At receptions, Bolton’s wife, Gretchen, a financial planner, provides a lot of the social grease—she’s sweet-faced, warm, and unafraid of grabbing guests by their arms and leading them into the dining room. He, on the other hand, rises at 4 a.m. to read the foreign press and send out e-mails and in social settings often seems at loose ends. Muñoz, from Chile, tells a story about the first time Bolton paid a visit to his office. “He said very bluntly, ‘So how is the U.N.?’ This is before we even sat down.” Muñoz smiles. “And I said, ‘Well, it’s not as good as it was before you invaded Iraq.’ ”

Bolton can be rude to the help, as advertised. During the negotiations leading up to the World Summit, he repeatedly told members of Annan’s staff, “You have no standing here.” To fellow perm reps, his directness can also come across as crassly undiplomatic. During the summit negotiations, he suggested a compromise on a particular matter to Stafford Neil, the Jamaican ambassador and chairman of the G-77. Neil said he’d have to check with other members of the G-77 first. “Great,” Bolton said, according to someone close to the negotiations. “I’ll throw it into an interagency process in Washington, and we’ll see who gets an answer first.”

“He has a style that is complicated for some colleagues,” says Muñoz. “He tends to lecture. Perhaps he doesn’t fully realize that he’s dealing with individuals who have as much or more diplomatic and political experience as he has—and who have gone through many difficult situations throughout their public life.” He takes a sip of coffee. “Maybe that’s his style,” he continues. “But when one has been in jail, like I have . . . ” He drifts. “You have to understand that if you’re facing people at the U.N., it’s because they have experience.

“But I’ve been very impressed by him,” he says. “He is extremely well informed. And he has a very dry sense of humor.”

And Bolton has not been rude in the way so many American officials have been rude in the past—namely by requesting meetings with fellow ambassadors, then insisting the ambassadors come to the American mission, rather than going to the representatives’ own turf. Baali remembers being summoned into Madeleine Albright’s office—an office he had loaned her, no less. Albright had graduated from U.N. ambassador to secretary of State by then, but still. “I said, ‘No way,’ ” says Baali. “ ‘She wants to see me? It will be in my office.’ ” He shakes his head. “Bolton,” he declares, “would never do that.”

On a recent morning, Bolton is asked by reporters what he thinks of a New York Times editorial accusing him of “all muscle and no diplomacy.” He smiles. “There are some things that make me happy in my job,” he says. “And that was one of them.”

Whether as a matter of tactics or temperament, Bolton can be stunningly impolitic. In November, he told a group at a New York dinner that U.N. officials lived in a “bubble” and the organization itself is “a target-rich environment.” He also told reporters that Americans, if unimpressed with the U.N., would eventually seek “other institutions, other mechanisms” to resolve their troubles. When later asked about this comment, Kofi Annan offered seven words: “I’m not the interpreter of Ambassador Bolton.”

For a while, Bolton publicly flirted with the notion of the United States’ contributing only to U.N. programs with “à la carte” dues, such as the World Food Program and unicef, because they’re better run—an interesting idea but highly impractical for everyone working on 44th Street, including the secretary-general. “My perception was that his style was more of a prosecuting attorney than a diplomat’s,” says Alexander Watson, Pickering’s deputy ambassador, who dealt with Bolton when he was still an assistant secretary at the State Department. “His interventions were not particularly helpful to achieving our objectives.”

This time around, his colleagues learned this same lesson almost immediately, and quite vividly, in the weeks leading up to this September’s World Summit, a three-day policy rave involving more than 150 heads of state. For months preceding the event, the president of the General Assembly had been trying to write a document leaders could endorse at summit’s end. This prospectus, known as the “Outcome Document,” was supposed to chart the course of the United Nations for decades to come.

Then Bolton arrived. Almost immediately, he sent out a letter to his colleagues saying he harbored reservations about the document—roughly 700 of them. Among them were all references to the Millennium Development Goals. “Even the secretary-general reacted,” recalls Baali, from Algeria. “The Millennium Development Goals are like the Holy Koran.”