“Could you tell us why you, a self-professed Democrat, a liberal, happened to be selected by the Reagan administration to represent the United States at the United Nations? It is, after all, a conservative administration.” The question came from Charles H. Percy (R., 111.), chair of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. The response followed sharp and confident.

“I suppose,” said Georgetown political scientist Jeane I. Kirkpatrick, “President Reagan asked me to take this very difficult job because he believes that we share a particular sense of the problems that confront the United States, the democracies, and Western civilization.” That “particular sense,” as she explained it, seems to relate back to the comparatively straightforward, bipolar world of the early 1950s, when Ambassador Kirkpatrick was studying political science in Paris and Stalin's soldiers still surrounded Vienna.