Jeane Jordan Kirkpatrick
(November 19, 1926 – December 7, 2006) was an American
ambassador and an ardent
anticommunist. After serving as
Ronald Reagan's
foreign policy
adviser in his
1980 campaign and
later in his Cabinet, the longtime
Democrat-turned-
Republican was nominated as
the
U.S.
ambassador to the
United Nations
and became the first woman to hold this position.
She is famous for her "
Kirkpatrick
Doctrine," which advocated U.S. support of anticommunist
governments around the world, including
authoritarian dictatorships, if they went
along with Washington's aims—believing they could be led into
democracy by example. She wrote, "Traditional authoritarian
governments are less repressive than revolutionary
autocracies."
Kirkpatrick served on Reagan's Cabinet on the
National Security
Council, Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, Defense Policy
Review Board, and chaired the
Secretary of Defense
Commission on Fail Safe and Risk reduction of the Nuclear Command
and Control System.
Early life
Jeane Duane Jordan was born
in Duncan,
Oklahoma
, the
daughter of an oilfield wildcatter,
Welcher F. Jordan, and his wife, the former Leona Kile. She
attended Emerson Elementary School there and was known to her
classmates as "Duane Jordan". She had one sibling, about a decade
younger than her, Jerry Jordan. At age 12, her father moved the
family to southern Illinois where she graduated from Mt.
Vernon
Township High School in Mt.
Vernon, Illinois
. In 1948, she graduated from Barnard College
after receiving her Associate's Degree from
Stephens College (then only a 2
year institution) in Columbia, Missouri
. In 1968, Kirkpatrick received a
PhD in
political
science from
Columbia
University.
She spent a year of post-graduate study at
the Institut des
Sciences Politiques at the University of Paris
, which helped her learn the French language.
She was also fluent in Spanish.
Though she
was to be ultimately known as a figure of conservatism, as a college freshman in
1945 she joined the Young People's Socialist
League of the Socialist
Party of America, a membership that was influenced by one of
her grandfathers, who was a founder of the Populist and Socialist parties in Oklahoma
.As
Kirkpatrick recalled at a symposium in 2002, "It wasn't easy to
find the YPSL in Columbia, Missouri. But I had read about it and I
wanted to be one. We had a very limited number of activities in
Columbia, Missouri. We had an anti-
Franco rally, which was a worthy cause. You
could raise a question about how relevant it was likely to be in
Columbia, Missouri, but it was in any case a worthy cause. We also
planned a socialist picnic, which we spent quite a lot of time
organizing. Eventually, I regret to say, the YPSL chapter, after
much discussion, many debates and some downright quarrels, broke up
over the socialist picnic. I thought that was rather
discouraging."
Professor at Georgetown
At
Columbia University, her
principal adviser was
Franz
Neumann, a
revisionist
Marxist.
In 1967, she joined the faculty of Georgetown
University
and became a full professor of government in
1973.
She became active in politics as a
Democrat in the 1970s, and
was involved in the later campaigns of former
Vice President and
Democratic
presidential
candidate Hubert Humphrey. Along
with Humphrey, she was close to
Henry
M. Jackson, who ran for the
Democratic nomination for President in 1972 and 1976. She was
opposed to the candidacy of
George
McGovern. In 1976, she joined with
George V. Allen and others to found the Committee on
Present Danger for the purpose of warning Americans against the
Soviet Union's growing military power and the dangers of the
SALT II treaty. She also served on
the Platform Committee for the Democratic Party in 1976.
Kirkpatrick published a number of articles in political science
journals reflecting her disillusionment with the Democratic Party
with specific criticism of the
foreign policy of Democratic
President
Jimmy Carter. Her most well
known piece was "
Dictatorships and Double
Standards," published in
Commentary in November 1979.
In that piece, Kirkpatrick mentioned what she saw as a difference
between authoritarian regimes and the totalitarian regimes such as
the Soviet Union; sometimes it was necessary to work with
authoritarian regimes if it suited American purposes. She wrote:
“No idea holds greater sway in the mind of educated Americans than
the belief that it is possible to
democratize governments, anytime and anywhere,
under any circumstances... Decades, if not centuries, are normally
required for people to acquire the necessary disciplines and
habits. In Britain, the road [to democratic government] took seven
centuries to traverse... The speed with which armies collapse,
bureaucracies abdicate, and social structures dissolve once the
autocrat is removed frequently surprises American
policymakers.”
Reagan's Cabinet
This piece came to the attention of Ronald Reagan through his
National Security Adviser
Richard
V. Allen. Kirkpatrick then
became a foreign policy adviser throughout Reagan's
1980 campaign and
presidency and, after his election to the presidency, the United
States Ambassador to the United Nations, a position she held for
four years. She had never been around a Republican before. On the
way to her first meeting with him, she told Allen, "Listen, Dick, I
am an
AFL-CIO Democrat and I am quite
concerned that my meeting Ronald Reagan on any basis will be
misunderstood." She asked Reagan if he minded having a lifelong
Democrat on his team; he replied that he himself had been a
Democrat till age 51, and in any event he liked her way of thinking
about American foreign policy.
She was
one of the strongest supporters of Argentina
's military dictatorship following the March 1982
Argentine invasion of the United Kingdom's Falkland
Islands
, which triggered the Falklands War. Kirkpatrick sympathized
with Argentina's President
Gen.
Leopoldo Galtieri, whose military
regime "
disappeared" critics, a position
on which she and Reagan's
Secretary of State Alexander Haig vehemently opposed each other
and which upset
Margaret Thatcher.
Her support became muted when the
administration ultimately
decided to
declare
support for the British.
At the
1984 Republican
National Convention, Kirkpatrick delivered the famous "Blame
America First" keynote speech, which re-nominated Reagan by
praising his administration's foreign policy while excoriating the
leadership of what she called the "San
Francisco
Democrats"—the Democrats had just held their
convention in San Francisco—for the party's shift away from the
hawkish policies of former Democratic presidents such as Harry S. Truman and
John
F. Kennedy to a more stringent anti-war position that the
left-wing of the Democratic Party had pushed since Vietnam. It was
the first time since 1952's speech from
Douglas MacArthur that a non-party member
had delivered the Republican convention keynote address.
Kirkpatrick, a member of the National Security Council, did not get
along with either Secretary of State Haig or his successor,
George Schultz. She disagreed with
Schultz most notably on the
Iran-Contra affair, in which she
supported skimming money off arms sales to fund the Contras.
Kirkpatrick and Schultz actually came to
physical violence in their disagreement over whether to find extra
funding for Nicaraguan
contras, with Schultz telling Kirkpatrick that it
was an "impeachable offense." Kirkpatrick wished to be
Secretary of State or head of the National Security Council, which
did not help either. Shultz threatened to resign if Kirkpatrick was
appointed National Security Adviser. Kirkpatrick was more closely
allied with Secretary of Defense
Caspar Weinberger and head of the CIA,
William J. Casey.
Ambassador to the UN
Kirkpatrick once said, "What takes place in the
Security Council more
closely resembles a mugging than either a political debate or an
effort at problem-solving." Still, she finished her term with a
certain respect for the normative power of the United Nations as
the "institution whose majorities claim the right to decide - for
the world - what is legitimate and what is illegitimate." She noted
that the United States had increasingly ignored this significance
and became increasingly isolated. This was problematic, because
"relative isolation in a body like the United Nations
is a
sign of impotence," especially given the ability of the United
Nations to shape international attitudes. Kirkpatrick was
ambassador to the U.N. during the Sept.
1, 1983 Soviet
shooting down of Korean Air Lines Flight 007
. KAL 007 had carried 269 passengers and crew
including a sitting congressman,
Larry
McDonald from Georgia. She played before the Security Council
the audio of the electronic intercept of the interceptor pilot
during the attack, after which the Soviet Union could no longer
deny its responsibility for the shootdown.
According to
Jay Nordlinger, on a
visit with American dignitaries, Soviet human rights activist
Andrei Sakharov said, "Kirkpatski,
Kirkpatski, which of you is Kirkpatski?" When others pointed to
Kirkpatrick, he said, "Your name is known in every cell in the
Gulag," because she had named Soviet political
prisoners on the floor of the UN.
Kirkpatrick said she would only serve one term at the UN and stepped down in April 1985.
Views on Israel
She was a
staunch supporter of the State of Israel
. During her ambassadorship at the United
Nations, she considered its frequent criticism and condemnation of
the Jewish State as holding Israel to a double standard. She
attributed it to hostility and considered it as politically
motivated.
In 1989, Mohammed Wahby, press director of
Egypt
's Information Bureau, wrote to the Washington Post saying, "Jeane
Kirkpatrick has, somehow, consistently opposed any attempt to
resolve the Arab-Israeli
conflict." Kirkpatrick had warned Secretary of State
James Baker and President Bush, in an
op-ed, not to get involved in the conflict, because any
intervention "will fail."
Kirkpatrick frequently expressed disdain for what she perceived to
be
disproportionate attention on Israel at the expense of other
conflicts. She "declared that what takes place in the Security
Council "more closely resembles a mugging than either a political
debate or an effort at problem-solving."
Anti-Defamation League
President
Abraham Foxman issued a
press release upon her passing saying that "She will be fondly
remembered for her unwavering and valiant support of the State of
Israel and her unequivocal opposition to
anti-Semitism, especially during her tenure at
the United Nations. She was always a true friend of the
Jewish people."
Political views
Comparing
authoritarian and
totalitarian regimes, she
said:
- "Authoritarian regimes really typically don't have complete
command economies. Authoritarian
regimes typically have some kind of traditional economy with some
private ownership. The Nazi regime left ownership in private hands,
but the state assumed control of the economy. Control was separated
from ownership but it was really a command economy because it was
controlled by the state. A command economy is an attribute of a
totalitarian state."
Explaining her disillusionment with international organizations,
especially the
United Nations, she
stated:
- "As I watched the behavior of the nations of the U.N.
(including our own), I found no reasonable ground to expect any one
of those governments to transcend permanently their own national
interests for those of another country."
- "I conclude that it is a fundamental mistake to think that
salvation, justice,
or virtue come through merely human
institutions."
- "Democracy not only requires equality
but also an unshakable conviction in the value of each person, who
is then equal. Cross cultural experience teaches us not simply that
people have different beliefs, but that people seek meaning and
understand themselves in some sense as members of a cosmos ruled by
God."
About
socialist activism, she said:
- "As I read the utopian
socialists, the scientific
socialists, the German Social Democrats and
revolutionary socialists —
whatever I could in either English
or French — I came to the conclusion
that almost all of them, including my grandfather, were engaged in
an effort to change human nature. The more I thought about it, the
more I thought this was not likely to be a successful effort. So I
turned my attention more and more to political philosophy and less
and less to socialist activism of any kind."
After the Reagan administration
In 1985,
Kirkpatrick became a Republican (which The Economist called her "only recourse"
after her speech at the 1984 Republican convention) and returned to
teaching at Georgetown
University
. She also became a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute,
a Washington
D.C.
think tank, and a
contributor to the American
Freedom Journal. In 1993, she co-founded
Empower America, a public-policy
organization. She was also on the advisory board of the
National Association of
Scholars, a group that works against what it regards as a
liberal bias in
academia, with its
emphasis on
multicultural education and
affirmative action.
Kirkpatrick briefly considered running for President in 1988
against
George H.W. Bush, because she believed he was not tough
enough on Communism. Kirkpatrick endorsed Senator Robert Dole of
Kansas, who was the runner up to Bush. Despite a strong showing in
the Iowa caucuses, Dole's campaign quickly faded after losing the
New Hampshire primary in Febrauary 1988. Kirkpatrick was an active
surrogate campaigner for Dole even as he was losing, as was her old
foe, Al Haig, who endorsed Dole after ending his own '88 campaign
several days before the New hampshire primary.
Along
with Empower America co-directors
William Bennett and Jack Kemp, she called on the Congress to issue a formal
declaration of war against the "entire fundamentalist Islamist terrorist network" the day after
the September 11
attacks on the World Trade Center
.
In 2003, she headed the US delegation to the
United Nations
Commission on Human Rights. Kirkpatrick was appointed to the
Board of Directors of
IDT Corp. in 2004.
It was revealed after her death that in 2003, she was sent as a US
envoy, to meet an Arab delegation and attempt to convince them to
support the
Iraq War; she was supposed to
argue that pre-emptive war was justifiable, but she knew this would
not work and instead argued that
Saddam
Hussein had consistently gone against the UN.
Personal life
On February 20, 1955, she married Evron Maurice Kirkpatrick, who
was a scholar and a former member of the
O.S.S. (the World War II-era
predecessor of the
CIA). Her husband died in
1995. They had three sons: Douglas Jordan (1956–2006), John Evron,
and Stuart Alan (a.k.a.
Traktung
Rinpoche, a
Buddhist lama).
Kirkpatrick died at her home in Bethesda, MD
, on December 7, 2006 of congestive heart failure.She
had been diagnosed with heart disease and had been in failing
health for several years.
Quotes
- "When Marxist dictators shoot their way into power in Central America, the San Francisco Democrats
don't blame the guerrillas and their Soviet allies. They blame
United States policies of 100 years ago. But then they always blame
America first."
- "Russia is playing chess, while we are playing Monopoly. The
only question is whether they will checkmate us before we bankrupt
them."
Awards and honors
Kirkpatrick received the
Presidential Medal of Freedom,
the nation's highest civilian honor.
The Kennedy School of Government at
Harvard
created a Kirkpatrick Chair in International
Affairs in her honor. Kirkpatrick received an
honorary doctorate at Central Connecticut
State University in 1991.
She was also awarded an honorary degree by Brandeis
University
in 1994, but her honor was met with protests from
some professors and students. One of the 53 (out of 350
total Brandeis faculty) opposing professors said, "We oppose the
degree because she was the intellectual architect of Reagan
administration policies that supported some of the Latin-American
regimes with the most repressive records."
In 2007, Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) honored
Jeane Kirkpatrick with the creation of the
Jeane Kirkpatrick
Academic Freedom Award. The first recipient was Marine Corps
reservist and correspondent
Matt
Sanchez. Kirkpatrick was inducted in the
Oklahoma Women's Hall of Fame
in 1984.
In popular culture
Kirkpatrick was portrayed by
Lorelei
King in the 2002
BBC production of
Ian Curteis's controversial
The Falklands Play.
In
Berkeley Breathed's weekly
comic strip
Bloom County,
Kirkpatrick becomes former Meadow Party Presidential candidate
Bill the Cat's love interest, the two
sharing an interest in guns and, apparently,
survivalist outings, judging by 'pictures' of
them together, both dressed in fatigues and holding firearms, the
latter of which seem to have a central role in their relationship.
She is also mentioned in a dream
Opus
the Penguin has of chairing the
United Nations, (we only hear him speak his
part of the dialogue while seeing Opus asleep) in which all members
assenting to his motion are asked to shout "Jeane Kirkpatrick is
nobody's baby!" An image of Kirkpatrick (drawn by Breathed) appears
on the cover of the fourth collection of
Bloom County
material,
Bloom County
Babylon. Her face is on one of the buttons pinned to
Opus's top hat (yellow, rimmed with red, close to the brim), as are
those of other characters of the strip and, for some reason,
Nancy Reagan.
In an October 1987 sketch on
Saturday Night Live, Kirkpatrick
(portrayed by
Nora Dunn) is a contestant
on a game show called "Common Knowledge" (in which answers to
questions are determined by 17-year old high school seniors).
Books authored
- Making War to Keep Peace, 2007 (ISBN
0-0611-9543-X)
- The Withering Away of the Totalitarian State—And Other
Surprises, 1992 (ISBN 0-8447-3728-3)
- Legitimacy and Force: National and International
Dimensions, 1988 (ISBN 0-88738-647-4)
- International Regulation: New Rules in a Changing World
Order, 1988 (ISBN 1-55815-026-9)
- Legitimacy and Force: Political and Moral Dimensions,
1988 (ISBN 0-88738-099-9)
- Legitimacy and Force: State Papers and Current Perspectives
1981–1985, 1987 ISBN 9999962750
- The United States and the World: Setting Limits, 1986
(ISBN 0-8447-1379-1)
- The Reagan Doctrine and U.S. Foreign Policy,
1985 (ISBN 999650591X
- Reagan Phenomenon and Other Speeches on Foreign
Policy, 1983 (ISBN 0-8447-1361-9)
- U.N. Under Scrutiny, 1982 (ISBN
99938-872-9-3)
- Dictatorships and Double Standards: Rationalism and Reason
in Politics, 1982 (ISBN 0-671-43836-0)
- Presidential Nominating Process: Can It Be Improved,
1980 (ISBN 0-8447-3397-0)
- Dismantling the Parties: Reflections on Party Reform and
Party Decomposition, 1978 (ISBN 0-8447-3293-1)
- The New Presidential Elite: Men and Women in National
Politics, 1976 (ISBN 0-87154-475-X)
- Political Woman, 1974 (ISBN 0-465-05970-8)
See also
References
- Kirkpatrick, Jeane J., Legitimacy and Force Vol. 1
(Oxford: Transaction Books, 1988), xvi.
- Kirkpatrick, Jeane J., "Standing Alone" in Legitimacy and
Force Vol. 1 (Oxford: Transaction Books, 1988), 193-194.
- Kirkpatrick, Jeane J., "Standing Alone" in Legitimacy and
Force Vol. 1 (Oxford: Transaction Books, 1988), 195.
- Kirkpatrick, Jeane J., "The UN as a Political System" in
Legitimacy and Force Vol. 1 (Oxford: Transaction Books,
1988), 222.
- The United Nations and Israel by Mitchell
Bard
- Speech at the 1984 Republican National Convention
- Speech given during the 1988 Barrick Lecture Series at the
University of Nevada, Las Vegas
External links