Christopher’s Surprise: He’s an Activist : Diplomacy: The laid-back diplomat has come up with major initiatives in his 40 days as secretary of state.

Warren Christopher had promised that his style as secretary of state would be laid-back--or at least less frantic than that of his workaholic predecessor, James A. Baker III.

It hasn’t worked out that way. At the end of one day last week, as Christopher sped from country to country across the Middle East, the 67-year-old Los Angeles lawyer donned an orange life vest and was strapped into a military helicopter for a tense, low-altitude dash into Beirut.

His aides peered out the helicopter windows, trying to catch a view of the ravaged city and the rugged Lebanese coast. But Christopher was bent over a yellow legal pad amid the rotor noise, scribbling out a relentless stream of questions for them in handwriting made shaky by turbulence.

“Where would the forces be redeployed?” asked one note, referring to Syria’s promise to withdraw its 35,000 troops from Lebanon.

“What are key issues to raise at the press conference?” asked another.

Forty days into his tenure as President Clinton’s secretary of state, Warren Christopher is proving something of a surprise.

Chief diplomat in an Administration focused on domestic affairs, he has been an unanticipated activist, launching major U.S. initiatives in Bosnia and the Middle East.

A courtly man whose manner is unfailingly mild, he has surprised some of his Arab and Israeli counterparts with blunt, unsparing critiques of their policies. He has also revealed himself unexpectedly passionate about human rights--and driven by a gnawing fear that the world is sliding toward a tragic age of ethnic and religious war.

Last week, at Israel’s Yad Vashem memorial to the 1.5 million children who died in the Nazi Holocaust--a single candle flame reflected countless times--Christopher stopped short and gazed into the darkness.

He found his thoughts drawn to Bosnia and Cambodia and the other massacres of our time.

In his limousine, moments later, he told an aide: “There is a heavy responsibility in being secretary of state, and I worry about acquitting it well. . . . (At Yad Vashem), I couldn’t help but think: Am I able to evaluate all the responsibilities? Am I able to sort out which of these things are possible situations like the Holocaust? . . . Is it Cambodia? Is it Bosnia? Or is it Haiti?”

And the question that keeps coming back to him: “Can one possibly live up to those responsibilities?”

Henry A. Kissinger, Christopher’s most noted modern predecessor, liked to intone that foreign policy should never be confused with philanthropy. Christopher, it seems, isn’t so sure.

The Middle East is not a charitable place. Its peoples, taught from birth that they are surrounded by enemies, rarely give anyone the benefit of the doubt. Before Christopher arrived, both Arabs and Israelis had him typed as a problem. Arabs saw him as a product of the Clinton Democratic Party, with its close ties to the American Jewish community; Israelis saw him as a product of the Jimmy Carter Administration, which seemed insensitive to Jewish concerns.

Both sides came away mollified. Christopher managed to convince Israel’s dour Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, Syria’s canny President Hafez Assad and the Palestinians’ beleaguered Faisal Husseini that as an honest broker, he would do.

“Rabin, in particular, warmed up to him--in a way he never had to Baker,” a senior U.S. official said.

Comparisons to Baker, who spent much of his last two years at State working on the Middle East, came naturally.

“Baker was calculating,” a senior Israeli official said, framing a careful compliment. “Christopher is--measured.”

“They’re totally different in approach,” a senior Egyptian official said. “Christopher is very, very low-key. Courteous. He’s really a gentleman, a very pleasant gentleman. I don’t mean to say that Baker was discourteous, but he could be rather brusque.

“I found him (Christopher) better briefed than Baker,” he added. “We raised some points on Africa, and he responded to issues that right now aren’t central to his agenda. Baker sometimes couldn’t do that, because he was focused on one thing at a time.”

Christopher also pleased the Egyptians by taking a morning off and playing tourist, striding around the Sphinx in chinos and Wallabees with his wife, Marie, at his side--something Baker never managed in nearly a dozen visits.

But that was the exception, not the rule. On most days, Christopher rose at 6, went running with his bodyguards, raced through a schedule of meetings and international telephone calls--and then, like Baker, got on his airplane to fly to another capital. By the end of his trip, he had visited 10 countries in nine days. His only concession to civility was to have at least one meal a day alone with his wife; the Israeli press said he even turned down a breakfast invitation from Israel’s ceremonial president, Chaim Herzog, so as not to leave her alone. (Christopher aides refused to comment on this.)

His negotiating style seems similar to Baker’s in some ways as well: dogged preparation, intense listening and then a search for new elements that might change the shape of the problem on the table. Christopher’s decision last Thursday to announce the next round of Arab-Israeli peace talks even though some of the parties had not yet agreed to come was a virtual carbon copy of a gambit Baker used in 1991.

But where Baker kept the details of negotiations in his own hands, Christopher seems to reach out more, to enlist third parties as allies and intermediaries. He learned the trick as Carter’s deputy secretary of state in 1980, when Algeria played an invaluable role in arranging the release of U.S. hostages from Iran. In just the past few weeks, Christopher has enlisted Morocco to help deal with Arab delegations at the United Nations, Egypt to prod the other Arabs to return to peace talks--and even Syria to talk with Arab radicals.

“He never gets off the phone with these guys without asking them to do something,” one aide said.

As the Egyptians noted, Christopher is more courtly and less imperious than his predecessor. He has a self-deprecating, wry sense of humor, an art Baker rarely attempted; during his meetings in the Middle East, he joked about his age--”old enough to be the President’s father”--his fear of microphones, his failure to work in more tourist events.

Still, he can be blunt, although his tone remains mild. An aide described his polite but concise reaction to a proposal from a Palestinian leader: “That’s a non-starter. I’d recommend that you change your thinking on that.” He told the Emir of Kuwait that the United States did not look kindly on his government’s boycott of U.S. firms that do business with Israel--and then, when the emir did not respond, Christopher told him again.

It is on the issue of human rights that Christopher’s understated passion shows. He was the Carter Administration’s point man on the issue--a new concept at the time--and it has clearly stayed with him. He returns to the subject whenever he can. He pressed the issue in every country he visited--even Saudi Arabia, a key U.S. ally. (He may have been the first secretary of state to do so. Aides declined to divulge what he told the Saudis, however.)

In Kuwait, officials said, Christopher told the emir that he believed it was time to give women a role in the patriarchal political life of the emirate. In Syria, he pressed Assad about restrictions on emigration by Syrian Jews. In Jordan, he praised King Hussein for allowing free elections for Parliament. In Israel, he told the Palestinians that he shares their concern about human rights violations on the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.

But in Christopher’s diplomacy, just as in the Carter Administration, high moral purpose must coexist with more pragmatic desires to maintain stable relationships with allies who have yet to embrace U.S. ideals. Ever since Woodrow Wilson, presidents and secretaries of state have wrestled with the trade-offs between moral and political imperatives--between making deals with repressive foreign leaders and making them uncomfortable over human rights issues. Christopher, last week, was trying to do both.

Times staff writer McManus, based in Washington, covered Christopher’s recent Middle East swing.