Leon Wiseltier's claim, in turn, was critiqued as exaggeration by Philip Kitcher in the New York Times Book Review.
"I am in no sense a neoconservative, as many of my neoconservative adversaries will attest," Wieseltier wrote in a May 2007 letter to Judge Reggie Walton, seeking leniency for his friend Scooter Libby.