Meet Bernard Kouchner #
James Traub’s profile of French foreign minister Bernard Kouchner from last weekend’s New York Times Magazine’s not perfect, but it’s certainly good.
Kouchner claims to know pretty much everything and everyone by heart. One of Rony Brauman’s jokes is, “The guy must be four or five hundred years old; he’s spent 30 years in every critical situation worldwide.” But in Lebanon, at least, it was true. He had been going there since 1975, when he, Aeberhard and others established a hospital in Nabaa, a poor Shiite neighborhood, in the midst of the civil war. He knew all the Shiite leaders and often their fathers and brothers; and the Sunnis and Christians as well. “We embrace each other, we tutoie each other, we are angry at each other, we hold hands, we joke, we say ‘shut up’ to each other,” Kouchner explained to me on the plane. Lebanon’s Christian army had “designated me for death,” as he liked to remind the Christian warlords. These rivals, who were barely talking to one another, would speak to him without posturing, he said. Kouchner felt that he could make a difference. Then again, Kouchner almost always feels that he can make a difference.