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Jeane Kirkpatrick, born Jeane Duane Jordan in Duncan, Oklahoma, graduated from Barnard College in 1948, and received a doctorate in political science from Columbia University in 1968. During her early academic career she was a Marxist, joining the Youth section of the Socialist Party. At Columbia her principal adviser was Franz Neumann, a revisionist Marxist. In 1967, she joined the faculty of Georgetown University, and became a full professor of political science in 1968.
She became active in politics as a Democrat in the 1970s, and was active in the later campaigns of former Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Hubert Humphrey. Kirkpatrick published a number of articles in political science journals reflecting her disillusionment with the Democratic party, and was especially critical of the foreign policy of Democratic President Jimmy Carter.
Kirkpatrick's political turn seems to have been driven largely by a religious turn. Explaining her disillusionment with institutions such as the U.N., she has said "as I watched the behavior of the nations of the U.N. (including our own), I found no reasonable ground to expect any one of those governments to transcend permanently their own national interests for those of another country...I conclude that it is a fundamental mistake to think that salvation, justice, or virtue come through merely human institutions...Democracy not only requires equality but also an unshakable conviction in the value of each person, who is then equal. Cross cultural experience teaches us not simply that people have different beliefs, but that people seek meaning and understand themselves in some sense as members of a cosmos ruled by God."
In 1980, she became the foreign policy adviser for the Republican presidential candidate Ronald Reagan during his campaign. After winning the election, Reagan nominated Kirkpatrick as United States ambassador to the United Nations, a position she held for four years. She was one of the Administration's strongest open supporters of Argentina against Britain in the Falklands War. She later became a member of Reagan's national security team, where she was accused of accepting bribes, falsifying tapes that implicated Soviet forces in the shooting down of a South Korean passenger jet (Flight 007) on September 1, 1983, and advocating the dismantling of India, all of which she denied.
In 1985 Kirkpatrick became a Republican and returned to teaching at Georgetown. She became a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. In 1993 she co-founded Empower America, a conservative public-policy organization.
Biography
Books
Quotes
External links