JAMES O. GOLDSBOROUGH THE UNION-TRIBUNE
The neoconservative ascension
October 4, 2004
The neoconservatives took charge of U.S. foreign policy under George W. Bush without the public knowing it. Nothing in the 2000 presidential campaign gave a hint of the direction Bush planned to take U.S. foreign policy, or the people he planned to run it.
It's doubtful even Bush knew the plans of the people he brought into his government to direct foreign policy. But their paper trail is long, and new publications are shedding more light on what the neoconservatives have done and what they plan to do.
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Tracing the rise of neoconservatism is a challenge because it is so new to power. Much is known about the movement as a cult, and now a new Yale University book helps complete the picture by tracing the transition from cult to political force under Bush. The book is "Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire," by Anne Norton. Norton, who teaches at Penn, traces the movement's origins to Leo Strauss, a German Jew who came to America as a refugee in 1938.
According to Norton, Strauss' theories of politics, which he taught at the University of Chicago, inspired a generation of students and teachers across the nation. Some of them went on to become government officials, like Paul Wolfowitz, the architect of the Iraq war, and Abram Shulsky at the Pentagon; and Leon Kass, chairman of Bush's Council on Bioethics... Norton makes clear that neoconservatism is a perversion of what Strauss taught. "I am sorry for the name 'Straussian,' " she writes, "because it implicates Strauss in views that were not always his own, but it is best to call people what they call themselves."
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