Updated for the Paperback Edition For most of his career as secretary-general of the United Nations, Kofi Annan was the embodiment of the institution's best elements: A Nobel Prize winner, gracious, even-handed, and brilliant, he was considered one of the best ever to hold the position. By the end, after genocide in Darfur, the Oil For Food scandal and war in Iraq, many felt the UN had failed its constituents too many times to forgive, and Annan had nearly been forced from office. Did the U.N.'s failures arise from its own structure and culture, or from a clash with an American administration determined to go its own way in defiance of world opinion? In "The Best Intentions, New York Times Magazine" writer James Traub traces the intertwined histories of Kofi Annan and the U.N. from 1992 to the present. In Annan he sees a conscientious idealist given too little credit for advancing causes like humanitarian intervention, an honest broker crushed between American conservatives and Third World opponents.

But he also describes a U.N. careerist, a bureaucrat who has absorbed the institutional culture and can not, in the end, escape its limitations.