For Now, Standing Pat at the U.N.

The most talkative and talked-about ambassador the U.S. has ever sent to the United Nations would not be muzzled. That was stated clearly last week as Daniel Patrick Moynihan emerged from a 40-minute White House session in which President Ford dissuaded him from resigning in protest over lack of State Department support. Announced the White House: "The President and Secretary Kissinger encouraged Ambassador Moynihan to continue to speak out candidly and forcefully on major issues coming before the U.N."

As a sort of ambassadorial fighting Irishman, Pat Moynihan has be] come an American pop hero. He has also riled many African and Arab leaders, and lately some of the U.S.'s European allies, who feel that his unguided missives against the Third World are reaching overkill proportions. But Ford could hardly have allowed Moynihan to quit. It would have opened the President to new criticism from Ronald Reagan's direction, and from others, both left and right, who feel that the U.S. has taken too much Third World abuse. Moreover, it could have been seen as a retreat from Moynihan's impassioned defense of Israel against the recent General Assembly vote condemning Zionism as "a form of racism."

Moynihan's "mini-Salzburg," recalling Henry Kissinger's own resignation threat in Austria last year when wiretapping accusations burst around him, left the Ford Administration with another wound. The President's inability to absorb one more high-level departure was exposed. Moynihan's own reputation was reduced; his threat to quit was seen as a temper tantrum with an aroma of vanity. Kissinger's authority was eroded too, since Moynihan went over his head to the President and won Ford's public backing.

No Connivance. When Britain's U.N. ambassador Ivor Richard ridiculed Moynihan as a shoot-from-the-hip Wyatt Earp (TIME, Dec. 1), some Moynihan supporters heard Kissinger's voice behind it. New York Times Columnist William Safire (who has been conducting a long vendetta-against Kissinger) speculated that Kissinger had planted the idea with Britain's Foreign Secretary James Callaghan during last month's economic summit talks in Rambouillet, France. Though the British later told Moynihan that Richard's views were "official" -- endorsed by his government in London -- participants in the Rambouillet talks deny any connivance. As one of them told TIME Diplomatic Editor Jerrold Schecter: "I was sitting in on all of Henry's conversations with Callaghan, and, although it may offend Moynihan's ego, I know he didn't talk with him about Pat Moynihan."

Yet Moynihan felt that the British attack was relished by his critics in Washington and Kissinger's first public defense of him -- "I very much hope he stays, I consider him a good friend" -- was symptomatic of tepid State Department support. Moynihan believes that in the U.N., the conflict is essentially between political philosophies, ind he feels U.S. career diplomats are often untrained for battle. They, Moynihan gibed cruelly in a recent speech, are likely to ask, "Marx who?"

TIME'S U.N. correspondent Curtis Prendergast reports:

In Moynihan's view, the world's minority of liberal parliamentary democracies is under assault from a majority of the U.N.'s 143 members; many are totalitarian and ideologically hostile to the U.S. Moynihan insists that his instructions from President Ford were unmistakable. "To say," as Moynihan puts it: "there are some things you cannot do to us and some things you cannot say about us. And we will just not take that, and we will find ways to discourage it."

But he became displeased with the kind of support he got from Washington. The Arab-sponsored anti-Zionism resolution was countered slowly at first in State Department instructions to American ambassadors abroad. They were told to call on foreign ministries if it was "deemed to be useful." That, snorts one U.S. official at the U.N., was "the weakest possible instruction. It means if you run into someone at tennis."

Amnesty Loss. Moynihan phoned the State Department to step up the pressure abroad. The weekend before the final vote, Kissinger belatedly ordered ambassadors to visit the foreign ministers of five key Third World governments, but after the vote, Western European delegates complained that Moynihan's "threatening" tactics had made face-saving compromise impossible. One European ambassador reported that three African delegates claimed they could not even abstain in the vote for fear of appearing to knuckle under to an American ambassador who had called the Organization of African Unity's chairman, President Idi Amin Dada of Uganda, a "racist murderer." Moynihan feels that without a strong stand the vote might have been worse. Israeli Ambassador Chaim Herzog agrees.

Another battle between Moynihan and the State Department developed over what he had hoped would be a "major" U.S. initiative: a resolution calling for worldwide amnesty for all political prisoners jailed for nonviolent acts. It was Moynihan's idea; he sold it to Kissinger over lunch.

Probably doomed from the start, the resolution was not helped by either Moynihan's or the State Department's handling of it. Moynihan failed to lobby for European support sufficiently in advance. One European ambassador first learned of the resolution when he heard Moynihan telling Barbara Walters about it on the NBC Today show.

The State Department was laggard too. The resolution would, as Moynihan declared, abandon the U.N.'s "selective morality" and ask for amnesty in all countries, not just in such objects of Third World indignation as South Africa and Chile. But in order for the U.S. not to be accused of selective morality, its delegation first had to be able to vote with the U.N. majority in condemning Chilean human-rights violations. Chile is a sensitive subject for Kissinger; as National Security Adviser he participated in Nixon Administration decisions to undermine former President Salvador Allende. Approval for the U.S. delegation now to vote against Chile was delayed and delayed in Washington. On the last day, Kissinger was finally reached by phone while en route to a speech in Pittsburgh, and instructions authorizing a vote against Chile were rushed to the American delegation with just six minutes to spare. The amnesty resolution, introduced the next day, was deformed by hostile Third World and Communist amendments and withdrawn by the U.S. the following week, without a vote. No credit to U.S. diplomacy, it succeeded only in worsening relations between Moynihan and the State Department.

Lame Duck. Last week's showdown at the White House did not bury Moynihan's differences with Washington, and the announcement made no mention of how long Moynihan would stay in his post. At the U.N. many considered him a lame duck, his effectiveness curtailed. This would please his critics but not settle the question: How should the U.S. view the U.N., as a place for conciliation or for confrontation?

Third World radicals, notably the Cubans and some Arab and African extremists, are not interested hi conciliation. But Third World moderates are interested, and they claim that Moynihan has made it harder for them. Europeans, while agreeing with Moynihan on the basic point that developing countries can no longer abuse the Western democracies in public and seek their aid in private, are still worried about keeping their lines open to African, Arab and Asian countries, where they retain important economic ties.

Kissinger has insisted to TIME that he and Moynihan have had "no policy disagreements, only disagreements over the use of adjectives." With another U.N. ambassador, those adjectives might change, but not the fast-crystallizing American attitude toward the U.N. that Moynihan voices: "We will just not be rolled over."

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