Jeane Kirkpatrick

Jeane Jordan Kirkpatrick (1926–2006)

Jeane Duane Jordan was born on November 19, 1926, in Duncan, Oklahoma, the daughter of Welcher Jordan, an oil wildcatter, and Leona Kile Jordan. Her father's fortunes rose and fell with the oil fields, and the family moved to Mount Vernon, Illinois, when she was a child. She was raised in a Protestant household in the Presbyterian tradition, and her religious formation was ordinary rather than dramatic. Her faith was never the center of her public persona, though it remained part of the moral grammar of her thought. She was an intellectual prodigy, finishing high school early and entering Stephens College in Missouri before transferring to Barnard College in New York, where she earned her undergraduate degree in 1948.

Her education was thoroughly secular and thoroughly political. She took a master's degree in political science at Columbia University in 1950, studied at the Institut de Science Politique in Paris, and worked for a time in Washington as a research analyst for the State Department. In 1955 she married Evron Kirkpatrick, a political scientist who had worked in government intelligence, and they raised three sons. She completed her doctorate at Columbia in 1968, and she taught at Trinity College in Washington and later at Georgetown University, balancing scholarship with a household and, in time, a growing public life.

Her early politics were those of a Democrat. She came of age in the anti-communist liberalism of Hubert Humphrey, in whose circle she moved, and she supported his presidential campaign in 1968. But the 1972 nomination of George McGovern marked a break. She and other former allies, many of them gathered around the Coalition for a Democratic Majority, concluded that the party had lost its nerve in the Cold War and its confidence in American power. She became one of the intellectual voices of what would be called neoconservatism, a migration she described as one made by people who felt they had been left behind by their own party rather than people who had left it.

The decisive event was an essay, "Dictatorships and Double Standards," published in Commentary in 1979. Its argument, that the United States had been quicker to condemn friendly authoritarian regimes than to resist totalitarian ones, caught the attention of Ronald Reagan, who appointed her ambassador to the United Nations in 1981. She was the first woman to hold the post, and she sat in Reagan's cabinet and on the National Security Council. The years that followed were turbulent. She defended American policy in Central America, and she faced fierce criticism over the Falklands War of 1982, when her sympathy for Argentina strained relations with Britain, and over the American position on Grenada and Nicaragua. Her critics regarded her as a defender of repression; her admirers saw in her a clear-eyed realist who refused to confuse good intentions with sound policy. She resigned in 1985 and returned to private life.

Afterward she joined the American Enterprise Institute, wrote a syndicated column, and served on advisory boards, including the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. She returned to the Democratic Party only in the sense that she never again felt at home in it, and in the 1990s she urged a smaller American role in the world as the Soviet threat receded, a position some of her allies found surprising. She lost her husband Evron in 1995. She died on December 7, 2006, in Bethesda, Maryland, at the age of eighty.

Her Writing and Its Influence

Kirkpatrick wrote as a political scientist, and her first book, Political Woman (1974), was an empirical study of women holding elective office in American state legislatures, an early and careful contribution to the field. Her scholarship also turned to the international left and to the question of how political movements mistake their own intentions for their effects. But it was the 1979 Commentary essay, "Dictatorships and Double Standards," that fixed her reputation. It was later collected, with related pieces, in Dictatorships and Double Standards: Rationalism and Reason in Politics (1982). Her other major volumes were The Reagan Phenomenon (1983), Legitimacy and Force (1988), and The Withering Away of the Totalitarian State (1990). Late in life she wrote Making War to Keep Peace (2007), published after her death.

The argument that carried the 1979 essay was a distinction, and the distinction was the whole point. Traditional authoritarian regimes, she held, tolerate private life, religion, family, and inherited institutions, and they can therefore evolve toward something more open. Revolutionary totalitarian regimes, by contrast, claim the whole person, dismantle every competing loyalty, and rarely reform from within. The distinction was contested from the start. Critics argued that it flattered friendly dictators and that the supposedly durable totalitarian states proved more fragile than she allowed. The collapse of the Soviet system in 1991 was claimed by both sides. Admirers pointed to her insistence that Soviet power rested on force rather than consent; critics noted that the transition she had thought unlikely did occur. She acknowledged the new situation and argued, to the surprise of some allies, that a "normal country in a normal time" should adopt a more modest foreign policy. She also kept pressing a theme that ran beneath the technical vocabulary: that political ideas deserve to be judged by what they do to human beings, and that societies cannot be remade by abstraction without cost.

It is this last conviction that makes her useful to readers of Christian writing, though she was neither a theologian nor a writer of devotion. Her work belonged to the debates in which American Christians of the late Cold War found themselves arguing. Evangelical and Catholic writers who wrote about communism, religious persecution, and the moral duties of power often drew on her distinction, and she made a point of giving religion a serious place in her account of what totalitarianism seeks to destroy. Her defense of Reagan-era policy in Central America was met by an equally serious Christian response. Catholic bishops, liberation theologians, and many mainline Protestants answered her directly, arguing that the regimes she was prepared to tolerate had murdered priests, nuns, and ordinary believers, and that the churches could not accept an argument that treated such violence as the lesser evil. The murders of Archbishop Óscar Romero in 1980 and of four American churchwomen in El Salvador that same year were the shadow in which her critics read her essay. The disagreement was not trivial, and it has not been settled. Christian readers still divide over whether her realism was prudence or a failure of moral nerve.

Her significance for a library of Christian writing is therefore of a particular kind. She shows how a serious secular mind, Presbyterian by upbringing and unsentimental by temperament, framed the problem of political evil in the century that tested the churches hardest, and she is the voice against which some of that century's most searching Christian protest was written.

Who should read Kirkpatrick: Readers who want to understand the arguments with which the Christian writers of the late Cold War were contending, whether they came to agree with her or not. She is valuable for those studying how the churches thought about communism, authoritarianism, and complicity, and for anyone who wants to see the realist case stated at its most forceful before deciding what to make of it. She is not a guide to the spiritual life, and she offers no consolation to readers who prefer their politics settled by principle rather than by tradeoff. She is for those willing to be unsettled by an argument they may finally reject.