Dead Celebrity Alert

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

The death of the 80-year-old Kirkpatrick, who began her public life as a Hubert Humphrey Democrat, was announced Friday at the senior staff meeting of the U.S. mission to the United Nations and on the Web site of the American Enterprise Institute, where she had been a senior fellow. …

Kirkpatrick, 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 though she’d left government service two decades ago. …

In the Reagan years she played a quiet role in cutting off U.S. aid to a leftist government in Nicaragua and supporting a military junta in El Salvador. …

In 2002, at a seminar in Washington sponsored by the Zionist Organization of America, Kikpatrick warned that a Palestinian state would be “a catastrophic mistake” and a danger to Israel. It would be appeasement, Kirkpatrick argued, and a step backward from the U.S. fight against terrorism. … Read full obituary

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