The Diplomat's Disease

...Moynihan does record one small final triumph...

...friends did a few years ago when he was in private practice...

...Moynihan’s description of the event is exaggerated, reflecting as ,much as anything the frustration of his lonely effort: “They, for once, had quit the field,” Moynihan writes...

...Here is how U.N...

...Malik, having lived his life in a world of lies, had fled before the truth...

...Moynihan replied that he had just put a sheet of paper in his typewriter and had written, “Dear Mr...

...Nations thus become personified, misleadingly embodied in acquaintances...

...With their documents and handshakes, their late-night camaraderie, diplomats are able to paper over the noisy disagreements between the peoples of the various countries they represent...

...he was worn out...

...To Moynihan, the U.N.’s corruption took the form of a moral blindness, in particular, a highly-developed ability to ignore the b’a s i c d i f f e re nc e s bet w e e n free, democratic institutions, and totalitarian ones...

...They can hurt, and perhaps are the host pervasive and continually used weapons in what used to be called the Atomic Age, but now is increasingly thought of as the Media Age...

...In the course of Moynihan’s speech, Yakov Malik, the Soviet ambassador to the U.N., walked out...

...President...

...He had lost his seat in the House of Commons,” Moynihan writes, “and was sent to New York as there was nothing else to do with him...

...Senator Daniel P. Moynihan, who was U.S...

...But Moynihan had a better idea: don’t just dismiss the rhetoric...

...In this light the great world-wide quarrels seem to be little more than “communications problems...

...answer it...

...His pessimism, even disgust, with the West was deeper than anything that could be touched by events . ” Moynihan remains an optimist despite all that he saw and heard at the U.N., and the example he set there is, in the end, inspiring...

...Senate, not to mention the House of Commons...

...logic, be included among political prisoners (defined as “effective activists...

...It would be helpful if the story of how this happened, precisely, were more straightforwardly told...

...The lights of Manhattan twinkle, the ice cubes clink, and soon the world seems not such a difficult place after all-amenable to memoranda and options papers if men will only be reasonable and keep their voices down...

...The result was “a totalitarian tract...

...Diplomats, they exercise r diplomatic charms on one another...

...seemed terminal...

...It was time, then, to speak out at the United Nations, to take the U.N...

...No one would know better who was a political prisoner than the government that had put the person in prison in the first place...

...Since the corruption of the new United Nations so obviously works against the interests of the United States, some in this country have taken the view that the best course of action would be to get us out of the U.N., and vice versa...

...document, produced by the “Third Committee,” called the Report on the World Situation...

...In the end t h e proposal was dropped, facing the prospect of being amended to death by the Non-Aligned bloc, including one country that saw in the proposal an opportunity to release jailed terrorists who would, by a characteristic twist of U.N...

...He enjoyed it all immensely, but with the air of a man who regarded duty-free liquor as the -difference between happiness and the real world...

...and with a few vodkas de him, Ivan Ivanovich yonder will show his lighter side...

...In the final week of the General Assembly the Soviets had had to withdraw a resolution in the :rice of our scorn, and had to walk out of the Assembly itself as they could not bear our contempt...

...it was not binding on them...

...te mentality is well personified by Cyrus Vance, who hankers after the dotted line upon which the Russians Will sign just as his Wall Street banker Tom Bethell is Washington editor of Harper’s and a contributing editor qf’The Washington Monthly...

...The resolution was only an appeal to governments...

...hi in a quasi-parliamentary setting such as the U.N...

...The League of Nations in the 1930s, he points out, expelled tht totalitarian powers...

...Take, for example, his thumbnail sketch of the British ambassador to the U.N., Ivor Richard...

...We are indeed ruled by words to a far greater extent than we realize...

...I answered that in our view a definition was not necessary and might not even be useful...

...He was trying to negotiate “another ‘decent interval,’ in this case for the West itself...

...Moynihan made this proposal, to which the response was: What does political prisoner mean...

...For him, the United Nations was the last outpost of empire, the one place on earth where Britain was still formally a major power...

...truly was ebbing...

...Far stronger speeches are given on the floor of the U.S...

...By way of reply, Moynihan writes that the S t a t e I Department is “entirely new to voting as a means of resolving disputes,” ?hikliCh it does by private negotiations...

...He said that he was...

...Charter seriously...

...The Ambassador from Malta proposed that what needed to be done was to establish a working party to develop an agreed definition of ‘political prisoner.’ I asked him if he had in mind the procedure by which a U.N...

...Theodore H. White called Moynihan the next day and said: “You know you have to go, don’t you...

...three years in the making, “the subject of a succession of conferences in the pleasanter parts of Europe, and of endlessly circulated drafts...

...for eight months beginning in 1975, has written about his stint, with the help of Suzanne Weaver, in A Dangerous Place (Little, Brown...

...F o r d a n d Kissinger support him in public and deplore him in private...

...our rhetoric was by no means extreme...

...out of touch with reality...

...But by the early 1970s the scene at the United Nations was very different...

...The State Department regarded Moynihan’s modus o p e r a n d i as L‘con f ro n t a t i o nal ,” a nd the ref o re counter-productive...

...The Diplomat’s Disease by Tom Bethell Representatives to the United Nations, who are paid munificent salaries, tax free, find it easy to believe that there are few world problems that cannot be resolved when men of high education, good will, and legal training get together and talk things over amicably...

...One gets the impression that Moynihan himself is a little vague about the details...

...Czechoslovakia came out as just about top country...

...group developed a definition of ‘aggression.’ He said that he did...

...Although on American soil and to a considerable extent funded by the United States, the United Nations, Moynihan persuasively argues, has in the past decade developed into a forurh for the expression of opinion that was both a n t i - A m e r i c a n and a n t i - democratic...

...When people become removed from the real world and have little serious work to do in return for their lavish pay and perquisites, they will nearly always become corrupted...

...I asked if he was aware that it had taken 17 years...

...It’s a pity, really, that Moynihan went along with the peculiar Washington convention that Reston’s column can reliably be construed as transmitting the thoughts of policymakers, a convention that in this instance exempted Kissinger from having to make an unpleasant phone call...

...In the penultimate session of the General Assembly he made a speech in which he quoted the Soviet physicist Andrei Sakharov to the effect that the best hope for peace arid human rights would be a “general political amnesty in all the world...

...Point out that those SO readily accusing the United States were among the worst violators of human rights-countries that were ringed by barbed wire in many instances...

...If the debated in Geneva of ttie late 1930s had a certain irrelevance, about them, they were nonetheless led by d e m o c r a t i c statesmen,” Moynihan writes...

...The world organization was growing in membership and in a certain kind of ideological authority, and this new strength was increasingly deployed on behalf of totalitarian principle and practice wholly at variance with its original purpose . ” By way of illustration, Moynihan describes the gradual fleshing out of an earlier U.N...

...How one wishes t h a t Moynihan had adopted his best “provocative” pose and said that Reston must have surely been making it all up-a response that would have forced Kissinger out into the open...

...Haroun Al-Fatar, sampling canapes at one’s elbow, turns out to be a charmer after all, even if he is dressed in preparation for a ilstorm...

...The measure of social well-being was the presence or absence of dissent...

...Moynihan’s theory here, an important one, is’ that although the U.N.’s weapons are paper weapons, or weapons written on paper, namely words, they are no less potent for that...

...The presence of dissent indicated the absence of social well-being...

...His power...

...Ambassador to the U.N...

...To even the most casual television watcher, Moynihan, in his “country gentleman’s”garb, and with his penchant for oratorical excess, comes across as something of a puffedup self-promoter, egotistical beyond even the political norm...

...He describes some of the U. N. d i p l o m a t s in c h a r a c t e r i s t i c a l l y u n d i p l o m a t i c terms, and he is particularly effective in portraying the unreal world in which many of these people live...

...The situation in the U.S...

...The proximate cause, of course, was a James Reston column noting that “Messrs...

...He was doing this, as I saw it, out of despair that the West would ever come to its senses and realize the imminent danger of its being overmastered...

...It imposed precise legal obligations on members,” Moynihan writes, “which by 1973 scarely one member in four abided by...

...Kissinger himself emerges in the book as a Machiavellian pessimist, who by this time “was not really on top of events any longer...

...logic evolved at those pleasant conferences: “The nations of the world were assessed in terms of social well-being...

...But he has a few ideas in his head, too, which is equally unusual among politicians, and on the written page he holds one’s interest...

...The Europeans were not moved...

...Lawyers mostly, such diplomats have been trained to believe that a document, once signed and notarized, is likely to be equally intimidating to intiff‘s attorney and foreign armies...

...In short, they are apt to be a little out of touch with reality, and so it is not surprising that an institution suchas the U.N., a permanent conclave of diplomats, should have become over the years serious...

...They meet at cocktail parties by the East River and are unfailingly teous...

...In the end Moynihan was maneuvered out...

...His reminder that “the world is a dangerous place and that not everyone knows this” may be needed most of all in the world of professional policymakers, who all too easily can convince themselves that if only we are diplomatic, and accommodating to the demands of others, then everyone will love us...

...How about member nations releasing political prisoners, for example...