Irving Kristol...Billy's Dad Has Passed... [View All]

WASHINGTON – Irving Kristol, the political writer and publisher known as the godfather of neoconservatism whose youthful radicalism evolved into a historic rejection of communism, liberalism and the counterculture, died Friday. He was 89.

"His wisdom, wit, good humor and generosity of spirit made him a friend and mentor to several generations of thinkers and public servants," said the editors of The Weekly Standard in announcing Kristol's death on its Web site. He died of complications from lung cancer.

Kristol was the husband of critic-historian Gertrude Himmelfarb and father of neoconservative editor and commentator William Kristol, an editor of The Weekly Standard.

A Trotskyist in the 1930s, Kristol would soon sour on socialism, break from liberalism after the rise of the New Left in the 1960s and in the 1970s commit the unthinkable — support the Republican Party, once as "foreign to me as attending a Catholic mass."