Jeane, We Hardly Knew You
The death of Jeane Kirkpatrick is a moment to reflect not only on a remarkable woman but also on the absence of a certain kind of Democrat from our politics today. When I met her, our defeat in Indochina was only six years past. President Reagan had just surprised the country by choosing a Democrat to represent America at the United Nations. A small dinner was convened so she could meet some of the newspapermen and -women who had an interest in what was then being called the Third World. I drew the assignment for the Wall Street Journal, for which I was writing editorials.
What I remember about the dinner, which comprised about 16 people at a large round table, is that it was percolating with the standard palaver about developing countries until Jude Wanniski, who'd popularized the economic ideas on which Reagan rode to victory in 1980, tilted in his chair, threw his head back, and emitted a long, bloodcurdling scream. This brought the group to an astonished silence. Wanniski leaned forward, looked across the table at Kirkpatrick, and said, "Taxes."
Then Wanniski launched into one of his lectures on how the laws of economics apply to poor countries as well as to rich ones. Whether it was what Kirkpatrick hoped to get out of the dinner, I have my doubts, but the new ambassador guided the conversation with aplomb, and I left the evening thinking she was going to be quite something at the United Nations. She went on to be one of the permanent representatives who, like Ambassadors Moynihan and Bolton, had both a realism about the world body and a passion for its ideals.
She was both tough and vulnerable. We got a sense of this at the Journal when Prime Minister Begin sent Israeli warplanes to bomb Iraq's atomic-bomb-making facility at Baghdad. The attack was met mainly with outrage. The Wall Street Journal, however, issued an editorial suggesting the world owed Israel a vote of thanks. It has since come out that Richard Allen, Reagan's national security adviser at the time, got the news at home on the afternoon of June 7, 1981. Mr. Allen called the president at Camp David. President Reagan was boarding his helicopter, but got off to take Mr. Allen's call. When he heard the news, Reagan at first exclaimed, "They did what?" Mr. Allen repeated the news. There was a pause. That's when Reagan uttered the immortal line, "Boys will be boys."
It was Kirkpatrick who drew the assignment to take care of the diplomatic niceties. She ended up in a room with the ambassador of Iraq to work out the wording of a Security Council resolution censuring the Jewish state. The Wall Street Journal reacted with an editorial headlined "Andy Kirkpatrick?" that likened her to the United Nations envoy in Jimmy Carter's failed presidency. Kirkpatrick was apoplectic. She sent one of her aides to see the Journal's editor, Robert Bartley. We gave the aide a neatly folded copy of the editorial and the suggestion that Kirkpatrick keep it in her purse so that the next time she had to go into a room with the ambassador of Iraq, she could pull it out and say, "Look what I'm up against."
In the event, she became one of the great tribunes of the American cause and one of the most important figures in Reagan's big tent. Like Reagan, she understood the importance of the labor movement in defeating the communists at home and abroad. She had four ambassadors under her and made sure she had a loyalist leading the American team on each of the United Nations' committees. Another of her deputies, Carl Gershman, went on to head — and still heads — the National Endowment for Democracy. She identified profoundly with such dissidents as Andre Sakharov, say, or the Cuban dissident Armando Valladaros. When her words were heard by such oppressed individuals, she took great satisfaction.
That Kirkpatrick was a Democrat was one of the things that I shared with her, though she had real party bona fides. She had come up through the Committee for a Democratic Majority, which coalesced after the catastrophe of Senator McGovern's presidential campaign, when the anti-communist labor leaders were locked out of the party. It was a group that bet on Jimmy Carter before ending up in Reagan's camp, and I gained the sense from her, on occasion, that her parting from the party that produced her political hero, Hubert Humphrey, was not easy — and even a bit wistful.
The difficulties women faced being accepted at the top of the political leadership was something about which she felt strongly. One evening in the fall of 1984, she invited me to drop by her ambassadorial residence at the Waldorf. Her husband, Evron Kirkpatrick, was there, and the three of us had a light supper at the enormous dining room table in the apartment. We were starting to have a lively conversation, when Kirkpatrick looked at her watch and suggested we go into the living room. It turned out she wanted to watch Geraldine Ferraro accept the Democratic nomination to be the first woman on the national ticket of a major party. So I found myself watching Kirkpatrick as she watched the woman who was standing where, had the Democrats taken a different turn, she might have been.
It was the last time I saw her privately. She went on to give her famous speech at the Republican National Convention in 1984, attacking the San Francisco Democrats. I don't for a moment suggest her heart wasn't in it; she became a Republican. And she was a passionate advocate of the doctrine of combining a strong defense of the national interest with an advocacy of American values in world affairs. "She was on both sides of that, the realism and the idealism," Mr. Gershman told me last night. "That's what was so unusual about her."
This may be the attribute that Norman Podhoretz perceived when he wrote on Friday a remembrance suggesting she had reservations about the Bush doctrine and, in recent years, was relieved to be out of the fray. But no one is relieved to have her out of it, for we are at a time when, if there are more like her, we could certainly use them.
