She was right: Jeane Kirkpatrick, statesman and intellectual.

THE most important story about Jeane Kirkpatrick was told by Jay Nordlinger in his NRO tribute to her: "Facing a group of visiting American dignitaries, [Andrei Sakharov] said, 'Kirkpatski, Kirkpatski, which of you is Kirkpatski?' Others gestured to Jeane. He said, 'Your name is known in every cell in the Gulag.' The reason was, she had named the names of Soviet political prisoners, on the floor of the U.N."

A similar story is told about President Reagan by the anti-Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky, who discovered in some Soviet archives a document he had painstakingly typed out himself years before. It was a list of Gulag prisoners he had handed to Reagan with the request that the president ask for their release at a superpower summit. Reagan had in turn handed it to Gorbachev.

Every now and then these leaders received some evidence that their pressure had not been ignored--the release of a Sharansky. But even when their pleas were rejected by the Kremlin, they gave hope to its victims. They had not been forgotten; for a few days at least their guards would be more wary, less brutal; the world knew their names and their plight. They were in purgatory, not hell.

If Jeane Kirkpatrick had done nothing else in her life but read those names out at the U.N., she would deserve praise and celebration. It is no small thing to give hope to the hopeless. But that particular moment was also the crystallization of her many contributions as both a public intellectual and a statesman.

Kirkpatrick took up an important distinction in political science--that between authoritarian dictatorships and totalitarian ones--and applied it fruitfully (and controversially) to U.S. foreign policy in the period when the Sandinistas were seizing Nicaragua and the Ayatollah was replacing the Shah. Her argument was that totalitarian regimes were manifestly worse than authoritarian ones since the latter allowed their subjects significant civil and intellectual freedom outside the realm of actual government. Totalitarianism, however, ruled and intruded on every aspect of life. Such regimes were not only incompatible with a liberal world order in principle, they were allied to the major anti-Western powers in practice. U.S. foreign policy should not therefore support the overthrow of authoritarian rulers if the alternative seemed likely to be totalitarians hostile to America. That would only make matters worse for everyone. So U.S. human-rights policy should place a higher priority on helping the innocent prisoners in the Gulag and its Asian equivalents. That would advance both human rights and U.S. interests.

These arguments, expressed most powerfully in her Commentary essay "Dictatorships and Double Standards," won the admiration of Ronald Reagan. They met and realized that they were political soul-mates--long-time Democrats unhappy with their old party, Cold Warriors, American patriots, and tough-minded believers in liberty. Appointed to Reagan's Cabinet as U.S. ambassador to the U.N., Kirkpatrick became an eloquent spokesman for American values in public forums and a close ally of Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger and CIA chief William Casey in private on such matters as helping the Contras and resisting the commitment of U.S. forces in Lebanon. (She could never work out what the U.S. forces were supposed to accomplish.) She lost that battle, but she won most of them--both because Reagan was of like mind and because he liked her. After one especially bruising debate between Kirkpatrick and Secretary of State Al Haig, Reagan got up to leave, changed his mind, walked around the table, and kissed her to mark his regard.

But what pleased Reagan infuriated the Left. Kirkpatrick was accused of being sympathetic to authoritarian regimes and of possessing a streak of authoritarianism herself. Her support for human rights as a weapon against the Soviets was twisted to make it sound as if she were advocating neglect of prisoners and subjects under authoritarian governments. And a small academic and journalistic cottage industry was established to knock down her broad thesis that authoritarians, with all their manifest faults, were nonetheless generally to be preferred to totalitarians when there was no democratic alternative on offer. Three points were at issue: Were totalitarians really more oppressive? Were they less successful economically? And were they ...