The Foreign Service Journal, November 2012

62 NOVEMBER 2012 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL during a particularly hot phase of the Sino-Soviet rift. As I watched from the gallery one evening, the Russian for- eign minister, the infamous Jakob Malik, was berating Beijing for some real or imagined duplicitous act. The Chinese dele- gate, speaking English, shouted in reply, “The trouble with you, Mr. Malik, is that you have no class!” I had waited a long time to hear one member of a self-styled classless society speak- ing so to another member of a self-styled classless society. My conclusion: some communists, despite Marxist rhetoric, considered themselves classier than others. While these events of some magnitude swirled around me, my role was peripheral. Although I was an accredited mem- ber of the United States delegation and bore all the necessary credentials, State Department officers clearly were frightened that I might somehow be emboldened to speak during one of the committee sessions I regularly attended. On one occasion when I momentarily was left alone as the sole American rep- resentative at a meeting, the mission dispatched a 23-year-old secretary to replace me in the U.S. chair. In the final analysis, I found the United Nations—essen- tial as it is—a place with too much talk and too little action. It made the U.S. Congress seem a veritable dynamo. So when the General Assembly session ended, I returned to Capitol Hill wiser in the ways of international diplomacy, and with a palpable sense of relief. Postscript Three years later, President Jimmy Carter appointed me assistant administrator for Asia and the Pacific at the U.S. Agency for International Development. For the next four years, I inhabited an office on the sixth floor of the State Depart- ment, where my experience at the United Nations came in very handy indeed in the “care and feeding” of diplomats, both foreign and domestic. n A gentleman fromNiger, elegantly dressed in an embroidered gown and wearing a tall conical hat, slid out of his seat and disappeared under the table.