Editor's Letter

Foreign Affairs

For years Kurt Waldheim's inglorious army career and the patchy state of his memory have been scrutinized, and he is now being tried on television in a three-and-a-half-hour HBO eyewitness inquiry. But, behind all the coverage, it seemed to us that Waldheim's predicament raises larger questions than his personal conduct. We asked the distinguished writer Gregor von Rezzori, who carries an Austrian passport, to go to Vienna and explain the inexplicable: why did the Austrians elect Waldheim president in the face of such international furor?

Von Rezzori returned to his old stomping ground on the fiftieth anniversary of the Anschluss, haunted by his sense of Vienna's "smiling resignation, of noble weariness under the weight of an overly rich and fading cultural heritage." His elegiac analysis of Austria's national identity crisis (page 64) ends at the Hofburg palace, at an audience with the mirrored face of Austria—Waldheim himself. The president's compromised smile is captured memorably for V.F. by Germanbom photographer Helmut Newton.

The last time von Rezzori wrote for Vanity Fair was when he re-created Humbert Humbert's lubricious drive with Lolita through motel America. Gay Talese included the piece in his anthology, The Best American Essays 1987.

In March 1987, V.F. reported the effect of AIDS on the worlds of fashion and the arts. It was the first close look at the loss of quality, as well as quantity, in ^ the AIDS toll, and it opened up the subject for discus/l sion by the rest of the media. Now we've focused on a ^ different scene of devastation. Africa. We sent Alex V Shoumatoff—who wrote for Vanity Fair about Dian

Fossey's murder in Rwanda and Emperor Bokassa's trial in the Central African Republic—on a 3,500-mile journey through the "AIDS belt." This is where AIDS is thought to have originated, and where it is a widespread, heterosexually transmitted disease that threatens the whole population. "We are dead on the equator, and the sun is incredibly hot," he writes (page 94). "I imagine myself a latter-day Ponce de Leon, searching for the Fountain of Death."

In a gripping piece, full of vivid reporting as well as information and ideas about AIDS, one of the questions Shoumatoff sets out to answer is: Will what is happening in Africa also happen here? And what is going to happen to the rest of the world ? The story he came back with is deeply troubling. Shoumatoff s experiences in Africa for Vanity Fair will become a Knopf book this fall.

Editor in chief