THE OPTIMIST.(Kofi Annan)(Interview)

From a distance, Kofi Annan's gray hair and goatee cast a hazy nimbus around his face, and his features appear as if in soft focus. At closer range, it is an easy face to look at, in no way extraordinary, and this is its advantage: it does not appear to be hiding anything, and at the same time it gives nothing away. The rest of him is of a piece, a model of equanimity. (Recently, when I asked about Annan's plans, one of his aides said, "We're trying to read his body language. That means we have no idea.") Annan is a slight man--five feet nine, and trim--with perfect posture and an unflappable air of amiable gravity. His impeccable tailoring, stately bearing, and elegant, expressive hands suggest a personal fastidiousness, even preciousness. He is, in fact, an aristocrat--in Ghana, where he was born and raised, his father was a traditional chief of the Fante people; through his mother, he is heir to the paramount chieftancy of the Akwamu. His wife, Nane Annan, is also of proud pedigree, a niece of Raoul Wallenberg, the martyred Swedish rescuer of Hungarian Jews during the Holocaust. Like many complex people, Annan likes to describe himself as a simple man. He says he prefers to live life modestly and enjoys nothing so much as a hike in the country. He loves to dance, and he does so with the sort of undemonstrative panache that draws one's attention as if by seeking to deflect it--through finesse and understatement, expressing warmth while manifesting cool. He is at once intensely present and personable and curiously detached. Annan was born a twin, and when I asked him about that, he said, "Yes, I had a twin, but she died about eight years ago. We were close, yah." A colleague who has worked with Annan for years expressed astonishment at this: "I've never heard him say he was close to anyone before."

Annan has spent four decades working in the U.N. bureaucracy, and before he became Secretary-General, six years ago--the first black African, and the first career U.N. man to hold the office--he and his wife lived in a three-bedroom apartment on Roosevelt Island, in the East River; now they look out on the river from their official residence, a grand brownstone on Sutton Place, the former mansion of J. P. Morgan's daughter, and they have become fixtures of New York society. Annan has appeared as a special guest on "Sesame Street," seeking to resolve a conflict between shag-carpeted puppets, and a double-page photo of the Annans embracing ran in the "Couples Issue" of Vogue in February. "There is a little bit of an element of a royal couple around them," Mark Malloch Brown, an Englishman who runs the U.N. Development Program and has counted the Annans as friends for nearly twenty years, told me. Malloch Brown used to work as an international political consultant, advising heads of state. "My guys slogged through the trenches, and by the time they got to be national leaders they had put their reputations on the line, they had lived through campaigns, they were battle-hardened veterans. But royals sort of get there effortlessly, by accident of birth. Although Kofi and Nane came up through the ranks, they have a more gracious, divine-right-of-kings feel about them than the other Secretary-Generals I've known."

In the mid-nineties, Annan served as head of the U.N. Peacekeeping department for nearly four years, during which he oversaw the grim withdrawal of the U.N.'s force from Somalia, and the catastrophic failures of its missions in Bosnia and Rwanda. Nonetheless, he professes continued astonishment at the existence of evil. Since his elevation to Secretary-General in 1997, he has been charged by the U.N. Charter with looking after "the maintenance of international peace and security," and while that goal remains elusive, he exudes an uncanny sense of being at peace in himself. After all, as he never tires of pointing out, he has no practical political power. He controls no territory; he commands no troops; he cannot make or enforce laws; he cannot levy taxes; he exercises no administrative authority outside the U.N. bureaucracy, and he hasn't even got a vote in its General Assembly or on the Security Council. The Secretary-General, he says, is "invested only with the power that a united Security Council may wish to bestow, and the moral authority entrusted to him by the Charter"--or, put more plainly, he has nothing but his voice.

Annan's voice is a low, husky hush, like an amplified whisper, and there is an uncanny metronomic evenness to his speech. He sounds ancient, and yet the voice is full of vigor, a monotone without tedium, inflected only by the equatorial mid-Atlantic lilt of his accent--as much West Indian, to an American ear, as West African--which lends it a muted musical cadence. The effect is disconcertingly soothing. Annan can make the vaguest, most innocuous statements sound substantial and profound, and he can deliver his toughest, most challenging arguments without apparent argumentativeness. When he speaks, one-on-one or from a dais studded with microphones, he clearly feels himself to be speaking to the world, but he creates the impression of a man listening to himself, confirming that he agrees with himself as he goes, and allowing one to eavesdrop. In the complete absence of any discernible attitude in the quietly rumbling deadpan of his oratory, one is left with nothing to respond to but his words.

The overriding theme of Annan's frequent public speeches is that the troubles of the world in our time--war, terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, aids, refugees and economic migration, extreme poverty, environmental degradation, and all other manner of woe and mischief that humanity is heir to--are more than ever "problems without borders," and must be dealt with as such, internationally, lest we reap a whirlwind of Hobbesian mayhem. To anyone with a pessimistic view of history, the notion that our salvation depends on everyone's coming together for the common good may sound like a forecast of doom. But Annan, who counts himself as a pragmatist, believes in the possibility of world order. Reflecting on the terrorist attacks of September, 2001, he heard a wakeup call for his cause. "Ladies and Gentlemen, we have entered the third millennium through a gate of fire," he said in Oslo, on accepting the Nobel Peace Prize--awarded jointly to Annan and to the U.N.--in December of that year. "If, today, after the horror of 11 September, we see better, and we see further, we will realize that humanity is indivisible." To illustrate his point, Annan evoked an image from chaos theory: "Scientists tell us that the world of nature is so small and interdependent that a butterfly flapping its wings in the Amazon rainforest can generate a violent storm on the other side of the earth. This principle is known as the Butterfly Effect. Today, we realize, perhaps more than ever, that the world of human activity also has its own Butterfly Effect--for better or for worse."

A year later, when I visited him in his office at the northeast corner of the thirty-eighth floor--the top floor, of course--of U.N. headquarters, Annan allowed that of late the human storms have been for the worse. His office is a spacious room, wood-panelled, with a large, surprisingly clean desk (no computer). One wall of the room is almost entirely glass, giving way to a vast and mesmerizing panorama across the East River of the roofscape and highway overpasses of Queens. It is a comfortable aerie; a pleasantly defiant memory of Cuban cigar smoke hung in the air. "The world is really a big mess," Annan said as we settled into his sitting area. "Wherever you turn you have problems." Iraq was obviously the most pressing issue for the U.N., but Annan seemed as concerned by the ravages of poverty, disease, ignorance, and misrule. "We have the global economic downturn, and of course you have the terrorist threats and the terrorist networks, which are spread very far," he said. "Even without these things, I always maintain that we have a serious crisis of governance. To govern in this atmosphere and take optimal and rational decisions, trying to deal with the hot issues while containing the others, is a really difficult thing. Sometimes when I wake up in the morning I don't know where else a major crisis is going to come from, where it's going to break."

Annan didn't sound alarmed; his voice was as mellifluous as ever. He is, above all, an optimist, and he spoke with something of a weatherman's confidence that even the most devastating tempests will pass. He is a master of talking politics without politicizing, naming names, or apportioning blame. This is partly standard diplomatic discretion and partly a taste for subtlety that is peculiarly suited to the ambiguities of his office. The U.N. is composed of a hundred and ninety-one sovereign governments. These member states, as they're called, are Annan's employers, and, as his double-barrelled title indicates, his job is to serve them as the U.N.'s secretary, its chief administrative officer, and also as its general, its chief political operative. Together the member states form the General Assembly, which convenes in full each fall. The Assembly rides herd over the U.N.'s administrative functions, sets its internal agenda, and can also pass resolutions, which may have political influence but have no standing as law and no power of enforcement. For that, there is the Security Council, the U.N.'s political organ, which has only fifteen seats, ten allotted by an arcane political arithmetic to member states elected for two-year stints, and the remainder occupied since 1945 by five permanent members, known in-house as the P-5--China, England, France, Russia, and the United States--who alone enjoy the supreme power of the veto, and thereby dominate the Council's debates and decisions.