Irving Kristol, conservative leader, dies

WASHINGTON, Sept. 19 (UPI) -- Irving Kristol, a former socialist and liberal who morphed into the patriarch of U.S. neo-conservatives, has died at 89.

His son William, editor of the Weekly Standard, told The New York Times his father, who lived in Washington, had lung cancer.

Kristol founded The Public Interest, which became one of the intellectual centers of modern conservatism and was an influential writer and commentator. He was a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington.

Born to non-religious Jews in New York, Kristol became a Trotskyist as a student at City College and an anti-Communist liberal in the 1950s. But his questioning of the premises of his political beliefs and a distrust of the welfare state backed by President Lyndon Johnson moved him rightward.

"Ever since I can remember, I've been a neo-something: a neo-Marxist, a neo-Trotskyist, a neo-liberal, a neo-conservative and, in religion, always a neo-orthodox, even while I was a neo-Trotskyist and a neo-Marxist. I'm going to end up a neo," he once said. "Just neo, that's all. Neo-dash-nothing."

He also is survived by his wife Gertrude Himmelfarb, an expert on Victorian history and culture and also an influential conservative writer, and by their daughter Elizabeth.