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UNITED NATIONS - / www.MaximsNews.com@ U.N./ - 15 April 2005 -- There is an unspoken but long understood historical tradition among both Republican and Democratic parties about whom they decide to send as the US ambassador to the United Nations.

With Senate hearings about to begin on the nomination of John Bolton to be the next American envoy to the United Nations, it is worth reminding ourselves of what that hoary old protocol constitutes and why both parties have adopted it as a regular practice.

The unwritten convention is that the presidents of both parties pick their most distinguished leaders from among their ranks – men and women of immense prestige,  who are committed to the notion that the United Nations is important to America's national security, and whose standing and words will have immediate impact around the world.  

It is a consensus view crossing political lines that Washington cannot afford, given the interlocking nature of the world's problems, to trifle with the only body on the planet that deals directly with life and death for every nation on earth.

This understanding was reached sixty years ago at the historic conference in San Francisco that established the United Nations. 

At that meeting, both Democrats and Republicans hammered out a common concordat for an international security organization. 

While Democrats got the initial credit for the formation of the UN under presidents Roosevelt and Truman, the Republicans serving on the US delegation in that California city were always enthusiastic about its creation. 

Leaders like Senator Arthur Vandenberg of Michigan praised the United Nations as "the world's only chance" to stop World War III. 

Governor Thomas Dewey, twice the Republican nominee for the presidency in 1944 and 1948, observed: "There is a clear mandate from the American people" for the United Nations. 

John Foster Dulles, later Eisenhower's Secretary of State, said "I believe it could be a greater Magna Carta." 

Other iconic figures of the party at that time such as Nelson Rockefeller, whose family gave the land in New York for the UN building, and Harold Stassen, lauded the establishment of the body.

Since then, the twenty-five American appointees to that august body by both parties have fit the profile. 

They have included a former Secretary of State, Edward Stettinius, and a future Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright; a former presidential nominee of the Democratic party, Adlai Stevenson, and a future Republican president, George H. W. Bush; two former Republican Senators, Henry Cabot Lodge, and John Danforth, and a future Democratic Senator, Daniel Patrick Moynihan; a former Justice of the US Supreme Court, Arthur Goldberg; the future Democratic mayor of Atlanta, Andrew Young and the future Democratic governor of New Mexico, Bill Richardson; and a series of distinguished career diplomats – Vernon Walters, Thomas Pickering, Richard Holbrooke, and John Negroponte. 

Mixed in with this exalted lot admittedly have been a few lesser figures.    

John Bolton's history as a minor governmental official of scant accomplishment along with his now famous litany of pronouncements on the United Nations, however, leaves him decidedly outré this tradition. 

Mr. Bolton's meager record of public service is one formidable limitation. 

But his swaggering observations that nobody really cares whether ten stories might be sliced off the UN building, that we do not have any obligation to pay our dues to the organization, that the Security Council should be reduced to one member, namely the USA, and, perhaps his most notorious sally, that "there's no such thing as the United Nations", betray an underlying and, indeed, withering contempt for the organization that is virtually unprecedented in the annals of US engagement with the UN. 

He seems a man utterly devoid of the talents necessary to work with other states to advance US interests.

Some observers, in his defense, argue nonetheless that Bolton resembles two past appointees whose intemperate behavior at the United Nations drew widespread global attention – Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Jeane Kirkpatrick – yet were still notable envoys. 

However, whatever one's views of these two individuals, both took the UN seriously as a forum in which to argue for American positions. 

The flamboyant Moynihan denounced Uganda's Idi Amin as a "racist murderer" and criticized the "Zionism is racism" resolution, among his other reproofs. 

Kirkpatrick, in her turn, praised as noble the UN's goal "to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war" and said the Charter was "planned and constructed by some hard-headed realists."

What would today Arthur Vandenberg, Thomas Dewey, John Foster Dulles, Nelson Rockefeller and Harold Stassen make of the appointment of John Bolton as their country's representative to the world's most important body? 

My guess is that they would share the view of one of today's leading Republicans, John Whitehead, Ronald Reagan's former Deputy Secretary of State, who, along with the fifty-nine former diplomats who have served in both Democratic and Republicans administrations, have labeled the choice of Bolton as a profound "mistake" and should be rejected forthwith by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Labels: United Nations, U.N., 

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