Jeane Kirkpatrick, RIP

We join our friends at Commentary mourning the death of Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, 1926-2006: scholar,
diplomat, and champion of liberty. Her contributions to Commentary include “Dictatorships & Double Standards,” the famous essay that led directly to her appointment by Ronald Reagan as United States ambassador to the United Nations. (Commentary has now made that and other of her essays available at its site.)
Mrs. Kirkpatrick served as the United States ambassador to the United Nations during the first term of the Reagan administration. She followed in the footsteps of Daniel Patrick Moynihan and paved the way for John Bolton as the most brilliant and consequential of the American representatives ever to serve in that body.
I saw Mrs. Kirkpatrick speak in Minneapolis at the annual dinner of the Center of the American Experiment back in May 1994. Last year I had lunch with her (courtesy of Michael Ledeen) in the beautiful dining room of the American Enterprise Institute. On both occasions she recalled her connections to Minnesota through her late husband, former University of Minnesota Professor Evron Kirkpatrick, who had been influential in the growth of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party. On both occasions she was warm, gracious, funny, gallant, inspirational. The New York Sun’s Daniel Freedman recalls Mrs. Kirkpatrick at work here. She will be deeply missed. (Thanks to Commentary’s Davi Bernstein and the Center of the American Experiment’s Peter Zeller.)
UPDATE: The Stanadard has posted Norman Podhoretz’s fitting tribute to his friend: “A true America hero.”