Giuliani Campaign Downplays Neocon Influence

Meet Charles Hill, the former executive assistant to Secretary of State Shultz, who is the Giuliani campaign's chief foreign policy adviser. The campaign says that in the coming days and weeks, the Yale University professor will be setting up meetings with journalists and interviews with television outlets to get the campaign's message across on matters of war and peace.

The move in part is a response to what Mr. Giuliani's campaign sees as a series of inaccurate articles summing up the candidate's foreign policy brain trust as a collection of particularly hawkish neoconservatives, such as the editor at large of Commentary, Norman Podhoretz, who is one of 12 members of the campaign's senior foreign policy team.

"I don't know of a single person on the campaign besides Norman who is a self-identified, card carrying member of this neocon cabal with its secret handshakes," Mr. Hill said in an interview. He praised Mr. Podhoretz in the interview, but made sure also to draw at one point a distinction between the former editor's view that all diplomatic options with Iran were exhausted and that of the candidate, Mr. Giuliani.