Kirkpatrick Regarded As Staunch Supporter of Israel, Foe of PLO

Jeane Kirkpatrick, President-elect Reagan’s nominee for U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, is regarded as both a strong supporter of Israel as on independent nation-state and on equally strong opponent of the Palestine Liberation Organization and its attempts to establish a state.

Kirkpatrick, who is 53 and a professor of political science at Georgetown University, said following her nomination yesterday that she has been “a Democrat all my life but that doesn’t mean that I always agree with my party. Her nomination to the Cabinet level post in the incoming Republican Administration is subject to Senate confirmation but that is considered a foregone conclusion.

Kirkpatrick’s major disagreement with President Carter has been in the realm of foreign policy and she has stated her views about that frequently in Commentary, the monthly magazine published by the American Jewish Committee, She is associated with the Coalition for a Democratic Majority, co-chaired by Sens. Henry Jackson. (D. Wash.) and Daniel Moynihan (D. NY) which has long been fighting for firm U.S. support for Israel and Soviet Jewry.

She is also a scholar of the American Enterprise Institute, on influential conservative research organization in Washington.

PRAISES SADAT, BEGIN FOR PEACE TREATY

In her latest pronouncement on the Middle East, Kirkpatrick told the American Friends of Hebrew University last week in Miami that Carter merits praise for his work toward the Egyptian Israeli peace treaty, but most of the credit belongs to Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Premier Menachem Begin of Israel and their governments.

“It is they who transcended entrenched enmity, they who assumed the risks,” she said of Sadat and Begin. She assured her Miami audience that Reagan is a “solid friend of Israel” and regards Israel as a “strategic asset.” Those words are in keeping with Reagan’s expressions since his Gubernatorial days in California.

In her disavowal of Carter’s foreign policy, Including his views on the Middle East, Kirkpatrick was quoted in the American Spectator magazine as saying: “If the aim of American foreign policy is to reward our enemy and betray our friend, then the American Middle East policy undoubtedly ranks as a brilliant success for that is precisely what it has accomplished.”

Kirkpatrick was been in Duncan, Okla., the daughter of an oil wildcatter. She was graduate from Barnard College in New York in 1948 and did post-graduate work at Columbia University and the Institute de Science Politique in Paris, She has been a specialist in Latin American affairs.

Her husband is Evron Kirkpatrick, also a political scientist and a Democrat. They were married in 1955 when he was teaching at the University of Minnesota. He managed the late Sen. Hubert Humphrey’s campaign for Mayor of Minneapolis. For the past 20 years he has been executive director of the American Political Science Association.