From yesterday’s Nelson Report, why Bob Zoellick may not be a complete safe pick for World Bank chief after all …
There is a potential down side, of course, as with any nomination made in extremis, and in Zoellick’s case it’s the risk that certain personality traits will carry over, and create problems with his Bank colleagues different than the Wolfowitz debacle, but no less damaging, should they occur.
Recall that Zoellick was forced out of his presidency of CSIS here in Washington, with the official reason being his too-overt politicking for then-Republican nominee George Bush. In reality, veterans of CSIS during that period will tell you, Zoellick had by that time made himself very unpopular with both the Board and his colleagues for some of the same problems which cropped up at USTR:
He has a terrible temper, he is “prone to tirades” – a daily dump on Japan generally, and its trade ministers specifically, came to be something of a ritual at USTR – and he has been known to keep “enemies lists”. Probably this Report tonight will get us back on one from which it took us two years to escape. But you do have to wonder the level of joy in Tokyo over his appointment will be tempered by memory of his many public and private condemnations.
It was long a matter of “inside knowledge” that Rice and President Bush respected Zoellick to the point of giving him virtual autonomy in his spheres of operation, but that Zoellick’s penchant to lecture, point by point, with little concern for editorial compression, drove them slightly bonkers. A telling story attributed to Condi Rice by a fellow journalist, “Condi let’s Bob do whatever he wants, so long as she doesn’t have to talk to him about it.”
