Irving Kristol III

After marrying, Mr. Kristol followed his wife to Chicago, where she was doing graduate work and where he had what he called “my first real experience of America.” Drafted into the Army with a number of Midwesterners who were street-tough and often anti-Semitic, he found himself shedding his youthful radical optimism. “I can’t build socialism with these people,” he concluded. “They’ll probably take it over and make a racket out of it.”

In his opinion, his fellow GI’s were inclined to loot, rape and murder, and only Army discipline held them in check. It was a perception about human nature that would stay with him for the rest of his life, creating a tension with his alternative view that ordinary people were to be trusted more than intellectuals to do the right thing.

After the war he and Ms. Himmelfarb spent a year in Cambridge, England, while she pursued her studies. When they returned to the United States in 1947, he took an editing job with Commentary, then a liberal anti-Communist magazine. In 1952, at the height of the McCarthy era, he wrote what he called the most controversial article of his career: “ ‘Civil Liberties,’ 1952 — A Study in Confusion.” It criticized many of those defending civil liberties against the government inquisitors, saying they failed to understand the conspiratorial danger of Communism. Though he called Senator McCarthy a “vulgar demagogue,” the article was remembered for a few lines: “For there is one thing that the American people know about Senator McCarthy: he, like them, is unequivocably anti-Communist. About the spokesmen for American liberalism, they feel they know no such thing. And with some justification.”

After leaving Commentary, Mr. Kristol spent 10 months as executive director of the anti-Communist organization the American Committee for Cultural Freedom, and in 1953 he removed to England to help found Encounter magazine with the poet Stephen Spender. They made an unlikely pair: Mr. Spender, tall, artsy, sophisticated; Mr. Kristol, short, brash, still rough around the edges. Together, they made Encounter one of the foremost highbrow magazines of its time.

But another explosive controversy awaited Mr. Kristol. It was later revealed that the magazine had been receiving financial support from the C.I.A. Mr. Kristol always denied any knowledge of the connection. But he hardly appeased his critics when he added that he did not disapprove of the C.I.A.’s secret subsidies.

Back in New York at the end of 1958, Mr. Kristol worked for a year at another liberal anti-Communist magazine, The Reporter, then took a job at Basic Books, rising to executive vice president. In 1969 he left for New York University, and while teaching there he became a columnist for The Wall Street Journal.

It was during this time that Mr. Kristol became uncomfortable with liberalism, his own and others’. He supported Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey in his 1968 presidential campaign against Richard M. Nixon, saying that “the prospect of electing Mr. Nixon depresses me.” But by 1970 he was dining at the Nixon White House, and in 1972 he came out in favor of Nixon’s re-election. By the mid-’70s he had registered as a Republican.

Always the neoconservative, however — aware of his liberal, even radical, roots and his distance from traditional Republicanism — he was delighted when another Democratic convert, President Ronald Reagan, expressed admiration for Franklin D. Roosevelt. In 1987 he left New York University to become the John M. Olin Distinguished Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

By now Mr. Kristol was battling on several fronts. He published columns and essays attacking liberalism and the counterculture from his perches at The Wall Street Journal and The Public Interest, and in 1978 he and William E. Simon, President Nixon’s secretary of the treasury, formed the Institute for Educational Affairs to funnel corporate and foundation money to conservative causes. In 1985 he started The National Interest, a journal devoted to foreign affairs.

But Mr. Kristol wasn’t railing just against the left. He criticized America’s commercial class for upholding greed and selfishness as positive values. He saw “moral anarchy” within the business community, and he urged it to take responsibility for itself and the larger society. He encouraged businessmen to give money to political candidates and help get conservative ideas across to the public. Republicans, he said, had for half a century been “the stupid party,” with not much more on their minds than balanced budgets and opposition to the welfare state. He instructed them to support economic growth by cutting taxes and not to oppose New Deal institutions.

Above all, Mr. Kristol preached a faith in ordinary people. . “It is the self-imposed assignment of neoconservatives,” he wrote, “to explain to the American people why they are right, and to the intellectuals why they are wrong.”

Mr. Kristol saw religion and a belief in the afterlife as the foundation for the middle-class values he championed. He argued that religion provided a necessary constraint to antisocial, anarchical impulses. Without it, he said, “the world falls apart.” Yet Mr. Kristol’s own religious views were so ambiguous that some friends questioned whether he believed in God. In 1996, he told an interviewer: “I’ve always been a believer.” But, he added, “don’t ask me in what.”

“That gets too complicated,” he said. “The word ‘God’ confuses everything.”

In 2002, Mr. Kristol received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, often considered the nation’s highest civilian honor. It was another satisfying moment for a man who appears to have delighted in his life or, as Andrew Sullivan put it, “to have emerged from the womb content.”

He once said that his career had been “one instance of good luck after another.” Some called him a cheerful conservative. He did not dispute it. He had had much, he said, “to be cheerful about.”