Background and career
William Kristol (; born December 23, 1952) is an American neoconservative writer. A frequent commentator on several networks including CNN, he was the founder and editor-at-large of the political magazine The Weekly Standard. Kristol is editor-at-large of the news and opinion website The Bulwark and is among the editors of its Substack publication that bears the same name. Since 2014, he has been the host of Conversations with Bill Kristol, an interview web program. Kristol played a leading role in the defeat of the Clinton health care plan of 1993, as well as for advocating the 2003 invasion of Iraq. He has been associated with a number of conservative think tanks. He was chairman of the New Citizenship Project from 1997 to 2005. In 1997, he co-founded the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) with Robert Kagan. He was a member of the board of trustees for the free-market Manhattan Institute for Policy Research until 2022 and a director of the Foreign Policy Initiative, which dissolved in 2017. He is also one of the three board members of Keep America Safe, a national-security think tank co-founded by Liz Cheney and Debra Burlingame, and serves on the boards of the Emergency Committee for Israel and of the Susan B. Anthony List (as of 2010). Kristol is a critic of president Donald Trump, a supporter of the Never Trump movement, and a founder and director of Defending Democracy Together, an advocacy organization responsible for such projects as Republicans for the Rule of Law and the Republican Accountability Project.
William Kristol was born on December 23, 1952, in New York City into a Jewish family, the son of Irving Kristol and Gertrude Himmelfarb. Irving Kristol was an editor and publisher who served as the managing editor of Commentary magazine, founded the magazine The Public Interest, and was described by Jonah Goldberg as the "godfather of neoconservatism". Gertrude Himmelfarb was a prominent conservative historian, especially of intellectual history in the U.S. and Great Britain. Kristol attended Collegiate School for Boys in Manhattan. Then at Harvard University he received a bachelor's degree in government in 1973 and a Ph.D. in political science in 1979.
In the summer of 1970, Kristol was an intern at the White House. In 1976, Kristol worked for Daniel Patrick Moynihan's United States Senate campaign, serving as deputy issues director during the Democratic primary. In 1988, he was the campaign manager for Alan Keyes's unsuccessful Maryland Senatorial campaign against Paul Sarbanes. After teaching political philosophy and U.S. politics at the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, Kristol went to work in government in 1985, serving as chief of staff to United States secretary of education William Bennett during the Reagan administration, and later, as chief of staff to the vice president under Dan Quayle in the George H. W. Bush administration. The New Republic dubbed Kristol "Dan Quayle's brain" when he was appointed the vice president's chief of staff. Kristol served as chairman of the Project for the Republican Future from 1993 to 1994, and as the director of the Bradley Project at the Bradley Foundation in Milwaukee in 1993. In 1993, he led conservative opposition to the Clinton health care plan of 1993. In 2003, Kristol and Lawrence F. Kaplan wrote The War Over Iraq: America's Mission and Saddam's Tyranny, in which the authors analyzed the Bush Doctrine and the history of Iraqi-U.S. relations. In the book, Kristol and Kaplan provided support and justifications for the 2003 invasion of Iraq. He also served as a foreign policy advisor for Senator John McCain's presidential campaign.
After the Republican sweep of both houses of Congress in 1994, Kristol established, along with John Podhoretz, the conservative news magazine The Weekly Standard. Rupert Murdoch, chairman and managing director of News Corp., financed its creation. Beginning in 1996, Kristol was a panelist on the ABC Sunday news program This Week. Three years later, following declining ratings his contract was not renewed. Kristol was a columnist for Time in 2007. The following year, he joined the New York Times as a columnist. Several days after he joined the Times, its public editor Clark Hoyt called his hiring "a mistake" because of Kristol's assertion in 2006 that the newspaper should potentially be prosecuted for having revealed information about the Terrorist Finance Tracking Program. Kristol wrote a weekly opinion column for the New York Times from January 7, 2008, to January 26, 2009. For ten years, Kristol was a regular panelist on Fox News Sunday and often contributed to the nightly program Special Report with Bret Baier. In 2013, his contract with Fox News expired, and he became a commentator on several other networks, including ABC, NBC, CNN, and MSNBC. It was announced on This Week with George Stephanopoulos on February 2, 2014, that Kristol would be a contributor for ABC News and to that program.
Since the summer of 2014, Kristol has hosted an online interview program, Conversations with Bill Kristol, featuring guests from academic and public life. The series debuted in 2014. It is programming of the Foundation for Constitutional Government, a nonprofit organization devoted to promoting the study of politics and political philosophy. Each episode of Conversations with Bill Kristol features an interview. The program is longform, often more than an hour. The series has hosted a diverse roster of guests, from scholars and journalists to political strategists and public intellectuals. Notable regular guests including Garry Kasparov, Anne Applebaum, Harvey Mansfield, and Larry Summers have been featured on the program. The program is produced by Kristol and Andy Zwick. Episodes are released biweekly.
Kristol was key to the defeat of the Clinton health care plan of 1993. In the first of what would become many strategy memos written for Republican policymakers, Kristol said the party should "kill", not amend, President Clinton's health care plan. A later memorandum used the phrase "There is no health care crisis", which Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole used in his response to Clinton's 1994 State of the Union address. Kristol was a leading proponent of the Iraq War. In 1998, he joined other foreign policy analysts in sending a letter to President Clinton urging a stronger posture against Iraq. Kristol argued that Saddam Hussein posed a grave threat to the United States and its allies: "The only acceptable strategy is one that eliminates the possibility that Iraq will be able to use or threaten to use weapons of mass destruction. In the near term, this means a willingness to undertake military action as diplomacy is clearly failing. In the long term, it means removing Saddam Hussein and his regime from power. That now needs to become the aim of American foreign policy." In 1998 he and Robert Kagan wrote a New York Times piece in which they said "bombing Iraq isn't enough" and called on Clinton to invade the country. In the 2000 presidential election, Kristol supported John McCain. Answering a question from a PBS reporter about the Republican primaries, he said, "No. I had nothing against Governor Bush. I was inclined to prefer McCain. The reason I was inclined to prefer McCain was his leadership on foreign policy." After the Bush administration developed its response to the September 11, 2001 attacks, Kristol said: "We've just been present at a very unusual moment, the creation of a new American foreign policy." Kristol ardently supported the Bush administration's decision to go to war with Iraq. In 2003, he and Lawrence Kaplan wrote The War Over Iraq, in which he described reasons for removing Saddam. Kristol rejected comparisons to Vietnam and predicted a "two-month war, not an eight-year war" during a March 28 C-SPAN appearance.
Sources
Net-worth figure: Celebrity Net Worth (October 2026), in USD. Biography and career facts: the person's Wikipedia article and linked reporting. Snapshot date for all StarWorth figures: 28 October 2026.
