the first to tell you that. He knows the story.

It has its roots in more grand ideologies than traditional conservatism. In fact you can go all the way back to Trotsky and some of the Marxist thinkers and find some of the roots of neoconservatism.

But strangely neoconservatism found a home in the Republican Party as it began to shape itself about 35 years ago. And you know, Bill Buckley, the old – I mean I shouldn’t say old but the grandfather of the National Review started out was a conservative magazine. And early on the National Review and Buckley were a big part of this whole idea that Bill Kristol mentions of reshaping our foreign policy, rethinking how it is that America deals with the world, and when – and in the directions that he’s talking about it wasn’t 9/11. OK, I’m sorry, Kristol’s wrong on that.

9/11 is a nice event that gets everybody awake and allows for possibilities of change but this refocusing of American foreign policy is – as a unilateral power, as a shaper of not just ourselves but of others, this comes about early on, 35-40 years ago neoconservatism is a big part of it.

LAMB: Reaction?

KRISTOL: Well, 35-40 years ago the Cold War was going on and I think we were right to stand up to the Soviet Union and to help our allies do so. We were right to pressure some of our allies to move towards democracy away from authoritarianism as we did with some of the Asian countries that were on our side, South Korea, Philippines, Taiwan. We were right to have a defense build up in the ’80s and have the moral assault on the Soviet Union and put pressure on the Soviet Union and help it to topple the Soviet empire and bring down the Iron Curtain.

So I rather agree that in fact what’s now called neoconservative foreign policies in the tradition of Truman, in the tradition of Reagan, somewhat actually more than people realize in the tradition of the better parts of Clinton’s foreign policy in the ’90s, the intervention in Bosnia and in Kosovo.

So yes, I think it’s – I do think the notion that there’s some brand new neoconservative foreign policy is wrong. I think certainly in the stuff I’ve written I’ve always appealed to the examples of Roosevelt and Truman and Reagan and the broad tradition in American foreign policy.

LAMB: What’s the difference between Bill Kristol conservatism and Bill Buckley conservatism?

KRISTOL: I think Bill Buckley conservatism is more conservative, I mean more nostalgic for the past, more Torre if you will, probably more grounded explicitly in religion and in his case I think in a particular religion, but more of a kind of defense of the old west against the corrosive forces of modernity.

I’m not – I’m not hostile to that, I respect that kind of conservatism. That’s not quite what neoconservatism is which is more – which came out of an acceptance of certain aspects of modernity in 20th century America. You know most neoconservatives look back on FDR’s presidency and think it was a pretty good thing; and think the best thing about FDR was his standing up to Nazi Germany and Japan and that Roosevelt’s instinct that we should have intervened earlier, if possible, was probably right; and that Teddy Roosevelt’s instincts that we should have intervened earlier in World War I; Henry Cabot Lodge’s instincts that it would have been good to have stronger alliance relationship in 1919-1920 with Europe were also right.

So there Buckley’s conservatism, though not Buckley himself had a tinge of isolationism, a tinge of kind of the old American republic let’s stay away from the rest of the world. I don’t think in foreign policy neoconservatism has ever had that.

LAMB: What’s the difference between Bill Kristol conservatism and George Bush conservatism?

KRISTOL: Well, Bill Kristol conservatism is a magazine and George Bush is running the Executive Branch of the government which is a very different thing. You know I’ve criticized certain things that Bush has done and I wasn’t a huge Bush supporter in 1999 and 2000. I really ironically because I was concerned so much about foreign policy that I’d gotten somewhat close to McCain because of our common view where we supported Clinton on Kovoso and on the intervention in the Balkans. And I was unsure that Bush would be in the sense – Bush was way – was uncertain on foreign policy I would say.

But I admire Bush on the whole. I think he’s been a strong president. There are things I would have done differently, obviously. And look the verdict’s still out, there are three long years to go in the Bush presidency but I sure hope it turns out OK and I think it would.

LAMB: The difference between Bill Kristol conservatism and Pat Buchanan conservatism?

KRISTOL: Well that’s a pretty clear difference since Pat Buchanan spends an awful lot of time elaborating his distinction between his conservatism and mine I guess. Well, he’s a protectionist, he’s an isolationist, he’s very dubious about I think most of the social programs in the 20th century whether, I don’t know, the Social Security and Medicare and civil rights. I think, I’m not sure, that he’s a big fan of any of those even in retrospect and I’m very different from him.

He dislikes FDR, thinks it was a mistake to have intervened in World War I, detests Woodrow Wilson, dislikes Franklin Roosevelt, dislikes Truman, and now is sort of re-writing history. He won’t bring himself to say that he dislikes Reagan but certainly the foreign policy he’s embraced for the 21st century is not a Reaganite foreign policy in my view.

LAMB: Karen Kwiatkowski talks some more from last week’s program about a project you’re involved in.

KWIATKOWSKI: A document called rebuilding America’s defenses and I had seen it before just because it’s a document – something we would see because it’s about views of a post-Cold War world and what we should do. This is the kind of thing that people in the Pentagon think about.

Didn’t think much of it until I saw the President’s national security strategy, his very first one that George Bush put out. Of course we do read that and it’s on the Web site, White House Web site. And when I read it not just me but lots of people saw almost word-for-word lifting of phrases and ideas and concepts from the Project for New American Century’s previous document ”Rebuilding America’s Defenses.” Which is – sounds a very benign name, ”Rebuilding America’s Defenses” that’s fine but what it calls for is very much what George Bush has more overtly called for which is America at the top of the world unilateral approach and that kind of thing.

LAMB: Any comment on just what she said there?

KRISTOL: Well just the – I think the paper she’s referring to, ”Rebuilding America’s Defenses,” was written mostly by a fellow named Tom Donnelly and – who had worked on Capitol Hill and at the Project for the New American Century. It was called – it came out I think before the presidential election in 2000 and called for an expansion of the defense budget and tried to think through our defense needs in the post-Cold War world.

I think it’s a pretty good paper. I don’t know, frankly, how much direct influence it had on President Bush’s national security strategy. No one every called me and asked me about it but it’s a public document so of course it could have had an influence. It’s a thoughtful paper and I hope it did have an influence.

I wish – but the truth is I wish it had had more influence since one of the main things we’ve been arguing at the Weekly Standard and arguing at the Project for the New American Century since before 9/11 and especially after 9/11 was the need to increase the size of the military, especially the Army and the Marine Corps, that we don’t have enough ground troops. And Rumsfeld bitterly resisted that and continues to resist it and has resisted it successfully to this day.

So for a group that’s allegedly making Bush American defense policy we’ve been awfully critical of Rumsfeld’s management of the Defense Department for the last five years.

LAMB: I have in my hand the famous January 26, 1998 letter from the Project for the New American Century signed by 18 people including you. Before I read a little bit of it, when did you get the idea for the Project for the New American Century?

KRISTOL: We started the Weekly Standard in September ’95 or it first came out September ’95. One of the first controversies we had at the Standard was when Bob Kagan and I wrote the editorial together, I think it was the first piece we ever wrote together. We had just met – we’d met a little bit before but we’d become friendly just since the Standard had started.

We wrote an editorial in December ’94 defending Clinton’s intervention in Bosnia, the military intervention in Bosnia, and chastising Republicans for tending to criticize it.

And we lost I think about a quarter of our original subscribers to the Weekly Standard at that point who wrote in saying they didn’t subscribe to a conservative magazine so they could read editorials defending Bill Clinton.

In any case we did a fair amount of foreign policy stuff in ’96 on Bosnia and other issues, China in particular. And by 1997 I had the sense that there was more work to be done than could just be done in the pages of a weekly magazine on foreign policy.

And a friend of ours, Gary Schmidt, was available to take on the task of raising a little bit of money and trying to start a small think tank that focused on a strong foreign policy for the post-Cold War world.

Also I should say in mid 1996 Bob Kagan and I had written an article on foreign affairs called ”Towards the Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy.”

LAMB: Let me just stop a minute. Bob Kagan is the son of Don …

KRISTOL: … of Don Kagan and has written this very famous book now on Europe and America called ”With Paradise and Power,” which he wrote a few years ago.

LAMB: Married to a woman that used to be Dick Cheney’s foreign policy advisor and now is in Europe.

KRISTOL: Now is our ambassador to NATO, a very capable foreign service officer and served with great distinction certainly in the State Department of the Clinton administration, too.

LAMB: And her name?

KRISTOL: She’s nonpartisan. I don’t want to get her in trouble here. Victoria Nuland.

LAMB: Go back to the New American Century, one of the things I saw somewhere in the – as you know you can Google Bill Kristol and there’s a ton of articles. Is John M. Oland Foundation, the Bradley Foundation, and the Sara Mellon Scaife Foundation – Sara Mellon Scaife the mother of Richard Mellon Scaife – supported the start up of it?

KRISTOL: Yes, I think that’s right. I think all three of them at least gave money at some point early on.

LAMB: How much money do you need to start something like this and how big a deal is it?

KRISTOL: Well, we started it just to finish – we wrote the article ’96 there was a fair amount of interest. There weren’t many people making a case for what we called net and neo-Reaganite foreign policy. The Republican Party on the whole was mildly isolationist. Their criticism of Clinton had led them to weary of all foreign entanglements.

Any case, so in ’97 we thought well what if we started a small think tank and did longer studies, conferences, seminars, in addition to what you can do in a magazine like the Weekly Standard. So we started the Project for the New American Century, Gary Schmidt was the executive director for virtually its whole existence, eight-nine years. And I think its annual budget was usually around $400,000 and they usually had three or four, five at most I think, employees.

LAMB: This letter, who wrote the letter?

KRISTOL: Honestly I don’t remember, probably some combination of Bob Kagan and Gary Schmidt and I. And we circulated it to people to see if they would sign it.

LAMB: Well up top in the first paragraph it’s written to Bill Clinton, again it’s January 26, 1998.

”We urge you to seize” – to Bill Clinton – ”We urge you to seize that opportunity and to enunciate a new strategy that would secure the interest of the U.S. and our friends and allies around the world. That strategy should aim, above all, at the removal of Saddam Hussein’s regime from power. We stand ready to offer our full support in this difficult but necessary endeavor.”

Did he respond?

KRISTOL: No, I don’t think so but I guess president’s don’t usually respond to these kinds of public letters. Remember what was happening then – well we’d started it in ’97 with the statement of principle. But there was a crisis with Iraq at this point, this was about two weeks before Clinton went to the Pentagon and gave a speech which came very close to leading us to war with Iraq. And, of course, later in the year we did bomb Iraq, et cetera.

And the point of this was we were mostly Republicans and conservatives identified with the Reagan and Bush administrations and we were really honestly and in good faith telling President Clinton if you take the decision to remove Saddam now you will have our bipartisan support. This was in the context – what’s the date of the letter, January …

LAMB: January 26, 1998.

KRISTOL: … just after the Lewinski affair broke. And the point here was to show that, you know, I was on TV, you know, criticizing Clinton for his behavior but that we were willing to support him on important issue of U.S. national security policy.

So it was an honest attempt to sort of support what we thought was Clinton’s inclination. He ended up backing down of possibly really forcing a confrontation with Saddam and finishing the job that should have been finished years before.

So it was an attempt to show the president that he would have some Republican support if he confronted Iraq.

LAMB: Karen Kwiatkowski talked about the importance of the New American Century Project. Let’s hear what she had to say.

KWIATKOWSKI: I think that Bill Kristol underestimates the – modestly – the – he’s a very modest man and so he is not going to give the Project for the New American Century too much. But you can find it in the words and you can also find it in the members. The Project for the New American Century brought many, many key leaders and key political appointees – people that were working on the Project for the New American Century moved seamlessly into government and that starts with Dick Cheney.

LAMB: I want to read – because there are 18 people who signed this letter and I just want to read who they were. Eight of them are still in government. Correct me if I’m wrong on any of this, Elliot Abrams joined the National Security Council, Jeffrey Bergner is the State Department Congressional Liaison, John Bolton is the U.N. Ambassador, Paula Dobriansky is one of the top people at the State Department, Zalmay Khalilzad is the Ambassador to Iraq, Peter Rodman is at the Defense Department, Assistant Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld is the Secretary of Defense, and Bob Zellick is the number two person at the State Department.

And then there were three that were in government that are now out: Richard Armitage who was the number two under Colin Powell, Richard Perle who used to be the Chairman of the Defense Policy Board of the presidents, and the third one is Paul Wolfowitz who is head of the World Bank but was the number two person at the Pentagon.

And finally there were seven that used to be in and around government or professors: William Bennett, Francis Fukuyama, Robert Kagan, Bill Kristol, Ben Webber, James Woolsey and William Schneider, Jr. And if I remember correctly Mr. Schneider was with George Schultz years ago ….

KRISTOL: Right.

LAMB: … at the State Department.

KRISTOL: Right.

LAMB: Anyway, it’s quite a list.

KRISTOL: Yes, well they were prominent people and we wanted to get prominent people to sign the letter. I mean that their signing the letter didn’t get them the jobs they got in the Bush administration. George Bush didn’t pick Dick Cheney as his vice president because he signed a letter from the Project for the New American Century. He picked Dick Cheney as his vice president because Dick Cheney had been Secretary of Defense.

I mean I’m happy, I’m not being excessively modest, I’m happy to – if we had some influence in sort of bringing these people together and in helping these people be associated with a more forward-looking neo-Reaganite foreign policy. I’m happy to have played some role in that but the truth is these were very prominent people. They would have gotten jobs in the next Bush administration whether they had ever signed this letter or not. And, you know, and they did.

I mean Richard Armitage ended up being with Colin Powell and sort of fighting the neoconservatives but at this time he signed – he signed this letter and. So I – the causality is backwards. We got prominent people who had served in previous Republican administrations and were likely to serve in the next one to sign this letter to try and have an impact. It’s not that the letter made them prominent.

LAMB: What’s the most important part of this for you? Why did you want this country to take out Saddam Hussein?

KRISTOL: Oh, because I think it was the right thing to do and I think it was necessary to have the chance of beginning to change the Middle East in a positive direction. I don’t think if Saddam had stayed in power with the sanctions coming off, reconstituted the weapons of mass destruction, having stared down the United Nations and the West I think the Middle East would be even more dangerous than it is today.

LAMB: So how do you think we’ve done as a country in this whole contest?

KRISTOL: I think we’ve done pretty well. I think there have been failures of execution which we’ve pointed out in the pages of the Weekly Standard and Tenec (ph) letters and memo I think over the last three-four years but I think the country has a lot to be proud of. I do think on the whole this country rose to the occasion after 9/11, after certain holiday from history as Charles Krauthammer put it during the ’90s – has risen to the occasion and has taken on the responsibility of dealing with these threats that are real and that are out there and has dealt with them pretty effectively.

I mean the jury is still out. We need to keep our nerve. We need – there’s some things I wish we were doing that we aren’t doing as aggressively as I would like. But I’m proud of the country actually and think it’s impressive what the country has done and really what our political leadership has done, too.

LAMB: But if you were, you know, just among friends assessing your input, the Weekly Standard, all through what we’ve talked about in your career, the letter, the people that signed the letter that went into government, what’s the message to people who have never been involved in any of this? Does all this stuff need to happen in order to get the – and what impact has all this had on the president?

KRISTOL: I’d say that my message would be – I mean I think it’s been good to have the Weekly Standard. I’m proud of the Weekly Standard. I’m happy that people signed the letter. But at the end of the day people need to write what they believe, make the best arguments they can.

Bob Kagan wrote very, very good pieces for commentary before the Weekly Standard existed and before the Project for the New American Century existed. Obviously Paul Wolfowitz, Dick Cheney served their country well before the Weekly Standard or the Project for the New American Century existed.

Now I think we played some role in giving them another outlet in the forum and in sort of I hope in my personal writing stimulating some of these other people to think freshly. I think there are lots of young people, I hope, who found interesting arguments in the Weekly Standard and been inspired to write themselves or to go into government and try to act on these policies.

But at the end of the day people – I mean it comes down to individuals making arguments and serving in government or writing important books or articles more than – more than the, you know, the Project for the New American Century. It doesn’t exist apart from the efforts of particular individuals.

LAMB: Are you still chairman?

KRISTOL: I am chairman but it’s a little bit on hold now because Gary Schmidt, who was our executive director from the beginning until a few months ago, has gone upstairs to the American Enterprise Institute where he’s running strategic studies there.

So we have one or two people finishing projects at the Project for the New American Century but we’re not actively doing very much any more.

LAMB: Again, if you were in Rupert Murdoch’s shoes does he look around and say, ”I got my money’s worth with the Weekly Standard, I got my money’s worth when I funded part of that rebuilding the Republican Party years ago with you.” I mean you know where I’m getting. He funds FOX News and you appear …

KRISTOL: Right.

LAMB: … on FOX News. Is he getting his money’s worth?

KRISTOL: Well he is getting his money’s worth at FOX News because he’s actually making money off of it so that’s a good way to get your money’s worth.

I don’t know, you know, I’ve often wondered about this. If the Weekly Standard didn’t exist a lot of our best writers would be writing for other magazine and newspapers and, you know, their work wouldn’t be lost to humanity.

I do think one thing one can do when one has a magazine though is you provide a critical mass. You bring people together, you recruit younger people, people stimulate each other.

Look, David Brooks, who came to Weekly Standard to begin again in September of ’95 moved to the New York Times say what it’s like a couple of years ago now. David Brooks would have been a success I strongly suspect if the Weekly Standard never existed.

But did we help give him a place in which to show is talents, yes, absolutely. Am I proud of that – and Chris Caldwell (ph) and Tucker Carlson and many, many other people who have come up through the Weekly Standard? I think we – I hope we’ve – Jody Bottoms (INAUDIBLE) first things it was our book review editor for about seven-eight years.

And I hope we’ve been able to provide a forum for good people, stimulate younger people, and the nicest thing is to go speak at a college somewhere and you meet some very bright 19-year-old who is taking good courses and says ”You know and I’ve really been interested by what I read in the Weekly Standard.” And sometimes they’ve been interested by something I wouldn’t have expected, some slightly offbeat author or something in the back of the book and it’s helped me – stimulated me to study this topic or to learn history or to study literature perhaps and it’s helped, you know, make me think in a fresh way. That’s the best thing you can do.

LAMB: You went to a pacifist in Indiana in Richmond called Earlham, Quaker school …

KRISTOL: Right.

LAMB: … and got a pie in the face. How big a surprise was that?

KRISTOL: Well, it was a surprise at the moment. The guy rushed to the stage and threw a pie in my face and I half ducked but I’m not as quick as I used to be and I got a chunk of it in my face.

LAMB: Did they arrest the guy?

KRISTOL: I think he was subsequently – he ran away and I think he was subsequently prosecuted and suspended from the school or I think given some kind of suspended sentence by the – by the court.

I continued with the speech. The president of the college also got the pie in his face since he was behind me and kind of came running up to try to – he saw what was happening before I did and I sort of half ducked and he got it as much as I did.

I – the people there were very nice, very apologetic. Obviously they’re not responsible for one person. It is, of course, somewhat ironic that you can’t help but be amused that the one place I’ve ever – I’ve spoken on many college campuses in many liberal places, Berkeley and of course Harvard and many, many others and really had very little in the way of trouble. And the one place I was sort of physically assaulted, though luckily in a pretty benign way, was at a Quaker school. I sort of like that.

LAMB: One of the things that comes up a lot around your name is Israel and your defense of Israel. And I went back and found a bunch of articles from others and I’ll let them define this and see if you can’t respond to it.

Eric Alterman, who himself is Jewish, wrote in April the third, 2003 in the Nation: ”A big part of the problem in addressing the Jewish war conspiracy thesis is the reticence of almost all sides to broach the issue of Israel and American Jewish on U.S. foreign policy. A few writers, mostly notably Stanley Hoffman, Robert Keiser (ph), Mickey Callis (ph), have raised the question gingerly. But writing on the Washington Post op ed page New Republic editor Lawrence Kaplan insist that” – and you wrote a book with him if I remember – ”that even raising, quote, ’the specter of dual loyalty’ unquote, is toxic” – in quote marks.

”Callis (ph) noted accurately in Slate that the dual loyalty taboo is, quote, ’quite openly designed to stop people from raising the Likudnick issue’ unquote, and it works.”

That’s Eric Alterman’s words back in April of 2003. You know how sensitive this whole thing is in discussion. Explain that to somebody that doesn’t understand what this is about.

KRISTOL: It’s hard to explain this. I think it’s just nonsense. I mean most American Jews voted Democratic in 2000, voted Democratic in 2004. I think some surveys have suggested most American Jews were hostile to Bush’s foreign policy and to the war in Iraq. A lot of the leaders anti-Iraq – the antiwar movement are Jewish.

Russell Feingold the last I looked – the Senator from Wisconsin who is going to run as the antiwar candidate he hopes in 2008, is Jewish. And I assume Russell Feingold wishes Israel well and is, you know, proud of being a Jew as I am. And so I think the connection is just ridiculous – it’s particularly ridiculous.

So I do think it is malicious. I mean some people can innocently I suppose make the mistake of think that George Bush, Dick Cheney, Condi Rice were stampeded into war by a bunch of Jews but it’s not the kind of mistake one usually makes innocently, you know. One makes innocent mistakes because you just get confused. That’s kind of a – that mistake has a certain pedigree and it is so ridiculous, in my view, so absurd that one does have to wonder about the motives of some people who make that charge.

The other point I would make about some of us in particular, let’s call them the neo-Reaganites, the neoconservatism – me, Kagan, Wolfowitz – we were hawks on everything. We wanted to intervene in 1991 in the Balkans. We wanted to intervene in Bosnia in ’95. We wanted to intervene in Rwanda in ’94. We wanted to remove bin Laden from – I wish we’d been more attentive even to the need to remove bin Laden from Afghanistan before September 11th, 2001. None of us had anything to do with Israel’s interest. I would bet the Weekly Standard had more articles on China and the threat China posed than on the Arabs and Israel in the late ’90s.

So if one – if someone showed up who was a Jew and very closely associated with Israel who was a dove on everything else, didn’t want to intervene in the Balkans, hadn’t supported Reagan’s defense build up, didn’t want to fight any wars anywhere else, didn’t want to do war in the Sudan, but suddenly wanted to fight only the enemies of Israel then one could say, OK, well gee, maybe that person has a special interest in Israel.

But it’s manifestly not true of Wolfowitz, or Kagan, or – and me or really the rest of the kind of neo-Reaganite, neoconservative group. So that’s why I just don’t take the charge seriously.

LAMB: How important is Israel to you?

KRISTOL: It’s important. I mean I …

LAMB: How involved are you in the whole effort for, you know, through United States support of Israel?

KRISTOL: Mildly involved. I mean I’ve been to Israel several times but I don’t speak Hebrew and I don’t, you know, have that many close friends who live there, and I’ve never worked much on Israel when I was in the U.S. government. Or as I say, at the Weekly Standard we’ve run some stuff on Israel but as I say we have not been Israel-centered in our foreign policy.

Incidentally, Iraq was not Israel’s big problem. They weren’t obsessed about Saddam. From their point of view he was kind of in a box. He was a threat – we were the ones who were fighting over the Israel wasn’t. Israel’s always been much more upset about Iran and the threat Iran posed to Israel.

So the idea that Israeli’s were urged – I was never urged by any Israeli go to war against Iraq, in all honesty. So that’s why I think the charge or the kind of imputation that we’re doing Israel’s bidding is malicious.

And incidentally, it’s worth being specific here, we’ve got a – if one had a record of being a wildly pro-Israel activist and one said Iraq threatens Israel and therefore we should go against Israel then one can impute certain perhaps reasoning. But here the imputation is based entirely on religion. They’re Jewish therefore they’re doing Israel’s bidding. That is pernicious I think.

LAMB: Why do you think – you know I hear it all the time in our caller call up and they’ll always talk about the Jews in the media and all this stuff and I always – one of the things I think about why haven’t you called up and accused all the Catholics that appear on here of being involved in some kind of a cabal. What is the difference here in your opinion? You no doubt have thought about it all your life.

KRISTOL: Well Catholics used to be accused, incidentally, all the time and it was a big problem until John Kennedy was elected or something of a problem until John Kennedy was elected president.

And of course in previous wars there have been accusations of Jew loyalty with Germans, Japanese who were interned here in the U.S. So it’s not a new thing to take a look at a group to find some ethnic or connection with a different country abroad and then distrust their loyalty to the United States.

Now in the case of the Jews it has a much longer history in Europe and a much longer history in America – in western thought and life and I suppose it hasn’t gone away.

LAMB: What your sense, will Israeli – I don’t know what you want to call it, it’s obviously there’s a problem there with getting the kind of security that they want. Will it ever be solved, the relationship between the Israelis and the Arabs – and the Palestinians?

KRISTOL: I think so. It may not be a perfect solution. They may not love – I don’t think most Palestinians are going to love having Israel as a neighbor but could they live together the way Ireland lives with the United Kingdom entity with Northern Ireland and, you know, yes I think so.

LAMB: Where did you meet your wife and what does she do now?

KRISTOL: Well I met Susan at Harvard. She was a year or two years behind me actually and I met her through a mutual friend – a friend of mine who lived next door to her which was extremely good luck and almost providential you might say. And so I met her at the end of her freshman year actually and we’ve known each other ever since and got married after she graduated. She was a classicist, she had a Ph.D. in classics, taught at Brandeis, attended at Brandeis. We moved to Washington and we had our second kid, we had our third kid, she gave up teaching and has raised our kids and is very active in a lot of the civic organizations and the schools. She’s president of our synagogue right now which is a very difficult job but a very rewarding job. And it’s a very nice synagogue, I don’t want to say anything ...

LAMB: So if …

KRISTOL: … negative about it.

LAMB: … you’re at a dinner table with Gertrude Himmelfarb, your mother; Irving Kristol, your father; and Susan, your wife, you’ve got four Ph.D.s sitting there.

KRISTOL: No, my father has no advanced degree.

LAMB: No, he hasn’t. All right, well you still …

KRISTOL: He has a …

LAMB: You have the four intellectuals sitting there.

KRISTOL: Right. I want to defend my father because, you know, he’s proud of not having gotten a Ph.D.

LAMB: Why? Why is he proud?

KRISTOL: I don’t know, he just got out of the Army after, you know, after World War II and I guess he didn’t want to bother going back to grad school. I think he has some story about how he signed up and wanted to – he loved Dante I guess and wanted to learn Italian better and to study Dante so he went for a week and then decided the academic life was not for him. And so he went to work I think at Commentary magazine shortly after that.

LAMB: But he – are the conversations different then you’d have in a political group sitting around the table? I mean what do you all talk about at dinner?

KRISTOL: I’d say we talk about these day about our kids and some about sports and the NCAA. Oh, of course, we talk about ideas and intellectual matters. This is the common world we live in, people in business who, you know, will talk about their – what’s going on in the businesses they care about. But I think it’s not – some people say what was it like to grow up with your parents and they were – I think they were conscious that some of their friends had created kind of intellectual hothouses for their kids and it hadn’t really been healthy for their kids. And so whether they were conscious of that or not – I think they probably were – we had very normal lives. I went out every afternoon to Riverside Park and played baseball if it was spring or summer and touch football if it was fall, and basketball if it was winter. And I played on the collegiate sports teams and I wasn’t very good but I did my best. And, you know, we were sports fans and we went to the movies and we did all the normal things that kids do.

So it was an intellectual home and we weren’t embarrassed about that and I’m sure I learned things just by being around there that I wouldn’t have learned otherwise. But it wasn’t some kind of, you know, pressure to become an intellectual or to go into journalism or anything like that.

LAMB: How old are your three kids and what are they doing?

KRISTOL: Our three kids are Rebecca and Joe – I’ve got to get this right because in case they watch this I’ll be in trouble. Rebecca is 23, she graduated from Duke a year-and-a-half ago, almost two years ago I guess now – is working in New York and is engaged to be married in a year to a very nice young man who is at NYU law school. So right now she’s looking for places to get married here in Washington which is so far as I can tell a full-time job for both her and Susan.

Anne is a junior at Wash U. in St. Louis and enjoying it very much, studying history. And Joe is a freshman at Harvard and enjoying it very much and studying politics.

LAMB: Any of them going into your kind of work?

KRISTOL: I don’t know but none evidently so, none wrote for the student newspapers. They were sort of politically active, they’re interested in politics and active in sort of intellectual efforts of various kinds – but not directly I don’t think.

LAMB: So what’s in your dream for the rest of, you know, your life? What are things you haven’t done you want to do?

KRISTOL: You know that’s a good question. You know I have – I’ve been very lucky I think in life, life both personally and professionally. But I have never really planned ahead much and really things sort of happened. You know I was an academic, and then I was Washington in government, and then I did this little political interlude, and then we started the magazine and that’s gone 10 years. That’s the longest I’ve had any jobs. So I haven’t really given it much thought.

I guess I would like to try to write a book. I mean I feel I’ve co-authored one book but it was an OK book but it just a case for the war in Iraq, it wasn’t intellectually sort of challenging book in a way that a broader book would be.

I studied political philosophy. I’ve gone back and taught it a little bit in the last year. And I’d like to try to write a more serious book if I could somehow about America and neoconservatism and sort of these fundamental – these big questions. But so far I keep thinking about it and then I end up writing 800-word editorials for the Weekly Standard. So maybe I’m not – maybe I’m not really cut out to write a serious book.

LAMB: Of all the things you’ve written for the Weekly Standard which one either caused the most stir or got the most feedback from?

KRISTOL: You know I don’t know. I honest don’t – I suppose some of the foreign policy pieces I would say. Actually though I’ve gotten very nice responses. I very rarely – I’m not a good writer. I think about personal things. I’m not good at capturing personalities the way some of my colleagues are so terrific at doing, you know.

But I’d say the piece I wrote about my uncle recently who passed away just a couple of months ago, Milton Himmelfarb, I though it came out OK and I was very pleased by some of the responses I got, people I’ve never met but to whom he had meant a lot – some people that he had never meet but he nevertheless meant a lot to them because he was writing. They wrote very nice letters. So that moved me and see I’m not good at this kind of personal appreciation or memoir but that piece.

And I wrote a similar one about Pat Moynahan which I got a couple of nice notes about, one from Pat’s daughter.

So, you know, in a funny way I remember those pieces more than all the public policy pieces I think.

LAMB: You did a lot – you did some pieces in your weekly center magazine about plagiarism, some of the …

KRISTOL: Right.

LAMB: … I mean what kind of impact those kind of stores have you had with the Weekly Standard?

KRISTOL: Yes, some – we sort of stretched there where we did one or two pieces on – we stumbled one or two plagiarism stories and then I guess people thought we were interested in plagiarism so we started to get stuff over the counter, across the transom, some of which turned out to be true about other law professors and historians who had plagiarized.

They had some impact I think though on the whole the academy is not terribly serious about sort of prosecuting those offenses so there’s a bit of a slap on the wrist and the people go about their careers.

LAMB: What has the most impact the magazine, the actual physical magazine or the Web site and what’s the difference in the use of the two?

KRISTOL: Well that’s a good – very good question and lots of people are spending a lot of time trying to figure out that for the future. I don’t know, they each have an impact but a different impact. I guess I remain – Fred Barns always said from the beginning of the magazine ”print matters most.” He was contrasting print not with the Web site but with TV. And I remember people would come to him and they’d get on – get to get on TV some and they’d be excited. And he would say, that’s great you should do it. It’s been great to me. I enjoy doing it, I respect it, but, you know, if you started as a print journalist if that’s really what you’re good at it’s great to have the additional benefit of being able to be on TV. And there are pros like you obviously, and – but don’t – you know, keep the print. If you’re good at print, if that’s what you like doing keep that at the center of your professional life. I think that was good advice for a lot of our writers and a lot of them ended up doing fine on TV, David Brooks for example, but I think because they were able to say things at more length and with more care obviously in print.

I guess I sort of have that attitude about the Web site, too. The Web site is great but it’s derivative from the magazine. It’s parasitic in a way on the magazine.

Now there are times when news is breaking so fast that you can do things on the Web site that you can’t do in the Weekly. But I don’t think the Web site would have much impact if it were – as much impact if it were just freestanding, if there weren’t a good, solid magazine that has been coming out 48 times a year for 10 years and has built up something of a track record of being serious and reliable, I hope, and thought provoking.

So I think that’s the core of it, the magazine.

LAMB: When you get up in the morning what’s the first place you go for news?

KRISTOL: Well I’m so old fashioned I walk downstairs and get the newspapers from the driveway and look at the Washington Post first. And depending on whether it’s a key part of the sports season I look at either the sports section first or at the first section first.

LAMB: Which …

KRISTOL: But I go online when I get to the office and I go to Real Clear Politics which is a very good Web site that has a lot of the day’s op eds and a lot of articles from weekly magazines like the Weekly Standard, very good way to catch up quickly on sort of opinion journalism.

LAMB: Which columnists are you likely to read first when the column is available?

KRISTOL: Charles Krauthammer.

LAMB: Why?

KRISTOL: He’s a good friend so I’m biased. I think he’s – I think he’s the best columnist in America. I mean no one else, I think, week to week is so crisp, so sharp, so interesting, at times unpredictable. And a lot of reporting in it – I mean a lot of – Charles reads a lot, he looks below the surface. You learn something from Charles’ columns as well as getting a sharp and interesting opinion.

LAMB: If you had to pick – you can pick one or more than one philosopher and the book of that philosopher that you want on your shelf that you pick up from time to time at home, what is it?

KRISTOL: Well, I guess I wrote my senior thesis at Harvard oh so many years ago on Tocqueville’s ”Democracy in America.” And I think still – I mean his deep understanding of American democracy, his appreciation for it, his belief that it can and has to be improved, and the certain distance from it too as well, I guess I’ve always been – found that very congenial I suppose, influenced by Tocqueville or if I already was sort of susceptible to Tocqueville. But I think Tocqueville’s ”Democracy in America” now you can get that in an excellent translation by my teach, Harvey Mansfield and his wife, Delba Winthrop, so that’s the best – a very good introduction by Harvey and Delba. So it’s the best of both worlds.

LAMB: In the remaining less than a minute would you like to predict who you think the Republican and Democrat will be in the 2008 presidential election?

KRISTOL: No, but I guess I’ll say this, it’s the first presidential election in 56 years with neither an incumbent president running nor an incumbent vice president running to succeed the president, which means it’s wide open in both parties. And I guess I really think it’s wide open on the Republican side, many strong candidates and on the Democratic side I don’t think Hillary Clinton has nearly as much of a lock on the nomination as others thinks.

So I think it will be unlike almost any race in our political adulthood where we really have two multi-candidate competitive races going on simultaneously with lots of issues, issues of war and peace, issues like immigration popping up. I mean it really will be an interesting and unusual presidential year.

LAMB: Thank you, Bill Kristol.

KRISTOL: My pleasure, Brian.