Talkin' baseball and diplomacy

ByJANE MCMANUS
April 11, 2014, 6:59 PM

— -- NEW YORK -- "I've got a near-torn Achilles," Henry Kissinger said outside the door of his apartment building.

"Like Kobe Bryant," said Samantha Power, the United States ambassador to the United Nations, as she helped him into the van.

"Who?" he asked as he settled into the seat for the ride to Yankee Stadium.

"You know who Kobe Bryant is," Power said.

"I don't know basketball," Kissinger said.

But the 90-year-old former Secretary of State knows baseball, and has been an avid Yankees fan since his youth. Power, on the other hand, can detail decades-old at-bats in the Bronx-Boston rivalry, but from her vantage point as a fervent Red Sox fan. The Irish-born ambassador even wrote this essay for The Boston Globe after the Red Sox won the World Series in 2013.

For 30 minutes, as the van negotiated traffic from the East Side of Manhattan to the Major Deegan, Power and Kissinger discussed baseball and diplomacy. The two are natural allies, given his experience and her current work at the United Nations, which included the passage Thursday of a resolution to send 12,000 peacekeepers to the Central African Republic, from where Power had returned that morning.

Power would have a few other issues she'd want to discuss "between pitches" in the owner's box, but the conversation began with the subject of the Red Sox and Yankees rivalry.

"One of the great negotiations," Kissinger started.

"If a Yankee fan and a Red Sox fan can head into the heart of darkness for the first game of the season," Power said, "all things are possible."

Before long, baseball was compared to diplomacy, and Power said baseball was like negotiating in that you send your closer in last. Kissinger countered that he always made his best offer first.

As the sunset turned golden yellow, the black van pulled up to Yankee Stadium and the diplomats exited to watch the next chapter in one of baseball's great rivalries and talk of matters with more far-ranging consequence.