"a Dazzling Array of Opportunity"

By William R. Doerner.

For most people, leaving high public office quickly leads to a loss of prominence. Not so for Jeane Kirkpatrick. Ten weeks after returning to private life from her four-year stint as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, the blunt-spoken Kirkpatrick has become a star on the lecture circuit, a hero within her newly adopted Republican Party and probably the most talked-about, albeit undeclared, electoral newcomer on the political scene. Though Kirkpatrick finds the glare of personal celebrity "very unexpected," she is passing up few opportunities to make the most of it. "I get a lift from speaking out," she says. "And there is just a dazzling array of opportunity."

Outside of the President and perhaps the Vice President, Kirkpatrick, 58, is the most sought after political speaker in the country. She plans to accept 50 of more than 200 lecture invitations she has received for the coming year. Her fee is $20,000 and up, meaning that she will pull in a cool $1 million at least. Her written words are also in demand. Last month she agreed to sign a $900,000 contract for a book about her experiences at the U.N. This fall she will begin writing a weekly newspaper column on foreign affairs, producing at least another $150,000 a year.

Kirkpatrick will also make about 20 unpaid appearances on behalf of the Republican Party in 1985. The G.O.P. threw a bash in April just to celebrate her change of registration. Republican National Committee Chairman Frank Fahrenkopf plans to showcase Kirkpatrick in a $100,000 campaign to convert Democrats in four states with potentially close Senate races next year (Florida, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Louisiana). Last Friday 1,000 Republicans paid $50 a plate to hear her address a dinner in Des Moines; counting others who put up $1,000 each to meet her at a private reception, her appearances raised more than $100,000. Her speech sounded like a campaign rouser; Democrats, she said, "can't get elected unless things get worse -- and things won't get worse unless they get elected." She drew a standing ovation, and Iowa Governor Terry Branstad opined, "I think she would be a very attractive national candidate."

Kirkpatrick's cult standing with the party's ruling right wing was firmly established last summer, when her attack on "the San Francisco Democrats," whom she blamed for an era of national self-doubt, drew a foot-stamping response at the Republican Convention in Dallas. While her departure from the Administration was somewhat strained, Reagan went to considerable lengths to retain her. Though it has never been mentioned publicly, Secretary of State George Shultz offered her a job as his deputy. Kirkpatrick has continued to please conservative supporters with calls for an assertive U.S. foreign policy. She has been especially vocal in support of aid to the antigovernment contras in Nicaragua, and proudly notes that the rebels have named one of their 400-man brigades the Jeane Kirkpatrick Task Force.

The reasons for her growing appeal to moderates of both parties are more complex. Partly it is a matter of speaking her mind. Kirkpatrick's husband Evron, 73, known to everyone as Kirk, recalls an incident in New York: "We were on a walk waiting for a light to change, and a truck driver sticks his head out the window and says, 'Give 'em hell, Jeane.' Things like that happen all the time." Kirkpatrick also projects a formidable intelligence and the ability to think fast on her feet. On domestic social issues, she takes moderate-to-liberal stands. Feminist aspirations within the G.O.P. are soaring, moreover, and along with Senator Nancy Kassebaum and Transportation Secretary Elizabeth Dole, Kirkpatrick is regarded by many as one of the few women qualified to become a party standard bearer. Says Senator Paul Laxalt, G.O.P. general chairman: "She is a political godsend."

Kirkpatrick sums up her message in two words: "Freedom works." One of her favorite themes is the distinction between the use of force and the use of power. Force, insists Kirkpatrick, should be reserved for matters that "directly affect a vital national interest." But in "recoiling" from its use, she contends, "we have developed dangerous inhibitions about the use of American power" in economic and diplomatic forms.

Kirkpatrick sees no inconsistency in Washington's backing of the rebels in Nicaragua and the government in El Salvador. In both cases, she insists, "we are supporting democrats against nondemocrats." As for the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua, she adds ominously: "A government is not legitimate merely because it exists." Yet Kirkpatrick is no superhawk. She thinks the U.S. should limit its military effort in Nicaragua to support of the contras unless Soviet proxies there threaten vital U.S. interests.

Kirkpatrick's supporters maintain that she could balance just about any G.O.P. ticket in 1988. Vice President George Bush, for example, who has never won the trust of the G.O.P. right wing, would get ideological buttressing. Conservative Congressman Jack Kemp, relatively untutored in foreign affairs, could profit from her international expertise.

Picking Kirkpatrick for the national ticket would be a major political gamble, since she has never run for an elective office. Even friends wonder whether her sometimes abrasive personality would wear well in a long race, or for that matter whether she is willing to suffer the indignities of the stump. "She has found herself in situations where she has had, in effect, to campaign," says a close friend. "I know she does not enjoy it at all."

Kirkpatrick has disclaimed any plans for seeking office, but has declined repeatedly to rule out the possibility. "Jeane's shot will depend on the nominee," says Political Analyst Richard Scammon. "She can't run for President and nobody can run for Vice President." For the moment, moreover, Kirkpatrick has other things on her mind. "I know what I am going to do in the next year or so -- write a column, write a book," she says. "I don't know beyond that." That time frame extends approximately to the 1986 midterm election, after which the jockeying for 1988 will begin in earnest.

With reporting by Hays Gorey and Gregory H. Wierzynski/ Washington