A Dangerous Place
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

Back in the Ford administration, when Donald Rumsfeld was chief of staff and Richard Cheney his deputy, the White House turned to a New Yorker, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, as ambassador to the United Nations. Moynihan, while erudite, was a straight talker, and he spent his term at Turtle Bay in defiant opposition to a world body that was declaring Zionism was racism. Mr. Moynihan later recounted his eight-month term there in a memoir, “A Dangerous Place.” Of Mr. Rumsfeld, Moynihan wrote, “I wish him the presidency one day, partly because he would be splendid at it.”
Now President Bush, facing a world body with its own hostility to American interests and values, could do worse than to appoint another outspoken New Yorker. Mayor Giuliani would be a fine candidate. After wounding the president with his botched suggestion of Bernard Kerik as homeland security director, the least that Mr. Giuliani could do is take some time away from his money-making to serve the nation himself in the middle of a global war on terrorism. But if Mr. Giuliani isn’t interested or if Mr. Bush isn’t interested, we can suggest a number of other luminaries who could make a mark at Turtle Bay. There is Norman Podhoretz, the longtime editor at Commentary, who was close to Moynihan during Moynihan’s term at Turtle Bay and who grasps as well as anyone President Bush’s strategy and tactics in what Mr. Podhoretz calls World War IV. The publisher of the Wall Street Journal, Karen Elliott House, would make another inspired selection.
If Mr. Bush wants to look beyond New York, there is William Kristol, whose Weekly Standard magazine has been urging a hard line in the war on Islamic extremist terror. All the great American ambassadors at the United Nations – and we count Moynihan and Jeane Kirkpatrick among the best – have been outspoken public thinkers who have made their mark by refusing to truckle to the tyrants and terrorists who sit there. It is a point for Mr. Bush, not to mention Messrs. Cheney and Rumsfeld and Secretary of State designate Rice, to mark as they weigh their choice.