The Turbulent Times of an Outspoken Ambassador

Back when he was a civil rights leader, Andrew Young was generally considered a skillful diplomat. He was a conciliator, a charmer, one who could quietly negotiate a compromise between even the angriest adversaries. While shouting demonstrators surrounded the Birmingham jail where Martin Luther King Jr. was imprisoned during a civil rights protest, Young was the ambassador who dealt with Police Commissioner Eugene ("Bull") Connor and won a promise to end segregation of facilities at large downtown stores.

So, too, was Young's diplomacy crucial to Jimmy Carter's presidential campaign. He mobilized a voter registration drive, mustering black support for Carter. When Carter later blundered into saying that any neighborhood had a right to maintain its "ethnic purity," Young objected but stood by him and helped convince blacks that he had not intended a racial slur. Asked if there was anyone to whom he was indebted after winning the nomination, Carter named one: Andy Young.

Young learned negotiation and conciliation in the Italian and Irish neighborhood of New Orleans where he was born 47 years ago. His grandfather was a prosperous "bayou entrepreneur," his father a dentist, and his mother a prominent black Creole. Although they tried to shield him from racial prejudice, Young recalls: "I was taught to fight when people called me Nigger, and that's when I learned negotiating was better than fighting." After going to Howard University and Hartford Seminary Foundation, he eventually moved to Atlanta to work with King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference. In 1972, after one unsuccessful campaign, he was elected to Congress from a predominantly white Atlanta district.

But street diplomacy is very different from the cool, precise diplomacy of international relations. Young's candor, boldness and naive idealism were often ill suited to the subtleties and exactitudes crucial to world politics. Like many a Southern preacher, he was never at a loss for words, and he knew their power. But he failed to fully appreciate the dangers of using them rhetorically and carelessly.

So while embodying the spirit and idealism of Carter's Human Rights policy, he also became at times a loose cannon on deck, damaging not only his own image but that of the President who loyally kept him in office.

His timing was often terrible. When the U.S. was engaged in delicate negotiations with Britain about the future of Rhodesia, he said the British had "practically invented racism." Then he said there was just as much racism in Sweden as in Queens, N.Y. Then he said Presidents Nixon and Ford were racists, then that he himself was racist, which he defined as being unable to deal comfortably with people of another race.

When the U.S. was opposing the influx of Cuban troops into Africa, Young said the Cubans "bring a certain stability and order to Angola." When Carter was sending Soviet Party Boss Leonid Brezhnev a letter protesting the trials of dissidents, Young declared there were "hundreds, maybe thousands of political prisoners" in the U.S. When the U.S. was trying to work out an edgy relationship with Iran's Ayatullah Khomeini, Young said he would some day be viewed as "some kind of a saint," and when the U.S. protested against Iran's revolutionary courts, Young said he saw no difference between those and the "socalled due process" that led to Murderer John Spenkelink's execution in Florida.

Carter often had to repudiate Young's statements. After Young's comment on U.S. political prisoners, Carter phoned to say he was "very unhappy." But he believed Young had great value in improving U.S. relations with the Third World. As Carter once said of the U.N.: "It is an unconventional diplomatic situation, and it requires an unconventional diplomat." When Carter chided members of his Cabinet just before his July housecleaning, he rebuked Young for the embarrassments he had caused, but then went on to praise him, saying that no one else in the room had "improved relations with 50 countries of the world."

The rapport of the two men stems partly from a shared commitment to translate religious beliefs into action. Said Young as a Congressman: "When I pray 'Thy Kingdom come on earth,' I mean I want Atlanta to look like heaven." And upon resigning last week he said: "I continued to identify with what may be called in biblical terms the least of these my brethren." He also cited a bit of Victorian piety when he said that he had never particularly wanted the job of ambassador, and that he left it with his head not at all bloodied--and unbowed.

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