Word: kirkpatrick
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...diplomat talks of the "crazy kooks" in the Pentagon who in his view are putting too much emphasis on military moves. Any such kooks do not include the Joint Chiefs, who have made it plain that they are concerned about increased military involvement in the region. Jeane Kirkpatrick, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, has been widely regarded as the Administration's intellectual guru on Latin American policy. She has argued long, hard and convincingly within Administration councils that the loss of Central America to Communist revolutionary regimes would be a devastating blow to U.S. security interests. But Kirkpatrick learned...
...bellicose talk, and through most of 1982 the region got a relatively low policy priority. But last whiter Clark, by then transferred to the National Security Adviser's post, began moving to bring Central America back to front and center among Administration concerns. He formed an unlikely alliance with Kirkpatrick, an academic intellectual who is his temperamental opposite but often supplies a detailed rationale for positions that Clark reaches by instinct...
Clark in February dispatched Kirkpatrick to the region on a fact-finding tour. She returned with a gloomy assessment of the entire Central American situation. Her findings prompted the Administration to ask for an additional $110 million in military aid to El Salvador in fiscal 1983, on top of Reagan's original request for $61.3 million. Another point on which Clark and Kirkpatrick agreed, with the support of CIA Director William Casey, was that Thomas Enders, then in charge of Latin American policy at the State Department, should be replaced. They felt that Enders was moving too slowly and cautiously...
...addition, although everyone in the Administration would like to see an increase in aid, there are divisions about how much, over how long a period and in what form. Kirkpatrick insists that the trouble in Central America is primarily economic and social: the poverty, hunger, illiteracy and disease that win masses of recruits for Marxist revolution. She has long advocated a "Marshall Plan" for the area that would provide a sharp and continuing increase in aid well into the future. Three times she wrote a recommendation for such a plan into drafts of Reagan's April 27 speech to Congress...
Clark was irked by Enders' one-man show-and by his reluctance to pressure Congress for economic and military aid. He convinced Reagan, and U.N. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick agreed, that a Central American policy review was needed. In a telling remark, one White House official noted acerbically, "You don't handle Central American policies with tea and crumpets on the diplomatic circuit." Shultz and Clark cut a deal: in return for firing Enders, the Secretary of State would be given day-to-day control of Central American policymaking. Deane Hinton, the able Ambassador to El Salvador, was also...