Nor did the outbreak on 9/11 of what I persist in calling World War IV tempt her back into battle. She had serious reservations about the pru dence of the Bush Doctrine, which she evidently saw neither as an analogue of the Truman Doctrine nor as a revival of the Reaganite spirit in foreign pol icy. Even so, she was clearly reluctant to join in the clamor against it, which for all practical purposes meant relegating herself to the sidelines.The Council on Foreign Relations, which named a chair in her honor, issued a press release. Newt, Bill Bennett, Michael Novak and others reflect on what Jeane Kirkpatrick meant to them and the nation. NRO helpfully posts an old WFB piece on "St. Jeane of the UN." Michael Novak also posted an entirely different and touching tribute at First Things:
Aristotle wrote that the criterion of good moral action is not a principle or a law so much as “the man of practical wisdom”—that is, the person in your environment who habitually makes the wisest and bravest decisions of anyone else you know. Aristotle mentions, in his context, Pericles. In my circle, I always wanted to ask Jeane Kirkpatrick for advice and counsel. I wanted to watch what she did. I guess nowadays they call persons of this type “role models.” But that term doesn’t quite get the whole idea. It misses the interiority of the thing, the inner life, the fount of the wisdom one is seeking. Not a role player but a person who has lived through a lot, learned from it, and has a burning desire to get things right, circumstance by circumstance. That was Jeane.Before closing he touched on her stint in the UN:
Jeane was the architect of the emphasis on democracy and human rights that turned the later years of the 1980s into one of the most dynamic and star-bursting periods ever for the birth of new democracies. What she added to the Carter rhetoric was a firmer sense of the necessary habits, dispositions, actions, and institutions that turn human rights from “parchment barriers” on paper into real social forces. She tried to put substance and action into the high-flown empty statements of UN resolutions. When nations said one thing, then did another, Jeane carefully called them to account, privately or publicly as seemed to her wisest. She demanded straight-shooting. Countries that begged the United States for aid and relief, military help or emergency airlifts—and then stood rhetorically with the enemies of the United States on the floor of the UN—were informed that greater integrity was expected from them.
Jeane Kirkpatrick was an enormous force for honesty, liberty, candor, straightforwardness, and sheer moral bravery. She was a valiant woman and a gallant soul. She was a thoughtful and gentle colleague; a very warm, generous, and open friend; and a great, brave American heroine.
She will add much to the arguments and intellectual excitements that rage, I imagine, at the celestial banquets to which we are all called. It will be fun to engage with her again.
