The incoming secretary-general of the UN, Ban Ki-moon, got his new job in an unlikely manner for a man known for head-of-the-class performance, devotion to duty and a relentless rise through the ranks.
He got fired.
"I was totally out of work for the first time in my life," Ban said.
Worse than that, the professional lapse that cost him his high-level position in the South Korean Foreign Ministry required a public apology from the president at the time, Kim Dae-jung. Ban had accidentally left a positive mention of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in a joint communique with Russia at a time when the Bush administration had decided to abandon it.
"You must understand the political impact in Asia that public apologies have," Ban said, wincing at the memory.
He survived thanks to another Asian cultural tradition.
"I had what we call a jeon-hwa-we-bok experience," he said. The maxim, well known to Koreans, means turning a misfortune into a blessing.
While waiting in Seoul to be shunted off to a remote embassy, as he expected, he was tapped by Han Seung-soo, the General Assembly president for 2001, to come to the UN to be his chief of staff.
"Had I been appointed to an ambassadorship somewhere, I simply wouldn't have had this opportunity to be selected secretary-general," Ban said.
The full realization of this reversal of fortune comes on Thursday with his formal swearing-in as the eighth secretary-general of the UN. He will assume the office Jan. 1, replacing Kofi Annan, who completes his second five-year term on Dec. 31.
Unknown
Courtly and deliberate, with an easy smile, Ban, 62, is an unknown at the UN, particularly compared with the high-profile, globetrotting diplomat he is succeeding.
With the exception of his misstep in 2001, Ban has been almost surpassingly unassuming and inoffensive -- noticed, when he is, for his steady record of incremental achievement at the South Korean Foreign Ministry, where he has spent his entire 37-year career.
The elusiveness may be intended.
"When I was the foreign policy adviser to President Roh Moo-hyun, everybody was caught up in controversy with what they said to the media, but I avoided the tricky, sometimes nasty questions," he said. "The press people called me the `slippery eel' because they could never grab me."
A loyal and dependable company man, he once wrote handwritten letters of apology to 120 Foreign Ministry officials after being promoted ahead of them.
"They were very much grateful for my gesture," he said. "With that, I was able to lessen the sorry feelings of my senior colleagues."
Ban's penchant for not stepping on toes and his repeated public expressions of humility during the months that he was campaigning for secretary-general have raised doubts about his suitability for the job.
How can someone with such a retiring manner lead an organization undergoing a hotly contested reformation, riddled with regional rivalries and subject to competing demands from the great powers and the nations of the developing world?
Addressing this concern in his acceptance speech to the General Assembly on Oct. 13, he asked that people accept his modest mien as a cultural attribute and not misread it as lack of decisiveness or passion.
"Modesty is about demeanor," he said, "not about vision and goals. It does not mean the lack of commitment or leadership."
In campaigning for the job, Ban presented himself as a "harmonizer and bridge builder" who would try to dispel the widespread mistrust of the UN.
With the choice of each secretary-general, the question always arises about which part of that title the new person will inhabit. Given Ban's resume and style, the prediction now is that he will be more a secretary, less a general.
But the same expectation greeted Annan 10 years ago, and, to the particular dismay of the Bush administration, he ended up being more general, less secretary.
John Bolton, the departing US ambassador, left no doubt what the US hopes were for Ban, whom Washington backed vigorously. He repeatedly pointed out that the job of secretary-general was described in the UN charter as simply "chief administrative officer."
Ban was born on June 13, 1944, in Eumseong, a farm village in Japanese-occupied Korea, and raised in Chungju, a nearby town. His family lost its middle-class standard of living when his father's warehouse business went bankrupt, and Ban was to spend his early years as a diplomat deliberately picking posts where he could save money to send home.
When he was six, his family had to flee to a remote mountainside to escape the fighting during the Korean War.
Americans
"We were safe and in a place where neither the South Korean nor North Korean armies would come, but we were poor and hungry," he said. "I could see the fighter jets bombing the towns and cities nearby."
The experience led to his first sighting of Americans.
"After the war, the American soldiers would throw biscuits and chocolates and chewing gum to us, and all our clothes were given to us by America," he said.
A later encounter with Western ways occurred when American technicians came to his town in the 1950s to help build a fertilizer factory, and he still recalls it with shock.
"I was startled one summer when I met for the first time one of the daughters, and she was sitting there with hot pants and her two legs stretched out in front of me, a young country boy," he said. "I didn't know where to place my eyes, where to focus. It would have been a matter of shame for any Korean lady at that time."
The eldest of six children, he was a standout student, applying himself with particular zeal to learning English.
The method of study was arduous, with students required to write the same English sentences 10 times as a way of memorizing them.
In 1962, he won an English competition sponsored by the Red Cross and got a chance to visit the US. The high point of that trip was a meeting at the White House with president John F. Kennedy, which he said first inspired him to become a diplomat.
Ban married another high achiever, his school's student council president, Yoo Soon-taek, in 1971, a year after he had passed his diplomat's exam.
The couple have two daughters, Seon-yong, 34, who works in Seoul for the Korea Foundation, a nonprofit organization that promotes Korean culture, and Hyun-hee, 30, a field officer for UNICEF in Nairobi, Kenya. They also have a son, Woo-hyun, 32, who is studying for an MBA at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Ban is admittedly all work, no play.
"When you ask about hobbies, that's a question I have difficulty answering," he said. "I regret, looking back at my life, that I have not been able to cultivate any extracurricular activities like playing tennis or soccer or football. The only sport I do is golf, but in the last three or four years, I have played less than 10 times."
In 1956, Ban was picked by his class to address an appeal to Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold over the Hungarian uprising against the Russians. But whether there is an interesting historical footnote here, Ban cannot say.
"I never found out if they ever sent it," he said.
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