So what kind of mammal did UNDP become?

Shortly after Ukraine's Orange Revolution, Klavdia Maksimenko, one of the people in the Kiev offce working late each night to backstop the new government, pulls up a photograph on her computer screen. It is of a drawing made by a group of young UNDP offcers from around the world gathered together at a management retreat. They had been asked to imagine UNDP as an animal. The Programme was long-lived, gregarious, and compassionate; ‘It had to be an elephant.’ The glasses are ‘because it is wise’. Cesar Silang-Cruz from the Bureau of Crisis Prevention and Recovery, who held the pen, gave it the face of Gandhi, or maybe that of the favourite of Hindu deities, Ganesh, ‘the remover of obstacles’. Of course, the elephant is also doing the impossible. It is flying, or at least attempting to.

I showed the drawing to a friend, a professor of international environmental policy, who instantly recognized it, ‘Oh, it's Gus Speth!’

‘Speth’, Önder Yücer says of the man who became Administrator after Bill Draper, ‘to me, he's like a holy man, very shy, very cerebral … with an innocent soul … very different from Draper.’

Yet it was Draper who recommended that his old friend, the US president George H. W. Bush, nominate Speth. As it turned out Bush lost his 1992 bid for a second term as US president, and Bill Clinton was the one who nominated his fellow ‘New South’ Democrat.