Jeane Kirkpatrick

AP

IN THE strangest way, Jeane Kirkpatrick seemed to haunt Washington in the days before she died. When the Iraq Study Group produced its report, voices from the right lamented that the panel had not featured, alongside Jim Baker and Ed Meese and Sandra Day O'Connor, that angular, high-cheekboned, coolly intelligent face. In public Mrs Kirkpatrick had the look of having sucked on a lemon, or heard too much liberal and relativist claptrap. She, in contrast, was the voice of forceful neoconservative common sense.

For most of the 1980s, as perhaps Ronald Reagan's most influential foreign-policy adviser, she supported military interventions, covert proxy wars, the coddling of anti-communist dictators and the full-blooded, unapologetic pursuit of America's national interests. Asked 20 years later about Iraq, old age or greater wisdom seemed to have tamed her. George Bush junior was “a bit too interventionist for my taste”. As for moral imperialism, “I don't think there is one scintilla of evidence that such an idea is taken seriously anywhere outside a few places in Washington, DC.”

Certain sentences from her most famous article, “Dictatorships and Double Standards”—written on her summer holiday in France, published in Commentary magazine in November 1979—now induce a sigh. “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.” Yes indeed.

Yet Mrs Kirkpatrick's presence on the ISG would not have been a calming one. In the Reagan cabinet, into which her Commentary article had suddenly translated her from her professorial suite at Georgetown, she distrusted consensus, and did not know the meaning of the word “team-player”. Her relations with Alexander Haig, Reagan's first secretary of state, were poisonous; with George Shultz, his second, sorely strained. Neither man liked to have competition, least of all a woman's, for the president's ever-drifting ear. Mr Haig and Mrs Kirkpatrick, who sat on the National Security Council, fell out over the Falklands war, where she had an embarrassingly soft spot for Argentina's General Galtieri; Mr Shultz and she came to blows over the illegal scheme—“an impeachable offence”, as he mildly told her—to find extra-congressional funding for the Nicaraguan contras. Mrs Kirkpatrick made it an open secret that she wanted to be secretary of state herself, or at least head of the NSC. Over his dead body, implied Mr Shultz.

Her actual job was ambassador to the United Nations, the first woman to do it. She found the UN a dangerous place, the work miserable, and Security Council debates “more like a mugging than anything else”. There, too, her shade seemed to haunt the corridors in the days before she died. Her style at the General Assembly was a model for John Bolton's, confrontational and blunt to a degree, and the present ambassador, as he resigned amid general hooting, candidly acknowledged his debt to her. But times were different then. Mrs Kirkpatrick represented an America that had become, under Jimmy Carter, an apologetic and unconfident country. She saw no need to compromise or conciliate on anything, but instead came out furiously fighting against the “expansionist” Soviet Union and its client states. “There is...only one revolutionary society in the contemporary world,” she cried in 1984, “and that is our society.”

Leftish leanings

Reagan adored her, telling her she had removed from America's back the sign that said “Kick Me”. She reciprocated, enjoying his gallantry and sunny self-confidence; but it took a while, because she had never spent time with a Republican before. Her family, dragged from Oklahoma to Illinois by a wild-catter father prospecting for oil, were all Texas Democrats. She herself, for a time, signed up to the minuscule Socialist Party of America and had a Marxist teacher. She was pro-union all her life, and indeed stayed a Democrat in name until 1985. But by that time she was also calling her party the “Blame America first” crowd. She mocked them at the Republican convention of 1984 for their leftish, appeasing, lily-livered ways. To become a Republican was now her only recourse.

Briefly, at the end of Reagan's second term, she thought of running for president herself. Anything to keep out of the White House that wimpish, generalising, accommodating man, George Bush senior. Several colleagues thought she might have made a great commander-in-chief; Michael Novak, going further, said he wanted her to be empress of the world. But her heart was truly in academe, to which she returned. She had never wanted to do anything else—outside the ambit of a long, happy marriage and children—except be a professor of political science. That, and see America bestriding the world again, bathed in “its glorious legitimacy and success”, and never saying sorry.