rom:

You seem to forget the most important name of whole neo con story.
Neocons are also known as "The Straussians", .Leo Strauss was the spritual
leader and chief ideologist of neo con movement.

Many of the neo cons you mentioned above were actually the students of
Strauss.

Leo Strauss, yes, another one of Columbia University's Germans. Certainly an
important ivory tower conservative philosopher.
What I was mentioning was the relationship of the so-called neo-cons to Sen.
Jackson. All those I mentioned were protoges of his, many working for him in
their youth.
They were more directly influence by Jackson's views, which were evolved from
personal experience, both his and his confreres such as Paul Nitze, Walt
Rostow, George Meany and others.
The bipartisan Committe on the Present Danger, officially debuted in Nov.,
1976, is a better place than Strauss to look for "neo-con" origins. Among
founding members were Charles E. Walker, Richard V. Allen, Lane Kirland, Jay
Lovestone, Henry H. Fowler, Adm. Elmo R. Zumwalt, James Schlesinger, Max
Kampelman, David Pakard, Charles Burton Marshall, Edmund A. Gullion and Charles
Tyroler II.
Students of American political science will spot in this list men from the
Truman, Johnson and Nixon administrations, not to mention the Fletcher School
of Diplomacy and the AFL-CIO. Such a group of brilliant minds led to some very
lively discussions at the Metropolitan Club in D.C.
Labor leader George Meany's straightforward brand of political philosophy was
more their style than Leo Strauss. Here's what Meany said about what the CPD
was all about: "In my book, you have to be anti-communist. You have to be
anti-dictatorship. You have to be anti-Allende, you have to be anti-Franco,
anti-Hitler, anti-Stalin, anti-South Africa. The people who consider
themselves liberal become very selective. They can be very anti-South
Africa--strongly against this apartheid policy--and shrug their shoulders about
Czechoslovakia and Poland and the Soviet Union. We hold them all even."
You've also got the Georgetown University anti-communist branch, where Jean
Kirkpatrick was, along with Ernest Lefever, Valerie Earle, William V. O'Brian,
Estelle R. Ramey and Peter Krogh. Their Center for Strategic and International
Studies, affiliated with the AEI, was chaired by CPD member Ray Cline, who, as
you know, was former deputy director of the CIA. It published a journal,
Washington Quarterly, that dueled with the pro-detente Foreign Affairs.
Other important names in these formative days were the amazing Bertram Wolfe,
who went from being a card-carrying communist to a member of the Hoover
Institution, Richard Pipes, also a very interesting fellow, Richard J. Whalen
and James T. Farrell (author of the Studs Lonigen trilogy, for fans of the
American novel), not to mention Clare Boothe Luce, Dean Rusk, Peter Grace
(Grace Corp.), William F. Casey, and Gen. Maxwell Taylor and Gen. Matthew
Ridgway. Again note the bipartisanship.
The Jewish element was well represented in the CPD, prominent among them Saul
Bellow (the Nobel-prize winning novelist), Nathan Glazer, Oscar Handlin,
Seymour Martin Lipset, Norman Podhoretz and Midge Dector (Podhoretz' wife).
Back in the seventies, this nascent "neo-con" movement was described by Sidney
Bloomenthal (who defined neo-conservatism as "the counter-establishment" which
I think is a very accurate way to describe what it was--against detente and
accomodation, the premier policies of Nixon and Carter) as "the final stage [so
he thought then] of the Old Left.... The conservatives believe that the
Liberal Establishment has been ruining the country. The neo-conservatives (who
aren't conservative in the traditional sense at all) add to this general notion
the belief that liberals are either a species of Stalinist fellow traveler or
operate 'objectively'--whether they know it or not--in the broad interest of
the Soviet Union. Conservatives would like to believe this, too, but deep down
don't. But the neo-conservatives, many with the benefit of Trotskyist
background, offer an unmatchable authenticity and intensity on the subject."
The CPD people bitterly opposed the New Left, which they clearly saw had a
dangerous fascination with populist totalitarianism. As Podhoretz recalled,
"To be pro-American in the 1970s was like being anti-Soviet in the 1930s. But
just as radicalism then had been tied to suport of the Soviet Union as the
center of socialist hope, so radicalism in the '70s increasingly defined itself
in opposition to the United States as the major obstacle to the birth of a
better world." This view the CPD and like-minded thinkers vowed to fight and
defeat.
You could see all of this played out during the GOP convention this week, with
the populist totalitarian loons raving in the streets while Democrats Ed Koch
and Zell Miller joined forces with like-minded Republicans to face real, deadly
threats to freedom and democracy whatever the current incarnation, nazis,
commies, islamic terrorists...whoever, while the Liberal Establishment, now
almost all in the current incarnation of the Democratic Party, looked on with
raised eyebrows at all this unnecessary alarmism.



Chris Mark