Ex-U.N. Ambassador Kirkpatrick dies

12:44 p.m.

Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, an unabashed apostle of Reagan-era conservatism and the first female U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, has died.

The death of the 80-year-old Mrs. Kirkpatrick, who began her public life as a Hubert Humphrey Democrat, was announced today at the senior staff meeting of the U.S. mission to the United Nations.

Spokesman Richard Grenell said Ambassador John Bolton asked for a moment of silence. An announcement of Mrs. Kirkpatrick’s death also was posted on the Web site of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a conservative-oriented think tank here where she was a senior fellow.

Mrs. Kirkpatrick’s assistant, Andrea Harrington, said she died in her sleep at home in Bethesda late yesterday. The cause of death was not immediately known.

Mrs. Kirkpatrick’s health had been in decline recently, Miss Harrington said, and she was “basically confined to her house,” going to work about once a week “and then less and less.”

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, Tennessee Republican, said Mrs. Kirkpatrick “stood up for the interests of America while at the U.N., lent a powerful moral voice to the Reagan foreign policy and has been a source of wise counsel to our nation since leaving the government two decades ago. She will be greatly missed.”

Mrs. Kirkpatrick, who was elevated to the U.N. post by President Reagan in 1981, was known as a blunt and sometimes acerbic advocate for her causes. She remained involved in public issues even after leaving government service. She joined seven other former U.N. ambassadors in 2005 in writing a letter to Congress telling lawmakers that their plan to withhold dues to force reform at the world body was misguided and would “create resentment, build animosity and actually strengthen opponents of reform.”

Bill Bennett, a former secretary of education under Mr. Reagan, the nation’s drug czar under the first President Bush and a leading conservative opinion maker, called her “very forceful, very strong, a daughter of Oklahoma [with a] great sense of humor. She held her own.”

Mr. Bennett said the Iraq Study Group so prominently in the news “would have been better with Jeane Kirkpatrick on it. … She had no patience with tyrannies, said they had to be confronted, you couldn’t deal with tyrannies, that there were some people you could work with — these people you couldn’t.”

Mrs. Kirkpatrick once referred to herself as a “lifelong Democrat.”

She actually switched to the Republican Party in early 1985, four years after Mr. Reagan sent her to New York for the U.N. job. She took with her a reputation as a hard-liner on foreign policy. Because of that, she often was a lightning rod for the opposition.

Mrs. Kirkpatrick considered seeking the Republican presidential nomination that went to George H.W. Bush in 1988. She stopped that process short, however, retreating to the position that she would accept the No. 2 slot if asked. She had played a leading role at the party’s convention four years earlier — when she was still a Democrat.