Columbia International Affairs Online: Policy Briefs

CIAO DATE: 02/2010

In Memoriam--Irving Kristol

Christopher DeMuth

October 2009

American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research

Abstract

EI senior fellow Irving Kristol--godfather of the neoconservative movement and one of the towering intellectual figures of the twentieth century--died peacefully on September 18 at the age of eighty-nine. Mr. Kristol's connection to AEI began long before he became a full-time scholar at the Institute in 1988. In 1973, he gave the first of AEI's Distinguished Lectures on the Bicentennial of the United States. The lectures were delivered at historic sites around the country, and Mr. Kristol's lecture, "The American Revolution as a Successful Revolution," was given at St. John's Church in Washington, where many of the nation's presidents have worshipped. We reprint excerpts from it below after a tribute to him written by Christopher DeMuth, the D. C. Searle Senior Fellow at AEI.