It's a terrible risk in my environment to write anything positive about George W. Bush. When I do, my wife treats me as if I am a bit ill. My children (grown) are reluctant to introduce me to their pals. The phone stops ringing, except when there are nasty people on the other line. I get snubbed at dinner parties, or don't get invited at all. Some friends are less vindictive than others. These are the ones who humor me, apparently hoping that this is just a phase--"Rather like," said a professor of law at the University of Texas, "when you went off the deep end and supported aid to the Contras." I didn't remind her that the Sandinistas actually lost an internationally supervised election that was part of the formula for ending the Nicaraguan civil war.
I want to say something favorable about Bush again. It is this: He seems to me to have completely transcended the biases of gender and race in his appointments. Oh, he has his prejudices: He wants his appointees to be a certain sort of conservative. But no one can deny that he has broken the glass ceiling for women and blacks and Latinos in the executive and judicial branches. This is an embarrassment for Democrats who, like their present chairman, still attribute bigotry wholesale to Republicans. Well, Bush is a Republican who isn't bigoted: He has put his foreign policy in the hands and head of a female African American. This is not without some risk. Imagine the inner challenge to Saudis and other Arabs who encounter Condoleezza Rice as the plenipotentiary of the most powerful country on earth. You get an inkling of what that might feel like from the Arab saying that "a black face begins a black day." And just look at the proliferation of minorities among generals. These aren't presidential appointees, of course. Many of these decencies are the work of the hated Donald Rumsfeld.
Bill Clinton was the first black president, or so Toni Morrison ruled. He even put his post-presidential office in Harlem. But he did not appoint one African American to a truly significant office in the executive branch. Of course, Jesse Jackson did a lot of hustling around the Clinton administration, having been named "Special Envoy of the President and Secretary of State for the Promotion of Democracy in Africa." Clinton did appoint a woman to the big post of secretary of state, and Madeleine Albright did literally chase breathlessly after Yasir Arafat at Camp David, begging him to return to the conference table. Well, dignity she did not have. Let's call her excitability diligence. Albright appointed her protégée, Susan Rice, all of 33 but black, as assistant secretary for African affairs, so the eyes whose scrutiny the tyrants of Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Nigeria eluded were hers. If John Kerry had won the election, Rice was destined for a top job.
Which brings me to John Bolton. Whatever his would-be tormentors say, he is hardly being opposed because he's a nasty man or because he delivered a speech not vetted by the State Department or because he played rough with people lower on his totem pole or because he didn't believe some intelligence emanating from the CIA. (This last is actually a sign of his wisdom. The CIA has been peddling feeble and dangerous intelligence for decades.) Bolton's offense is to believe that American democracy has enemies; that words alone will not hinder their weapons; and that the United Nations is an alliance of those too weak-willed to stand up and fight for the good. Bolton believes in the sovereign power of democracies because they are responsive and responsible to their peoples. The United Nations cannot even pretend to embody such legitimacy. Please read on page 29 the immensely impressive essay by Thomas Nagel arguing (with some practical differences) this same principle.
The fact is that Bolton, as ambassador to the United Nations, would pick up the intellectual mantle of Pat Moynihan, who was attacked for his undiplomatic words and provocative ways on the same editorial pages, at the same high-minded conferences, and by the same kind of gauzy-eyed politicians that now revile Bolton. Moynihan once said to me, quoting Fred Ikle, that negotiating at the United Nations always betrays you into the "semantic infiltration" of deep falsification. This is something that Bolton would not do. It is no secret that I believe the United Nations to be a false remedy for the world's ills. (Darfur just keeps happening, doesn't it?) So, since the expansion of the organization's headquarters in New York is in deep financial and political difficulties, I propose a test. Let the United Nations move, say, to Lagos, a major city of a paradigmatic member state, undemocratic and verging always on civil strife. Let all of the supposed economic advantages of hosting the United Nations flow to that poor country. Let us see what happens. What will happen is that no one would come. The supposed need for the organization would vanish, and with it would go "the theatre of the absurd," as Moynihan once put it. His U.N. memoir and lament, A Dangerous Place, remains all too relevant.
And speaking of historically momentous personnel decisions: Reports last week revealed that the FBI had, for nearly two years, been unable to track down two of the 19 perpetrators of September 11 already in the United States. The CIA joined in the fiasco by blocking information from the Bureau. Both agencies knew that the two men posed a threat; both did nothing to stop them. This led me to ponder two other appointees, Clinton appointees. The first is Louis Freeh, who spent the years immediately before September 11 obsessing about Al Gore's altogether faultless appearance at some Buddhist temple rather than riveting his attention and his counterterrorism team on, well, terrorism. The second is George Tenet, whose failures in dealing with Al Qaeda have been overwhelmed by his confident evaluation of Saddam's chemical arsenal, which locked the Bush administration into its own fixations. And one last observation that will not endear me to my own: For many years, Hillary Rodham Clinton was a director of Wal-Mart, which is taking heat for structuring its labor force so that it doesn't have to pay medical benefits. This is a moral and economic scandal. What did Mrs. Clinton say about it or do about it when she was on Wal-Mart's board?
http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20050627&s=diarist062705
