Unvanquished: A U.S. - U.N. Saga

Boutros Boutros-Ghali offers a frank chronicle of his five years as secretary-general of the United Nations. Although Unvanquished describes ambitious activities in the Middle East, the Balkans, Central America, and elsewhere, its title is clearly a pun (capitalize those first two letters and look at it again), and this is a bitter memoir of hardball diplomacy. The central story line features Boutros-Ghali's confrontations with the United States, with a special focus on how the Clinton administration prevented him from serving a second term as secretary-general--a "rejection of democracy," he calls it, because the United States was the only member of the Security Council to vote against him. The serious trouble began as a result of election-year politics in the United States: "the White House apparently felt a growing need to compete with the GOP over which party was more anti-United Nations." Yet it seems clear that trouble was brewing for much longer. Consider how Boutros-Ghali describes his early impression of Madeleine Albright, who was the U.S. representative to the United Nations before she became secretary of state: "I was puzzled, however, by what seemed her desire to strike attitudes rather than address substantive issues.... She seemed to assume that her mere assertion of a U.S. policy should be sufficient to achieve the support of other nations." Boutros-Ghali is fiercely unapologetic, and his narrative is feisty and engaging. --John J. Miller