HISTORY AND CULTURE:
The Skeptical Democrat and the Enthusiastic Republican

By Richard V. Allen

How Jeane Kirkpatrick made common cause with Ronald Reagan. By Richard V. Allen.

Reagan, then a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, was in town, and as his chief foreign policy adviser I had been trying to get Kirkpatrick and him together.

A few months before the meeting, I had read Kirkpatrick’s article “Dictatorships and Double Standards” in Commentary magazine, and given a copy to Reagan for his flight from Washington to Los Angeles. Reagan called me immediately upon reaching home. “What you gave me to read was extraordinary!” he said. “Who is this guy Jeane Kirkpatrick?”

We had a laugh about “this guy,” then discussed the article. At the end of the call, I asked if he would like to meet with the “guy” on his next visit to Washington. “Yes,” he said, and instructed me to leave enough time for a private session.

It wasn’t easy. Initially, Kirkpatrick was indifferent, hesitant, dubious. As a former Democrat himself, Reagan could sympathize. The moment they met, he went to work putting her at ease. He opened that first meeting by telling her that he considered it a private conversation for informational purposes, not a “political” one.

He then brought up her article, saying that it helped him see the differences among undemocratic regimes but that he believed leftist regimes were more deeply rooted and therefore harder to topple than their rightist counterparts.

Noting that unspeakable atrocities had occurred under rightist regimes in Spain and Germany, Kirkpatrick warned him not to read too much into that belief. Still, she generally agreed that Reagan’s assessment was correct when it came to communism.

After that, the conversation flowed smoothly, and she spoke extensively about Cuba and Latin America, with Reagan asking specific questions. She visibly relaxed. Clearly, they liked each other.

A couple of months later, at their second private meeting, the two went right to work with no preliminaries, covering the Helsinki Accords, détente, human rights, NATO, the Soviet Union, and Eastern Europe. Reagan had been thinking about Kirkpatrick’s distinctions among dictatorships, and they discussed how different regimes should be treated. This time, Kirkpatrick seemed eager to find out more about Reagan’s thinking, though she did not hesitate to argue with him or to correct anything she thought too simply put.

A third meeting followed not long after. As I was escorting her down to the hotel lobby after an hour of discussion, she turned and said, “Dick, I am ready to endorse this man for president.” She expected nothing in return. Reagan was not asking for an endorsement, I said, and suggested that it might be best simply to wait for the results of the November election. But I did inform Reagan, who was quite pleased.

He had reason to be. Finding common ground with Democrats on foreign policy was a crucial element of Reagan’s wider strategy. In the main, Democrats with expertise in foreign affairs were dismissive of Reagan as unschooled and unserious. Fortunately, that would change with time.

Jeane Kirkpatrick seemed eager to find out more about candidate Ronald Reagan’s thinking, though she did not hesitate to argue with him or to correct anything she thought too simply put.

One important bridge between Reagan and Democrats like Kirkpatrick was an organization called the Committee on the Present Danger, of which she and I were among the founders in late 1976. The aim of the group was to make Americans aware of the growth of Soviet military power and the risks posed by the SALT II treaty.

Over the course of the campaign, many Democrats on the committee met with Reagan. These off-the-record briefings in California and Washington dealt for the most part with arms control, a favorite subject for Reagan, who did not believe in merely limiting the rate of growth of weapons of mass destruction but was instead looking for ways to reduce their numbers and eventually do away with them altogether.

Reagan went into the sessions with an open mind, speaking with members of another political party just as he would with his own circle of advisers. The meetings did much to sharpen his thinking and help him find effective ways to present his views—as his position was not well understood by his opponents or by the press, and was often depicted as uninformed right-wing opposition to arms control agreements of any type.

It soon became apparent that Democratic foreign-policy experts like Kirkpatrick, Paul Nitze, Eugene V. Rostow, Henry Fowler, and Charles Tyroler (the committee’s director)—individuals deeply dissatisfied with the soft approach Presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and now Jimmy Carter had taken toward the Soviets—found in Reagan a willing listener and a suitable discussion partner. They preferred anonymity, which we provided. And Reagan was happy to have them: not just for their wisdom but because their presence likely meant that they would not be talking with Carter’s team (presuming Carter’s team would have wanted to talk to them). In this, the Carter campaign squandered a huge potential asset that became Reagan’s for the taking.

After his victory in November, Reagan and his inner circle turned to staffing the new administration. My close colleague Fred C. Ikle and I concluded that Kirkpatrick would be superb for the United Nations role envisioned by Reagan. When her name came up before the president-elect, he declared it an ideal appointment.

In the main, Democrats with expertise in foreign affairs were dismissive of Reagan as unschooled and unserious. Fortunately, that would change with time.

Jeane Kirkpatrick had, in a real sense, cleared the way for Democrats to cross the bridge to the Reagan administration. Eugene Rostow became the director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, and Paul Nitze was appointed Reagan’s chief arms negotiator. Myer Rashish became undersecretary of state; Charles Tyroler served on the Intelligence Oversight Board; Lane Kirkland, president of the AFL-CIO, joined the National Endowment for Democracy; and Edward Bennett Williams, a prominent Washington lawyer, became a member of the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board. Max Kampelman was reappointed ambassador to the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe. Bipartisanship personified.

Others followed, of course. And all of them played a role in sending communism over the edge. But Jeane Kirkpatrick, as she was in so many ways, was the first.

Copublished by Rowman & Littlefield and the Hoover Press is Fight Club Politics: How Partisanship Is Poisoning the House of Representatives, by Juliet Eilperin. To order, call 800.462.6420 or visit www.rowmanlittlefield.com.

The holder of a master’s degree in political science from the University of Notre Dame, Richard Allen was a senior staff member at Hoover from 1966 to 1968, at which time he took a leave of absence to serve as Richard Nixon’s foreign policy coordinator. He subsequently served twice in the Nixon White House. He was Ronald Reagan’s chief foreign policy adviser from 1977 to 1980 and served as President Reagan’s first national security adviser from 1981 to 1982. A Hoover fellow since 1983, he is currently a member of the U.S. Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee.