Amid last-minute campaigning, a string of high-profile speeches and dozens of media interviews in New York, Ban Ki-moon last week took a few hours off to buy dinner for the burly bodyguards, supplied by the State Department, who had been looking after him round the clock.
The South Korean foreign minister “wanted to thank them for working so hard”, says an aide to the man who will almost certainly become the next secretary-general of the United Nations.
Such humility has won Mr Ban many fans and much respect at home. “The thing about minister Ban is that no one really dislikes him,” says one of his staff in Seoul. Those traits have served the 62-year-old well in his campaign for the top job at the UN.
But the same emollience has led the foreign ministry press corps to dub him – half affectionately, half out of frustration – the “slippery eel”. No matter what question is lobbed at him, the adroit Mr Ban can slide right through without answering directly.
Indeed, ask almost any South Korean who knows Mr Ban and they will almost invariably describe him as nice, affable, sociable, mild mannered, consensual and accommodative – if a little lacking in charisma.
It is an image his campaign staff have been eager to promote. His advisers say Mr Ban, newly decked out in Calvin Klein suits, never gets angry or flustered – even when North Korea fires off provocative missiles.
His advisers have also been careful to be just hard enough on the US to appeal to countries that bristle at President George W Bush’s policies, at the same time as being just pro-American enough to secure Washington’s support for the bid.
The formula has worked so well that not even Pyongyang objects. South Korea’s Hankyoreh newspaper quoted Han Song-ryol, North Korea’s deputy permanent representative to the UN, saying that Mr Ban’s appointment as the world’s top diplomat would be “good for the Korean people”.
These very qualities have, however, sparked criticism that he is not tough enough to do the difficult job and that the US supports him because it thinks it will be able to push him around.
A 36-year veteran of the South Korean foreign service, Mr Ban knows the UN well. After serving in the UN division in Seoul in the 1970s at the beginning of his career, he has been posted to the UN three times, including as ambassador in 2001.
But at a time when institutional reform is high on the UN agenda, some question whether Mr Ban has the constitution for the job.
“He has not distinguished himself as foreign minister among all this combustive diplomacy with Japan and the US,” says Shim Jae-hoon, a veteran South Korean commentator who first met Mr Ban 20 years ago. “He should have stepped in and stopped the Roh administration from burning its bridges.”
Many diplomats also highlight the Roh government’s – and Mr Ban’s – silence on North Korean human rights issues, which are treated as a taboo subject as Seoul tries to engage its neighbour without antagonising it.
But many of his colleagues do not doubt Mr Ban’s ability to do the job. “While he might appear softly spoken, he is a man of metal,” says a senior diplomat who has worked with Mr Ban for three decades. “He is a firm decision maker with excellent managerial skills and is very good at accommodating a wide range of views.”
Moon Chung-in, the Yonsei University professor now acting as a special ambassador for international relations, points out that Mr Ban has not been afraid to take radical or unpopular steps during his tenure as foreign minister.
“He has undertaken a number of sweeping re-forms,” Prof Moon says. “He cleared about 30 ambassadors-at-large out of the ministry and took very aggressive steps to recruit ambassadors from outside the foreign service, an innovative idea that upset many career diplomats.”
