Jeane Kirkpatrick: A First Rate Cold Warrior
Shortly before Christmas in 1980, President-elect Ronald Reagan called Jeane Kirkpatrick at the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami, where she was giving a speech to the American Friends of Hebrew University. Reagan called the lifelong Democrat to offer her a position in his administration as United Nations Ambassador with Cabinet rank. Dr. Kirkpatrick accepted the offer.
It was, arguably, the most important and consequential foreign policy appointment of Reagan’s first term. As a key member of Reagan’s national security team, Kirkpatrick was one of the intellectual architects of the “Reagan Doctrine,” which proved to be an essential component of the strategy that led to victory in the Cold War.
Reagan had been politically courting Kirkpatrick ever since Richard Allen, his campaign’s top foreign policy advisor, showed him a copy of Kirkpatrick’s November 1979 article in Commentary titled “Dictatorships and Double Standards,” a brilliant and devastating critique of the Carter administration’s foreign policy. Reagan read the article during a flight from Washington to Los Angeles, and when he arrived home he called Allen to discuss the author of that “extraordinary” article. Allen subsequently arranged three meetings between Reagan and Kirkpatrick, and after the third meeting she agreed to endorse him for president.
Kirkpatrick had been gradually and reluctantly drifting away from the Democratic Party since 1972, when the McGovernites took control of the party and moved it leftward, especially in its foreign policy positions. Kirkpatrick had been a supporter of Harry Truman, Adlai Stevenson, John Kennedy, and Hubert Humphrey (who was a close friend of her husband Evron). Those Democratic leaders supported the bipartisan policy of containment of communism backed by strong military power. The Vietnam War, however, had split the Party into hawkish and dovish factions, and by 1972 the doves won. Kirkpatrick and other hawkish Democrats looked to Sen. Henry M. “Scoop” Jackson (D-Wash.), the nation’s chief critic of arms control and the policy of détente with the Soviet Union, to regain control of the party, but it was too late. Jackson’s presidential bids failed in 1972 and 1976.
When Carter entered the White House in 1977, he dashed any remaining hopes that Kirkpatrick and her “wing” of the Party had about reinvigorating U.S. foreign policy under a Democratic president when, in his first major foreign policy speech, he announced that the United States was now free of its “inordinate fear of communism,” then proceeded to cut defense programs and publicly criticize longtime U.S. allies for human rights violations. Carter canceled weapon systems while the Soviets built up a strategic first-strike capability.
Carter did nothing to prevent the overthrow of friendly regimes in Iran and Nicaragua, which resulted in unfriendly regimes coming to power which had even less regard for human rights than their predecessors. Communism was on the march in Latin America, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, and Americans were taken hostage in Iran. What the Soviets called the “correlation of forces” appeared to be shifting in their favor.
