HOT TICKET
by Ben McGrath

Third week in September: back to school at the United Nations. No sooner had the Fashion Week tents come down in Bryant Park than gravitas (of a sort) returned to the city, ushered in by motorcades ferrying visiting dignitaries between the U.N. and various East Side cocktail parties. For foreign-policy buffs—and who, these days, doesn’t have a world view to propound?—the concentration of big shots and big speeches occasioned a rush of invitation anxiety and panel overload. John Kerry made sure to see and be seen, last Monday, just before the opening of the fifty-ninth session of the General Assembly; he squeezed in a lecture on Iraq (at N.Y.U.), an awards-ceremony keynote address (at Lincoln Center), and a fund-raising gala (at the Hilton). The fund-raiser brought Kerry within blocks of President Bush, who was over at the Sheraton raising money, before he set up shop in the Presidential suite at the Waldorf.



But many of the week’s hot tickets were nominally nonpartisan. A sizable line forming alongside a Park Avenue town house, late Thursday morning, commanded special attention. So many well-cut suits, so much well-kept gray hair, a police barricade: “Who is this for?” a passerby asked.

“The President of Pakistan.”

“Oh!” she replied, turning to a friend. “It’s the President of Pakistan.”

Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan’s Chief Executive, was the scheduled guest speaker at the Council on Foreign Relations that afternoon—the headliner, in a sense, of a weeklong wonkfest at the council’s Sixty-eighth Street clubhouse. Among the warmup acts were the Emir of Qatar, for dinner on Monday, and President Mikhail Saakashvili, of Georgia, for Wednesday lunch. But it was Musharraf whose talk—his fourth in as many years—brought out the greatest array of armchair diplomats and the special pleading for last-minute seats. By Tuesday, the waiting list among council members ran about a hundred deep. Two overflow rooms, with closed-circuit television, had been set up to accommodate the audience. “It’s a little bit like a restaurant or an airplane: you overbook,” Richard Haass, the council president, said.

Security was tight—Musharraf has been the target of several assassination attempts—and the line outside inched slowly forward. Two tanned elderly men chatted near the front, sounding not unlike Deadheads discussing the fall tour.

“Is this the first Musharraf appearance you’ve been to?” one asked.

“Yes, it is,” replied his friend, who was wearing tweed.

“Well, I think he’s very interesting. I find him to be straightforward and candid.”

“It’s a miracle he’s still alive.”

“Oh, I know,” the first man said. “This’ll be the third time I’ve seen him.”

Once inside, the council members traded stories about memorable performances past. Who could forget Hamid Karzai, in 2002, shortly after he became the President of Afghanistan? That was standing-room only, and of course there’d been a lot of buzz about his emerald-green shawl.

“He was just extraordinary—so candid,” one member, a hedge-fund manager in his early thirties, said.

“I call that the ‘Better Him Than Me’ speech,” another, a management consultant, added. “When it was over, everyone just exhaled: ‘Better him than me.’”

Not all council events are rated equal (next week’s breakfast with Nicolas Sarkozy, the French finance minister, has been called only a “moderately hot” ticket), and neither are its members. In the conference room, people took their seats and scanned the attendance list—“That’s your Sunday Styles section,” the management consultant explained—for V.I.P.s.

“I see Ted Sorensen’s on here,” he added. “There’s living history right there.”

“Look, there’s David Rockefeller in the front row,” a woman sitting toward the back exclaimed. “He’s, like, ninety.”

There was no sign of Henry Kissinger, however, and no George Soros. “You know, I think an Eastern European accent is worth an automatic fifty I.Q. points,” the hedge-fund manager said.

“Actually, I think an Oxbridge accent is worth at least twenty,” the consultant said.

And then it was one o’clock—showtime—and Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, the event’s moderator, took the stage to introduce Musharraf. There he was, the General, dressed conservatively, his hair parted down the middle. It would, presumably, not be a violation of the council’s off-the-record mandate to report that he spoke candidly and displayed a winning sense of humor. Holbrooke certainly seemed pleased. Haass said that he thought Musharraf had “hit a home run.”

“‘A tough man for a tough job’—that’s my one-line summary,” the consultant said. “Before, I’d have estimated the chance of nuclear mishap in Pakistan at thirty per cent. Now I’d say it’s twenty per cent.” He added, “I feel more secure having seen him speak in person.”