Jeane Kirkpatrick, former U.N. ambassador, 80, dies

WASHINGTON — Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, a staunch Reagan-era anti-Communist who infused American foreign policy with firm conviction as the first American woman to serve as U.N. ambassador, has died. She was 80.

Ms. Kirkpatrick died late Thursday in her sleep at her home in Bethesda, Md., according to an announcement Friday on the Web site of the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank where she worked for several decades after leaving office. Ms. Kirkpatrick's assistant said she had been suffering from heart disease, though no cause of death was announced.

After Ms. Kirkpatrick gained entry into the male purview of foreign policy, Madeleine Albright and Condoleezza Rice followed her, serving in high-profile national-security positions for the Clinton and now the Bush administration. Secretary of State Rice on Friday called her a role model, "an academic who brought great intellectual power to her work."

A political scientist who received a doctorate from Columbia University and studied at the Institut de Sciences Politiques in Paris — Ms. Kirkpatrick came to the attention of Ronald Reagan after writing an article for the conservative journal Commentary in 1979.

Called "Dictatorships and Double Standards," the piece argued that utopian thinking (under the Carter administration) had moved U.S. foreign policy to destabilize friendly, anti-Communist regimes such as Anastasio Somoza's in Nicaragua and Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi's of Iran — only to find them replaced by unfriendly totalitarian ones.

"Traditional authoritarian governments are less repressive than revolutionary autocracies," she wrote.

Reagan called Ms. Kirkpatrick, a lifelong Democrat, in for a meeting. Hesitant to take a job in a Republican administration, she was swayed by Reagan's commitment, and his remark, "I was a Democrat once, you know."

In February 1981, she went to New York as Reagan's ambassador to the United Nations, an institution she had little use for and compared to "death and taxes." Eager to restore U.S. prowess in the wake of defeat in Vietnam and the capture of American diplomats as hostages in Iran, she vowed to do battle against Marxists, Communists and anyone else who mistook U.S. policy mistakes for weakness.

When nations opposed U.S. policy, she made sure Congress — with its power of the purse to underwrite the U.N. budget — knew their names. She argued for El Salvador's right-wing junta and against Nicaragua's left-wing Sandinista government. She defended Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and the American invasion of Grenada in 1983.

Perhaps her most dramatic moment at the United Nations came in 1983, when she presented a film of the Soviet Union's downing of a South Korean passenger plane, KAL 007, that had strayed into Soviet airspace. All 269 passengers, including a U.S. congressman, and crew aboard were killed.

An icon to many conservatives, Ms. Kirkpatrick was for most of her life a Democrat. Her husband, Evron, head of the American Political Science Association, was an adviser to liberal Minnesota Sen. Hubert H. Humphrey. But she said later that they were "chronically dismayed" by the party's drift toward the left after 1972. A "serious Christian," over the years she also talked about her discomfort with the left's counterculture and with same-sex marriages.

Although she did not officially change parties until 1985, Ms. Kirkpatrick had lasting influence on the political labeling of Democrats as weak on foreign policy.

In 1984, Democrats held their convention in San Francisco, nominating former Vice President Walter Mondale. At the subsequent Republican Convention in Dallas, where Reagan was re-nominated, Ms. Kirkpatrick blasted the "San Francisco Democrats" she said had driven her away from her party.

"When Marxist dictators shoot their way into power in Central America, the San Francisco Democrats don't blame the guerrillas and their Soviet allies," she said. "They blame United States policies of 100 years ago. But then they always blame America first."

Kirkpatrick also supported the Iran-contra initiative, in which funds from Iranian purchases of weapons were diverted to help contra rebels in Nicaragua.

After she resigned the U.N. post and left government in 1985, Ms. Kirkpatrick wrote widely and became an unexpected draw on the lecture circuit. She also joined seven other former U.N. ambassadors in a letter advising Congress that a plan to withhold U.S. dues to force reform at the United Nations was misguided and would "create resentment, build animosity and actually strengthen opponents of reform."

She considered running for president in 1988, the year that George H.W. Bush was elected, but she quit early, saying she would accept the vice presidential slot if asked. She was not — Bush picked Indiana Sen. Dan Quayle — and she returned to academia and think tanks.

Her support for Israel, particularly at the United Nations where the Jewish state often is denounced, was steadfast.

In 2002, at a seminar in Washington sponsored by the Zionist Organization of America, Ms. Kirkpatrick said a Palestinian state would be "a catastrophic mistake" and a danger to Israel. It would be appeasement, she argued, and a step backward from the U.S. fight against terrorism.

Ms. Kirkpatrick also helped found the Center for a Free Cuba in 1997.

Jeane Duane Jordan was born in Duncan, Okla., an oil wildcatter's town about 160 miles from Dallas. She attended Stephens College in Missouri, then transferred to Barnard College in New York. Later she got a master's degree and Ph.D. from Columbia, where her dissertation was on the rise of fascism in Britain.

Even before completing her doctorate, she was appointed associate professor at Georgetown University, teaching European government, French politics and political theory.

In an interview with The Washington Times last May, she called President Bush's foreign policy "a little too interventionist for my taste, frankly," urging skepticism about any foreign campaign that turns into nation-building. "It is extremely difficult for one nation to seriously remake another nation," she said, adding that she was "very much in favor of his actions in Afghanistan and have not opposed them in Iraq."

Asked about her legacy, she said she hoped she had brought about a realignment in American politics and a renewed respect for the United States in U.N. corridors. "I wanted to make it clear we were there to stand up for U.S. interests and principles," she said.

She is survived by two sons. A third, Douglas, died earlier this year. Her husband of 40 years, known as "Kirk," died in 1995.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.