INTRODUCTION
SURE, ID LIKE To have an autobiography, Jeane Kirkpatrick once told me. I just dont want to write it myself.
Someone else might have been trying for a witty paradox. But Jeane, who always held tightly to the idea that she was a Tru-manesque plain speaker, was saying here exactly what she meant. She would have welcomed an authentic record of her days, but considered the first-person-singular pronoun such an enemy that she was not willing to attempt it. If pressed, she would claim that in the modern publishing world such books had to be undignified to be acceptable, then haughtily suggest that the requirement to present an intimate self was like Coriolanus having to show his wounds. But the fact was that while it was never hard for Jeane to say what she deeply believed, it was often difficult for her to say what she deeply felt.
She had actually tried to write such a book soon after leaving the Reagan administration in 1985. Advanced close to $1 million by Simon & Schustera testament to what a hot property she was at that timeshe worked fitfully on it for a couple of years before finally giving up. She resisted showing the manuscript to anyone. I kept pestering her about it until she finally sent me a copy, fifteen years after she had put it away. It was fragmentary and stiffly formal, filled with abandonments and new beginnings, resolute only in its avoidance of character and anecdote and, above all, introspection in the discussion of her years as ambassador to the United Nations and paladin of the Reagan Doctrine. No naming names or telling where the bodies were buried; written very much in the manner of someone who had been married for forty years to a former intelligence officer and who seemed to believe that potential readers had no need to know.
Her colleagues and sometime enemies from the Reagan years, Al Haig and George Shultz, were able to erect serviceable personae in their score-settling books, but Jeane couldnt manage this, although she certainly had scores to settle with both of them and a handful of others. One of her core beliefs, fundamental to her anticommunism, was that individuals, not impersonal forces, make history. But she believed with equal ferocity that her own private history was nobody elses business.
Still, in the years that followed her failure with the Simon & Schuster book, people kept urging her to tell her tale. I was one of them. The first time was in 1988 when I happened to be seated next to her at a dinner organized to watch the first Dukakis-Bush debate. I well remembered her from appearances on Meet the Press and other Sunday morning news shows a few years earliercoolly examining her fingernails as a way of gaining time for a response to generally hostile questions, or arching a brow above a hooded eye to express dismay at obvious bias, both signature gestures of someone who had chosen to be a public hard case. Not knowing she had already tried, I asked why she hadnt written the inside story of her role in Reagans first term. Barely responding (later on I found out that her husband Kirk was quite ill that evening and she had come to the event only out of loyalty to the host), she said that she was not interested in contributing to the culture of gossip. Her tone indicated that this was not a subject to pursue.
A mutual friend, Jim Denton, reconnected us a decade later, in 1998, when he was executive director of Freedom House, and Jeane and I were on the board. Kirk had died a few years earlier and Jeane seemed more willing than before to escape her own self-imposed confines. I was starting a publishing company called Encounter Books and asked her again about a book, this time with a professional interest. She said that she was already working on onea big policy book on the United States abroad, which she gave me to believe she saw as her legacy project. It was overdue and she needed to finish it before she could even begin to think about anything else. I told her how important I thought the book I was proposing would be, even years later, in telling two major stories at once: the migration she had led of centrist Democrats out of their hijacked party into the Reagan camp, and the major role they had played in fighting the Cold War to victory.
Present at the destruction? she asked after thinking for a minute.
Thats it, I replied.
This is when she said in a provisional way that she would like to have such a book but didnt really want to write it herself.
We danced around the subject for a few minutes and then I made her a proposal: I would do the groundwork, interviewing her occasionally, as our schedules permitted; then I would put together something like a syllabus of her own thoughts and memories, which she could work from as an editor as much as a writer.
In what I soon came to understand was a habitual tendency to let people believe they had heard what they wanted to hear from herthus compartmentalizing that commitment to plain speakingshe gave the impression of being interested in this plan. And so we began to have conversations.
Most were at her office at the American Enterprise Institute, a place filled with memorabilia that provided context for the project: a Truman for President button; the fan letter that Ronald Reagan wrote her after he read her famous 1979 article Dictatorships and Double Standards; a battle standard given to her by Enrique Bermdez, commander of the Nicaraguan Contras; a beautiful piece of quartz that Jordans King Hussein brought her once when he personally flew his private 747 to the United States; testimonials from Israeli leaders indicating how they had counted on her above anyone else in the Reagan administration to be their champion.
Living on opposite coasts, we had ten or so of these conversations over a period of a few years. Most lasted a couple of hours, but were stop-and-go because of interruptions from the phone calls asking her to testify, participate in panel discussions or be a keynoter at a Republican Party gathering. Constitutionally unable to turn down the invitations, but not particularly anxious to accept them, she would cradle the receiver to her neck and study her nails while speaking in her staccato way to these callers. Then, after hanging up, she would make the transition back to our talk by going through the repertory of ticsrodent-like scrabbling in her purse for buried keys, pens, and prescription pills; noisily adjusting necklaces, rings and bracelets; jerkily searching through a litter of papers on her desk for some conclusive but invisible piece of dataall of which made her seem to be fighting the revolt of the inanimate objects.
She tended to lecture rather than chat, particularly if big ideas were at issue. (She understood that this made her seem a little starchy, and once told me: Its a problem. I was a teacher long before I got involved in government and Im a teacher now that Im not in government. Its who I am.) She didnt like to stray too far from her favorite subjects: how growing up in Middle America at a certain moment in our national life had been a time-lapse civics lesson; how loyalty to the Democratic Party was so deeply embedded in her identity that it required an intellectual bone marrow transplant to get rid of it; how the study of totalitarianism had become her lifes work by the time she was twenty years old; how her husband Kirk (full name Evron Kirkpatrick) had been a great man; how her friends Hubert Humphrey and Scoop Jackson were her ideal of public servants; and how she and other centrist Democrats unwilling to regard the decline of America as irreversible had rebelled against Jimmy Carters presidency, although she herself had done this without any notion that she would eventually embrace and be embraced by Ronald Reagan.
