'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.
[1]
She is famous for her "
Kirkpatrick Doctrine," which advocates U.S. support of anticommunist governments around the world, including
authoritarian dictatorships, if they were not totalitarian and 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."
[2]
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.
[3]
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". 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 transferring from
Stephens College in
Columbia, Missouri. In 1968, Kirkpatrick received a
Ph.D in
political science from
Columbia University.
[4] She spent a year of post-graduate study at the at the
Institut des Sciences Politiques at the
University of Paris, which helped her learn the French language. She was also fluent in Spanish.
[5]
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.
[6]
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 political science in 1973.
She became active in politics as a
Democrat in the 1970s, and she 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 President on the Democratic ticket 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.
[7] She also served on the Platform Committee for the Democratic Party in 1976.
[8]
Kirkpatrick published a number of articles in political science journals reflecting her disillusionment with the Democratic Party with specific critism 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 the 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
democratise 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 "
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