What these surveys suggest is that eight months into Mr. Bush’s Presidency, he was already wearing thin his welcome with the American people. This was at a time when his relations with Congress were tense and the Democrats had regained control of the Senate. Despite Mr. Bush’s success with his tax-cut bill, he was in a public fight over stem-cell research, followed by education, immigration and the question of the Social Security “lockbox.” And he was simultaneously pressing for a retrogressive domestic agenda.

After the shocking assaults on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Zogby showed Mr. Bush’s popularity soaring to 82 percent positive and only 17 percent negative. The Washington Post–Gallup poll had Mr. Bush’s approval rating even higher. From then on—really until this year—Mr. Bush maintained a plus rating with the American people, tied almost solely to 9/11.

Like “America’s Mayor,” Rudy Giuliani, whose approval ratings were at their lowest ebb on 9/10, Mr. Bush was elevated to political nobility by the kamikazes of Osama bin Laden.

His lackluster poll numbers and the unpopularity of his agenda were forgotten or put aside as the U.S. mourned and prepared its response to the attacks.

The image of Mr. Bush fighting back—something, by the way, which any American President would have had to have done under the same circumstances or he certainly would have faced impeachment—allowed him to catapult over the failures of his first eight months.

He was able to push forward an agenda that, under other conditions, might have been rejected as reactionary. Indeed, in 2002, despite a threadbare domestic record, Mr. Bush was able to increase Republican margins in that year’s midterm Congressional elections. In 2003, of course, he launched his war on Iraq, despite the outright opposition of the United Nations and some of our allies, his inability to find weapons of mass destruction and his lack of success in connecting Saddam Hussein to Al Qaeda. This led to the looting and mayhem that followed Saddam’s downfall, and the insurgency that sprung up thereafter.

Then, in 2004, he won the narrowest re-election race in years. That victory owed much to Karl Rove’s strategy of relentlessly appealing to fears related to 9/11. By framing the campaign in such a way, Mr. Bush was able to glide past a first-term record that was actually hurting him among the electorate. His failures and controversial initiatives accounted for John Kerry’s close finish.

Republican manipulation of 9/11 blinded voters to the fact that Mr. Bush turned Bill Clinton’s surplus into a massive debt, gutted environmental regulations, enacted an unwieldy Medicare prescription bill, ducked national health insurance, weakened mine-safety regulations, reduced scientific research funding, ended trust-busting and widened American poverty.

His foreign-policy record was hardly better, renowned mainly for its repudiation of global treaties that the U.S. had once supported and its shift toward unilateralism, which frayed relations with all of our allies around the planet.

Today, Mr. Bush is in deep trouble in the polls. He has gone downhill since February 2005, when his favorability rating last stood above 50 percent, one month into his second term. His positive numbers now hover from 34 to 40 percent. His collapse follows the disasters he helped to create, including the increasingly vicious Iraq war, the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, the botching of Katrina relief, the Social Security and Medicare calamities, the controversial Dubai port deal and others. But what must be especially disheartening for him is that his ratings even in his own party are now 10 to 15 percent lower than his previous level of support. Those low ratings have given Democrats hope of winning control of Capitol Hill this November.

All of this suggests that Mr. Bush is returning to what he was always viewed as before the 9/11 catastrophe—namely, a mediocrity. George Bush, without Osama bin Laden, would almost certainly not have been re-elected President in 2004.

With the passage of almost five years since 9/11, and the calming of emotions from that terrible day, the American people are beginning to view the Bush Presidency for what it really has always been: one of the most inept and feckless since that of Millard Fillmore.

What these surveys suggest is that eight months into Mr. Bush’s Presidency, he was already wearing thin his welcome with the American people. This was at a time when his relations with Congress were tense and the Democrats had regained control of the Senate. Despite Mr. Bush’s success with his tax-cut bill, he was in a public fight over stem-cell research, followed by education, immigration and the question of the Social Security “lockbox.” And he was simultaneously pressing for a retrogressive domestic agenda.

After the shocking assaults on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Zogby showed Mr. Bush’s popularity soaring to 82 percent positive and only 17 percent negative. The Washington Post–Gallup poll had Mr. Bush’s approval rating even higher. From then on—really until this year—Mr. Bush maintained a plus rating with the American people, tied almost solely to 9/11.

Like “America’s Mayor,” Rudy Giuliani, whose approval ratings were at their lowest ebb on 9/10, Mr. Bush was elevated to political nobility by the kamikazes of Osama bin Laden.

His lackluster poll numbers and the unpopularity of his agenda were forgotten or put aside as the U.S. mourned and prepared its response to the attacks.

The image of Mr. Bush fighting back—something, by the way, which any American President would have had to have done under the same circumstances or he certainly would have faced impeachment—allowed him to catapult over the failures of his first eight months.

He was able to push forward an agenda that, under other conditions, might have been rejected as reactionary. Indeed, in 2002, despite a threadbare domestic record, Mr. Bush was able to increase Republican margins in that year’s midterm Congressional elections. In 2003, of course, he launched his war on Iraq, despite the outright opposition of the United Nations and some of our allies, his inability to find weapons of mass destruction and his lack of success in connecting Saddam Hussein to Al Qaeda. This led to the looting and mayhem that followed Saddam’s downfall, and the insurgency that sprung up thereafter.

Then, in 2004, he won the narrowest re-election race in years. That victory owed much to Karl Rove’s strategy of relentlessly appealing to fears related to 9/11. By framing the campaign in such a way, Mr. Bush was able to glide past a first-term record that was actually hurting him among the electorate. His failures and controversial initiatives accounted for John Kerry’s close finish.

Republican manipulation of 9/11 blinded voters to the fact that Mr. Bush turned Bill Clinton’s surplus into a massive debt, gutted environmental regulations, enacted an unwieldy Medicare prescription bill, ducked national health insurance, weakened mine-safety regulations, reduced scientific research funding, ended trust-busting and widened American poverty.

His foreign-policy record was hardly better, renowned mainly for its repudiation of global treaties that the U.S. had once supported and its shift toward unilateralism, which frayed relations with all of our allies around the planet.

Today, Mr. Bush is in deep trouble in the polls. He has gone downhill since February 2005, when his favorability rating last stood above 50 percent, one month into his second term. His positive numbers now hover from 34 to 40 percent. His collapse follows the disasters he helped to create, including the increasingly vicious Iraq war, the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, the botching of Katrina relief, the Social Security and Medicare calamities, the controversial Dubai port deal and others. But what must be especially disheartening for him is that his ratings even in his own party are now 10 to 15 percent lower than his previous level of support. Those low ratings have given Democrats hope of winning control of Capitol Hill this November.

All of this suggests that Mr. Bush is returning to what he was always viewed as before the 9/11 catastrophe—namely, a mediocrity. George Bush, without Osama bin Laden, would almost certainly not have been re-elected President in 2004.

With the passage of almost five years since 9/11, and the calming of emotions from that terrible day, the American people are beginning to view the Bush Presidency for what it really has always been: one of the most inept and feckless since that of Millard Fillmore.

A fair reading of Mr. Volcker’s conclusions is that Mr. Annan not only did not have a central role in this lamentable affair but also bore scant responsibility at all from the onset. Instead, the one nation that shoved the inquiry forward from the beginning was also most culpable: the United States. Yet Mr. Volcker’s investigation still places much of the onus for this troubling event on the U.N. Secretariat’s office.

Let’s review the facts. Washington was complicit in two ways for what happened. First, starting shortly after the end of the first Gulf War in 1991, it secretly allowed oil to be smuggled from Iraq to two of its allies, Jordan and Turkey (and some to Syria).

Under this arrangement, Saddam Hussein managed to rake in $11 billion illegally (of the $12.8 billion he is estimated to have received unlawfully in the 1990’s and early 2000 from oil-related transactions). Then, under the separate oil-for-food program, which began in 1996, Saddam skimmed off the last $1.8 billion or so (far below original estimates of $4.4 billion) from various contractors. All of those latter deals were approved by the 661 committee set up by the Security Council, on which the U.S. was the most persuasive and powerful actor.

Critics have hammered Mr. Annan for allowing both operations to go ahead without his tight supervision. One must remember, however, that for the Jordan/Turkey undertaking, Washington exclusively controlled the venture and wouldn’t permit any outsider to oversee its activities, so Mr. Annan could do nothing about this smuggling. On the second matter—the oil-for-food program—commentators have assailed Mr. Annan for appointing a smarmy official as head of the U.N. unit carrying out the Security Council’s operations on the ground in Iraq; for permitting Saddam Hussein to select his own trading partners; and for not arranging internal audits of the program’s transactions.

In all three instances, Mr. Annan was essentially blameless. On the directorship of the U.N. Iraq program, Mr. Annan may have selected an inadequate and perhaps venal lieutenant but, in any case, this official had no influence over the contracting process. On the contrary, this Secretariat team alerted the 661 committee to pricing irregularities in Saddam’s contracts over 70 times. But the U.S. government, in the end, never heeded any of its particulars on kickbacks. Instead, it blocked or vetoed over 5,000 contracts solely on the possibility that the goods which Iraq purchased for “humanitarian” reasons might also be used for military purposes.

As for allowing Saddam to choose his own foreign collaborators and not imposing an internal audit, it was the Security Council (with Washington’s assent) that authorized Saddam to pick his own companies and that sidelined internal audits, not the Secretary General. Indeed, Mr. Annan himself set up the Volcker inquest to uncover any transgressions. Mr. Annan did make one serious misstep: not investigating forcefully enough his son’s brief employment at one of the companies participating in the program. Yet there’s no evidence that that case had anything to do with Mr. Hussein’s siphoning off $12.8 billion.

In his report, Mr. Volcker doesn’t delve much into the lucrative smuggling episode, but dwells almost entirely on the oil-for-food project. Mr. Volcker’s explanation for this omission is that the mandate given to him by the U.N. was to examine the oil-for-food program exclusively. But this is a cop-out. Since the media and Congress for the past three years have totally focused on all the boodle wrung from the criminal enterprise with Saddam, the public needed to know all of the relevant details. In particular, Mr. Volcker in his report should have given greater emphasis to the extraordinary size of the rip-offs from the American-backed bootlegging operations.

For Mr. Volcker not to do this is highly misleading and unfair to the Secretary General. The impression has now been left in the public sphere that Mr. Annan’s weak or complicit leadership was responsible for Saddam’s thievery. This has led to the blackening of his reputation by critics who have called him corrupt. These are cruel and libelous accusations. The media disseminated inflammatory reports on so-called U.N. double-dealing without taking the time to examine what was truly going on.

Now that the Volcker probe is over, it is time to recognize Mr. Annan’s essential faultlessness during the ugliest moments of his tenure.

Joe Conason will return to this space next week.

A fair reading of Mr. Volcker’s conclusions is that Mr. Annan not only did not have a central role in this lamentable affair but also bore scant responsibility at all from the onset. Instead, the one nation that shoved the inquiry forward from the beginning was also most culpable: the United States. Yet Mr. Volcker’s investigation still places much of the onus for this troubling event on the U.N. Secretariat’s office.

Let’s review the facts. Washington was complicit in two ways for what happened. First, starting shortly after the end of the first Gulf War in 1991, it secretly allowed oil to be smuggled from Iraq to two of its allies, Jordan and Turkey (and some to Syria).

Under this arrangement, Saddam Hussein managed to rake in $11 billion illegally (of the $12.8 billion he is estimated to have received unlawfully in the 1990’s and early 2000 from oil-related transactions). Then, under the separate oil-for-food program, which began in 1996, Saddam skimmed off the last $1.8 billion or so (far below original estimates of $4.4 billion) from various contractors. All of those latter deals were approved by the 661 committee set up by the Security Council, on which the U.S. was the most persuasive and powerful actor.

Critics have hammered Mr. Annan for allowing both operations to go ahead without his tight supervision. One must remember, however, that for the Jordan/Turkey undertaking, Washington exclusively controlled the venture and wouldn’t permit any outsider to oversee its activities, so Mr. Annan could do nothing about this smuggling. On the second matter—the oil-for-food program—commentators have assailed Mr. Annan for appointing a smarmy official as head of the U.N. unit carrying out the Security Council’s operations on the ground in Iraq; for permitting Saddam Hussein to select his own trading partners; and for not arranging internal audits of the program’s transactions.

In all three instances, Mr. Annan was essentially blameless. On the directorship of the U.N. Iraq program, Mr. Annan may have selected an inadequate and perhaps venal lieutenant but, in any case, this official had no influence over the contracting process. On the contrary, this Secretariat team alerted the 661 committee to pricing irregularities in Saddam’s contracts over 70 times. But the U.S. government, in the end, never heeded any of its particulars on kickbacks. Instead, it blocked or vetoed over 5,000 contracts solely on the possibility that the goods which Iraq purchased for “humanitarian” reasons might also be used for military purposes.

As for allowing Saddam to choose his own foreign collaborators and not imposing an internal audit, it was the Security Council (with Washington’s assent) that authorized Saddam to pick his own companies and that sidelined internal audits, not the Secretary General. Indeed, Mr. Annan himself set up the Volcker inquest to uncover any transgressions. Mr. Annan did make one serious misstep: not investigating forcefully enough his son’s brief employment at one of the companies participating in the program. Yet there’s no evidence that that case had anything to do with Mr. Hussein’s siphoning off $12.8 billion.

In his report, Mr. Volcker doesn’t delve much into the lucrative smuggling episode, but dwells almost entirely on the oil-for-food project. Mr. Volcker’s explanation for this omission is that the mandate given to him by the U.N. was to examine the oil-for-food program exclusively. But this is a cop-out. Since the media and Congress for the past three years have totally focused on all the boodle wrung from the criminal enterprise with Saddam, the public needed to know all of the relevant details. In particular, Mr. Volcker in his report should have given greater emphasis to the extraordinary size of the rip-offs from the American-backed bootlegging operations.

For Mr. Volcker not to do this is highly misleading and unfair to the Secretary General. The impression has now been left in the public sphere that Mr. Annan’s weak or complicit leadership was responsible for Saddam’s thievery. This has led to the blackening of his reputation by critics who have called him corrupt. These are cruel and libelous accusations. The media disseminated inflammatory reports on so-called U.N. double-dealing without taking the time to examine what was truly going on.

Now that the Volcker probe is over, it is time to recognize Mr. Annan’s essential faultlessness during the ugliest moments of his tenure.

Joe Conason will return to this space next week.

The unwritten convention is that Presidents from 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 60 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 the international security organization. While Democrats got the initial credit for the formation of the U.N. under Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, the Republicans serving on the U.S. delegation were equally 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. New York's Thomas Dewey, 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 Dwight Eisenhower's Secretary of State, said, "I believe it could be a greater Magna Carta." Other iconic Republican figures, such as Nelson Rockefeller (whose family gave the land in New York for the U.N. building) and Harold Stassen, lauded the establishment of the U.N.

Since then, the 25 American appointees to that august body by both parties have fit the same 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 U.S. Supreme Court, Arthur Goldberg; the future Democratic mayor of Atlanta, Andrew Young, and a future Democratic governor of New Mexico, Bill Richardson; and a series of distinguished career diplomats-Vernon Walters, Thomas Pickering, Richard Holbrooke and John Negroponte. Admittedly, mixed in with this exalted lot have been a few lesser figures.

However, John Bolton's history as a minor governmental official of scant accomplishment, along with his now-famous litany of denunciations regarding the U.N., leaves him decidedly outside this tradition. Mr. Bolton's meager record of public service is a formidable limitation. But his swaggering observations that nobody really cares whether 10 stories might be sliced off the U.N. 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 United States; and (perhaps his most notorious sally) that "there's no such thing as the United Nations," all betray an underlying and withering contempt for the organization that is virtually unprecedented in the annals of U.S. engagement with the U.N.

Given his arrant disdain for the organization, he seems a man utterly devoid of the talents necessary to work with other states to advance U.S. interests.

Some observers, in his defense, argue nonetheless that Mr. Bolton resembles two past appointees whose intemperate behavior at the United Nations drew widespread global attention-Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Jeanne Kirkpatrick-yet were still notable envoys. However, both took the U.N. 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 now-famous resolution equating Zionism with racism, among his other reproofs. Ms. Kirkpatrick, in her turn, praised as noble the U.N.'s goal "to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war" and said the U.N. Charter was "planned and constructed by some hard-headed realists."

What would 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.

Mr. Whitehead, along with 59 former diplomats who have served in both Democratic and Republicans administrations, have labeled the choice of Mr. Bolton as a profound "mistake" and have urged his rejection.

In his debate with John Kerry last week, Mr. Bush regaled Americans with his efforts to get the U.N. to help the U.S. in Iraq: "We support the U.N. effort there," he said. And he told the assembled representatives from 190 nations at the U.N.’s fall session that the world faced a time of "tremendous opportunity."

In a singularly upbeat manner, he asked the international community to stand by "the world’s newest democracies," citing Iraqi sovereignty and the Afghan elections next month as evidence of a new liberalization in the Muslim world. He proposed, for example, a Global Peace Operations Initiative to be formed by the G-8 nations to supply 75,000 more U.N. peacekeepers around the globe, as well as a Democracy Fund to help underwrite democratic development around the world.

With all of this flair and burnished rhetoric, however, Mr. Bush skimmed over his problems with the U.N. He didn’t cite the charge he made two years ago that the U.N. would go the way of the League of Nations into "irrelevance" if it dared not support his policy on Saddam Hussein. He didn’t mention his decision thereafter to defy the Security Council by invading Iraq without the council’s prior authorization.

Finally, he didn’t talk about how he chose to steer America on a unilateral path, upending traditional U.S. reliance on containment and deterrence.

Even on the Presidential campaign trail, though, Mr. Bush sounds cheerful about the U.N. Oblivious to his checkered history with the body, he told an audience in Bangor, Me., "I gave a speech to the United Nations. They looked at the same intelligence I had looked at. They remembered the same history we remembered. And they voted, 15 to nothing, to say to Saddam Hussein: disclose, disarm or face serious consequences." Mr. Bush said nothing about Secretary General Kofi Annan’s recent accusation that the Iraq war was "illegal."

Then, of course, there is the other Bush approach. This emerged in all its fury at the Republican convention. There, speaker after speaker vowed that the U.S. under George W. Bush would never seek a permission slip from the United Nations to attack another country or crush another terrorist cell. California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger drew a roar of applause with his line that "if you believe this country, not the United Nations, is the best hope for democracy, then you are a Republican." In his acceptance speech, Mr. Bush himself said: "I will never relent in defending America—whatever it takes."

Admittedly, most new Presidents since the U.N.’s inception have expressed some skepticism about the real value of the organization. A few have come into office ready to circumvent it, while others have argued that it should not be taken seriously. Most, in any case, have demanded reforms at the U.N. Still, almost every American President at some point eventually comes round to the realization that the U.N. represents one more quiver—a moral one, at that—in this country’s arsenal of diplomatic weapons. Harry Truman found that out in the Korean War, Dwight Eisenhower in the Suez crisis, and John F. Kennedy in the Cuban missile crisis.

That both of America’s leading political parties have employed the U.N. for their security goals is not that surprising. The U.N., after all, came into being in 1945 as a result of a bipartisan coalition of Republicans and Democrats.

George W. Bush, however, may be the first President since the end of World War II who has demonstrated a breathtaking incoherence in his attitude toward the United Nations. He apparently has come to believe that he can both solicit the U.N. and bash it at the same time. His approach has fueled the U.N.-phobia that even now darkens the discussion of the U.N. during the Presidential election.

Mr. Bush is not the first candidate to have employed the U.N. as a foil as well as a crutch; Bob Dole did one thing as Senate majority leader and another in his 1996 Presidential campaign when he deliberately mispronounced the name of U.N. Secretary General Boutrous Boutrous-Ghali. But the President is surely the first candidate who has played the U.N. card both as a virtue and a vice and pretended that there are no contradictions in his game.

The first impression one gleans from Boutros Boutros-Ghali's memoir of his days as Secretary General of the United Nations is how much he relished his reputation as a difficult and exasperating man to work with. Mr. Boutros-Ghali notes approvingly that he was seen by others as "imperious," "arrogant and abrasive," "unfeeling," "wary and haughty," full of "obstinacy," "not the easiest person to deal with," partial to a "paternalistic tone," not being known "for downplaying my abilities" and as having a "deserved" fame for "being hard" on his aides. There is something weird or even psychologically stunted about a world figure who boasts of his own offensive personal characteristics as proof of his leadership qualities.

Despite being a diplomat, Mr. Boutros-Ghali was never really diplomatic. He was seemingly not able to relate on a personal level to other human beings–an odd trait in a Secretary General who is supposed to be able to speak to as well as represent the five billion people of the earth. Mr. Boutros-Ghali's prickliness was such that even when he did do the good things that he cites in this mostly readable, sometimes self-indulgent memoir (he authored an influential paper, "An Agenda for Peace," that urges the creation of a United Nations force with rapid reaction capability; he lectured the richer nations of the planet about helping the poorer ones; he insisted that the United States pay its back dues to the United Nations), his statements got derailed by his idiosyncrasies.

In fact, his own U.N. staff cordially detested him–something that was well known when I served at the organization briefly in the mid-1990's. He was famous for getting rid of high-level aides who, because they had carried out their assignments well, threatened his own prominence. He had a singularly perverse streak that often led him into downright self-destructive acts: For instance, he rejected the proposal to create a U.N. high commissioner for human rights because he said it was a token gesture to "please the nongovernmental organizations"; the Director's title smacked of "British colonialism"; and the office would "arouse nationalist opposition." He took this position, knowing "in the end, they would win and I would lose." It was nutty.

But Mr. Boutros-Ghali's most intense preoccupation throughout his time at the United Nations was with the American Government–and rightly so, since it was the 800-pound gorilla at the party. His inability to come to terms with the Clinton Administration, with U.S. politics, with the American media and with Congress was legendary. He was never able to press the right buttons, crack the right joke, exhibit the right deftness, invent the right sound bite, or make the right friendships. His two most important (and strangest) allies in America were a duo unlikely to earn him plaudits with the mainstream: New York Times columnist A.M. (Abe) Rosenthal and Representative Charles Rangel. He quotes Mr. Rosenthal and Mr. Rangel a total of 11 times in his text; he reproduces at length their earnest defenses of his U.N. service and their pleas to President Clinton to retain him. Mr. Boutros-Ghali never reveals the nature of his relationship with either man (which could have made for some interesting reading). One does wonder why, given his capacity for such odd friendships, he could never reach out to other power circles in America to expand his base of political and media support.

Mr. Boutros-Ghali's periodic meetings in New York City with Secretary of State Warren Christopher and the then U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Madeleine Albright, verge on the hilarious. He tells how both officials simultaneously embraced and pummeled him–which he ascribes to their professional insecurities. On a few occasions, Ms. Albright even tried to ban him from traveling to Washington to visit a Congressman. His response was either Uriah Heep obsequiousness or Charles Atlas defiance. Either way, he failed to satisfy. At the same time, he remained eternally clueless as to why the United States wouldn't pay its back dues to the organization. He occasionally offers his own superficial analyses of America's moods, such as his dotty suggestion that the "liberal left" used the United Nations simply to "appear to be doing something about a foreign crisis while avoiding direct U.S. involvement." Hello, Haiti.

He exhibited an almost Olympian disdain and world-weariness toward the antics of most Clintonians. He always knew better. Take the Bosnia crisis: Mr. Boutros-Ghali states that he originally opposed the dispatch of United Nations "peacekeeping" troops to Bosnia because he felt their role was too undefined, but that the Security Council, led by Washington, overruled him. He was thus stuck with a force that, while on the ground, could not fight. Then, he says, he got blamed when the United Nations could neither stop the Serbs from ravaging Bosnia nor prevent the barbaric Serb massacre of Muslims in Srebenica–though he admits that he had the power to call for air strikes and did not. He asserts that it was the "two-faced U.S. policy" of putting U.N. troops on the front lines to avoid risking American lives that did him in. There may be truth to his version of events, but he never explains why, if the American policy was so perilous to the United Nations, he did not rally the membership against it or resign over the issue.

Nothing was ever his fault. He tried to do what he felt was best for the United Nations, and still Washington did not care for his efforts or for the organization. It's true: The U.S. treatment of the United Nations was indisputably disgraceful, and Mr. Boutros-Ghali was right to criticize it publicly. But he could not fathom why Washington, in its turn, wanted to dump him–except, of course, that Bill Clinton wished to get re-elected in 1996. Mr. Boutros-Ghali was particularly hurt when Senator Robert Dole mispronounced his name during the 1996 Presidential campaign.

In a paroxysm of self-absorption, Mr. Boutros-Ghali devotes the final quarter of his memoir to the story of how the United States prevented him from getting his second term. By turns dull, tendentious and embarrassing, these chapters reprint paeans to him from the Organization of African States; the assurances of world leaders who tell him he's the best; and Mr. Clinton's rote rhetorical praise of him during the 50th-anniversary celebration of the United Nations' founding. Mr. Boutros-Ghali argues that the U.S. action in dropping him was antidemocratic because the Clinton Administration employed its veto to defeat a candidate ostensibly desired by the rest of the body. What he doesn't say is that Washington used the same tactic that China employed when it blocked Kurt Waldheim's re-election. He also forgets that the United Nations was built on Realpolitik , not on majority rule. Mr. Boutros-Ghali admits he originally vowed to stay for only one term, but changed his mind.

Mr. Boutros-Ghali delivers some inside gossip and swift glances at recent history. His tale in the end provides a certain voyeuristic pleasure, almost like watching an automobile accident in slow motion. But, over all, he presents himself less like a martyr and more like a chump.

The first impression one gleans from Boutros Boutros-Ghali's memoir of his days as United Nations Secretary General is how much he relished his reputation for being a difficult and exasperating man to work with. Mr. Boutros-Ghali notes approvingly that he was seen by others as "imperious," "arrogant and abrasive," "wary and haughty," full of "obstinacy," "not the easiest person to deal with," partial to a "paternalistic tone," not being known "for downplaying my abilities" and as having a "deserved" fame for "being hard" on his aides. There is something weird or even psychologically stunted about a world figure who boasts of his own offensive personal characteristics as proof of his leadership qualities.

Despite being a diplomat, Mr. Boutros-Ghali was never really diplomatic. He seemingly was not able to relate on a personal level to other human beings–an odd trait in a Secretary General who is supposed to be able to speak to, as well as represent, the 5 billion people of the earth. Mr. Boutros-Ghali's prickliness was such that even when he did do the good things that he cites in this mostly readable, sometimes self-indulgent memoir (he authored an influential paper, "An Agenda for Peace," that urges the creation of a U.N. force with rapid reaction capability; he lectured the richer nations of the planet about helping the poorer ones; he insisted that the United States pay its back dues to the United Nations), his statements got derailed by his idiosyncrasies.

In fact, his own U.N. staff cordially detested him–something that was well known when I served at the organization briefly in the mid-1990's. He was famous for getting rid of high-level aides who, because they had carried out their assignments well, threatened his own prominence. He had a singularly perverse streak that often pushed him into downright self-destructive acts: For instance, he rejected the proposal to create a U.N. high commissioner for human rights because he said it was a token gesture to "please the nongovernmental organizations"; the Director's title smacked of "British colonialism"; and the office would "arouse nationalist opposition." He took this position, knowing "in the end, they would win and I would lose." It was nutty.

But Mr. Boutros-Ghali's most intense preoccupation throughout his time at the United Nations was with the American Government–and rightly so, since it was the 800-pound gorilla at the party. His inability to come to terms with the Clinton Administration, with U.S. politics, with the American media and with Congress was legendary. He was never able to press the right buttons, crack the right joke, exhibit the right deftness, invent the right sound bite, or make the right friendships. His two most important (and strangest) allies in America were a duo unlikely to earn him plaudits with the mainstream: New York Times columnist A.M. (Abe) Rosenthal and Representative Charles Rangel. He quotes Mr. Rosenthal and Mr. Rangel a total of 11 times in his text; he reproduces at length their earnest defenses of his U.N. service and their pleas to President Clinton to retain him. Mr. Boutros-Ghali never reveals the nature of his relationship with either man (which could have made for some interesting reading). One does wonder why, given his capacity for such odd friendships, he could never reach out to other power circles in America to expand his base of political and media support.

Mr. Boutros-Ghali's periodic meetings in New York City with Secretary of State Warren Christopher and the then U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Madeleine Albright, verge on the hilarious. He tells how both officials simultaneously embraced and pummeled him–which he ascribes to their professional insecurities. On a few occasions, Ms. Albright even tried to ban him from traveling to Washington to visit a Congressman. His response was either Uriah Heep obsequiousness or Charles Atlas defiance. Either way, he failed to satisfy. At the same time, he remained eternally clueless as to why the United States wouldn't pay its back dues to the organization. He occasionally offers his own superficial analyses of America's moods, such as his dotty suggestion that the "liberal left" used the United Nations simply to "appear to be doing something about a foreign crisis while avoiding direct U.S. involvement." Hello, Haiti.

He exhibited an almost Olympian disdain and world-weariness toward the antics of most Clintonians. He always knew better. Take the Bosnia crisis: Mr. Boutros-Ghali states that he originally opposed the dispatch of United Nations "peacekeeping" troops to Bosnia because he felt their role was too undefined, but that the Security Council, led by Washington, overruled him. He was thus stuck with a force that, while on the ground, could not fight. Then, he says, he got blamed when the U.N. could neither stop the Serbs from ravaging Bosnia nor prevent the barbaric Serb massacre of Muslims in Srebenica–yet he admits that he had the power to call for air strikes and did not. He asserts that it was the "two-faced U.S. policy" of putting U.N. troops on the front lines to avoid risking American lives that did him in. There may be truth to his version of events, but he never explains why, if the American policy was so perilous to the United Nations, he did not rally the membership against it or resign over the issue.

Nothing was ever his fault. He tried to do what he felt was best for the United Nations, and still Washington did not care for his efforts or for the organization. It's true: The U.S. treatment of the U.N. was indisputably disgraceful, and Mr. Boutros-Ghali was right to criticize it publicly. But he could not fathom why Washington, in its turn, wanted to dump him–except, of course, that Bill Clinton wished to get re-elected in 1996. Mr. Boutros-Ghali was particularly hurt when Senator Robert Dole mispronounced his name during the 1996 Presidential campaign.

In a paroxysm of self-absorption, Mr. Boutros-Ghali devotes the final quarter of his memoir to the story of how the United States prevented him from getting his second term. By turns dull, tendentious and embarrassing, these chapters reprint paeans to him from the Organization of African States; the assurances of world leaders who tell him he's the best; and Mr. Clinton's rote rhetorical praise of him during the 50th-anniversary celebration of the United Nations' founding. Mr. Boutros-Ghali argues that the U.S. action in dropping him was antidemocratic because the Clinton Administration employed its veto to defeat a candidate ostensibly desired by the rest of the body. What he doesn't say is that Washington used the same tactic that China employed when it blocked Kurt Waldheim's re-election. He also forgets that the United Nations was built on Realpolitik , not on majority rule. Mr. Boutros-Ghali admits he originally vowed to stay for only one term, but changed his mind.

Mr. Boutros-Ghali delivers some inside gossip and swift glances at recent history. His tale in the end provides a certain voyeuristic pleasure, almost like watching an automobile accident in slow motion. But, over all, he presents himself less like a martyr and more like a chump.