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One of the problems of Annan's job is that everyone has an idea of what he should do. Annan listens eagerly to all of them (perhaps less eagerly when they are screaming) and does what he feels he must. In 1998, as Albright raged at him, the White House had wanted to send Saddam a message: he could choose between arms inspectors or bombs. Annan thought the choice absurd. "I worry about our Iraq policy," he said recently, using the our to reflect the international community. "We don't have one." What Annan did know was that innocent Iraqis were suffering as ineffectual U.N. sanctions hurt all the wrong people. And having seen Saddam face to face, Annan had a sense that bombs weren't the answer. Albright blasted him and told him not to forget how he got his job--a blunt reference to the fact that the U.S. had eased Annan in after despairing of working with his predecessor, Boutros-Ghali. But Annan wasn't playing that game. He did what he felt he had to. Says Albright today: "He feels his responsibility is to make sure always that there's peace, that you can work things out. We want peace too, but we have our national interests."
Annan was bred for such moments. His elder sister Essie recalls how their father, after dinner, would hold mock court sessions in which he would "try" his children for their misdeeds. Henry Reginald Annan was less interested in their excuses than in their comportment. Did they change their story? Were there holes in their logic? Did they pause and stutter and shuffle while they spoke? Kofi, his sister recalls, never hesitated. Often he would collapse the proceedings with a well-timed joke.
Awerehyemu. When Annan, age 21, went to America in 1959 to study economics at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minn., he was wrapped in the stuff. A picture from the period shows a couple of delighted girls fingering a kente cloth draped around Annan's shoulders. His history has always been for him like that kente cloth--protection against the elements, a cloak of awerehyemu. His presence at Macalester was a sign that the world was shrinking--an economic, technological and even, in his eyes, moral event. It would be decades before kente-cloth fashions appeared at the Gap, but Annan's arrival in the U.S. evoked a closer global community. He was instantly comfortable. "When he came back [from America]," his sister recalls, "he had a certain serenity. He looked very calm, very cool...He knew what he was about."
What Annan was about was a little bit subversive by Eisenhower-era standards. In a world buzzing with the polarizing chatter of mutually assured destruction, Annan was a committed globalist. Something about America--perhaps the striking disparity between the nation and the rest of the world--set Annan to noodling about the obligations of the powerful to the powerless. The problems of that disparity had been brewing inside his skull for some time--an obvious legacy of an African childhood of plenty in a land with little. America had a searing, sealing effect on Annan's thinking. In the long winter nights, he and his friends would cram into a beat-up old car and shoot out onto the Midwestern highways, driving through snow and ice to debating contests around the state. Annan's speech was almost always the same, a reasoned and moving pitch for global community. To the debate geeks who listened, the young man with the quiet voice was unforgettable.