Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick dies

Jeane Kirkpatrick

Jeane Kirkpatrick, a former U.N. ambassador and member of President Reagan's foreign policy team, died last night at the age of 80.

The American Enterprise Institute, where she served as a senior fellow, made the announcement on its website.

"The United States has lost a great patriot and champion of freedom, and AEI mourns our beloved colleague," the statement said.

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Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., said 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."

Kirkpatrick's assistant, Andrea Harrington, said she died late last night in her sleep at home in Bethesda, Md., according to the Associated Press. The cause of death was not immediately known, but Kirkpatrick's health had been in decline recently, Harrington said, and she was "basically confined to her house," going to work about once a week "and then less and less."

Kirkpatrick became the first woman nominated as U.S. ambassador to the U.N. after serving as Reagan's foreign policy adviser during his 1980 campaign.

Her "Kirkpatrick Doctrine" advocated U.S. support of anticommunist governments around the world.

One day after the 9-11 attacks, she joined with William Bennett and Jack Kemp, co-directors of Empower America, to call on Congress to issued a formal declaration of war against the "entire fundamentalist Islamic terrorist network."

As a young political scientist at Georgetown University, Kirkpatrick wrote the first major study of the role of women in modern politics, Political Woman, published in 1974, the American Enterprise Institute said.

She rose to political prominence in 1979 with an essay in Commentary magazine, "Dictatorships and Double Standards," in which she criticized the Carter administration's foreign policy and argued for a clearer understanding of the American national interest.

That piece caught the attention of Reagan, who put her on his campaign team.