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.

Image Irving Kristol in his home office in New York City in 1981. Credit... Keith Meyers/The NewYork Times

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.