Peacemaker

For his success in ending the war between Israel and her Arab neighbors, broad-shouldered Dr. Ralph Johnson Bunche had been showered with 40 awards and medals and 20 honorary academic degrees. One afternoon last week as Bunche, now senior director of the U.N. Trusteeship Department, was eating lunch in the delegates' dining room at Lake Success, his British secretary Mrs. Doreen Daughton dashed up with news of another honor. "I have a surprise for you," she told Ralph Bunche. "You've won the Nobel Peace Prize."

"One of the Greatest." Bunche insisted on taking Mrs. Daughton's report with a grain of salt. Not until midafternoon, when he received a telegram of notification from two members of the Nobel Committee, was he fully convinced that he had become the first Negro to win the Peace Prize.* The Peace Prize Committee, made up of five members selected by

Norway's Parliament, had chosen him from a list of 28 nominees, among them Harry Truman, George Marshall, Winston Churchill and India's Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru.

The Nobel Committeemen were not the first Scandinavians to recognize Ralph Bunche's talents as a peacemaker. Sent to Palestine in 1948 as assistant to U.N. Mediator Count Folke Bernadotte of Sweden, Bunche had quickly won the count's friendship and admiration. After Bernadotte's assassination by Israeli terrorists in September 1948, Bunche carried on Bernadotte's job. At his headquarters on the Aegean Island of Rhodes the American charmed, cajoled and sometimes bullied testy, mistrustful Arab and Israeli peace negotiators. Bunche worked tirelessly 16 to 20 hours a day, lighting one cigarette off another and drinking vast quantities of orange juice. (Some of his staff members, he recalls, insisted bitterly that the orange juice, like every other form of nourishment on Rhodes, was flavored with olive oil.) After 81 days of bargaining, Bunche achieved the three armistice agreements which finally put an end to the war--and gave U.N. one of its few claims to solid achievement. "Ralph Bunche," said an Egyptian delegate, "is one of the world's greatest men."

"A Walking Colonial Institute." The. road to greatness has been a steep one for the greying, 46-year-old man whose grandmother was born in slavery. Orphaned at 14, he worked during his high-school years first as a houseboy, then as a "pig boy," moving type metal in the composing rooms of the Los Angeles Times. When his grandmother, with whom he lived, became worried by ominous tales of "printer's consumption," Bunche left the Times for a job laying carpets.

Athletic ability won him a scholarship to the University of California at Los Angeles, where he played varsity baseball and basketball. Still brawny ("Call me over 200 pounds"), Ralph Bunche now admittedly confines his athletic activities to billiards.

A scholar rather than an athlete by inclination, Bunche left U.C.L.A. with a Phi Beta Kappa key and an interest in the problems of colonial peoples. In 1928, after postgraduate study at Harvard, he went to Washington's Howard University to teach political science. At Howard, friends say, he got his first experience as a peacemaker when he took up the cause of a senior coed who had been dropped from the graduation list for allowing herself to be kissed by a youthful instructor. Bunche worked all one night on a report defending the girl, submitted it to the board of trustees. Impressed by Bunche's defense, the trustees relented, let the indiscreet coed graduate with her class.

Bunche combined his teaching career with study (Ph.D. Harvard 1934) and travel in England, Africa, Malaya and Indonesia, won a reputation as a "walking colonial institute." With the outbreak of World War II he was grabbed off by O.S.S., became chief of the agency's Africa section. In 1944 he left O.S.S. for the State Department, resigned three years later to join U.N.

"A Very Conservative Person." Two years ago, after his return from Palestine, Bunche was asked by President Truman to become Assistant Secretary of State, one of the highest Government positions ever offered a Negro. Bunche refused. His official explanations: 1) his heart was with the U.N., which he regards as the world's only hope for peace; 2) as the father of three children, he could not afford to give up his U.N. post for the lower-salaried State Department job. But to a reporter he gave a more explicit explanation: "It is well known that there is Jim Crow in Washington. It is equally well known that no Negro finds Jim Crow congenial. I am a Negro."

In December Ralph Johnson Bunche will go to Oslo, Norway's capital, to accept the Nobel Peace Prize, which, according to the will of Alfred Nobel, Swedish inventor of dynamite, must be awarded "without distinction of nationality." In Oslo Bunche will get a gold medal and a cash award of about $31,700. He has not decided what he will do with the money. "I'm a very conservative person by nature," he said last week, "and I never spend anything before I get it." To celebrate the news, added the usually abstemious Bunche, he had bought a champagne cocktail--"which was more than I could afford."

*As well as the eleventh American to win the award. Bunche's predecessors: Theodore Roosevelt, Elihu Root, Woodrow Wilson, Charles G. Dawes, Frank B. Kellogg, Nicholas Murray Butler and Jane Addams (joint winners), Cordell Hull, John R. Mott and Emily G. Balch (joint winners).

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