The Other Side Of Paul Wolfowitz

Sunday, Jun. 19, 2005 By SIMON ROBINSON / KIGALI
FIELD TRIP: Wolfowitz meets children in Kigali
PETER VAN AGTMAEL / POLARIS FOR TIME
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This is not the Paul Wolfowitz the world is used to seeing. On a lush hillside in Rwanda last week, Wolfowitz — the über-hawk, the architect of the Iraq war, the embodiment of everything that the Bush Administration's critics find detestable about U.S. foreign policy — was talking about coffee. Standing beside tables of drying coffee under the beating sun, Wolfowitz, just two weeks into his new role as president of the World Bank, picked up a bean and asked a worker how he could tell that it was a good one. It's the color, the man said, launching into a lengthy lesson on the biochemical properties of coffee beans. "The sweetness comes from the sun," the man said. "We aim for a perfect water content of 10.5%." Wolfowitz listened intently and turned to an aide, impressed. "He's very exact," Wolfowitz said.

Wolfowitz has a lot more number crunching ahead of him. As the unlikely new executive of an institution focused on improving living standards in the developing world, he is racing to get up to speed on everything from the price of coffee beans in Rwanda to the salaries of schoolteachers in Brazil. Having served four years as Donald Rumsfeld's hawkish deputy at the Pentagon, Wolfowitz suddenly finds himself on the front line of another war: the global battle against poverty, a cause that has lately attracted Hollywood's interest but whose details are anything but glamorous. And so it wasn't entirely surprising that on a four-country swing through Africa last week, Wolfowitz spent most of his time listening rather than talking. "What impressed me the most [is] something I was hoping to find, which is the remarkable human material here," Wolfowitz told Time during a break in his schedule in Rwanda. "It's a real willingness to take advantage of opportunities and to work hard. And it's an intelligence and frankly a warmth, which is always a nice thing to work with."

Wolfowitz needs all the friends he can get. When he arrived at the Bank on June 1, many of the 8,000 staff members in its Washington headquarters were skeptical of the idea of a neocon boss straight out of the Pentagon. Some feared the Bank's Iranian division would be shut down to penalize the theocratic regime. Others thought Wolfowitz might be a halfhearted leader; in the minds of some conspiracy theorists, the Bush Administration had tapped Wolfowitz for the job to prove that World Bank-style aid doesn't work. A satirical staff newsletter imagined that instead of bopping around Washington in a limousine, Wolfowitz would travel in an Apache helicopter. Economist Jeffrey Sachs, head of the U.N. Millennium Project to reduce global poverty, hunger and disease, questioned Wolfowitz's lack of economic and banking experience. "I have looked for evidence of Mr. Wolfowitz having development goals — I have tried to find it in his speeches, and I haven't been able to," Sachs has said.

But Wolfowitz is already winning over the skeptics. The former academic has always been known for his soft-spoken, professorial style; it's his policy prescriptions — such as calling for regime change in Iraq as far back as the early 1990s — that invite criticism. But by asking questions, first in the office corridors and staff cafeterias in Washington and now in the fields and palaces of Africa, he has dispelled the idea that he has arrived with a set agenda. "I thought his appointment was a terrible idea, but after the meeting we had with him, I was really impressed," says David Beckmann, president of Bread for the World, one of five nongovernmental organizations that met with Wolfowitz days before his official start date. "He expressed clarity that the World Bank's mission is to reduce poverty. It's taken decades to get clarity about that."