I have just finished reading Madeleine Albright: A Twentieth Century Odyssey by Michael Dobbs, the second Albright biography that I have read in a year. The other was Seasons of Her Life by Ann Blackman. That's a lot of biography for a secretary of state in office. I don't believe anyone ever wrote one about Warren Christopher, and I haven't heard of any publishing house hawking a Christopher bio now that he's out of office. But Madeline Albright is a secretary of state with pizzazz, sort of like a rock star...

The backbiting and ass-covering erupted in Washington soon after the bombs began pounding Yugoslavia in March. The rush to escape and stamp blame was clear evidence that something had gone awry. The powers in the capital had obviously hoped and expected Slobodan Milosevic to put up no more than a show of resistance before signing with shaking hands any damn paper we would set before him. His defiance and the terrible fury hurled at the Kosovo Albanians surprised President Clinton and his foreign policy mavens. No matter how loud NATO and Washington may trumpet victory at the end, there is no doubt that a grievous miscalculation occurred at the beginning. And most people are blaming Secretary of State Madeleine Albright...

In Washington a few weeks ago, David Howard, a white gay man serving as the city's ombudsman, bemoaned the paucity of his budget. "I will have to be niggardly with this fund," he told coworkers, "because it's not going to be a lot of money." One of his listeners was shocked by the sound of the word and spread the news quickly that Howard had used an expression rooted in the hated epithet nigger. Blacks, who make up a majority of the capital's population, expressed their alarm and dismay...

I covered the House of Representatives for the Associated Press for a year or so during the 1960s and left with profound respect and affection for what is really a unique American institution. For years as a foreign correspondent I would extol the genius of our House against the lap dog role played by Houses in the parliamentary system used by democratic countries in Europe and former British dominions like Canada...

The American impasse on Iraq derives from two American faults: sound-bite thinking and too much empty bombast. For almost a decade, American policy towards Saddam Hussein has been based on the assumption that he can't last very long. This has produced a lot of threats and blather without too much thought about what would happen if someone didn't rescue us from our threats. The confusion has led us to the present snarl where options are limited and we do not know what to do. None of this would be with us, of course, if President George Bush had finished the job and ordered the troops into Baghdad to bring down Saddam. But we can't blame Bush much for this. That was not a war aim at the time. Policymakers, in fact, did not want Iraq so weak that it could not balance the power of our then bête noire, Iran. Moreover, the Bush people had every right to expect the Iraqi military to get rid of its disgraced leader. It's hard to recall any leader in the last century or so who survived a defeat as total as Saddam's. Napoleon III, Kaiser Wilhelm II, Hitler, Mussolini all died or were dumped into oblivion...

Since I usually write about foreign affairs, I have not covered much of the Monica story. I did have to whip out color on the first day she showed up at the federal courthouse to testify in secret before the grand jury. The frenzy of the photographers and the glee of the television performers and the gawks of the tourists made the story feel even more unwholesome than usual. I kept my sanity that day by escaping for an hour at the National Gallery of Art across the street. I can thus offer no special insights into what is going on in Washington, just a few random thoughts about the Starr report and its aftermath. The zeal of Kenneth Starr so astounded me that I had to reach for Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter to find a meaningful parallel. There is a good deal of Roger Chillingworth, the husband of the adulterous Hester Prynne, in Starr. To avenge his wrong, the relentless Chillingworth transforms himself into a gnarled, satanic creature...

In the "good old days" of the late 1960s, when Zaire was known as the Congo and its leader did not yet call himself Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu waza Banga (the all-conquering warrior who, because of his endurance and inflexible will to win, will go from conquest to conquest leaving fire in his wake), the United States proudly had the huge, unwieldy, volatile country wrapped around its little finger. The US propped up Joseph Désiré Mobutu, enriched him, shielded him and spoke for him. When a band of mercenaries and Katangese gendarmes led by the Belgian Jean Schramme rebelled and took over the eastern Congo in the summer of 1967, the Mobutu government did not bother briefing the hordes of foreign journalists arriving in Kinshasa. The US embassy did the job instead...

When Secretary of State Madeleine Albright showed up for a breakfast session with the Washington bureau of the Los Angeles Times recently (an event carried live on C-Span television), she began by chiding the reporters: "It is a sign of my undying affection for the Los Angeles Times that I'm here, but I don't know why I came, because you're the only paper in the United States that did not put my picture on the front page, my brilliant performance throwing out the ball..."

At a Korea University conference in Seoul a few months ago, I was placed next to Julius Nyerere of Tanzania at dinner. For those of us who covered Africa more than a quarter of a century ago, Nyerere was like a saint. Incorruptible, frank, good-humored, intellectual, he could charm the most suspicious and doubtful questioners into following the flow of his logic as he expounded the need in Africa for socialism, one-party democracy, self-reliance, non-alignment. He always made sense, at least in theory, and, since we knew he did not line his pockets with gold or pander to tribalism and racism, we always wished him and his poor country well. I turned to him at the Seoul dinner and said, "Mr. Nyerere, when I was a young correspondent, and you were a young president, I interviewed you." "Well," he replied with a laugh, "I got out of my business. I hope you got out of yours." In fact, the 74-year-old Nyerere is one of the few African leaders to get out of the business peacefully and voluntarily...

In the 1970s, when Kurt Waldheim was Secretary-General, reporters at the United Nations used to call him The Headwaiter. "He always stood there," recalled Don Shannon, the U.N. correspondent for the Los Angeles Times in those days, "as if he were wringing his hands on a towel, asking what he could do for the powerful countries." That kind of a scene would warm the hearts of American officials these days...