Jeane J. Kirkpatrick: first US woman to serve as UN envoy
By Johanna Neuman
WASHINGTON: Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, a staunch Reagan-era anti-Communist who infused American foreign policy with firm conviction as the first woman to serve as the US ambassador to the UN, has died. She was 80.
Kirkpatrick died in her sleep late on Thursday at her home in Bethesda, Md., according to an announcement on Friday on the website of the American Enterprise Institute. The conservative think tank, where Kirkpatrick worked for several decades, called her "a great patriot and champion of freedom."
The Associated Press quoted Kirkpatrick's assistant there as saying she had heart disease, though no cause of death was announced.
At the US mission at the United Nations in New York, Ambassador John Bolton announced the news at a senior staff meeting, requesting a moment of silence in her memory. "It really is very sad for America," he said. "She will be greatly missed."
At the White House, President Bush said Kirkpatrick "influenced the thinking of generations of Americans on the importance of American leadership in advancing the cause of freedom and democracy around the globe."
And on Capitol Hill, Rep. Tom Lantos (D-San Mateo) called her "a patriot and a class act … who almost single-handedly broke the glass ceiling for women in foreign policy."
After Kirkpatrick gained entry into the male purview of foreign policy, Madeleine Albright and Condoleezza Rice followed in her footsteps. Among other high-profile national security positions for both, Albright was secretary of state in the Clinton administration and Rice serves in the same post today. Rice on Friday called Kirkpatrick a role model, "an academic who brought great intellectual power to her work."
A political scientist who received a doctorate from Columbia University and studied at the Institut de Sciences Politiques in Paris, Kirkpatrick came to the attention of Ronald Reagan after writing an article for the neo-conservative journal Commentary in 1979.
Called "Dictatorships and Double Standards," the piece argued that utopian thinking (under the Carter administration) had moved US foreign policy to destabilize friendly anti-Communist regimes, including Anastasio Somoza's in Nicaragua and Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi's of Iran, only to find them replaced by unfriendly totalitarian ones.
"Traditional authoritarian governments are less repressive than revolutionary autocracies," she wrote.
The article caught the attention of Richard V. Allen, one of Reagan's foreign policy advisors. He sent the piece along to Reagan, who called Kirkpatrick, a lifelong Democrat, for a meeting. Hesitant to take a job in a Republican administration, Kirkpatrick was swayed by Reagan's commitment and his remark, "I was a Democrat once, you know."
In February 1981, she went to New York as Reagan's ambassador to the United Nations, an institution she had little use for and compared to "death and taxes".
Eager to restore US prowess in the wake of defeat in Vietnam and the capture of American diplomats as hostages in Iran, she vowed to do battle against Marxists, Communists and anyone else who mistook US policy mistakes for weakness.
"We were concerned about the weakening of Western will," she later told an interviewer. "We advocated rebuilding Western strength, and we did that with Ronald Reagan, if I may say so."
Reagan thought so too, once telling her, "You're taking off that big sign that we used to wear that said 'Kick Me.' "
When nations opposed US policy, she made sure Congress — with its power of the purse to underwrite the UN budget — knew their names.
She argued for El Salvador's right-wing junta and against Nicaragua's left-wing Sandinista government. She defended Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and the American invasion of Grenada in 1983. —Dawn/LAT News Service
