Irving Kristol was a powerful and pervading presence in American cultural life. As a thinker and writer he worked to break the adversarial reflex second nature to so many intellectuals. More quietly, he helped launch and sustain countless organizational ventures that sought to marshal ideas in support of the quotidian blessings of liberty and against a legion of utopian temptations. One of these was the National Association of Scholars.
Irving was the featured speaker at our very first event, held at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, in Manhattan in 1982. It was an occasion I’ll never forget. My job was to introduce him and as a leadership tyro I was properly nervous. Fumbling for something appropriate to say, I noted the difficulty organizations of intellectuals have in coupling action with talk. What we needed I said in some silly straining, was a kind of academic Bismarck who could really set things in motion. Rings out a voice from behind me, “then be a Bismarck!” to good humored laughter and scattered applause. It was our keynoter, providing just the right injunction: assert yourself but, in jesting subtext, without too much self-importance. I was never, thank heaven, much of a Bismarck, but his words, and the laughter, echoed in my mind during many subsequent leadership challenges, helping me to surmount them with a modicum of resolve, but no delusions of grandeur. One of Irving’s many helpful starts.
Irving Kristol served the NAS as a member of our board of advisors during the entirety of our history. This was not just a letterhead designation. He and his wife, the distinguished historian, Gertrude Himmelfarb, were frequently on hand with needful counsel and encouragement. And I’m sure he did much more, through opportune words at the right times and places, to aid our cause out of sight.
Irving Kristol was one of the defining figures of the last half-century, and a defining figure for the NAS. He gave us direction, but also an aspiration, despite a sometimes polemical vocation, to that measured, seasoned, and charitable wisdom that he so fully possessed. We couldn’t have learned that from Bismarck.
