When I met Kurt Waldheim in Vienna in 1994, the Balkans were doubly at issue, a generation apart. Though I lived in the Austrian capital, I was spending most of my time covering the brutal fighting and ethnic displacements then racking a disintegrating Yugoslavia. Waldheim had served a painful term as Austrian President, marked from beginning to end by controversy over what he had done, seen or known as a young Wehrmacht first lieutenant in Nazi-occupied Yugoslavia in 1942. When his activities there first came under scrutiny during his 1986 campaign, Waldheim, who had served two terms as U.N. Secretary-General from 1972 to 1982, had battened down the hatches, saying, "I did my duty like hundreds of thousands of Austrians" during the war. The Austrians responded by resoundingly electing him under the defiant slogan "now more than ever." But the defiance faded after early 1987, when he was barred entry to the United States and became an international pariah. After six years as a lonely captive of the Hofburg, valiantly protesting his innocence but rarely invited anywhere, he had declined to run for a second term in 1992. He would live a wealthy but constrained existence for another 15 years, until his death on Thursday.
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