President Nominates Pickering as Ambassador to Russia

President Clinton on Tuesday nominated Thomas R. Pickering, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, as ambassador to Russia and said that the choice reflects the high priority he places on supporting Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin’s reforms.

Clinton acted swiftly to fill the post, left empty since the departure of Robert S. Strauss in December, because members of Congress and Administration experts believe that relations with Russia need quick attention.

“It is essential that we continue to expand and develop our relationship with Russia,” Clinton said in a written statement. “I want to do everything I can to support democratic and economic reform there and want an experienced and dedicated ambassador to represent our nation in Moscow. Ambassador Pickering has demonstrated throughout his career that he has the ability and wisdom to carry out this important assignment.”

Pickering, 62, one of the most senior career diplomats in the Foreign Service, is currently U.S. ambassador to India and has also served as ambassador to Israel, El Salvador, Jordan and Nigeria. Other diplomats consider him a consummate professional--”the best there is,” one State Department official said.

As ambassador in Moscow, his job will include maintaining close contact with Yeltsin, encouraging political and economic reforms and trying to persuade the growing camp of nationalists that cooperation with the United States and the West is in Russia’s interests.

Nationalists in the Russian Parliament have stepped up their criticism of Yeltsin’s pro-Western foreign policy in recent weeks and have demanded that Russia oppose U.S. policies toward Iraq and Serbia. Yeltsin has responded to the complaints by joining in with some relatively mild criticism of U.S. actions.

Pickering’s job also will include working with Strobe Talbott, a former Time magazine editor and longtime Clinton friend who has been named as a special ambassador to coordinate U.S. aid to the former Soviet Union.

Pickering does not speak Russian and is not a specialist in Russian studies but is expected to take up intensive language studies on the job, officials said. He already speaks Swahili, Arabic, Hebrew, Spanish and French.

Sources said that Clinton offered the ambassador’s job first to former Vice President Walter F. Mondale, who reportedly turned it down because he did not relish the idea of moving to Moscow.

Pickering distinguished himself at the United Nations by helping organize the diplomatic coalition that opposed Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, but his success led to friction with aides of Secretary of State James A. Baker III, who thought that he operated too often beyond their tight control.

Pickering was born in Orange, N.J., in 1931, and entered the Foreign Service after attending Bowdoin College, the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and the University of Melbourne in Australia. As a diplomat, he served in Washington, Geneva, Zanzibar and Tanzania before then-Secretary of State William P. Rogers plucked him from the bureaucracy and made him a special assistant.

After working for Rogers and his successor, Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger, Pickering was named ambassador to Jordan at the age of 43.

During his tenure as ambassador to El Salvador from 1983 to 1985, he was the intended target of an assassination plot by extreme rightists who apparently believed he was too critical of the Salvadoran military. The plot was discovered and foiled.