I highly recommend the lovely tributes to Kate O’Beirne, who died Sunday after a very private battle with cancer, from her colleagues at National Review, Ramesh Ponnuru and Jonah Goldberg.
I’d add only this: Kate was a stalwart of the conservative movement who never manifested the stodginess or self-importance that one associates with stalwarts. She was a proud and believing Catholic who was more than capable of irreverent wit. She was bright and wise (not so common a combination), and (even less common a combination) at once knowledgeable and knowing.
And she was fun. If you arrived at a party and were unsure about how the evening was going to go, and if you then saw Kate was present, you were safe: All you had to do was to gravitate to her, and time would fly entertainingly and enjoyably by. Susan and I followed this strategy many times, and it always worked.
When Kate and I met, she was a little wary. I’d spent the summer of 1976 helping out at Pat Moynihan’s Senate campaign. Pat had gone on in the fall to defeat the incumbent, a man for whom Kate worked and a man Kate very much admired, Jim Buckley. I explained (truthfully) that I’d only come down from Harvard for the summer, and had only worked to help Pat win the Democratic primary—so I said, I’d never been involved in the fall campaign against Jim (whom I also admired). This sophistic evasion went nowhere with Kate, who could detect sophism from a mile off.
But at some point, after we’d fought various battles side by side over the next few years, Kate decided to (mostly) forgive and forget. And we became friends. It’s a friendship I along with so many others will always cherish.
Kate Walsh O’Beirne, a happy warrior for God and country, is gone. She would not, I think, object if I invoked on her behalf the traditional Jewish prayer: May her memory be a blessing.
