“How did you set about achieving your life-long ambition to be the US Ambassador to the United Nations?” a group of students interviewing Jeanne Jordan Kirkpatrick from her hometown in Duncan, Oklahoma, once asked. “I laughed,” she recalls. “It never even occurred to me; it never crossed my mind. I was interested in being a political science professor—that was my goal and in many ways it’s still my goal.

“Many people would say that my most important professional achievement was serving in the UN,” she continues, “but I wouldn’t say that. Many things stick out—being at the UN was part of a much bigger experience in my life.”

Life has been and continues to be an incredible journey for Ambassador Kirkpatrick. “I’ve always had a lot of interests—too many in some ways—because one of my interests would distract me from another,” she explains. Political Science, however, emerged as the primary interest to which she dedicated her professional life.

After graduating from Barnard College in 1948, Ambassador Kirkpatrick received a masters in political science from Columbia University and embarked upon her doctoral studies. Fourteen months into research on her dissertation, tragedy interrupted the Ambassador’s work. While in France on a French government fellowship, she learned that her primary thesis advisor had been killed in an accident in the Alps. “In those days, a topic was between a mentor and a student,” she explains. “When I went back to Columbia, I was told that they didn’t have anyone who was interested in France at that time.”

Although devastated by this setback, Kirkpatrick picked up the pieces and dedicated herself to a new era in her life. “I entered into what I call my intensive period of child bearing and child rearing,” she says. “There was a time when my husband Kirk [also a political scientist and former Director of the American Political Science Association] and I had three boys under five—they absorbed all of my attention and most of my time for more than eight years. The births of my three sons were the most important events in my life. Not much after that is my husband, to whom I was married for a little over 40 years and who died a few years ago.

“The most important events in my career are, I suppose, quite a bit harder to define. Completing my PhD was very important. Ultimately, I started a new dissertation entirely, retook my exams, and completed my doctorate, which then put me in a position to win the job I wanted at Georgetown University in 1967.” The Ambassador believes that the appointment at Georgetown was crucial to her long-term career, because it put her on a serious professional track. Also, since her sons were, by then, in school all day, she felt free to concentrate on her professional interests.

“You have to remember that this was still a time when there were lots of prejudices against women in the academic world,” she explains. “I had good colleagues at Georgetown, I had good students, I liked being there a lot, and I still do. I became progressively more and more engaged in political science research and I developed new skills, including new research skills.”

Kirkpatrick’s interest in the empirical approaches to political science, survey-based research, and comparative politics laid the foundations for her next three books: Leader and Vanguard in Mass Society: A Study of Peronist Argentina, The Political Woman, and The New Presidential Elite. “I think that those books were significant political and professional achievements, which established me as a serious political scientist.”

A lifelong Democrat, Kirkpatrick also became involved in national politics including the Democaratic Conventions of 1960, 1964, 1968, and 1972. During the Carter Administration, however, she found herself increasingly disillusioned with the party’s stance, particularly on issues revolving around foreign policy. During the summer of 1979, while spending time at her house in the village of Les Beaux de Provence, in France, she wrote an article titled “Dictatorship and Double Standards,” which was later published in Commentary magazine.

At the time, Kirkpatrick realized that she was undertaking unconventional analysis for someone associated with liberal democratic politics. “I was perplexed by a lot of the positions my government was taking. I found some of those policies undesirable and almost certain to fail. In the article, I took the cases of Iran and Nicaragua as examples of foreign policy running amuck that I thought was going to lead to very negative consequences for the United States,” she says. “We’re still coping with one of those major failures today—Iran.”

An acquaintance of Kirkpatrick’s read the article and handed a copy to Ronald Reagan, who wrote Kirkpatrick and expressed his interest in discussing the article with her. The future president and the future ambassador became acquainted over the next six months. Kirkpatrick joined Reagan’s foreign policy taskforce in the summer of 1980, at his request. After the election in November of 1980, Reagan made a phone call to Kirkpatrick that altered the course of her life.

“In the same breath he asked me to be his representative to the United Nations and a member of his cabinet,” she says. “I said I wasn’t sure I could do the job, because I’d never done anything like it before. He said he was sure I could do it and he wanted me to. So, with a lot of encouragement from my husband and from Ronald Reagan, I agreed to give it my best try: that is how I came to be at the United Nations.”

From 1981 to 1985 Dr. Kirkpatrick served as the first woman appointed by the United States to serve as ambassador to the United Nations. “I learned a lot in my four-and-a-half years at the UN,” she states. “I learned a great deal about the way the world works. I was also in the Cabinet for those years and in the National Security Council. I learned a lot about the way the US government works that I had never learned in political science textbooks.”

Kirkpatrick’s best try clearly pleased President Reagan, who later referred to her as “a giant among the diplomats of the world.” Still, Kirkpatrick never doubted her desire to return to the university and resume her academic career, which she has always felt was her true vocation. In 1985, after stepping down from her position at the UN, she returned to Georgetown University. That same year, she officially became a Republican.

Since that time, her life has continued to be rich and varied. She served as a member of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board from 1985 to 1990 and as a member of the Defense Policy Review Board from 1985-1993. From 1991 to 1992, Kirkpatrick chaired the Secretary of Defense Commission on Fail Safe and Risk Reduction. She is a founding Co-Director of Empower America and she holds the Thomas and Dorothy Leavey University Professorship at Georgetown, where she continues to teach.

She has also received numerous honors including the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the French Prix Politique, the Gold Medal of Veterans of Foreign Wars, and the Defender of Jerusalem Award. Georgetown University, Tel Aviv University, St. John’s University, and Hebrew University have been among the institutions that have awarded her honorary degrees.

In March of 2003, President George W. Bush nominated Kirkpatrick to chair the US Delegation to the 59th Human Rights Commission of the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations. Reflecting upon the role the United Nations plays in the world, Kirkpatrick says, “I think the United Nations is a place in which member states can develop important conversations and important policies. The UN is important as an arena, but I do not think it’s a major actor in world affairs, nor was it ever intended to be. If you read the UN charter, for example, you will see immediately that it says that the Secretary General is the ‘principle administrator:’ it doesn’t say executive, it doesn’t say leader, it says ‘administrator.’ Member states make the policies and the UN depends principally on decisions of member states.”

Rattling off a litany of recent human rights abuses in Cuba, Chechnya, the Sudan and other countries, the ambassador says she does not believe the Human Rights Commission will make important progress until member states are willing to condemn the human rights violations of other states. Thus far, she does not see that willingness on the part of member states.

Nonetheless, her resolve to address important political questions and issues facing the world is unwavering and the lines between her professional life and her personal life continue to be blurred. “One of our sons once said that he grew up in a political science subculture and, in a very real sense, that was true,” she explains. “Jack Peltason [President Emeritus, University of California and Chancellor Emeritus, UC Irvine] is a good example of a very close personal friend and a professional associate—there has never been any real distinction between the two.”

When Dr. Peltason invited Ambassador Kirkpatrick to deliver the annual Peltason Lecture on Democracy through the UC Irvine School of Social Sciences Center for the Study of Democracy, she readily accepted. On Thursday, May 8, 2003, Kirkpatrick’s lecture, “Human Rights and Democracy: The Essential Connection,” was attended by more than 200 students, faculty, staff, friends of the school, and guests from the community.

“This is my third visit to UCI and I think it’s a beautiful campus,” she says. “I admire the manner in which it’s developed. I’ve also been very favorably impressed with the social science program. I think you have a rich program in the School of Social Sciences: each time I come to campus it has developed since the previous time I was here. I think it’s doing really well and I think students at the School of Social Sciences are very lucky.

“I met with a group of young social scientists this morning and I gave them my very best advice,” she concludes. “Follow your interests. The surest way to have a successful and interesting life is to follow your interests. I think if you do this consistently enough, good things happen.”

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