Your fawning obituary of Irving Kristol, the so-called father of neoconservatism, is annoying from start to finish, but it is most annoying when it comes to the reasons for his rightward drift (September 26, 2009). “The convulsions in America’s universities from 1968 to 1971 probably shook him most,” you dutifully explain, “revealing not only the nihilistic horrors of the counter-culture, but also how deeply he himself believed in traditional bourgeois values.” Judging from the rest of your obituary, make that “petty-bourgeois values,” instead. Given his origins, he was unlikely to be an unrepentant bourgeois, as you call him, but an ever-aspiring one. This is where the “nihilistic horrors” of counter-culture undoubtedly come from. A bourgeois worth his salt would have seen the convulsions of the period as liberating and promising of a better world to come. Even the neoconservatism attributed to Kristol’s parentage would be unimaginable without the revolutionary changes brought by 1968 and its aftermath.