Jeanne Kirkpatrick, a small-town girl who became a world leader

Bethesda (Map, News) - She grew up in rural Oklahoma, but when former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Jeanne J. Kirkpatrick passed away in her sleep Thursday evening at her Bethesda home, she had long been acknowledged as one of America’s most effective and respected Cold War strategists and diplomats.

She was 80 at the time of her death, and because of declining health had made few public appearances in recent years.

Though she always called herself “a life-long Democrat,” had joined the Young People’s Socialists League in college and campaigned actively for Vice President Hubert Humphrey in his failed 1968 presidential bid, it was a Republican chief executive from another corner of Middle America who brought Kirkpatrick to the world stage. She was a Georgetown University political science professor in 1978 when she wrote a widely read Commentary Magazine article on “Dictatorships and Double Standards” that impressed then-presidential candidate Ronald Reagan, the former California governor and Hollywood actor who was raised in Tampico, Ill.

The two quickly hit it off and she agreed to be a foreign policy adviser to Reagan, who appointed her to the United Nations in 1981 and relied upon her for advice throughout his two terms in the White House. She was thus a key architect and advocate of Reagan’s foreign policy, especially his determination to assert the moral superiority of democratic freedoms against the Soviet Union and its communist satellites in Asia and Eastern Europe.

Among the most dramatic moments of her ambassadorship was the 1983 narration before the General Assembly of an audiovisual demonstration of the Soviet shoot-down of a South Korean commercial airliner that blundered into Soviet airspace. All 269 people aboard perished, including U.S. Rep. Larry McDonald, D-Ga. Kirkpatrick’s demonstration presented graphic evidence contradicting Soviet claims that Russian officials did not know they were destroying an unarmed civilian aircraft.

She was also known for a dramatic speech before the 1984 Republican National Convention in which she cited a long litany of incidents she said illustrated that “the San Francisco Democrats always blame America first” in confrontations with the Soviet empire and other enemies of democratic freedoms. Kirkpatrick’s contention became a staple of Republican campaign rhetoric that continues to the present day.

Known by her Georgetown students as a “tough” professor and to journalists and fellow diplomats as a combative defender of democracy, Kirkpatrick once told an interviewer, “I always assume that democracy is the only good form of government, quite frankly, and democracy is always to be preferred.” It was an assumption that carried her from obscure Duncan, Okla., to a president’s praise as “a giant among the diplomats of the world.”

Kirkpatrick’s husband, Devon, passed away in 1995 after 40 years of marriage. Her son Stuart is a Buddhist minister in Michigan and son John is a Florida attorney.

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