People Remember Saakashvilli in New York

August 15, 2008, 9:26 am
The Georgian Leader’s New York Days
By Jake Mooney
Mikheil Saakashvili in Tbilisi on Aug. 14. (Photo: Vano Shlamov/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images)
Not everyone in the neighborhoods around Columbia University remembers Mikheil Saakashvili — the guard at the front desk of his old condominium building at 110th Street and Central Park West shook her head on Wednesday when shown his picture in a newspaper — but even though the Georgian president spent only about two years in the area, more than a decade ago, he still has some local connections.
Mr. Saakashvili, who has been all over the news since his country’s long conflict with Russia flared up a week ago, got a master of laws degree at Columbia in 1994, then interned for a year at the Manhattan-based firm Patterson, Belknap, Webb & Tyler, and during that time he lived on 116th Street, in student housing, and later on 110th.
As for where he ate, a favorite spot apparently was Indian Cafe, at Broadway and 108th Street. Mr. Saakashvili, in 2004, told The New York Post that it served “the best Indian food I ever had in my life,” and Scott Horton, his friend and former colleague at Patterson, Belknap said last week that he asked after the restaurant in a subsequent conversation last year.
Mr. Saakashvili’s comments were hanging in the Indian Cafe’s window on Wednesday, and the chef, Puskar Basnet, pointed to the newspaper clipping proudly and said, “You see? The best Indian.”
He did not remember Saakashvili’s early visits, he said, but remembered his most recent, after he had become president. That time, the leader was accompanied by an entourage of more than a dozen people. And afterward, Mr. Basnet said, Mr. Saakashvili went to the store next door and bought a large stack of newspapers and magazines.
I heard all this while asking around the neighborhood about Mr. Saakashvili’s time there for this Sunday’s Dispatches in The City section. He is frequently described in the press as Columbia-educated and once even called the University his favorite place in America, so I wondered if there were people there who remembered him as fondly.
I thought maybe he would have frequented the Hungarian Pastry Shop on Amsterdam Avenue, second home to a crowd of literate and internationally minded regulars. But no one there, even those who were around in the 1990s, remembered having seen Mr. Saakashvili — though one man had been keeping up with the news, pointing to his picture and saying, in reference to the conflict with Russia, “He made a big mistake.”
Mr. Saakashvili made more of a splash when he returned in 2004, having taken over as president the previous November in the so-called “Rose Revolution.” There was a reception at the law school, and at Patterson, Belknap — though Bob LoBue, the firm’s managing partner, said last week that there is no one there anymore who worked closely with Mr. Saakashvili.
Mr. Horton, a former partner there who recruited him for the year-long internship, left in 2007 and now practices human rights law and writes for Harper’s magazine, among other things. Along with a string of old stories about Mr. Saakashvili in various outlets (and some more recent), Mr. Horton is one of the better sources of information I could find on Mr. Saakashvili.
“I think it was pretty clear to me from the beginning that he had a very strong attraction to politics,” said Mr. Horton, who first met Mr. Saakashvili when he was teaching at the law school and Mr. Saakashvili was a student. “He had a very strong command of language — in fact, a very strong command of many languages.”
Mr. Saakashvili, by the way, was pursuing a master of laws degree, LL.M. for short, that is typically sought by foreign students who have law training overseas — Mr. Saakashvili’s was in Ukraine — and want some exposure to the American system.
“In Europe they call it the ‘Been to the States’ degree,” Mr. Horton said.
The situation in Georgia in the last week is complex — these pages are as good a place to start catching up on it as any — but Mr. Horton, who wrote about the conflict on his Harper’s blog this week, offered continued praise for Mr. Saakashvili.
“He’s very, very gifted, one of the most incredibly polyglot people that I’ve ever run into,” he said, adding later, about Patterson, Belknap, “We wanted him to stay on. We wanted him not to leave, but I think he had made up his mind that he wanted to go into politics. So there you have it — it’s too bad.”
Regarding Mr. Saakashvili’s personality, Mr. Horton sought to counter suggestions — often Russian propaganda, he said — that the Georgian leader was the rash type who had led his country into a conflict impulsively.
“If you look back at what happened at the time of the Rose Revolution, he’s definitely someone who believes in historically fated moments, where if you don’t act, the moment is lost forever,” Mr. Horton said. When such actions did come, he added, “it was always a result of reasonable calculation.”
The ultimate result of those calculations, in this case, is still unknown.
“I know the Russians would love to kill him, frankly,” Mr. Horton said.
In a visit to Mr. Saakashvili’s former Columbia student housing residence on 116th Street, I happened to run into two movers from Philadelphia, a father and son who are native Georgians and were working in the building. Both remained enthusiastic about their native country’s president, saying he had spurred economic growth in Georgia and done his best to prevent loss of life in the current conflict.
Badri Kalandadze, the father, said his own English is limited, but wanted to pass on a message to America: “Please, please, everybody help Georgia. Please, because this is very nice country, very nice people, very good people.”