Bush Expected to Replace Pickering as U.N. Ambassador

President Bush will replace Thomas R. Pickering as ambassador to the United Nations this spring, despite the envoy’s reputation as one of the most effective American diplomats ever to serve there, government sources said Monday.

The 60-year-old Pickering will be reassigned as ambassador to India and replaced by Edward Perkins, now the State Department’s director-general, the agency’s chief personnel officer. The 63-year-old Perkins is best known as the first and only black American to serve as ambassador to South Africa.

While the change of assignment will be described by the White House and the State Department as a routine transfer in the Foreign Service, most insiders believe that Secretary of State James A. Baker III was irritated by the amount of attention Pickering attracted at the United Nations.

During the months before the Persian Gulf War, for example, Baker’s press aides reportedly conveyed their annoyance to the American mission at the United Nations when photos of Pickering appeared on the front page of the New York Times three times in a little more than a week.

Some observers also said that they detected tension between Pickering and Assistant Secretary of State John R. Bolton, the official to whom Pickering reports in Washington. But Pickering, asked recently about rumors that he might be replaced, said that it is normal for a career ambassador to be transferred every three years or so.

Many diplomats at the United Nations, however, look on Pickering as far more than a routine ambassador subject to routine reassignment.

“Tom may be the best diplomat of his generation,” said another American diplomat, who also said that he doubts Pickering’s successor, no matter how talented, will be able to match his “force, intellect and experience.”

“Pickering has brought an intellectual vigor and commitment to the job which I think is unprecedented in the history of U.S. relations with the United Nations,” said Edward C. Luck, president of the United Nations Assn. of the United States, a private organization. “One of the reasons that the Security Council has functioned so smoothly and that U.S. relations with the United Nations have improved so rapidly was his personal relations with other ambassadors.

“The United Nations is a diplomatic club just like the U.S. Senate is a political club,” Luck said. “(Pickering) was a master at being part of the club and playing the club at the same time. His successor certainly has some very big shoes to fill.”

President Bush’s appointment of Pickering as U.N. ambassador in 1988 had been hailed as a morale booster for the Foreign Service. Pickering was only the second career officer to serve in the post and the first to be appointed by an incoming President.

In more than three decades, Pickering had fashioned a reputation as a skilled professional in Third World areas of tension. He has served as ambassador to Jordan, Nigeria, El Salvador and Israel.

Pickering speaks Swahili, French, Spanish, Arabic and Hebrew. He is a tall, easy-going man with a bachelor’s degree from Bowdoin College in Maine and master’s degrees from both Tufts University in Massachusetts and the University of Melbourne in Australia.

Perkins, who holds a doctorate from USC, served as ambassador to Liberia and South Africa before assuming his present post in 1989.

He accepted the South Africa assignment amid some controversy. Many civil rights organizations insisted that the appointment of a black ambassador to the then-racist government of South Africa was a way for the Ronald Reagan Administration to put a benign face on its sympathetic policies toward South Africa.