PUBLIC NUISANCES:Jeane Kirkpatrick, RIP/Barroom Reflections
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
R . E m m e t t Ty r r e l l , J r . Jeane Kirkpatrick, RIP P U B L I C N U I S A N C E S WASHINGTON TWAS AT JEANE KIRKPATRICK’S FUNERAL on December 11 that I finally heard of some good...
...Seeking the support of liberal intellectuals, Carter had summoned her and a handful of others into his pert presence...
...According to SBRB, if a foreign government is not amenable to our diplomatic requests we simply bust the joint up...
...With eight decades of growing 74 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR F E B R U A R Y 2 0 0 7 R . E M M E T T T Y R R E L L , J R . virtue in her wake but tired by a weakening heart, she told him that that she would die in the bedroom of her Maryland home before her next birthday...
...At her funeral one of her surviving sons recalled her telling him, “My strength is your father...
...For a while Washington talked up other strategies, “Brinkmanship” and “Roll Back...
...She began her intellectual life a socialist and an atheist...
...And if he plans to drive home or even take public transportation, forget about it...
...In his press conference Mr...
...And with our troops safely home from Iran we would not even have to clean the place up...
...Her public defiance of bullies both in domestic politics and in the UN is well known...
...He worked his magic, and when she led her contingent of eggheads onto the White House front lawn she revealed to the waiting press corps the extent of Carter’s political genius...
...Within a few months our lightning-quick military could turn much of Iran into a ruin, and according to the protocols of SBRB our troops would be home in no time...
...Twenty-seven years ago Jeane predicted such a scenario...
...Her respect for Reagan only deepened through the years...
...Edward (Teddy) Kennedy...
...Three days after her death the right-wing dictator Pinochet died, as a private citizen at home in prosperous, democratic Chile...
...But after leaving the house of hustlers on the East River, she became deeply Christian...
...Most of these hacks are reflexive even on those rare occasions when they make an elementary effort at being reflective...
...Photographs of what we accomplished in Serbia merely with airpower and in Iraq with airpower and armor ought to persuade even a stubborn fellow like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad that if he continues to displease us his office will be a wreck...
...They were very serious thinkers, often political scientists...
...According to Jeane’s pastor, during her momentous tenure as our UN ambassador Jeane was so wobbled by the international body’s cynicism and moral emptiness that she forsook years of atheism and became a person of faith...
...R . E m m e t t Ty r r e l l , J r . Jeane Kirkpatrick, RIP P U B L I C N U I S A N C E S WASHINGTON TWAS AT JEANE KIRKPATRICK’S FUNERAL on December 11 that I finally heard of some good achieved by the United Nations midst all its dithering and graft...
...Really, Senator Kennedy in old age has become frighteningly hotheaded, and it is not reassuring to see that other Democrats—for instance Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi—are also recommending the brevity of World War II as more desirable than our more moderate pace in Iraq...
...It was the beginning of a working relationship that led to deep friendship...
...Leave that thankless task to the French and the Germans...
...The military has demonstrated that it is sufficiently powerful to smash any aggressor anywhere on earth, but American public opinion is not sufficiently resolute to sustain a commitment of American troops in hostile environs...
...At first it looked as though all F E B R U A R Y 2 0 0 7 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 7 5...
...The original neocons broadened American conservatism and distinguished themselves by their independence of mind, their courage, and their principled defense of the American way of life...
...Jeane was very American...
...Bush lived up to Johnson’s assessment...
...The validation of her political writing was on display the week she died, most notably the validation of her “Dictatorships and Double Standards...
...For a certitude, they lack the stomach for Franklin Roosevelt’s goal of transforming Nazi Germany and militaristic Japan into democracies...
...but with her keen mind and natural courage she never flinched if principles were at stake...
...Tehran’s infrastructure will be a mess overnight...
...But apparently at least the Democrats do not have the patience to pacify these conquered countries...
...and religion gently informed all she thought and did thereafter...
...The mentality of many Americans and the enormous capacity for destruction of our military can be wedded for a very effective and exciting strategic doctrine...
...However, I am not sure I would adopt the drastic measures being suggested by some of the critics of this war, for instance the bellicose Sen...
...In board meetings she was equally stalwart when anyone tried to take advantage of her colleagues under siege...
...And so she did, a dreadful loss to us all...
...The Cold War was not as dominated by instant gratification as the present...
...Today’s neoconservatives are mostly misnomers, the consequence of journalism’s invincible ignorance...
...The demands of history change...
...Henry Jackson, Jeane came to be called a neoconservative...
...Sen...
...Hillary Rodham Clinton would still be in her cheering stage as our troops headed home...
...Jeane and her husband, who had also been her teacher, fought for years to maintain high intellectual standards in academe...
...Less well known is the counsel and loyalty she gave friends under fire...
...Re-evaluating our tactics and strategy is appropriate, though we should resist the drift of the Massachusetts senator’s taunts about the Iraq war dragging on longer than our war with Germany and Japan...
...Critics of the White House press corps will understand the slip...
...After a few beers surely Senator Kennedy will see the sense of it...
...They are also impatient, which is one of the reasons that I too have given thought to a revision in our military posture...
...Only one other person fortified me with advice like that, Lady Thatcher, who asseverated, “If you have nothing else, you have your principles...
...Americans were going to stand with the President to defeat the re-emergence of right-wing aggressors, this time in the form of Baathists in Iraq and Islamofascists in Afghanistan...
...Jeane has been the paradigmatic 20th-century intellectual of the good sort...
...She became a Hubert Humphrey Democrat with her beloved husband, “Kirk,” the legendary head of the American Political Science Association who through his tenure kept it a serious instrument of American scholarship...
...And as the dinner progressed the fire she had shone on the floor at the UN ignited: “You stick to your guns...
...Barroom Reflections WASHINGTON SUPPOSEITWILLBEconsidered highly outréfor me to say it, but I shall say it anyway...
...They are a reckless lot...
...With the money we save we could get on with busting up Syria...
...With other liberal Democrats drawn mostly from the camps of Humphrey and Sen...
...One of the salient messages to be taken from this press conference is that the White House is now engaged in a far-ranging re-evaluation of America’s military posture...
...The strong consensus among Republicans and Democrats when we sent troops into Afghanistan was apparently misleading...
...In fact, their thought processes are almost wholly reflexive...
...The President spoke quite well at his press conference shortly before Christmas, and was very gentlemanly when he caught one of the journalists interrogating him in an embarrassing malapropism...
...She was devoted to her sons and to her husband...
...Mind you, she had always had an abundance of secular faith before President Ronald Reagan tapped her for the UN...
...On the board of The American Spectator she was true blue when the Clinton administration harassed us with its grand jury and its journalistic hacks...
...Of all her achievements her most precious, however, was her achievement as mother and wife...
...The Democrats’ abandonment of this war makes it apparent that an entirely new strategy is necessary if our military is to be used to achieve our diplomatic goals...
...The hack asked him to be “reflexive” about the war in Iraq when the word he meant to use was “reflective...
...As those two sacred cows revealed their barnyard primitivism she reassessed the evidence...
...Yes, Senator, the United States could end this war as expeditiously as we ended World War II, but the use of nuclear weapons on Iraqi cities is not the way to do it...
...Thus we must adopt a strategy that recognizes the impatience of public opinion, as well as public opinion’s enthusiasm during the initial stages of combat...
...Her son recalls a more recent declaration from her...
...The movement began in the late 1970s and pretty much concluded in the late 1980s...
...Friends suspected as much...
...Bust the place up and be gone”—that can be the slogan for the Strategy of the Bar Room Brawler...
...In Cuba the Communist dictator Castro is about to die, still a dictator, still a menace to the democratic West, and about to hand over his despotism to his Communist brother...
...She was always a lady, never without refinement...
...Jeane was a fine writer with a gift for the memorable line: “San Francisco Democrats,” or “Blame America First...
...But by the 1970s many liberal Democrats were beginning their long dissipation into fantasy and the megalomania that we witness today...
...This readiness for combat Jeane brought into her political life and to her wide-ranging intellectual interests...
...Her faith in the American way of life, its freedom, democracy, and equality, was as ardent as it was intelligently conceived...
...She cited “Kirk” often...
...Very impressive,” is how the British historian and journalist Paul Johnson found this President a week earlier when the President conferred on him a Presidential Medal of Freedom...
...That is all to the good...
...My suggestion is that the Pentagon, the State Department, and the White House adopt what might be called the Strategy of the Bar Room Brawler (SBRB...
...Softly and wryly she sang a line from an old American folk song, “Nobody loves ya’ when you’re down and out...
...For the first time in her life Jeane would support a Republican, Ronald Reagan...
...After a historic 1980 meeting with President Jimmy Carter, Jeane made clear that enough was enough...
...I recall one gloomy night with her at dinner when the Spectator’s prospects seemed bleak...
...The Cold War had the strategy of Containment...
Vol. 40 • February 2007 • No. 1
