It is this almost Zenlike evenhandedness, this ability to see the parts and the whole at the same time, that has made Kofi Annan perhaps the most popular executive in the United Nations today. He will be the first secretary-general to have risen through the U.N. ranks, having started nearly 35 years ago as a minor official in the World Health Organization, “a little punk, just like the rest of us,” as one of his fellow bureaucrats put it gleefully last week. Annan rose steadily through a series of dull-sounding bureaucratic jobs: budget, personnel, pension funds, refugee affairs. He earned the respect of the United States while overseeing the withdrawal of U.N. forces from Somalia in 1994, and even more so, when he took over peacekeeping operations in Bosnia in 1995. Part of Annan’s job was to meet regularly with the U.N. ambassadors from the United States, Britain, France and Russia, to coordinate U.N. actions in the former Yugoslavia. “To come out of that, with all four of them feeling that they had never been misled, is what’s called diplomacy,” said a U.S. official. “Everyone thought he was an honest broker.”

Annan’s appointment, though it still had to be confirmed by a pro forma vote of the U.N. General Assembly, had American officials crowing last week over their diplomatic victory. In fact, for weeks the United States had been isolated in its open hostility to Boutros Boutros-Ghali, the current secretary-general, whom Washington considered too independent-minded. Even close allies like Britain had forced Washington to cast the lone veto against his reappointment for weeks on end. Finally, after Boutros-Ghali declared in early December that other candidates should step forward, Annan’s name rose quickly to the top.

The French opposed Annan, however, because he didn’t hail from a Franco-phone country (though he speaks fluent French, and joked recently that he was even starting to speak English with a French accent). But as other countries swung behind Annan’s candidacy, it boiled down to a test of wills between Washington and Paris, and the United States won. “We took a lot of heat for dumping on Boutros,” remembered one U.S. official. “But that’s the price of being the indispensable nation. We’re the only country that could have pulled this off.” And Annan was perhaps the only candidate who, by virtue of his broad popularity, could extricate the United States so quickly from the Boutros imbroglio.

Annan’s popularity will be sorely tried in his new position. Even amid the ringing chorus of approbation surrounding his selection, some voices questioned whether Annan has the toughness to alienate old friends in the U.N. bureaucracy–something that real reform would surely require. U.S. critics of Boutros-Ghali always liked to accuse him of blocking U.N. reform, but the charge was unfair. Boutros-Ghali actually cut the Secretariat staff from 12,000 to 9,000 and presided over the organization’s first-ever zero-growth budgets. His problem was that the U.N. staff found him haughty and remote. Annan has evidently thought this over. “I don’t think reform need necessarily be brutal,” he said. Reform “should be explained to [the staff], and let it become our reform… [otherwise] there are so many morale problems and anxiety that productivity is likely to drop.”

Getting the United Nations out of hock will have to be Annan’s first priority. The United States, the world’s biggest debtor to the United Nations, owes about $1.5 billion. To persuade Congress to cough up its dues, Annan will need all the skills he honed as winner of the 1960 Minnesota state oratorical contest (he was a student at St. Paul’s Macalester College at the time). “By withholding its dues, the U.S. offends friends and foes alike,” he told NEWSWEEK almost mechanically, as though repeating a sound bite that he knew he’d be using often in the coming months.

Annan should have a strong ally in Secretary of State–designate Madeleine Albright, who tried and largely failed to pry the money out of Congress when she was U.N. ambassador in Clinton’s first term. In her new job, she may have the clout to be more persuasive. Annan also knows America’s new U.N. ambassador, Bill Richardson, having met him at an Aspen Institute seminar some years ago, and on at least two occasions since then. “I’m delighted that he’s coming here as ambassador,” said Annan. “It will be great to work with him.”

Annan, meanwhile, can again take his predecessor as a negative example. One Western diplomat rued the fact that Boutros-Ghali wasn’t “more PR conscious,” noting he’d made repeated visits to the German Bundestag and French Parliament but visited the U.S. Congress only once. “He’s a product of a certain generation and a certain culture that constrains him from promoting himself,” said the diplomat. Annan, though modest by nature, will not likely make that mistake. He told NEWSWEEK: “I think it’s important that the U.N. do a much better job in public relations.”

Annan’s best weapon is probably his own personality. Tales of his kindness are legendary among his friends and staff. He is the son of a hereditary leader of the Fante tribe; his wife is a painter and the niece of Raoul Wallenberg, the great Swedish protector of Jews during World War II. “Annan is a confidence-building measure in and of himself,” remarked Ruth Wedgwood, a law professor at Yale University and an expert on the United Nations. But there’s a curious thing about U.N. secretaries-general. Even close allies of the United States end up having to distance themselves from Washington once they get the job. “I have 185 masters,” Annan pointed out last week. Pleasing all of them will test even his prodigious diplomatic skills.

Since Scandinavians Trygve Lie and Dag Hamarskjold, the top job has shifted by region.

(1961-1971), Burma. Broke with the U.S. over Vietnam.

(1971-1981), Austria. Legacy clouded by Nazi ties.

(1981-1991), Peru. In a word: unassertive.

(1991-1996), Egypt. Independence and aloofness made enemy of U.S.