Profiles in Power : The...

At 5 a.m. in a conference room of the U.S. trade mission in Geneva, a room unadorned but for its glorious daytime view of Lake Geneva, all but one of the U.S. negotiators have given up, exhausted. A trade agreement that President Clinton considers crucial to the United States’ economic future is on the line, and prospects look bleak. The key U.S. deputy, so fatigued that he fears he is suffering a heart attack, has gone home to his borrowed apartment and immediately fallen into a deep sleep.

On one side of the table sits Sir Leon Brittan, representing the European Community, and his deputies. On the U.S. side, the lone negotiator remains amid the empty coffee cups and scattered papers: U.S. Trade Representative Mickey Kantor. At issue is whether Europe will relax regulations limiting the showing of U.S.-made movies and videos in movie theaters and on television channels. It is the only stumbling block to completing an agreement that could modernize the global trading system.

Kantor knows that success will turn a key that could eventually open markets around the world to U.S. products. Mexico is important. So is Japan. But this is the world. Completing this deal, he reasons, is the single most important step he can take to help America reach the world’s consumers, with 96% of the world’s population living outside the United States, and that could mean $100 billion in economic growth for the country.

This meeting, in December, 1993, comes after a week that could not have been more grueling, the issues more complex. As they inch closer to reconstructing the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, or GATT, the negotiators have hammered out agreements regarding the international sale of commercial airliners. The United States maintains that Europe’s controversial subsidies give the consortium building the European Airbus an unfair advantage over Boeing and McDonnell-Douglas. They’ve discussed questions over steel and questions dealing with textiles, unresolved despite seven years of talks. What about agricultural exports and politically potent subsidies? Would the new agreement include the growing international business in financial services--banking, stock brokerages and insurance companies, for example?

Jack Valenti, who three decades earlier watched master negotiator Lyndon B. Johnson from the vantage of the White House staff, is a player in the Geneva drama. As president of the Motion Picture Association of America, Valenti is Hollywood’s man in Washington and is based temporarily in Geneva’s Intercontinental Hotel. He is watching Kantor, another master negotiator, at work.

Kantor’s pace has been relentless--sometimes 48 sleepless hours at a stretch, Valenti says. “He would have in one room aircraft guys; in another room, steel; in another room, agriculture; in another room, audiovisual. And without notes, he was moving from room to room. Many of those issues were unresolved, and he was involved in all of them. Four o’clock in the morning, he’d come into the room where we were and he’d work on a proposal to take to Brittan. After an hour, he’d go to the aircraft people.”

And so he goes, from office to office, tie undone, jacket long discarded, shirttail flapping. No small talk. Kantor walks into the room, sinks quickly into a chair and announces: “Here’s where we are” as he reports to the U.S. industries relying on his negotiation to boost their sales. Then he presents the latest proposals and counteroffers.

With less than a week to go, completing an agreement, no matter how limited, looks nearly impossible.

On Sunday morning, Dec. 12, Kantor meets with his senior deputy, Rufus Yerxa, and other top U.S. negotiators. Yerxa outlines where each segment of the talks stands. The deadline is three days away. “Mickey was under enormous pressure. The issues were coming at him,” says a participant in the meeting. Peter Sutherland, director general of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, “was pounding on him, ‘You’ve got to take this deal, that deal.’ Every few minutes somebody was calling him.”

“Mickey sat there, listening to Rufus go through the list of what had to be done. Every once in a while he’d blow up. ‘That’s not possible, that’s not possible.’ He kept punctuating it with emotion. He disagreed with this. He disagreed with that. Really technical stuff. Who to talk to next. What to say to Sutherland. How long to hold out. Senators calling. Senior congressional staff waiting outside. It was an amazing hour.”

Two days later, every issue but one--the one dearest to Valenti and Hollywood--has essentially been settled. Kantor and Brittan go at it, tackling this last stumbling block. One by one, their aides drop away, exhausted. In the end, Kantor has met his match. Brittan will not yield.

Just before dawn in Geneva, Kantor calls Clinton, gaining his late-night approval to abandon Hollywood’s quest for greater U.S. access to European audiences in exchange for completing the rest of the global trade pact. It is, even the disappointed Valenti concedes, the price that has to be paid if the world is to benefit from the slashing of tariffs, import quotas and other trade rules envisaged by the long-running trade talks known as the Uruguay Round to which Kantor had devoted himself throughout 1993.

It was a typical Kantor performance, carried out, to the denouement, behind closed doors and with few witnesses.

For a man who had played a crucial role in the Clinton campaign, he had not reaped the rewards typically distributed to the most trusted advisers. Nevertheless, he found himself concluding the year on a triumphant note, returning to prominence one year after a stunning fall from political grace--and elevating along the way the stature of a once-overlooked position in what had been a backwater of government bureaucracy.

At noon, Yerxa, the aide who had given up in sheer exhaustion, wakes and switches on a television. There are Kantor and Brittan, announcing their “agreement to disagree” and ready to resolve all outstanding issues beyond those dealing with entertainment.

“The success of the Round,” Yerxa thinks, “is now assured.”

So, too, the reputation--and reach--of Mickey Kantor.

*

It was two days after the presidential election in 1992. Global attention was lighting up Little Rock, Ark., and shining on the thirtysomethings who had fueled Clinton’s 13-month race to the White House. Quietly slipping out of town, the chairman of the Clinton campaign flew home to Los Angeles. For weeks, Kantor had been planning the transition to a Clinton Administration. Kantor’s two decades of friendship with the President-elect put him among the closest “Friends of Bill,” and it seemed natural to assume that he would have a prominent place on the inside. But divisions had grown among campaign factions. Kantor’s planning only embittered the more-recent FOBs, James Carville and George Stephanopoulos among them. And it was they who had the candidate’s ear in Little Rock.

“Mickey had pissed a lot of these guys off, and a lot of them ganged up,” says a close Kantor friend and political associate of more than 20 years. Their message to Clinton was blunt: Keep Kantor out. Almost before Kantor knew it, Warren Christopher was given the transition reins. Kantor headed for home in the canyons above Beverly Hills, his future seemingly secure at his old law firm, Manatt, Phelps, Phillips & Kantor, but less certain in politics.

“This was a very difficult time for Mickey. For the first time, he was off balance. He had worked his guts out to get the guy elected, and he didn’t know what was going on,” Kantor’s friend says. “He just didn’t understand it. It was the first time something political had happened to him that way.”

Kantor was well-known in California political and legal circles. In 1972, he had worked for presidential candidate George S. McGovern and running mate R. Sargent Shriver, the first Peace Corps director. In 1976, he had been chairman of Jerry Brown’s presidential campaign. In 1984, he’d been Walter F. Mondale’s man in California. In 1988, he’d lent support to a friend who was backing Al Gore’s presidential campaign. He became the center of Clinton’s team before the candidate had a team. Then, with the Democratic nomination secured, it was Kantor who became Clinton’s principal representative to Ross Perot, trying to keep the Texas billionaire and occasional independent presidential candidate on the sidelines. And during the campaign’s closing weeks, it was Kantor who led the Clinton team’s negotiation with President Bush’s camp to arrange the presidential debates.

But it was during the short days and long nights of the New Hampshire winter when Kantor did perhaps his most valuable work for Clinton. And it was then that the seeds were planted for Kantor’s defeat, rebirth and rise to what would become one of the most important positions in the U.S. government.

That winter, Clinton was drowning in the allegations that he had had an extramarital affair with a nightclub singer named Gennifer Flowers. Then there was the inescapable discussion of his Vietnam War-era draft problems.

Ensconced in a Days Hotel in Manchester, Kantor “set up shop and just worked his ass off,” recalls Dee Dee Myers, the campaign press secretary who became Clinton’s first White House press secretary. What had been a loosely run regional operation became a tight, disciplined national campaign. Young field staffers and senior aides barely in their 30s found themselves, egos bruised and no longer independent operators, taking orders directly from the campaign chairman, who had placed himself at the head of the conference table. Quickly, the campaign righted itself.

Although Clinton came in second in New Hampshire to former Sen. Paul Tsongas of neighboring Massachusetts, his performance demonstrated that he could fight back from his twin crises. But that crucial victory cost Kantor: Among the reined-in aides, “he made himself pretty unpopular,” says a reporter who tracked the Clinton campaign.

In the late autumn of 1992, nearly one year later, the divisive seeds bore fruit. The job of White House chief of staff, for which Kantor had once been mentioned, was filled. So, too, was the job of secretary of state. Treasury, commerce--one by one, each top assignment was meted out. There was no mention of Kantor.

It appeared he was falling into political oblivion. Then, says Myers, “Mickey’s name came back in. All of a sudden, it just clicked. Everyone thought it was a good idea.”

The call in mid-December from the President-elect caught Kantor at his Westside health club. Would he, Clinton wanted to know, be interested in the job of U.S. trade representative?

It would mean spending his time in grueling negotiations after overnight flights to Europe and napping in economy-class seats on commercial airliners. He would oversee a closely knit staff of 156, minuscule by government-agency standards, working in a modest building one block from the White House. He would lead what a Republican predecessor, William E. Brock, calls “the Green Berets of government--a very small, very elite office coordinating government policy and conducting negotiations.”

It was not a role, Kantor says in retrospect, to which he had given any consideration. But Kantor, above all else, is loyal to Bill Clinton. If Clinton asks, the only answer is yes. (Indeed, despite his disclaimers, that is why it is widely believed that he would have no choice but to acquiesce if Clinton insists he head the 1996 reelection campaign.)

By Dec. 23, the deal was set. He had left the Clinton camp, Myers says, “under cover of night and he came back to a totally shiny moment. It was amazing.”

Why did the job fall to Kantor?

“The nice thing about Mickey was he couldn’t be characterized,” recalls Laura D’Andrea Tyson, then a Clinton economic policy adviser who now heads his National Economic Council. “He brought a sense of political and negotiating skills to the President’s agenda of trade liberalization.”

What he did not bring was a single day’s experience in the highly complex, wonkish, unbelievably arcane--but increasingly important--world of international trade. He was, however, quick on his feet.

*

In the yard of a modest home in Nashville, a boy no older than 5, wearing a baseball mitt, does his mightiest to pitch a tennis ball against a brick wall, perhaps 25 feet away.

Thwack! The ball hits the wall, rebounds, sinks to the ground and skitters back to the boy. Thwack! The ball bounces again. Thwack! One more throw. Thwack! Hour after hour. Day after day. Over and over so many times, says Mickey Kantor, looking back half a century, that “I used to drive my parents crazy.”

“I had an older sister and an older brother. I always wanted, desperately, to be good enough to play with the big guys. So you go out and you just work on it and work on it and work on it. I’d stand back as far as I could and throw as hard as I could, and at 4 and 5 years old you couldn’t throw very hard. You’d catch ground balls. You see how hard you can make it on yourself.”

As the balls arced from the bricks, they would land on the gravel driveway, “where they took bad hops, so your hands would get quicker.”

Kantor tells this story in response to a question about his negotiating style and tactics. It illustrates the heart of his game: Intensive preparation and quick response when the other side hits a fast-moving, unpredictable, hopping-mad grounder.

As U.S. trade chief, Kantor, 56, oversees the rules governing international commerce. Are U.S. companies getting a fair shake in Japan? Are Chinese companies bootlegging American compact discs? Is South Korea pricing American goods out of the Korean market with high import taxes? Kantor wrestles daily with such questions.

As the United States seeks to keep its competitive advantage, the office of the U.S. trade representative, once a little-known government agency, has become a primary weapon. Mickey Kantor may not be a household name, but he is sufficiently recognizable--black hair with the barest flecks of gray, angular, narrow face framed by Prince Charles-like ears--that he turns a few heads while talking in his Tennessee twang on a cellular phone at the Detroit airport one day in July. And he is fond of relating how, despite his being dressed in T-shirt, old jeans and sneakers while on a family trip in the Rockies, he drew a congratulation from a stranger at a Burger King for his role in the just-concluded auto negotiations with Japan.

When Clinton asked Kantor to become the U.S. trade representative, Kantor called Robert S. Strauss, the deal-maker par excellence of the Democratic Party who held the post during the Jimmy Carter Administration. “Like most people, he had no understanding of what is involved in it,” Strauss says.

Should he, Kantor wanted to know, have any interest in the job?

“Mickey,” Strauss recalled saying, “you shouldn’t have some interest in it. You should have every interest in it. It’s the best job in government for you. In the next few years, you’re going to be in the catbird seat.”

Strauss had one more piece of advice:

“You’re going to be remembered for the deals you did, not for the deals you blew up.”

So, Mickey Kantor makes deals.

In office 31 months as of this Monday, he has negotiated more than 170 trade accords. Not all are reached amid the drama and public scrutiny that accompanied the auto agreement. Last month, for example, the United States quietly persuaded South Korea, the third-largest importer of U.S. beef and beef products, to phase out shelf-life standards that Kantor maintained have unfairly limited sales of U.S.-made sausages.

But three of Kantor’s agreements stand out: the North American pact removing the tariffs, or import taxes, quotas and other obstacles to free trade among the United States, Mexico and Canada; the wholesale rewriting of the international regulations, known as the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, that was completed in Geneva, and a pact--negotiated after the United States threatened to slap a 100% tax on the import value of Japan’s most expensive automobiles--intended to increase sales of foreign automobiles and auto parts in Japan.

His work on the first two restored his position in the Clinton pantheon and provided Clinton with some of his most important policy triumphs. There has already been speculation about whether he would become chief of staff or secretary of state in a second Clinton Administration. And if Clinton is defeated? He could certainly resume his law practice in Los Angeles or move into the ranks of Washington’s political eminence grise.

The North American agreement was essentially completed before Clinton, and Kantor, took office. But they insisted on important modifications, intended to protect the rights of workers and the environment. Negotiations on the global pact began in 1986, but were not completed until the Geneva talks. The Japanese agreement was wrapped up June 28, after nearly two years of sporadic negotiations. None came without controversy, last-minute twists and political horse-trading--the trademarks, so to speak, of a Mickey Kantor operation.

*

Kantor learned early how consumers can benefit from free-market competition. His father, the son of a Lithuanian Jewish immigrant, owned a furniture store in Nashville. So did assorted uncles and other relatives, operating within a few blocks, “all competing with each other, and to this day I can’t figure out why,” Kantor says. His formal education came at Vanderbilt University, where he studied business administration (class of ‘61). He served four years as a junior officer in the U.S. Navy, then received a law degree in 1968, after taking night courses at Georgetown University.

Immediately after graduation, he moved to Florida, where he helped create the South Florida Migrant Labor Services, a farm workers’ legal aid program operating with federal funds. That experience led him back to Washington, D.C., to work on legislation creating the Legal Services Corp., a private nonprofit organization created by Congress to offer legal assistance to poor people in non-criminal cases. His work caught the eye of former Sen. Alan Cranston, and Kantor ended up in California, running the Democrat’s 1974 reelection campaign. It was through his tenure on the Legal Services Corp that he met Hillary Rodham, a fellow board member, and her husband, the young governor of Arkansas, Bill Clinton.

Kantor’s resume reflects a devotion to traditionally liberal causes, born within the family home in Nashville, where Kantor’s father, Henry, was a member of the school board--until he pushed fellow board members to move quickly to implement the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 school desegregation order.

“He had the temerity to believe that the law of the land should be followed,” Kantor has said. “I was 15 years old and it was almost like a wake-up call.”

But occasionally in his current job, his liberalism doesn’t go far enough for labor unions and environmentalists, who express dismay when he strays from their course.

Sometimes he has promoted causes counter to traditional liberal dogma. In California, Kantor worked for the tobacco industry, fighting a Beverly Hills anti-smoking ordinance that eventually went into effect. He represented Occidental Petroleum Corp. in its efforts to drill wells off the coast of Pacific Palisades. He lost that one, too.

Kantor was brought into the drilling fight by Gerald M. Stern, the Occidental Petroleum senior general counsel. They were opposed by John R. Phillips, a public-interest lawyer. The three were friends before the fight, and it is typical of the loyalties and friendships Kantor develops that they remain so today. All three now live in Washington, where they spend occasional Sunday afternoons on a schoolyard basketball court together.

By all accounts, Kantor on the court is Kantor at the negotiating table--just substitute the athletic wear for the All-American blue suits and black penny loafers he favors these days.

“He just pours himself into it nonstop,” says Phillips the morning after a recent game. “He’s totally engaged in the game and expects perfection of himself. He gets so angry at himself. He works hard and if he doesn’t do it right, he gets upset.”

John Emerson, now a White House aide, remembers playing racquetball with his boss when he was a lawyer in Kantor’s firm about a decade ago.

“He was absolutely tenacious, diving across the court, smashing into walls,” Emerson says. When the game ended and they were about to head for the showers, something on the locker-room floor caught Emerson’s glance: Kantor’s socks had turned red with blood. Kantor had ignored a foot wound throughout the game.

Kantor has known the deepest tragedies, by which any other pain he could suffer pales. His first wife, Valerie, died in the PSA airline crash in 1978 in San Diego; their 17-year-old son Russell, one of their three children, died 10 years later in a car accident in Santa Monica.

During his first months in office in 1993, Kantor tumbled through a duct in the roof of a Geneva hotel. With his second wife, former NBC News correspondent Heidi Schulman, and their daughter, Alix, he had been watching a fireworks display at the start of a vacation. His body flipped during the fall and he landed on his back. He just missed hitting the knife-like blades of a commercial air-conditioning fan. But the fall damaged his back so badly that his upper torso was wrapped in a fiberglass cast for four months.

For nearly two decades, he has suffered from arthritis, which has gnarled his long fingers. Still, he routinely rises before dawn for a daily run.

“This is a man,” Emerson says, “who has the capacity to rise above personal, physical and deeply emotional pain and move on. Not in a robotic sense. Mickey feels. You know he’s in pain. He has his humanity about him. But he moves on with an incredible sheer force of will.”

*

On a sunny day in May, as skiers in shorts made their way down a snow-covered mountain in the Canadian resort village of Whistler, in British Columbia, Kantor went toe to toe with his Japanese counterpart, Ryutaro Hashimoto, ticking off each Japanese regulation restricting the installation of replacement mufflers and rearview mirrors that the Administration was arguing had unfairly limited sales of U.S. auto parts in Japan.

That, says aides who have worked with him, is how he performs in a negotiation.

He is, says Jeffrey E. Garten, undersecretary of commerce for international trade, a “master of his brief” and a good listener, who can absorb not only detailed briefings but also grasp concepts and others’ points of views. And, Garten says, Kantor “has a great sense of negotiating strategy.”

Regardless of the issue on the table, says Garten, who has observed Kantor for nearly 2 1/2 years and was one of the lead negotiators during the talks with Japan, Kantor remains “clear and consistent” in adhering to the overall theme of his tenure in office: “The U.S. market is the most open market in the world; we want other markets to be as open to us as we are to them, and there is no barrier too small for us to address, whether it is a tariff or a quota or a method of labeling a product which blocks our goods.”

Kantor’s Japanese discussions took nearly two years to complete, and as he prepared for each stage, says a senior Clinton Administration official, he would consider possible scenarios. “Who would Hashimoto be talking to? What might they say? What freedom would Hashimoto have? What role would the top bureaucrats play? He would throw out curves, and he wanted them challenged. It was Socratic.”

What, Kantor would try to determine, was the relationship between the auto companies and the government, the senior bureaucrats and the politicians, the senior bureaucrats and the auto companies? What would be the effect of the changing dynamics of Japanese politics?

“He started every internal discussion by trying to set the strategic context: How does this play out and why?” the official says. “Let’s figure out,” Kantor was asking, “how the ball is going to bounce.”

At 2 a.m. June 28 in Geneva, the ball is skittering once more off the gravel. At that moment, Kantor, Garten and Ira Shapiro, general counsel to the U.S. trade representative, are in the final stages of their tortuous negotiations with Hashimoto and his two deputies, Yoshihiro Sakamoto and Osamu Watanabe. It is the day on which the United States has said it will impose 100% tariffs on 13 luxury-model Japanese cars if Tokyo does not make acceptable plans to boost sales of U.S. automobiles and auto parts in Japan.

Although agreement is not certain, Hashimoto and Kantor have reached sufficient common ground to leave the U.S. trade representative surprisingly confident that the crisis will be averted. He and Hashimoto leave the completion of details to their deputies. But within 10 minutes, everything to which they have agreed is unraveling.

The U.S. deputies have run into the famed wall of the Japanese bureaucrats, behind which the career officials of the trade ministry carry out their own agenda, fending off U.S. negotiators and ignoring their own politically appointed boss, Hashimoto.

By 4:15 a.m., the Japanese quit the meeting room for a private caucus. At 5 a.m. they send word to the U.S. team that they want to extend the private session 30 minutes. Kantor, who has returned to the U.S. mission, tells Garten and Shapiro by telephone: “Walk away.”

“He was really furious,” a senior Administration official says. “He was ready to do the sanctions at that moment.”

As dawn breaks, Garten and Shapiro send word to Sakamoto that Kantor wants to see Hashimoto as soon as possible.

“Wake the minister?” an incredulous Sakamoto is said to have asked. “Yes,” the U.S. officials insist.

By 9 a.m., Kantor and Hashimoto have resumed their negotiations--this time in private.

“When Hashimoto walked in, Mickey was the model of grace. He treated Hashimoto with incredible dignity, like it was the two of them against the rest of us, as though he and Hashimoto were managing to get an agreement, against the wishes of the senior staff,” says an official who observed Hashimoto’s arrival. “He had figured out what was making Hashimoto tick. He was unwavering where he would draw the line, and he was determined not to let a few details trip up the agreement, which you can do if you’re really tired.”

Within a half hour, Kantor and Hashimoto call their aides into the room. They sweep away whatever disagreements cropped up since the two last met, and the teams start from where they had been at 2 a.m.

“Hashimoto stayed in the U.S. mission almost all day. Mickey told him: ‘If you and I do not keep a handle on this, it’s not going to happen,’ ” the senior official recalls. “Three or four times during the day, the two of them had to come in because it hit a snag.” By late afternoon, an agreement is reached, and within an hour, Kantor and Hashimoto are putting a public imprimatur of mutual acceptance on it at an internationally televised news conference.

The deal--built around a set of vaguely worded forecasts of increased Japanese purchases of U.S.-made auto parts and the expectation that Tokyo will cut back regulations that favored Japanese companies--is done. But to what grander end? That is the core of the U.S. trade representative’s mission.

*

Mickey Kantor, says a Democratic congressional staff member, “takes the Monty Hall approach to trade: Let’s make a deal. The real question should be not whether you get a deal, but what is the result?”

And what is the policy that lies behind the deal-making?

“Part of the Administration’s problem is they haven’t decided to what degree they want to be advocates of liberal trade policies and to what degree they want to be mercantilist,” establishing a closely regulated policy aimed at protecting the U.S. economy from foreign competition, says William E. Brock, U.S. trade representative from 1981 to 1985, who generally applauds Kantor’s performance.

Similarly, Charles McMillion, an economist in Washington who has at times advised Ross Perot, praises Kantor’s tenacity. But he says of Kantor: “My problem is the job he’s been given. The idea is that global trade will win friends and cooperation, but what we’ve seen is ever-more-shrill fights over autos, air cargo or human rights.”

The Administration, McMillion says, is “putting a lot of pressure on the global trading and financial system. This system, which is supposed to be increasing prosperity and world peace, has been turned on its head, driving income and living standards down and contributing to escalating tensions around the world. So we need a new system. Mickey Kantor? That’s just not his job.”

To back up his argument, he cites these statistics: The “current account,” the measure of international trade in merchandise and services, showed a U.S. deficit of $61.5 billion in 1992; $99.9 billion in 1993; $151.2 billion in 1994, “and 1995 is on track to be significantly worse,” McMillion says.

But the trade deficit depends on more than just the reach of the U.S. trade representative. The value of the dollar and the health of foreign economies plays a roll.

Still, it’s not just about numbers. There are geopolitical considerations. During the Cold War, no Administration wanted to pressure Japan to open its markets when it was counting on Tokyo’s help to balance Soviet and Chinese might in Asia.

If the trade representative “came forward with complaints on the economic scene, they would be smothered because the Pentagon, State Department or the National Security Council had bigger fish to fry,” says Clyde Prestowitz, president of the Economic Strategy Institute, a Washington, D.C., nonprofit policy research organization, and a former trade negotiator in the Commerce Department.

“The Soviet Union proved that having the most weapons does not necessarily make you the most powerful on the block,” Prestowitz says. “It became apparent that industrial-technological leadership is the real basis for economic power, and that in a rapidly globalizing economy, if the United States were to remain the world leader, it had to do so on economic terms.”

Enter Mickey Kantor and the new, expanded role of the U.S. trade representative. “It strikes me,” says Prestowitz, “that Mickey has become to a significant extent more important in U.S. foreign policy than the State Department because the balance of power is increasingly dependent on economic success.”

At a time when the U.S. trade representative is moving into a broad, geopolitical role, “the real issue,” Prestowitz says, “is what are the rules of international engagement going to be in the 21st Century?”

And this is where Kantor is throwing the ball with all his might against the brick wall.

“I think we’ve begun to establish a base line of understanding among Japanese politicians and officials that we’re not going to continue to accept an unfair situation in trade,” Kantor says.

The Japanese talks, he agrees, were only incidentally about autos and auto parts. Rather, they were about the broad course of the global economy. “They represent a real change in the way in which this country looks at trade, international economics, our involvement with other countries on diplomatic and economic terms, where our security interests lie in the future, and how we’re going to engage in each other,” he says.

In the U.S. view, the Japanese auto industry is the epitome of an economic system that focuses on the needs of the producers rather than the rights of the consumer. It is built around cartels and the protection of the domestic market--at the cost of higher prices to consumers--to make it easier to hold down prices of goods sold abroad. This strengthens the export market while weakening sales of foreign competitors in their home markets.

South Korea. Thailand. Malaysia. China. Each is developing consumer appetites that could soon devour the products of American factories and fields, providing more jobs for American workers. Each wants to see whether the United States will continue to tolerate economic systems that remain essentially closed to the spirit and reality of free trade. “Fifty percent of our trade goes over the Pacific,” Kantor says. “If we don’t send the right signals and begin to make progress in opening those markets, we couldn’t be successful. We’ve got to be able to indicate to the rest of Asia that we’re going to level this playing field over the course of the next few years.

“Our economic security and national security have become inextricably intertwined. You cannot have one without the other. Stability--political, strategic, economic--depends on successful trading relationships.”

*

At Vanderbilt University, where he played shortstop for the varsity baseball team, Mickey Kantor was occasionally dispatched to the pitcher’s mound, “when we were having a bad game and we didn’t want to waste any other pitchers. I could throw hard. I couldn’t do anything else but throw hard.”

Then one day he came up against Ole Miss.

“They were a wonderful baseball team. All of their infielders signed Major League contracts. They just shelled me,” he recalled. “Throwing hard was not enough.”

It was his last appearance on the mound. He would be a shortstop.

Throughout lawyers’ softball leagues in Washington and Los Angeles, it was his position. He played it deep, near the outfield grass, where he could cover more territory. He played hard.

“He may have been the only fortysomething arthritic lawyer I ever saw slide head first to score a winning run,” says Stephen Greenberg, a Triple A minor leaguer, and, later, a Kantor teammate while at his L.A. law firm.

The role of shortstop lacks the glamour of the pitcher, and it is the center-fielder whose leaping catches turn a game-winning home run into a game-losing out.

Why, Kantor is asked, did he play shortstop?

“I just love playing baseball, but what I liked about it most is you’re in the middle of everything.”