Jeane Kirkpatrick, 1926-2006
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What a tower of a woman! One who commanded treacherous landscapes. If Hannah Arendt had lived long enough to mature into a neoconservative, she would have matured into Jeane Kirkpatrick.
From the AP wire story:
During her early academic career she was a Marxist and joined the youth section of the Socialist Party of America....
As with Johnny Cash and Susan Sontag, Jeane Kirkpatrick's a talent a familiarity with whom I'd scrounged countless excuses to put off establishing during her living days. Fruitlessly and again and again I'd put it off. So this latest news now stirs a shiver of remorseful recognition: to have denied acquaintance with Jeane Kirkpatrick was to have denied acquaintance with who I once had been and who, to be, I intend again. It's time to enter her tower, now damper and draftier, and, candle in hand, to ascend its spiraling staircase.
In her own words (from a truly formidable piece of necessary reading, "How the PLO Was Legitimized," from the July 1989 Commentary:
Traumatized by spectacular instances of violence, and by conventional conceptions of war, Americans -- and a good many Israelis -- have misconstrued the nature of PLO tactics. Both Americans and Israelis have been slow to understand that terrorist attacks are self-consciously political acts, and that the intifada is less an armed uprising than a political melodrama staged daily for credulous Western audiences whose sympathies are quicker than their comprehension. (emphasis added)
The eulogies will be issuing from many corners. Fausta's announced itself first (quoting WaPo):
She
was a leftist early in her academic career and later joined the
Democratic Party, becoming active in party politics and political
campaigns in the 1970s. But she grew disillusioned with the foreign
policy of President Jimmy Carter and eventually left the party,
aligning herself with the conservative policies of Ronald Reagan.
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Pamela says she died of a broken heart.
Jeane Kirkpatrick on the tyrannous mainstream media.
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From Ambassador Kirkpatrick's 1984 RNC speech, truer now than ever:
This is the first Republican Convention I have ever attended. I am
grateful that you should invite me, a lifelong Democrat. On the other
hand, I realize that you are inviting many lifelong Democrats to join
this common cause ...
When the San Francisco Democrats treat foreign affairs as an
afterthought, as they did, they behaved less like a dove or a hawk than
like an ostrich - convinced it would shut out the world by hiding its
head in the sand.
Today, foreign policy is central to the security, to the freedom, to
the prosperity, even to the survival of the United States. And our
strength, for which we make many sacrifices, is essential to the
independence and freedom of our allies and our friends ...
The United States cannot remain an open, democratic society if we
are left alone -- a garrison state in a hostile world. We need
independent nations with whom to trade, to consult and cooperate. We
need friends and allies with whom to share the pleasures and the
protection of our civilization.
We cannot, therefore, be indifferent to the subversion of others'
independence or to the development of new weapons by our adversaries or
of new vulnerabilities by our friends.
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Related: "See Jeane Buy A Thesaurus"
Jeane told me once that as a young woman she hadn't expected to
marry, so dedicated was she to the life of the mind. As a little girl,
she spent one of her first dollars on a thesaurus. "So what happened,"
I asked. "You fell in love?" She put it differently: "Kirk fell in love
with me."
