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Everyone on campus knew who Annan was. It was not simply that he was a handsome black man in the middle of the lily-white Midwest. It was that he carried himself with complete assurance. Today his appearance is as much an element of his ethos as his velvet voice or his poetic words. "Such elegance," a French journalist exclaimed after meeting him. "The ideas, the politics, the clothes!"
Annan is 5 ft. 9 in. tall and stands perfectly straight, but with an easy bearing, not a soldier's forced rigidity. He has an athlete's muscular build--left over from his college running days--and a trim weight that can drop as much as 10 lbs. when he is worried, or overworked, or sad--as when his twin sister died a rapid death from a still unknown disease in 1991. And he is always perfectly dressed. When journalist William Shawcross refers to him as a "secular pope," the observation is almost as much sartorial as moral. But Annan's assurance rests mostly in his eyes. Flip this magazine back to the cover, and look into them for a moment. It was often said of Gandhi that he had eyes that reflected the world's sorrows. Annan's seem to hold the world's hopes. He relies on them in negotiations and grumbles when his interlocutors look away from him to take notes or read talking points. He likes to go eye to eye. "He is captivating in the best sense of the word," says former German Chancellor Helmut Kohl, whom Annan has supported as a friend through difficult times. "When he approaches you," Kohl explains, "it is not possible to keep up any barriers."
III. AKOKODUR (COURAGE)
In dangerous situations--the kind that would have most of us tingling with a little bit of healthy fear--Annan becomes calmer, aides say. His jokes get funnier; his voice is quieter. People who worked with him in the field when he was running the U.N.'s peacekeeping division say no weather was ever too bad, no road too dangerous, no campsite too open to sniper fire for Annan. He regularly put himself in harm's way to negotiate access for medical supplies, food aid and humanitarian personnel in the world's hellholes. An aide recalls one night last year sitting with him on a Macedonian balcony overlooking Kosovo as U.S. air strikes reverberated nearby. Annan calmly chatted up world leaders by cell phone for two straight hours. He wears a thick U.N. flak jacket with as much dignity and ease as a kente cloth.