Book Review: ed. William Kristol

Before he arrived in Cambridge for a year-long stint as a visiting lecturer in Harvard’s government department, William Kristol compiled a 534-page anthology of reprinted articles that initially appeared in his Washington-based conservative magazine, The Weekly Standard. The resulting collection, “The Weekly Standard, A Reader: 1995-2005,” is filled with writing that is often laugh-out-loud funny and reliably thought-provoking.

The Standard is a subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, but the magazine’s erudite prose contrasts starkly with the bawdiness that characterizes other Murdoch ventures. Perhaps the Standard is Murdoch’s attempt to atone for the sin that he has committed by bankrolling the New York Post.

Almost all of the writers in the Standard distrust international institutions such as the U.N., favor a less-strict separation between church and state, and believe that lower taxes are needed to spur economic growth. But the views expressed in the magazine are certainly not monolithic. For instance, in a 1997 article, economist Irwin Stelzer writes that, to achieve “the long-held and very American ideal of equality of opportunity,” conservatives like himself might consider the possibility of imposing a 100 percent inheritance tax—at least for large estates.

Although the bulk of each edition of the Standard is devoted to political news and analysis, Kristol’s anthology is chock-full of trenchant cultural criticism. One particularly strong example is a 1999 article by an English professor at the University of Virginia professor, Paul A. Cantor, analyzing the threat that the end of the Cold War posed to professional wrestling.

“Suddenly audiences could not be counted upon to treat a given wrestler automatically as a villain simply because he was identified as a Russian,” Cantor observes. And the World Wrestling Federation’s new bad-boy of the early 1990s, a pro-apartheid white South African character named Colonel DeBeers, failed to rouse audiences’ ire.

Since then, wrestlers’ identities have not been as closely linked to nationality. Plot schemes have grown more complex, and the line between good characters and evil characters has become blurred. Drawing from his analysis of wrestling, Cantor postulates that “the decline of old nationalism may be linked to a new kind of creative freedom.”

One of the edgiest articles in the anthology is a 1999 essay by assistant managing editor David Skinner arguing for the importance of male chest hair. Observing that a long list of male Hollywood stars, including Kevin Bacon, Tom Cruise, and even Al Pacino, have appeared with shaven chests in recent films, Skinner writes: “The newly prominent hairless man is a sign of the convergence of gay and straight culture.” He concludes with a rhetorical question: “Where can one find reflections of manliness, if everywhere you turn, the American male seems boyish, hairless, shorn of any sign that he is an adult?”

As a prognosticator of an emerging fashion trend, Skinner was ahead of his time. But in his not-so-subtle implication that homosexuality is inherently childish, Skinner remains trapped in a (hopefully) bygone mindset.

One piece that—surprisingly—has been left out of the anthology is former books and arts editor Joseph Bottum’s October 2004 article on Harvard constitutional law scholar Lawrence Tribe. Bottum revealed that Tribe, in a 1985 book on Supreme Court appointments, included a 19-word passage that was lifted verbatim—without attribution—from an earlier text by a University of Virginia political scientist.

Bottum’s article led University President Lawrence H. Summers and Law School Dean Elena Kagan to issue a joint statement finding that Tribe’s failure to attribute the passage to its original source constituted “a significant lapse in proper academic practice.” Although Harvard did not formally punish Tribe—who remains widely respected in the field of constitutional law—the enormous influence of Bottum’s exposé should have earned it a place in this anthology.

Kristol’s volume also does not include West Point history professor Kimberly Kagan’s May 2002 article arguing that the United States, although “hegemonic,” is not “imperialistic.” This omission is rather surprising because Kristol has assigned the article to undergrads in the course that he is co-teaching this semester, Government 1792, “Intellectual Foundations of American Foreign Policy.”

But the compendium does include a 1996 article by the Standard’s books and arts editor, Philip Terzian, assailing the New York Times Magazine’s centennial issue. Terzian takes the Times anthology to task for omitting an array of significant events from the previous century. But he goes over the top when he criticizes the Times anthology for failing to mention—among other examples—the 1913 Armory show of modern art in Manhattan, or the life of early 20th-century Pentecostal evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson.

Men who live in glass houses ought not to throw stones—even if those men are journalists. The Standard anthology commits many errors of omission in its own right—and Kristol had only a decade, rather than a century, of back-issues to browse through. Kristol’s anthology is guilty of the same “self-congratulations” for which Terzian attacks the Times magazine.

But, given the remarkable quantity of insightful prose that Kristol has condensed here, his self-congratulations are certainly well-deserved.

—Staff writer Daniel J. Hemel can be reached at hemel@fas.harvard.edu.