Walters Is Used to Sensitive Missions : U.S. Switching to Veteran Team Player for U.N. Post

He was with Richard M. Nixon on the terrifying day in 1958 when Venezuelan mobs set upon the vice president’s party in Caracas, battering the windows of his limousine with pipes and baseball bats.

He was with President Dwight D. Eisenhower when Soviet Premier Nikita S. Khrushchev, furious at the discovery of flights over Soviet territory by American U-2 spy planes, stalked out of a Paris conference room, wrecking a summit meeting.

A decade later, he spirited Henry A. Kissinger in and out of Paris no fewer than 15 times for clandestine meetings to discuss peace terms with officials from North Vietnam.

Now, retired Army Lt. Gen. Vernon A. Walters is 68 and, with more than four decades of government service behind him, is about to become U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. His nomination by President Reagan is expected to sail through the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the full Senate, perhaps unanimously.

“Gen. Walters will be a strong voice for American interests in the U.N.,” said Sen. Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.), chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, which is expected to consider Walters’ nomination during the first week of April.

The Administration’s selection of Walters marks a decisive shift in the kind of representation the country will have in the world body--a shift toward an unusually experienced diplomat, a team player who has prided himself on the nearly invisible performance of sensitive missions around the world. It is a huge change from the ideologically outspoken style of his predecessor, Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, one of the most visible and controversial U.S. representatives in the history of the United Nations.

As a result, although Walters’ selection has drawn praise from moderates and professional diplomats, it has also raised concerns in some quarters--particularly among conservatives who believe that he represents a retreat from the doctrinal purity of Kirkpatrick.

Nor will the Administration find it easy to replace Walters in his current post as ambassador-at-large for Reagan, a job in which he estimates he has logged 1 million miles traveling to more than 100 countries in the last four years on missions that have gained only rare and fleeting public notice.

Speaks Seven Languages

With a command of seven languages and diplomatic experience dating back to World War II, it is possible that he has known more foreign leaders than any American official since W. Averell Harriman retired from his diplomatic travels.

Early in the Reagan Administration, he spent six fruitless hours with Fidel Castro in Cuba, exploring the possibility of improved relations between Washington and Havana. He was dispatched to Buenos Aires during the Falkland Islands war to explain to the Argentine junta why the United States found it necessary to stand with Britain.

Few weeks went by when he was not somewhere in Central America or Africa, privately protesting human rights conditions, delivering bad news on a military assistance request or bearing a complaint from Washington.

Although Walters has assiduously avoided the press, he summed up his role for the Administration in a rare interview published last December in the Foreign Service Journal:

“Sometimes I carry a message of reproof, or I carry a message of request, or I carry a message of encouragement,” he said. “But, more often, I tell them that they’ve lost X% of their aid, or that we don’t like what they are doing in one way or another. . . .

“I am not sent on meetings if success is likely. All the local authorities take care of the easy problems. One of my chief tasks is administering extreme unction just before the patient dies.”

Praised by Haig

“He was, I think, the single most effective diplomat we had in the State Department during the first years of the Reagan Administration,” said former Secretary of State Alexander M. Haig Jr., who brought Walters into the Administration. “He carried heavy water, distasteful water, and he was indispensable.”

Observers inside and outside the Administration believe that, under Walters, the U.S. mission at the United Nations will become more responsive to the State Department than it was under Kirkpatrick. Despite Walters’ long experience, these observers expect him to be more of a team player, less doctrinaire and less inclined than Kirkpatrick to follow a personal agenda.

“The real significance of it,” Richard Bissell of the Georgetown University Center for Strategic and International Studies said, “is that he is seen by both the traditional people at the State Department and the political people at the White House as very satisfactory for the job.”

For conservatives outside the government, however, Reagan’s choice of Walters is seen as part of an unwelcome trend toward moderation, a trend marked by the reopening of arms control talks with the Soviet Union.

“In the rhetorical role,” New Right political activist Paul Weyrich said, “he will probably represent the United States much as Ambassador Kirkpatrick has, but he does not have her ability. Jeane’s shoes will be hard to fill, and he is not the one who can fill them.”

From the other side, some Administration critics contend that Walters’ nomination is a clear sign that the Administration puts a premium on its relations with militaristic regimes, with which he has long maintained strong ties.

Although Walters worked hard for Reagan’s election in 1980, he earned entree to the Administration through his close friendship with Haig, Reagan’s first secretary of state. Their close friendship, going back for years, blossomed when Haig was national security adviser Kissinger’s deputy at the White House and Walters was Kissinger’s secret contact with North Vietnamese representatives in Paris.

“I wanted someone I could send around the world,” Haig said in an interview. “I wanted someone who had entree in Latin America, in black Africa and in the Arab world. He had it, and, to some extent, he had it in Asia as well.”

Throughout his four years as ambassador-at-large, Walters has been more closely identified with the State Department than with the White House, although he has, at times, received orders directly from the President.

Delicate Missions

At State, Haig used his old friend for a long string of sensitive assignments, beginning early in Reagan’s presidency. Administration sources said Walters often carried messages considered too delicate to be sent through routine channels and acted as an emissary to foreign leaders unhappy with Washington’s decisions. By their nature, his assignments were not only secret but usually did not end with anything that could be advertised as diplomatic triumphs.

Walters’ role remained the same after Haig was replaced by George P. Shultz.

When there were rumors of a right-wing plot to kill U.S. Ambassador Thomas Pickering in El Salvador, Walters flew to San Salvador to discuss them face to face with rightist leader Roberto D’Aubuisson. As hostility mounted between the United States and Nicaragua, he conferred with leaders of the Sandinista regime in Managua.

There is no way to judge whether he failed or succeeded in either mission, other than to note that Pickering is still alive, and relations with Nicaragua are no better.

Some of his friends said Walters quickly developed a cordial relationship with Shultz at the State Department but continued to miss his old friend Haig. And, these sources said, Walters was receptive to the U.N. assignment because he had grown tired of his role of “administering extreme unction.”

Although he made his reputation as a linguist and as an expert on Africa and Latin America, Walters has long been more than an interpreter, and his expertise reaches beyond those two areas of the world.

Besides interpreting for four Presidents, he worked for Gen. George C. Marshall and for Harriman and was occasionally detailed to French President Charles de Gaulle and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Because of his fluent Portuguese, he was U.S. liaison officer during World War II with the Brazilian expeditionary force in Italy.

No College Degree

He eventually rose to the rank of three-star general and, during the Nixon Administration, was deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency, all without benefit of a college degree.

Born in New York in 1917, Walters lived in Europe from the age of 6 until 16, learning French and German. His father, a British-born insurance man, took the family back to the United States before falling on hard times, and the boy dropped out of school to work. With the coming of World War II, he joined the Army, where his knowledge of German led him into intelligence work and officer candidate school.

His career--in and out of the shadows--has made Walters, at times, intensely controversial.

Despite his denials, accusations have persisted that he had a role in the overthrow of leftist President Joao Goulart in Brazil in 1964. Walters has always maintained that the accusations originated in the communist press and were based solely on the fact that Humberto Castelo Branco, the military officer installed as president after the coup, had been a wartime friend of his in Italy.

During the 1973 investigation of the Watergate burglary, it was disclosed that Nixon aides had sought to bring Walters and the CIA into the cover-up of White House involvement in the scandal.

On instructions from Nixon, White House Chief of Staff H. R. Haldeman asked Walters to deliver a message to the FBI that its investigation could compromise CIA interests. After delivering the message, Walters found that, in fact, no CIA interest was jeopardized and so informed the White House. He thus avoided involvement in the cover-up, but the attempt to use the CIA later became one of the articles of impeachment voted against Nixon by the House Judiciary Committee before Nixon resigned.

During his travels for Reagan, Walters has seemed to relish moving secretly around the world. He delighted in having his name stricken from the passenger list of government planes carrying Cabinet secretaries, enabling him to travel undetected. When his U.N. nomination was announced last month, he half-boasted that he had been able to travel for four years almost unnoticed without ever resorting to a disguise or a false name.

Lifelong Bachelor

A lifelong bachelor, he has moved around the world more easily because of his extraordinary linguistic ability and because he has made world geography a hobby. He is said to be, among other things, an expert on subway systems. Former CIA Director William E. Colby said that Walters, during long staff meetings at the intelligence agency, would pass the time absently drawing maps of the London, Paris, Peking or Moscow transit systems.

Walters is a gregarious man given to spinning yarns about his adventures among the century’s historic figures. However, much of what is known about him was disclosed in his memoir, “Silent Missions,” written after his retirement from the Army while he was working as a private consultant.

In the book, he presents himself at times as hard-nosed and confrontational, at times as a model of diplomatic courtesy.

He wrote of embarrassing the Soviet ambassador to Brazil, who had remarked about Americans’ unwillingness to use other languages. Switching to Russian, Walters asked the ambassador whether he would prefer to continue the conversation in Russian or Portuguese.