They Knew They Were Right

Zusatztext A fast-paced! edgy profile of the intellectuals whose views about Islam and the Middle East came to dominate foreign policy after 9/11. Chicago Tribune Persuasive! wide-ranging. . . . Heilbrunn takes a long! nuanced measure of the neocon policy revolution. The New York Observer Excellent. . . . Heilbrunn adroitly surveys the movement's history from the Trotskyist alcoves of the City College cafeteria up to the present day. The New York Review of Books Thorough . . . fair. . . . They Knew They Were Right will fit nicely on the rapidly expanding shelf explaining Iraq. The Washington Post Informationen zum Autor Jacob Heilbrunn Klappentext From its origins in 1930s Marxism to its unprecedented influence on George W. Bush's administration! neoconservatism has become one of the most powerful! reviled! and misunderstood intellectual movements in American history. But who are the neocons! and how did this obscure group of government officials! pundits! and think-tank denizens rise to revolutionize American foreign policy?Political journalist Jacob Heilbrunn uses his intimate knowledge of the movement and its members to write the definitive history of the neoconservatives. He sets their ideas in the larger context of the decades-long battle between liberals and conservatives! first over communism! and now over the war on terrorism. And he explains why! in spite of their misguided policy on Iraq! they will remain a permanent force in American politics. Leseprobe Exodus And you, stand here by Me and I shall speak to you all the commands and the statutes and the laws that you will teach them, and they will do them in the land that I am about to give them to take hold of it. Deuteronomy 5:28 It's the same with all you comfortable, insular, AngloSaxon antiCommunists. You hate our Cassandra cries and resent us as alliesbut, when all is said, we ex-Communists are the only people on your side who know what it's all about. Arthur Koestler , The God That Failed I call them utopiansI don't care whether utopians are Vladimir Lenin in a sealed train going to Moscow or Paul Wolfowitz. Utopians, I don't like. You're never going to bring utopia, and you're going to hurt a lot of people in the process of trying to do it. Lawrence B. Wilkerson , chief of staff to former secretary of state Colin Powell in GQ In the spring of 2003, shortly after the liberation of Iraq, Irving Kristol and Gertrude Himmelfarb attended a party in Washington, D.C., for Melvin Lasky. They hadn't seen one another since a conference in Berlin in 1992 celebrating the end of the cold war. Now they were enjoying a sentimental reunion at which these eightyyearolds reminisced about their years at the City College of New York in the 1930s. As Lasky held forth, Kristol waspishly intervened to tell the room that none of you know what the first magazine was that he had published an article inan obscure Trotskyist publication called the Chronicle . After Kristol observed that the theneighteenyearold Lasky rewrote every sentence in the piece, Lasky responded, That was the last recorded moment your prose needed help. It was a telling moment. For all the joviality, their reminiscences weren't about going out for sports or their old professors. Instead, they were about the intensely political sectarianism of the left. Decades later, the passions that had first impelled them into politics had hardly dimmed; as Lasky later recounted to me, The memories are very sharp, it's not like an old man who says, 'Who? What college were you in?' Their saga began in Russia. At the turn of the twentieth century, Jews, overrepresented in leftwing and revolutionary movements, intent on creating a utopia, went on the attack against capitalism and imperialism. As one Yiddish news...

Autorentext

Jacob Heilbrunn

Klappentext

From its origins in 1930s Marxism to its unprecedented influence on George W. Bush's administration, neoconservatism has become one of the most powerful, reviled, and misunderstood intellectual movements in American history. But who are the neocons, and how did this obscure group of government officials, pundits, and think-tank denizens rise to revolutionize American foreign policy?Political journalist Jacob Heilbrunn uses his intimate knowledge of the movement and its members to write the definitive history of the neoconservatives. He sets their ideas in the larger context of the decades-long battle between liberals and conservatives, first over communism, and now over the war on terrorism. And he explains why, in spite of their misguided policy on Iraq, they will remain a permanent force in American politics.

Leseprobe
Exodus

And you, stand here by Me and I shall speak to you all the commands and the statutes and the laws that you will teach them, and they will do them in the land that I am about to give them to take hold of it.
—Deuteronomy 5:28

It's the same with all you comfortable, insular, Anglo–Saxon anti–Communists. You hate our Cassandra cries and resent us as allies—but, when all is said, we ex-Communists are the only people on your side who know what it's all about.
—Arthur Koestler, The God That Failed

I call them utopians…I don’t care whether utopians are Vladimir Lenin in a sealed train going to Moscow or Paul Wolfowitz. Utopians, I don’t like. You're never going to bring utopia, and you're going to hurt a lot of people in the process of trying to do it.
—Lawrence B. Wilkerson, chief of staff to former secretary of state Colin Powell in GQ

In the spring of 2003, shortly after the liberation of Iraq, Irving Kristol and Gertrude Himmelfarb attended a party in Washington, D.C., for Melvin Lasky. They hadn’t seen one another since a conference in Berlin in 1992 celebrating the end of the cold war. Now they were enjoying a sentimental reunion at which these eighty–year–olds reminisced about their years at the City College of New York in the 1930s. As Lasky held forth, Kristol waspishly intervened to tell the room that “none of you know what the first magazine” was that he had published an article in—an obscure Trotskyist publication called the Chronicle. After Kristol observed that the then–eighteen–year–old Lasky “rewrote every sentence in the piece,” Lasky responded, “That was the last recorded moment your prose needed help.”

It was a telling moment. For all the joviality, their reminiscences weren’t about going out for sports or their old professors. Instead, they were about the intensely political sectarianism of the left. Decades later, the passions that had first impelled them into politics had hardly dimmed; as Lasky later recounted to me, “The memories are very sharp, it’s not like an old man who says, ‘Who? What college were you in?’ ”

Their saga began in Russia. At the turn of the twentieth century, Jews, overrepresented in left–wing and revolutionary movements, intent on creating a utopia, went on the attack against capitalism and imperialism. As one Yiddish newspaper put it, “With hatred, with a three–fold curse, we must weave the shroud for the Russian autocratic government, for the entire anti–Semitic criminal gang, for the entire capitalist world.” (1)

So pronounced was this phenomenon that in a 1927 study titled “The Jew as Radical,” the Russian historian (and apologist for Stalin) Maurice Hindus maintained that Jews had an innate propensity to radicalism dating back to their biblical origins. Indeed, the Menshevik exile Simeon Strunsky, who would end up on the editorial board of the New York Times, sardonically recalled the intensity of Marxist debates that had been transported from Europe to the United States: “I remember quite well those pioneer Yiddish labor paper…