What do Joe Lieberman, Peter Collier and the late Jeane Kirkpatrick all have in common? All are liberals who, between 1968 and the present, found themselves supporting conservatives or conservative values while being attacked by the Left.
Collier is the radical activist who became a conservative author and activist, and has now written “Political Woman,” a biography of Kirkpatrick, who died in 2006. Kirkpatrick is the academic and activist who backed Hubert Humphrey in 1968 and Ronald Reagan in 1980, served as Reagan’s ambassador to the United Nations and made a speech to his convention in 1984 attacking her old party for “blaming America first.”
Lieberman is the Connecticut Democrat ending his Senate career as an independent. After being the Democrats’ candidate for vice president in 2000, he was dumped by his party in the 2006 midterms, and two years later endorsed John McCain.
Collier is wholly at peace with his new dispensation. Leaving home brought grief for Kirkpatrick. And for Lieberman, the pain still hasn’t ended.
Born in Oklahoma into a liberal household, Jeane Jordan married Evron Kirkpatrick, a “visceral New Dealer and Democrat,” founder of the Minnesota chapter of the American Federation of Teachers, and intimate of the emerging state liberal powerhouse, which included Orville Freeman, “Clean Gene” McCarthy and Hubert Humphrey, who was and remained her ideal.
Things went wrong in the mid-1960s, when the counterculture slithered into the liberal garden, laying waste to the patriotism and the traditional values she prized. Reluctantly, she voted in 1972 for Richard M. Nixon, and began to identify with Scoop Jackson, Pat Moynihan and the group later known as neoconservatives. But her unhappiness with both the Carter and Nixon-Ford foreign policies left her nowhere to go but rightward. Yet even then she had problems in making the transition: “I’m an AFL-CIO Democrat,” she told Richard Allen.
She became a Republican in 1985, but only unhappily. “I would rather be a liberal,” she said the next year. Collier writes that Kirkpatrick suffered from a political version of “phantom limb syndrome” — a matter she referred to incessantly on her deathbed. As Collier tells us, “For Jeane, becoming a Republican would always evoke a touch of melancholy she was never able to hide.”
Joe Lieberman did not hide his disgust when his party left him, forcing him out in a primary in 2006, after he followed what he thought of as JFK’s principles in support of the war in Iraq. His loss forced him to run as independent and to win with the help of Republican votes, and he was allowed back into the Democrats’ caucus when they decided they needed his vote. But he could not bring himself to sever relations formally, and he is leaving, as Howard Kurtz put it, without a political home.
“Home” is the problem for Kirkpatrick and Lieberman because the one they grew up in no longer exists. Humphrey’s and Kennedy’s house was torn down and made over. Kirkpatrick and Lieberman found the Democrats’ doors no longer open, and the GOP a nice place to visit but not to live.
Examiner Columnist Noemie Emery is contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and author of “Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families.”
