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Neoconservative from the start.

Article Excerpt
WHEN Daniel Bell and Irving Kristol were discussing founding a new journal, The Public Interest, I was teaching at the University of California in Berkeley, after having worked for a year in the Kennedy administration in the Housing and Home Finance Agency. Very likely I would have been involved in these discussions had I been in New York: I had written for Dan Bell at the New Leader years before, when he was managing editor, and he had written for Commentary when I was on the staff. Irving had joined Commentary as an editor while I was an editor there, and I had written for him when he edited Encounter and the Reporter. Dan Bell told me about the new magazine on a visit to Berkeley.

I was in complete accord with the original vision of The Public Interest. If this was not quite yet the age of "the end of ideology," it should be, and there was much the social sciences could tell us to improve our social policies and the world in which we lived, and in crafting decent policies that served "the public interest." Daniel Patrick Moynihan had come to Berkeley to observe the astonishing student revolt of 1964 (as so many others did), and to participate in a major university conference on poverty--we were at the beginning of the "war against poverty." We may have talked about The Public Interest. My essay for this conference, "Paradoxes of American Poverty," appeared in the PI's first issue.

I do not refer to the student revolt and the war against poverty idly: They were to shape The Public Interest and to make it very rapidly something rather different from what was intended. What astonishes me in glancing over those early issues was how soon the simple notion that science and research could guide us in domestic social policy became complicated, how rapidly this theme was reduced to a much smaller place than originally expected, how early the themes that were shortly...

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