Kirkpatrick Decides to Exit After Huddle With Reagan : Won’t Say if She Got Job Offer

U.N. Ambassador Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, ending the capital’s long-running guessing game about her future, announced today that she is quitting the Administration after a sometimes-stormy tenure and returning to teaching and writing.

After a private meeting with President Reagan, Kirkpatrick adamantly refused to say whether she had been offered a new job in the second Administration. White House officials also declined to say.

Asked if she was disappointed at not getting another top government post, Kirkpatrick said: “No. No, no, no, no, no.”

“If I had wanted a top foreign policy job in the second term, I would have remained as U.S. permanent representative to the United Nations,” said Kirkpatrick, one of three women in the Administration with Cabinet rank.

‘Committed to Teaching’

The ambassador, on leave from a post of teaching government at Georgetown University, said, “I am very committed to teaching and writing and the independence that goes with that. And it’s the life I intend to return to.”

Kirkpatrick said she wrote out the announcement of her resignation on the eve of her meeting with Reagan.

The President, who once lamented he did not have a job “worthy of her” outside the United Nations, had said last week that he was ready to offer a suitable job outside the White House.

While Reagan refused to be more specific, sources said it was the top post at the Agency for International Development or the United States Information Agency or the task of revitalizing the now-moribund International Development Cooperation Agency.

Kirkpatrick’s associates let it be known she was not interested in those jobs.

Kirkpatrick, whose resignation from the United Nations had been rumored as far back as 1982, announced last November that she wanted to return to teaching.

Conservatives, fond of her hard-line views, immediately began a campaign for her appointment to a top foreign policy post, such as national security adviser or secretary of state. Reagan decided to keep incumbents in each of those spots.

Among those rumored as top candidates to succeed her at the United Nations are Ambassador-at-large Vernon Walters; Frank Shakespeare, head of the Board of International Broadcasting and one-time chief of the USIA; Evan G. Galbraith, the U.S. ambassador to France, and Charles H. Price II, the U.S. ambassador to Britain. Senate Republican leader Robert J. Dole of Kansas suggested his wife, Elizabeth, secretary of transportation, as a candidate.

Not Accepted Immediately

Kirkpatrick said she gave Reagan her resignation during a Dec. 11 meeting, asking that it take effect March 1 or as soon as a successor could be confirmed. But Reagan did not accept the resignation immediately, trying to determine if he could find a job that would entice her to stay.

“I now feel that I can best serve the President and our shared objectives for the United States and the world by returning to teaching and writing,” Kirkpatrick told reporters after today’s meeting with Reagan.

“In private life--perhaps even more than in public life--I can speak out clearly on behalf of shared foreign policy objectives such as restoring and preserving American strength, supporting democracy and independence in the hemisphere, defending our friends, our principles and our interests in the Middle East and elsewhere,” she said.

Reagan was attracted to the conservative Democrat initially by her published articles suggesting that the United States must work with authoritarian regimes--which she distinguished from totalitarian societies--even though it prefers democracies.