A Lecturer for The U.N.

Who talks tough on policy

It helped that Jeane Kirkpatrick is a woman and a Democrat. But her selection as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations was made chiefly on the grounds of her intellect. She first came to Reagan's attention last year when Commentary magazine published her forcefully written, tightly reasoned article criticizing the weaknesses and inconsistencies in Jimmy Carter's human rights policies. She concluded that the President behaved "not like a man who abhors autocrats, but like one who abhors only right-wing autocrats."

Reagan told her that the article was the best piece he had read on the subject, and the one that came closest to expressing his own foreign policy views. From that time on, Jeane Jordan Kirkpatrick, 54, seemed destined for a top post in a Reagan Administration.

She is part of a group of hard-line defense and foreign policy intellectuals associated with the American Enterprise Institute and Georgetown University, where she teaches political science. A gifted lecturer with a schoolmarm's no-nonsense forthrightness, Kirkpatrick is admired and sometimes feared by colleagues as a scorching polemicist--an attribute that may win her some points but may also make some difficulties for her, as it did for one other outspoken U.N. Ambassador, Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

The daughter of an Oklahoma wildcatter who never struck it rich, Kirkpatrick graduated from Manhattan's Barnard College ('48). Her teaching plans were interrupted when she married Evron Kirkpatrick, who is now executive director of the American Political Science Association, and devoted most of the next eight years to bringing up their three sons. When the children had all entered school, she earned her doctorate in political science from Columbia University, and then started teaching at Georgetown. In 1974 she published a book, Political Woman, in which she showed that American women in politics behave much like men, though they tend to get a later start because of child rearing. "There is a reluctance to have women run for office," she explains. "But one of the interesting things is how quickly this reluctance gives way. One woman says, 'No door opens unless you push it,' but that's really all it took."

As a lifelong Democrat, Kirkpatrick went through some vigorous soul-searching before she endorsed Reagan. Fairly liberal on domestic issues, she quarreled mainly with her party over foreign policy. In the post-Viet Nam era, she thought, Democrats had become much too guilt-ridden and irresolute. She wrote: "Viet Nam presumably taught us that the United States could not serve as the world's policeman; it should also have taught us the dangers of trying to be the world's midwife to democracy when the birth is scheduled to take place under conditions of guerrilla war." She was aghast at what she considered to be the foreign policy setbacks tolerated by the Carter Administration. Its failure, she wrote in Commentary, "is now clear to all except its architects." She complained that the G.O.P. "has not articulated any inclusive vision of the public good that reflects its concern for the well-being of the whole community." But she concluded that Reagan shares many of her views and "he would be the most effective communicator in the White House since F.D.R." Reagan, she added, "is a secure person, comfortable in dealing with experts and ready to listen--even to women."

Reagan's advisers seem just as happy with Kirkpatrick. Says a member of the foreign policy transition team: "She is more pragmatic and more political than most academics. You can imagine her making policy because she thinks fast and talks tough." But Kirkpatrick cautions that "by habit and by temperament, I am rather low-key in my jobs. I do not come in swinging or making pronouncements."

Some critics question her ability to function among Third World representatives at the U.N. Says a liberal foreign policy analyst: "She is too rigid to do the job. She has no taste for pluralism." Kirkpatrick Insists that there is a vast difference between getting along and giving in, the latter a tendency she ascribes to the Carter Administration. "There is no one generalization that is sensible and true for the entire Third World," she says. But, as she wrote in Commentary, "a posture of continuous self-abasement and apology vis-a-vis the Third World is neither morally necessary nor politically appropriate."

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