EDITORIAL NOTE: Around the time I was starting Encounter Books in 1997, I mentioned to my friend Jim Denton that I thought a memoir by Jeane Kirkpatrick would be an important book. Jim knew Jeane, and he brought the two of us together at a New York restaurant to talk about it.
Jeane listened to my pitch and then said noncommittally that she had considered doing such a book, but didn't have time now because she was just starting a work on foreign policy that might take a while. (It took longer than that: It is only now being published posthumously as Making War to Keep Peace.) Fearful that the memoir would wind up in the literary boneyard where good ideas go to die, I argued that it was possible to do both projects at once. I would interview her every so often over the next couple of years while she was completing the other work, and then we would move ahead on the memoir using the syllabus of material I had developed. She examined her fingernails for a long time: one of those gestures that had become iconic on Sunday morning talk shows when she was ambassador to the United Nations in the early '80s. Then, surprisingly, she looked up and said, "Why not?"
So began an odd enterprise, which, although it sometimes resembled stalking on my part and a game of hide-and-seek on hers, eventually resulted in dozens of hours of taped conversations--and the piece that follows, which I
drafted a couple of years after we began in order to prove that all the talk would lead somewhere. Many of our chats took place in her office at the American Enterprise Institute. But most of the interviews took place during the summers of 1998 and 1999 at the elegant place Jeane and her late husband Evron Kirkpatrick had reconstructed near the historic town of Les Baux in the south of France.
Perhaps eventually someone will use this rich material to help write the full-dress formal biography Jeane deserves. Until then, we have the following memoir, which would have been the first chapter of the book Jeane and I never completed, and which was seen and approved by the subject herself. Since her death, it has been read by her brother Jerry Jordan and her sons John and Stuart--who also made available the family photographs--and it is published here with their blessing.
--Peter Collier
I keep some of the plaques and awards I've received over the years on the windowsill of my office at the American Enterprise Institute. I know some of them are only casual symbols of the gratitude that flows as a matter of course to people who have spent some time in public service, but they all have meaning for me. One of them I particularly like is a small bronze statuette of Will Rogers set in a base of polished stone given to me by the state of Oklahoma for being a "favorite daughter." There is something about the posture of the figure--feet anchored firmly in the ground, hips thrust forward, chin tucked down in a way that gives the face a "show me" look--that calls up for me a sense of place and belonging. I look at it now and again while I'm writing or talking on the phone and think again how lucky I am to have been born an American, in the heartland of this country, at a time when we had no doubts about our national greatness or our mission.
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