The right attitude: over time, the neocons' ideology has morphed. But their temperament has remained fixed.

• Author: Drum, Kevin
• Position: They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons - Book review

They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons

by Jacob Heilbrunn

Doubleday, 336 pp.

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What is a neocon? Do neocons, in fact, even exist? New York Times columnist David Brooks, who might himself be described as a kind of soft neocon--or is that an oxymoron?--tried his best to make light of the whole idea four years ago in a piece that mocked liberal notions of neocon influence on the Bush administration's foreign policy:

Theories about the tightly knit neocon cabal came in waves. One day you read that neocons were pushing plans to finish off Iraq and move into Syria ... Every day, it seemed, Le Monde or some deep-thinking German paper would have an expose on the neocon cabal, complete with charts connecting all the conspirators ... The full-mooners fixated on a think tank called the Project for the New American Century, which has a staff of five and issues memos on foreign policy. To hear these people describe it, PNAC is sort of a Yiddish Trilateral Commission, the nexus of the sprawling neocon tentacles. Later, in the same column Brooks joked that the conspiracy theorists think "con is short for 'conservative' and neo is short for 'Jewish.'" Or, at least, he said it was a joke later, after critics pounced on him: "I was careful not to say that Bush or neocon critics are anti-Semitic," he backtracked.

As well he should have been. After all, the accusation that neoconservatism is primarily a Jewish phenomenon is a common one because--well, because an awful lot of neocons are Jewish. After all, the roll call of influential contemporary neocons usually starts with Paul Wolfowitz and Bill Kristol and then rolls ponderously through Richard Perle, Doug Feith, Elliott Abrams, and others before finishing up with Charles Krauthammer and Marry Peretz. Not to mention one David Brooks. That's a lot of Jewish names.

But wait! What about Jeanne Kirkpatrick and Patrick Moynihan? Or, among the current crop, Bill Bennett and Michael Novak? They aren't Jewish.

Which brings us to Jacob Heilbrunn and his recently published history of neoconservatism, They Knew They Were Right. Heilbrunn, who is himself Jewish and who once went through his own youthful flirtation with neoconservatism, doesn't shy away from diving directly into this most inflammatory of questions. No, Heilbrunn writes, not all neocons are Jewish, especially today, but there's no question where the roots of neoconservatism lie:

Despite the fervent protestations of its...