my name is david brooks and we are here to talk about a book called "the neoconservative persuasion" selected essays, 1942-2009, and the book was written by or consists of writings written by irving kristol. irving kristol is not here because he died last year in september, but we are joined by his son, bill kristol who will probably need no introduction for anybody watching this. bill kristol grew up in new york i know your resume. used to be my boss at harvard university, taught at penn, worked for william bennett of the education department and dan quayle and edits a fine magazine rory stuart called "the weekly standard". just go very well done. >> host: i thought we'd start by you but your dad's life because they think neoconservatism and a lot of american conservatism flows out of his life and the first thing i want to ask you about was his upbringing, the social class he was raised in and what i guess your grandfather did because they think those roots informed a lot of his writing later on. guest go it says somewhere in this book that he didn't realize he was for. poor working class. his father my grandfather was employed as a detailer and i think fairly regularly employed although i think in a depression like everyone else he lost his job and they had to start over once or twice. but i think my father had, his mother died when he was young when he was a teenager but apart from that i think he had a happy childhood and i think very much of a sense that there was none of their class resentment that marks ms. wanted to think that the working class should have in the 20s and 30s and none of the alienation that later sociologist thought that you know being a jewish kid in a christian america would cause. i think he had a happy and well-adjusted childhood and went to city college in new york. >> host: we'll get to this later on but people would say poor people think is important to think that in he would say, we were poor and i didn't think any of that stuff but then he went to city college, legendary place. i talk to college students these days about city college and what they say often is true or a hopeless hope is that the faculty was impressive. the lunchtime conversations were more impressive and famously young students had to all codes, all codes one and two and one was troske and when was levalized. i assume your father was a trotskyite. guest go does all codes were parts of the dining room i guess and these were associated with people who would bring their lunches or buy cheap lunches from the cafeteria and would sit with their ideological group and i think there were many democrats and there were where are many fridays of marxist, quasi-marxist anti-stalinist and pro-stalinist marxist. my father was a trotskyite. i don't know was quite as big of a deal -- he had fond memories of it and he thought he learned had a lot arguing with socialist and having a system of thought that made you a very serious about the world and make distinctions and have confiscated arguments about why the soviet union was or wasn't in the spirit of lenin and lenin itself in the spirit of marks. one thing he learned from all that is the limits of all the systems and ideologies and became pretty skeptical. >> host: who were some of the other students that want to great careers? >> guest: daniel bell was there and is alive and well at america's professor at harvard. one of his closest friend of man named martin diamond who died much younger in the late 70s that really was one of the key people in revitalizing the study the founding fathers. he would be happy to be light today and see the constitution cited everywhere. it was such a loan enterprise when he did it. my father had a piece in this book and i was flipping through the 1987 celebrating the constitution. that was 23 years ahead of its time but there were many famous people went on to be famous intellectuals. people want to be famous in other ways. another famous sociologist and i think it was a very good education. i think it is true today of college. most of the education and much of the education came from fellow students and of course from the faculty buddy went through that and meanwhile my mother was a brooklyn college but they were opposed trust the eyes of at a trotskyite meeting and that was a good effective trotskyism that put my parents together. as a personal stake in saying it was a good thing. is a very happy marriage. he got killed, murdered by the stalinist that my parents got happily married. >> host: i read somewhere at one point the smart kids were all the trotskyite they think and at one point as dolomites decided they were losing too many battles so they said we will no longer talk to the trotskyite send such was party discipline even among college kids that they actually didn't do it. they'll let in the same neighborhoods but i think college students today look at that. mackenson a wow they were serious about ideas but i assume because they thought the whole world would be marxist someday and further distinctions we make now take effect later on. guest go the degree to which the presciently and in the 30s and general. combination of the depression and the rise of rationalism -- fascism and miscellany and then hitler and in 1936 and 1938 with chuck was up on a degree two in which you were in college in 1939, they just thought the world was falling -- had fallen apart in either was going to continue falling apart and then of course this horrible world for and that it which is kind of go back into barbarism or chaos or maybe there was some system that could get us out of this the degree to which everyone thought all these people had in 1928 were conventional views, you know liberal or conservative, strong capitalist or mild capitalist and those were all discredited. i think people really felt that it may be more we appreciate if you are smart kids going to college in 1935 or 36 or 37. >> host: he is in this hothouse atmosphere and then he goes to the army. guest go chicago when my mother was in grad school and gets drafted into the army and goes over to europe a little behind d-day so i think his group lands in europe and later in his part, plants in europe in late 1994 he was an army for couple for couple of years and the war and and peacetime occupying germany and then he has to work on his french and had a certain amount of spare time and he was able to read you know. he said he believed in socialism and he got into the army and a lot of people decide it would be a racket. he would have biographical memoir which is in this book in which he wrote and i guess 1995. guest go i think it is certain -- romanticized the working class and romanticize what would happen if only all these authoritarian structures disappeared until you actually get with a bunch of 19 and 20 euro kids and you see the utility of having hierarchy and the utility of having rules and limits on what people can do, and he didn't talk much about the war though. i think he was really, think that struck him the degree to which military force absent strong rules that there would be a lot of bad behavior including bad behavior two german civilians. he felt sympathy for the civilians who's country had totally crumbled around them and maybe they didn't have much to do with it and there they were at the mercy of russian troops if they were in the wrong part of germany or the mercy of american troops. but i think it removed what was already disappearing if you read his very early essays in this book and excessive romanticism about the working class and about the public and a little skepticism i would even say about direct democracy. >> host: it did occur to me until now but he was very -- early in his career and one of the fascinating things in this book are the early essays. also "the wall street journal" public interest but he wrote a lot of essays very early on remarkably, rumor kabul essays for such young man but he mentions in here that in the early his career he was one of the people in a the circle interested in religion and there is one essay in here i think from 1947 on judaism and so do you know if he had contact with the holocaust or, he was in jewish in germany. guest go one of the interesting things let me backup on second about the book it without getting into details, with the exception of the autobiographical, these are all essays that were not collected. he didn't collect during his lifetime so they were previously on uncollected essay so doesn't overlap with rear for books published in his lifetime and i think one of the interesting thing about this book is the early essays. the first one he was 22 years old and published in mega-singh hope he cofounded a radical magazine based on partisan review. and then it is interesting to ruling in 1947 he gets his first essay in a commentary and judaism reflecting on the holocaust in that essay. he grew up religiously knowledgeable i would say but not observed at home. he once told me that they didn't talk about it much when his mother died at 15 or something like that. he did go to synagogue i think everyday certainly every week but i think every day to say cottage for his mother. after that he went for 11 months and then he wasn't particularly observant after that and i think he wasn't so sure there was a just god because his mother died of cancer at age 40 or something like that. but he certainly knew about the holocaust and it was a big part of their self-understanding as young in this case had been in germany and france and the state of israel so i think it was very much on his mind but it is striking how much his "commentary" magazine which was of course a jewish magazine published at the time by the american jewish committee and he was the only person. he once commented and it says in the book somewhere that it was an interesting religion but he read a lot and i think it was an early sign of his unwillingness to accept the kind of very conventional progressive liberalism and we are on the moving into an enlightenment future and all that stuff. he read kierkegaard and c.s. lewis. he was interested him and and them as well as educating himself a lot on jewish matters and reading group. >> host: there was a crucial., to the other ph.d.? >> guest: i think he went to grad school for a couple of months he said at columbia on the g.i. bill. it was free until he got back. he really loved dante. he thought that he might study that in grad school and i think a little exposure to the academic study of all these issues that he found so fascinating. tropically wasn't his niche anyway andy and that getting a job that commentary so he read the great books but not in order to get a ph.d. and not with a ph.d.. >> host: i unfortunately deviated from the family tradition. my ' out of ph.d. so i followed my mother in this respect. just go here grandfather was struggling under the depression and my great-grandfather was a butcher. while your father was at city college studying my father was a basketball star. >> guest: your kids are good athletes. now i'm going to mention a few names that were instrumental in his electoral formation and in the book, each of these two people, the first is lionel trilling. could you describe who he was and what his influence was? >> guest: is a great literary critic considered one of the greatest literary critics. he taught at columbia for many decades and was a good friend, he and his wife were good friends of my parents but were a generation older i guess you could say. one of the most striking essays and my favorite of hers group is his essay on lionel trilling's book on forrester the british novelist. i think trilling, trilling was a liberal, critic of liberalism, critic of the progressive liberalism and it more tragic view of life, more complex view of the world. i think in that essay my father praises trilling's moral realism which is a phrase that i think he used many many times throughout the decades used about him and essays written about his death. i mean, if it is hardheaded, cold eyed realism about the world but it didn't lead to in a moralism or a contemporary litigious they demand that we be morally realistic instead of naïve or utopian or foolish. and trilling, also trilling was a great reader of text and i think that very much influence my father in the subtleties in these novels and especially the time how strong marxism was. this character is okay but doesn't fully have class consciousness in this character represents you know they mean bush was a and trilling rejected that and i think that really helped my father early on breakthrough those categories and i really appreciate literature and these books to learn from the books as opposed to merely have judgments from where we sit today on these. >> host: trilling also have this essay on the sort of emotional or psychological simplicity of liberalism trying to reduce everything to manocherian -- managerial technique. the second figure who i think he writes one of the essays in this book wrote an essay which had him i forgot the exact phrase but with a force of a thunderclap was leo strauss who has since become more famous. so what was strauss and what did strauss do? >> guest:strauss was about the same time as trilling. i think they died within a couple of years of each other. immigrated from germany, german jew who grew up in germany as he once called himself, who ended up teaching at the new school in new york and more famously at the university of chicago's great student of political philosophy in the great text. my father wrote -- strauss is quite obscure. he was somewhat famous but he was quite obscure when it published a difficult called for sedition in the art of writing i think i father's review was 52 so the book might it come out of year before that with essays on medieval thinkers including modern ace. you have to read a much more carefully than people have been doing in the past and these thinkers had thoughts for a lot of these questions of people assumed they are confused or consider the tension between certain things they said in the books and my father did write a really interesting review. ended up studying harvey mansfield myself and i got interested in this later and i went back and read my father's review which i really didn't know about i don't think until i was in grad school or after, the persecution and the art of writing. it is really impressive that he saw the depth of strauss' achievement and the depth of this challenge should conventional ways of reading his authors and how it would open the past and reopen the question of the greeks and ancients and the classic series taking seriously thinkers like modern i.t. and machiavelli or gandhi said later on that he was most influence he thought i strauss. less because they think any particular teaching of either one of them than either one of them had simple teachings but because they really, they were both critics of a simpleminded liberal progressivism which i think we -- a dominant that was at the time nor were they on the other hand romantic reactionaries who love you know, 14th century sir walter scott's britain or the monarchy or the church. they were very cute no clear-eyed about the limitations of these different regimes in the past so they were friends of liberalism who were critics of modern liberalism and to read text that maybe were deeper than some of the current liberal tax and i think it had a big influence on my father. >> host: he went on to encounter in london to encounter magazine. the very beginning of 1950. >> guest:i spent most of 53 when i was still six years old in london. he co-edits counter mixing with the well-known poet stephen spender and i think he really enjoyed that. i think getting to know the british intellectual and political class at that time was very interesting for him. it is in fact a group and why would that be interesting. he certainly had a lot of friendships and experiences with people who have now become more famous and more interesting. >> host: he mentioned some of the essays in the book that will talk about later that he was editing one of the great philosophers of the 20th century and submits an essay for which he thought was a brilliant essay which collected in oakeshott's book on rationalism but he rejected it because he didn't like it and he didn't agree with that. i don't know if that was the right of torreo. >> guest: i was struck at the way -- a little play further. i think he uses that to illustrate and i think was interesting that he went to london as many americans have in the 20 century, gone to your. very much living there in my mothers of reddish historian. i don't think he you ever really saw settling their or staying there and even describes in one of his memoirs and that he really wanted to come back to america because he thought america was, he is american of course, but also because he thought america was the center of not just political action but the intellectual struggles of our time and if there was going to be a kind of thinking through of liberalism and constitutionalism and beyond that of the relation of these things he later ends up disgusting -- discussing. european of the sense was kind of on the way down. >> host: in those days europe was the center of intellect. >> guest: in retrospect he was right that the high point, high watermark in europe was these interesting thinkers who really peaked in the 40s and 50s and maybe into the 60s and for all the hoopla about you know later on, you don't look back and think jay we learned that much from the europeans and he thought america was where the debates would be headed for he wanted to participate in them and so they came back to new york and they think and 59. >> host: he spent 40 years famously founding and then editing the public interest, a believer in small him ike seems. yours is probably a little bit too big for his taste. >> guest: we had 60 or 70,000 prescribers. he was like why do you need that many are scrapers? it had a huge implants. >> host: to me the quick trajectory of the public interest started out as a technocratic overseer of the great society. he would write essays using social science data to see what the great society was doing right and wrong and then chile evolve into a more, i'm up ideological is the word but overly neoconservatives were conservative direction. >> guest: i would say he was i skeptical love the grand claims of society and about worried about the unintended consequences of social policy and was a little dubious about the great confidence when you underestimate the early 60s and technocratic socialistic era. perhaps present obama's people, you can move all the levers to so and get all the up comes coming out just right so a lot of the earlier work throughout 40 years a lot of social science study saying this is what this program was supposed to do and this is the effects of exley have but i agree his best after the late 60s and after that kind of crisis of the 60s my father god personally more interested in making many of the contributors got more interested and they publish more on the moral and social side you might say of the problems with modern liberalism and not just the critique of a policy. >> host: at the public interest you had city college people but you also had dana patrick moynihan. james t. wilson. they were all in the first or second issue, jim wilson wrote for his entire 40 years. my father had a couple of memoirs in the book. the essay he wrote for the last edition in 2005 and then a little talk he wrote, didn't deliver liver actually put a conference and it is in the book too. that is in the book, and now it is really incidentally available free on line at the web site of national affairs which is a magazine as you know that edited and started in 2009 as a kind of successor. my father though