Word: kirkpatrick
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...Sunday as the picadors at all three networks prepared to implant their banderillas in the hides of their talk-show guests. NBC's Meet the Press had drawn the best bull, the one most likely to be goaded into making a Monday headline. This was the controversial Jeane Kirkpatrick, Ambassador...
...Meet the Press set, which looks like a courtroom lighted by Wurlitzer, the guest faces four questioners arrayed behind a judge's bench. That four on one, according to Moderator Bill Monroe, gives the lone guest the sympathy vote, but Kirkpatrick is not one to ask for sympathy. A former college professor, she has the manner of someone used to feeling intellectually superior to those she talks to, and probably must nudge herself not to talk that way to fellow diplomats or journalists...
...Israelis had just invaded Lebanon; the goading headline-seeking question to ask the Ambassador was whether the Israelis had "overreacted" to the attempted murder of their Ambassador in London. Kirkpatrick diplomatically ducked. The Israeli invasion, she said, was part of "an ongoing cycle of violence" in the Middle East. The questioner was dissatisfied: "Again, have they overreacted? Are they going too far?" Even Moderator Monroe, a forceful but fair questioner, persisted in speaking about overreactions. At last Kirkpatrick replied: "I just don't know that it's very useful even to try to characterize it as over...
Despite rumblings for her dismissal, Kirkpatrick still enjoys the full backing of President Reagan. For now, her position as the Cabinet's leading neoconservative and only woman outweighs her liabilities as a diplomat. But, as happened with Jim my Carter's first U.N. envoy, Andrew Young, she is unlikely to stay at the U.N. a great deal longer even if she continues to have the support of the President. That much was clear from her speech last week. Arguing that the U.S. should be more professional in its approach to U.N. politics, Kirkpatrick noted parenthetically...
Although Ambassador Kirkpatrick's controversial remarks last week were not taped or read from a prepared text, her office later released a version of the speech based on her recollection of what she had said. Some excerpts...