Kofi Annan of Ghana, whose popular and influential reign as secretary general of the United Nations was marred by White House anger at his opposition to the American invasion of Iraq in the early 2000s, died Aug. 18 at a hospital in Bern, Switzerland. He was 80. The death was announced by the Annan family and the Kofi Annan Foundation. The cause was not immediately disclosed. Current U.N. Secretary General António Guterres called Mr. Annan “a guiding force for good,” and added: “He provided people everywhere with a space for dialogue, a place for problem-solving and a path to a better world.” Mr. Annan, who pronounced his last name ANN-un to rhyme with “cannon,” shared the 2001 Nobel Peace Prize with the international body he led from 1997 to 2006. He owed his original triumph and his later turmoil to tense relations with the United States, but in some ways, he was an accidental secretary general...

This is the season for summing up the legacy of Kofi Annan, the UN Secretary-General whose ten-year reign comes to an end on December 31. Just a few weeks ago, I attended a day-long seminar at Georgetown University assessing his "legacy for Africa." The forty scholars, diplomats and civil servants agreed that Africa had benefited from his campaigns against AIDS and poverty, his hectoring against military coups, his championing of peacekeeping missions, and his remarkable doctrine asserting that the UN has the right to trump sovereignty and cross any border to stop a government from abusing its peoples...

I was applying some last touches to my biography of Kofi Annan on August 10th when I was surprised to read an ad by the Anti-Defamation League on the Op-Ed page of the New York Times. The ad had a simple and stark message. It said: "UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan: How many more Israeli civilians must die before you condemn Hezbollah? And when will you extend condolences to Israeli victims." It was signed by the Anti-Defamation League’s national chair, Barbara B. Balser, and by its national director, Abraham H. Foxman. The accusations were scathing. The source, moreover, was dispiriting for any admirer of the Secretary-General...

We travel to Africa with Kofi Annan, broker of the unanimous U.N. resolution to allow weapons inspectors back into Iraq. The trip would take Kofi Annan, the Secretary-General of the United Nations and a Nobel Peace laureate, first to Vienna for a meeting with Iraqi officials and then to Africa, where he would visit four nations in eight days to continue his particular brand of relentless yet soft-spoken diplomacy. Annan, 64, has been with the U.N. for 40 years, but unlike many career bureaucrats, he doesn’t shrink from trouble and is said to grow calmer as a crisis mounts. He has represented the world body in international and civil conflicts in Iraq, Bosnia and Herzegovina, East Timor and other hot zones, and he oversaw the U.N.’s 70,000 peacekeeping troops and civilian workers from 1993 to 1996. The next year he became the seventh Secretary-General - the first to rise through the U.N. ranks and the first black “diplomat in chief”...

Kofi Annan, soft in speech, clear and plain in meaning, scrupulously honest with words, is the second United Nations Secretary-General to win the Nobel Peace Prize. The Nobel committee in Oslo awarded the prize posthumously to Dag Hammarskjöld in 1961 for his leadership in the bloody Congo crisis that took his life. There can hardly be two statesmen of molds so different. And the mood and power of the U.N. then and now contrast as much as the personalities of the two men...