Jeane Kirkpatrick

Jeane Kirkpatrick died yesterday. She was the US UN Ambassador during the Reagan administration and an outspoken voice in the administration against what she described as a massive Communist threat around the world. She included in that Nicaragua which was during the US supported contra insurgency against the Sandinista government, which had ousted the US backed multi-generational Somosa dictatorships. I visited Nicaragua with Witness for Peace during that time in 1987. My view of the Sandinistas was not as highly favorable as many liberals in the US, but it also was not a massive Communist threat as Kirkpatrick and others described it.

Jeane's mother was a member of my first church in Mt. Vernon, IL. She visited periodically over the 3 years I was there, 1975-1978. At that time I didn't have a clue who she was. Two years after I left there, she became the UN Ambassador. I remember her the times she visited and came to worship as a dour person who sat in the sanctuary during worship. I suspect she was chafing (maybe a higher view of myself than was realistic) at my overly liberal, social justice gospel that I was preaching at that time. I remember that her brother who had visited his mother on July 4, 1976 when I preached my version of a truer vision of Christ and repudiation of overly done US nationalism at the time, gave me a warning when I moved in 1978 to be more cirumspect in my comments at my next church if I wanted to stay there a while.

Her mother was a very engaging, well-educated professional woman who was the wife of an oil wildcatter. They had moved from Oklahoma to the oil fields of southern Illinois (which also happened to bring a distant Loar relative of mine to Mt. Vernon as well from Oklahoma).

It seems strange to have had some form of a relationship with Jeane and then after the fact finding out her prominence and the historical role she played out for our country during the Reagan administration...who I very vehemently opposed.

I had her mother's funeral right before I moved (which is when her brother offered his comments to me before my move). I liked Mrs. Jordan. I had good visits with her at her home. Jeane looked a lot like her, even though her mother was a more physically impressive person than Jeane. Both now share in the resurrection to life in Christ. And my views don't amount to much in the face of that!