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WASHINGTON, D.C., December 23, 2003: This article in the Washington Post is mostly about the appointment of Robert D. Blackwill as coordinator for strategic planning with the National Security Council, a new and very influential position. Blackwill, a former Harvard professor, was much appreciated in India during his recently-concluded stint as ambassador, and appears to have imbibed some of India in the process. The article reads in part:



Although he returned this summer, part of Blackwill’s heart is clearly still in India. A huge map of “Mother India” adorns the cream-colored walls of his fastidious office in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. The only item on his vast desktop — besides precisely arranged wooden “in” and “out” boxes — is a tiny figurine of Ganesh, the Hindu elephant-headed God of wisdom and success.



During his two-year stint, Blackwill oversaw one of the fastest transformations in relations between the United States and any country by peaceful means, he noted in a farewell address to the Conference of Indian Industry in New Delhi this summer. When he arrived in 2001, India was under U.S. economic sanctions because of its 1998 nuclear tests and was considered “a nuclear renegade whose policies threatened the entire nonproliferation regime,” he recalled.



By the time he left, sanctions had been lifted, and cooperation flourished on issues ranging from counterterrorism to the HIV/AIDS crisis. And the U.S. and Indian militaries were engaged in almost monthly joint training exercises.



“The Bush administration perceives India as a strategic opportunity for the United States, not as an irritating recalcitrant,” Blackwill said shortly before leaving India.



But India, in which he traveled by both rail and elephant, transformed him somewhat, too. In a farewell reflection in July, Blackwill said the world for him now falls into two groups — those who have seen the Taj Mahal and those who haven’t. An avid reader, he lauded the Indian novel in English. “Who is writing better fiction today than these folks?” he said.



Blackwill has long been noted for pulling quotes out of the air, from Humphrey Bogart’s lines in “Casablanca” to Aristotle pithily defining analysis — “illumination through disaggregation.” In India, he added Krishna to the list — “Be thou of even mind” — as well as a taste for sugar in strong tea and Indian dancing.



In his farewell address, Blackwill fondly recalled “gyrating frenetically in a borrowed red turban with a professional local dance group on a lawn on a balmy evening in Chandigarth” — and his disappointment that members of the group did not ask “the long-legged whirling dervish” to join them permanently.

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