Rx for the U.N.

I don’t know John Bolton. I have never met him. However the attacks on him as President Bush’s nominee as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations persuade me he is the best appointment to that job since President Lyndon Johnson persuaded Arthur J. Goldberg to resign from the Supreme Court and move to Turtle Bay.

Those who attack Mr. Bolton as being too tough or nasty to subordinates are really trying to exploit President Bush’s lame-duck status. They have no idea of the “right stuff” essential to be America’s representative to the U.N.

I pride myself on being an expert on the relationship between the U.S. and the United Nations. I have written a book on the subject called “The ‘Other’ State Department.” (That was President Kennedy’s nickname for the USUN mission.)

And if there is one thing I learned during research into the USUN ambassadorship it is toughness is absolutely critical to being an effective U.S. Ambassador to the U.N.

Being a gentle soul at the U.N. is a recipe for disaster as America’s representative. Mr. Goldberg and other ambassadors have been tough as nails when U.S. interests were concerned.

Example No. 1: During a Pakistan-India brink-of-war emergency, Mr. Goldberg was pressing the Security Council for some remedy to prevent war between the two Asian countries. Opposing the U.S. effort was the ambassador from Guinea, a small Marxist-Leninist nuisance of a country in West Africa. The Guinea representative was popping about the Security Council table whispering into the delegate’s ears that they should oppose the U.S. effort.

Mr. Goldberg watched these shenanigans with growing anger. He invited the Guinea diplomat to the U.S. delegation offices across the street from the U.N. Building. When he arrived, Mr. Goldberg berated him for his antics and — this was the clincher: He told the Guinean that if he continued opposing U.S. peacemaking policies in East Asia, he would have him declared “persona non grata” which would have meant expulsion from the U.S. and return to Guinea. That was a fate too horrible to contemplate since this impoverished country was run by a loathsome Marxist-Leninist dictator named Sekou Toure.

The Guinean paled and promised he would henceforth behave. And he did behave but it did him no good. Eventually, he was recalled by his own government and for some reason or no reason Sekou Toure sent him to the gallows.

Example No. 2: I watched USUN Ambassador Adlai Stevenson during the October 1962 Cuban missile crisis launching his polished oratory at Valerian A. Zorin, the poker-faced Soviet ambassador and then Security Council president. Stevenson had “one simple question” for his Soviet counterpart: “Do you, Ambassador Zorin, deny that the U.S.S.R. has placed, and is placing, medium- and intermediate-range missiles and sites in Cuba? Yes or no — don’t wait for the translation — yes or no?”

There were no complaints about Stevenson’s “bullying” tactics or his misbehavior as a U.N. diplomat. And there should be none about John Bolton. He is just the man to follow in the footsteps of such hard-line U.N. ambassadors as Goldberg, Henry Cabot Lodge, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and Jeane Kirkpatrick.

Were John Bolton to be defeated by practitioners of Washington’s favorite indoor sport — personal assassination politics — it would be a triumph for the Kofi Annan anti-American cabal as well as for despairing Democrats who look upon Republican control of Congress and the White House as illegitimate and immoral.

Arnold Beichman, a Hoover Institution research fellow, is a columnist for The Washington Times.