World On Trial
(See Cover)
"O.K., O.K.," said the big, bald foreman, "now comes Chile." His crew of overalled workmen hefted Chile's red, blue and white banner and set it next to Canada's on the stage of San Francisco's gilded opera house. The workmen had 60 flags, from Afghanistan's to Yugoslavia's, to put in place. The occasion: the United Nations, born in San Francisco in June 1945, was back in its birthplace to celebrate its tenth anniversary.
From Yemen and El Salvador, Iceland and New Zealand, some 260 delegates journeyed to do homage to an organization that has power to subpoena none. They represented a total of 1.5 billion people. There, in the flesh, were black men, brown men and white, Communist and capitalist, Moslem and Confucian, atheist and Christian, vegetarian and carnivore. All told, 38 foreign ministers are gathered in San Francisco, among them the Big Four: Britain's Harold MacmilIan, France's Antoine Pinay, Russia's Vyacheslav Molotov and the U.S.'s John Foster Dulles. More than anything the assembled delegates say, their presence was proof of the attention that the U.N. still commands in the world.
To open the conference this week, the U.N. called on the President of the U.S. In the chair it placed The Netherlands' Eelco van Kleffens, 60, a familiar U.N. figure. But when the conference got under way, the man in charge was a slim and sandy-haired Swede with an easy smile, a sensitive mouth, and eyes the same color as the light blue U.N. flag. He is Dag Hjalmar Agne Carl Hammarskjold, Secretary-General of the U.N. and the world's No. 1 international civil servant.
Mr. U.N. To millions who cannot pronounce his name ("Just call it Hammer-shield," he says. "That's what it means"), Dag Hammarskjold is "Mr. U.N." He is the man whose job it is to stand between the representatives of Israel and the Arabs, India and Pakistan, the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. Hammarskjold does not fancy himself as a "World Moderator," as the U.S. Government once suggested the Secretary-General should be called. He sees himself more modestly as the U.N.'s chief servant, ready to do the bidding of his bosses, the 60 nations. In the name of the United Nations, Hammarskjold last winter journeyed to Peking to plead on behalf of humanity for the freedom of Americans held captive by the Red Chinese. His mission was a success, but Hammarskjold, characteristically, claimed no credit. The Pentagon sent Air Force Chief of Staff General Nathan F. Twining to thank him personally for the release of the first four flyers (TIME. June 13).
Hammarskjold is a quiet man, the exponent of "quiet diplomacy." Yet in this polished Swede, with his distaste for cocksure statements, lurks a calm, dogmatic conviction: that some day the U.N. will glow in the minds of men because there is no alternative.
Ten Years' Change. Cold war has shattered the U.N.'s first foundations (the wartime Grand Alliance), mangled its basic assumption (Big Power unanimity), surrounded it with perils undreamed of by most of its founders (the H-bomb and Communist expansionism). The revolt against colonialism has all but doubled U.N. membership. Yet all these vast transformations, says Dag Hammarskjold, make the U.N., or something like it, not less but more essential. In this unyielding conviction, Hammarskjold believes that the nations are in San Francisco not to bury the U.N., but to reappraise it.
How well the U.N. stands up to reappraisal depends on whether it is measured by the early oratory of its partisans or by the limited commitments its lawyers wrote into it.
The U.N. owes its inspiration to the 1941 Atlantic Charter and the declaration of the Four Freedoms. But its very name reflects a desire to limit its aim. Three weeks after Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt, who had been groping for a name for the anti-Axis alliance, awoke in the White House with the phrase on his lips. Rising, F.D.R. wheeled his chair to the guest suite, where the sound of running water drew him to the bathroom door. He pushed the door open and called out to the august figure sitting in the bathtub: "How about United Nations?" There was a gurgle of satisfaction from Prime Minister Churchill, who had been holding out against any highfalutin notions of world government. The P.M. rinsed the soap from his eyes, shook his head like a wet hippopotamus. Said Churchill: "That should do it."
Mice & Lions. F.D.R. was dead and Churchill too busy to attend when the U.N. put on its peacetime robes ten years ago. It was a time of victory; a war-weary world stirred with hope of something better. As the U.N.'s founding fathers were gathering in San Francisco, the bodies of Benito Mussolini and Clara Petacci were lowered into potter's field graves in Milan. Midway through the conference came the news that Hitler was dead. In the Utah desert, while the Pacific war raged on past Okinawa, a B-29 named Enola Gay was secretly being tested to carry the bomb that would make Japan, already defeated, plunge headlong into surrender.
Meeting at such a time, the delegates' first concern was to find ways of keeping the peace. They opened the U.N. charter with a ringing declaration: "We the peoples . . . determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war . . ." But when they got down to the details, the delegates proved to be hardheadedly nationalistic. The U.N. is universal, or is meant to be, and all nations "large & small" are assured of "equality"--but Big Power dominance (specifically, the veto) is built into the U.N.'s constitution. No nation gives up sovereignty to the U.N.; none would and none was asked. In deference to British wishes, the U.N. is specifically forbidden to intervene in matters which are "essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state." Mexico complained at the time that the charter created "an order in the forest which will keep the mice in order, but not the lions." This was true, yet it was a simple fact of life that in the end it would be hard to "police" a big power without a world war.
Unreal Hopes. Not the charter, but its presentation got the U.N. off to a false start. The statesmen who wrote it had few illusions, but being politicians as well as lawyers, they communicated all their hopes and few of their reservations to the watching multitudes. The U.N. was gloriously advertised as a "Magna Carta for the world" (the phrase was John Foster Dulles'). "The most important human gathering since the Last Supper," said the New York Post. The optimism was contagious: it spread to the New York mechanic who made a metal ballot box for the U.N. Security Council and cast his own ballot in it ("May God be with every member of the U.N.O."); to a band of Mexican Alpinists who climbed Mt. Popocatepetl and placed the U.N. flag at its top; to Manhattan's radio station WNEW, which cranked out a popular ditty: It may take a year or two, or maybe even three-o, But some day all the world will be a happy family-o, As we make the United Nations a reality-o, We shall see a world where we're happy, safe and free-o.
Clubs & What-Have-You. Judged--as it has been--by these unreal hopes, the U.N. has scarcely prospered. Soviet vetoes, 60 in all, have paralyzed the Security Council. The Military Staff Committee, designed to be the strong right arm of the U.N., commands a baker's dozen of generals, admirals and air marshals who meet twice a month to inquire after each other's health. The U.N. has been defied (by South Africa), ignored (by Israel), bypassed (over Indo-China), mocked at (by Andrei Vishinsky, who said Western disarmament proposals kept him "awake with laughter all night"). At one time or another, every colonial power has told the U.N. to mind its own business.
U.S. critics have accused the U.N. of poisoning American youth with "one worldism." The Daughters of the American Revolution have been advised to "go after it with clubs and what-have-you like our forefathers." Yet, for all its shortcomings, the U.S. as a whole appears overwhelmingly in favor of the U.N. Re cent U.S. polls show that 62% of Americans are "broadly satisfied" with U.N. performance, and only 7% opposed. Partly, this response stems from a widespread notion that the U.N., like organized charity, is something no good citizen should be against. But it is also a recognition of the U.N.'s contributions to a score of peaceful settlements -- the creation of the Kingdom of Libya and the Republic of Indonesia; the truces (however uneasy) in Kashmir and Palestine; the safeguard ing of Greece from Communist attack. "With all the defects, with all the fail ures that we can check up against it," says President Eisenhower, "the U.N. still represents man's best-organized hope to substitute the conference table for the battlefield . . . Where every new invention of the scientist seems to make it more nearly possible for man to ensure his own elimination from this globe, I think the United Nations has become sheer necessity."
Such qualification, and then such acceptance, was widespread last week. "We are only babes," says Dag Hammarskjold. "We must have more time." Much of the limited enthusiasm for U.N. stems not from fearing its strength but from an in difference born of its weakness.
Colossal Intangible. Actually, the U.N. is condemned by its origins to being no better than its members make it. Blaming the U.N. for Soviet intransigence or the danger of atomic war is like blaming the law courts for crime or the medical profession for death. The U.N. is not a super state: if it had been, the U.S., as well as the other big powers, certainly would have turned it down. Nor is it a world federation: no fewer than 21 nations, including half the countries of Europe, are missing from the line-up.*
The U.N., says Sir Winston Churchill, is the expression of "the heart's desire . . . of the vast majority of all the peoples . . . to earn their daily bread in peace." The U.N.'s moral power derives from its ability to mobilize a great intangible: world public opinion. It was a sense of this moral power that led the Belgians to improve conditions in their trust territory of Ruanda Urundi--before the U.N. Trusteeship Council sent out an inspection team. The British and French pulled their troops out of Syria and Lebanon in 1946 because, as civilized nations, they were unwilling to fly in the face of censure in the Security Council.
Nor are the Communists always impervious to the U.N.'s moral writ. In the battle for men's minds, they cannot afford to be. Soviet troops pulled out of Iran in 1946 soon after the Security Council cocked an eye at their presence. Russian delegates pay the U.N. the compliment of hypocrisy, invariably attempting to justify their conduct on the basis of the U.N. charter; Red China seeks desperately to join the U.N. club.
U.N. in Action. In the talkative flesh, the U.N. often seems out of touch--an assemblage of political arachnids busily spinning a web of Whereases and Be-It-Resolveds. "The flow of speech and the spate of words in the United Nations are quite incredible and in time become insupportable.'' complained New Zealand's delegate. Sir Carl Berendsen. Pakistan's Zafrullah Khan once talked for two days, and set a U.N. record. Britain's Selwyn Lloyd, listening to the same interminable speech by Soviet, Polish, Czech, Ukrainian and Byelo Russian delegates, remarked in Oxonian tones: "If I may lapse into the idiom of bebop, just dig that cracked record." Sometimes U.N. humor has been less intentional, as when Warren Austin advised the Arabs and the Jews to "settle this problem in a true Christian spirit."
Watching the U.N. show on television, Americans have had an international political education and. on occasion, a sense of stirring drama. They heard the brutal voice of Red China, and saw for themselves that it was authentic, when Peking sent General Wu to vilify the U.S. before the Security Council. They were moved by the sight of Africans pleading with the U.N. to set them free from colonialism; they laughed at the great debate over the So-year-old Fon of Bikom and his no wives. They watched President Eisenhower appear dramatically before the General Assembly with his offer of "atoms for peace"--an occasion when even the Russians applauded. At first, the favorite show was the eleven-man Security Council. It provided some big moments: the first Soviet walkout, with glowering Andrei Gromyko opening the abyss of cold war as he stamped out in a huff; the televised East-West duels starring Britain's Sir Gladwyn Jebb ("I'd rather watch Jebb than the wrestlers," said one enraptured fan), and the voice of the Russian purge trials: acid-tongued Andrei Vishinsky.
Structural Change. The U.N.'s most decisive hour was the Korean invasion, when the Security Council sanctioned the first armed collective effort to punish one nation for invading another. The resolution passed the Security Council only by a fluke--the Russian delegate had walked out and thus was not present to veto. It was an error the Russians never repeated. The result has been an important change in the structure of the U.N. With its "executive" arm (the Security Council) tied up by Communist vetoes, the U.N. General Assembly in 1950 passed a "Uniting for Peace" resolution that gives it the power to act by a two-thirds vote whenever the Security Council is deadlocked. Soon afterwards, by 44 to 7, Communist China became the first nation in history to be solemnly tried and condemned for an aggression.
Looking back on the U.N.'s first decade, U.S. Chief Delegate Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. concludes that "coercive power" is increasingly becoming the responsibility of regional organizations (NATO, etc.), while "the moral and psychological power" is wielded in the General Assembly and the Security Council. "This is, I believe, the arrangement which Senator Vandenberg and others advocated at San Francisco, but which was opposed at the time by those who wanted both coercive and moral power centered in the U.N."
Bridging the Gap. Subordinate to the General Assembly is the U.N.'s Trusteeship Council, which keeps an eye on the "human rights" of 20 million people in ten trust territories. Less known in the U.S., which is too prosperous to need its assistance, is the Economic and Social Council, with its ten specialized agencies. The work of these agencies has sometimes been flavored by visionary blueprinting and a blurry, do-gooder vocabulary, sometimes hampered by a new breed of international civil servant (many of them dedicated and imaginative, but others inefficient, impractical and vapid). There has been much waste, but also much done.
Like good government, the special agencies (see chart} are least conspicuous when they are working well. The International Telecommunication Union makes it possible for an American to telephone any one of 81 million telephone subscribers outside the U.S. The World Meteorological Organization gives warnings of storms in Asia, of locust pests in the Middle East; letters and parcels move freely across the continents and oceans because the Universal Postal Union divides the expenses among its 93 member nations.
The U.N.'s least known and most successful work is its continuing effort to rescue half the world's population from poverty and distress. With a yearly budget of barely one thousandth of the world's yearly arms bill, a handful of U.N. men and women are seeking by peaceful means to bridge the gap between the haves and the havenots.
They confront some appalling facts. Most of the human race cannot read or write. Each year, 300 million suffer from malaria. The world's population is increasing by 100,000 a day, but of its 900 million children, two-thirds are underfed.
A bigger fact is that these people in their millions are rapidly becoming aware that elsewhere in the world people are better off. Half the world's population is experiencing what economists call "a revolution of expectations"; they find it possible to improve their lives. Some of the things the U.N. is doing:
P:The U.N. Children's Fund (UNICEF) in 1954 helped organize mass health campaigns that examined 400 million children in 88 countries, vaccinating 14 million against TB, treating 2,000,000 for yaws and other skin diseases, 9,000,000 against malaria and typhus.
P: The U.N. Refugee Agencies provide a basic ration for 887,000 Arab refugees, primary education for 155,000 of their children. In Korea, the U.N. Reconstruction Agency has not only delivered immense amounts of food, fuel and machinery, but a team of British textile men who have taught their Korean spinners to speak English (with a Lancashire accent).
P: The World Health Organization has helped the government wipe out yaws in Haiti, where it affected a third of the rural population in 1950. It expects to wipe out malaria in Afghanistan this year.
Teams of WHO technicians are vaccinating Peruvian Indians, spraying Thai villages with DDT, training Pakistani girls in midwifery, teaching villagers in India to do a daily "twig-toothbrush" drill, using powdered charcoal as a dentifrice.
P: The U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization strives to keep a balance between the world's population growth and its food supply. A 51-day stay in Iran was long enough for a team of U.N. water experts, using light aircraft, to locate 50 new wells; Thai farmers, after learning from FAO experts of techniques developed 'n the Canary Islands, can now grow pineapples as a year-round crop.
P: U.N. Technical Assistants, often using funds loaned to governments by the World Bank, are making marks in the havenots' economies. In Pakistan, the output of an iron foundry was increased 44% by a U.N. technical mission. A forgotten village in Mexico tripled its population, opened a cinema and sent seven times as many children to school within three years after the World Bank financed a small diesel power plant. U.N. experts are ubiquitous in the underdeveloped free lands--a Haitian coffee expert and an Australian lumberjack teaching their trades in Addis Ababa, a Rhodesian statistician in Libya, an Icelandic engineer in Ceylon, a Danish fishing expert multiplying the catch of Chile's fisherfolk by replacing their oars with outboard engines.
Glass House. Coordinating the labors of these far-flung agencies and linking them to the U.N. proper is the job of the Secretariat: some 3,100 international civil servants who work in the U.N.'s "glass house," overlooking Manhattan's East River. A shaft of gleaming white marble boxing 5,400 green-tinted windows, the U.N. capitol was built on land that was paid for by John D. Rockefeller Jr. (price: $8,500,000) and furnished with teak from Burma, Jerusalem stone from Israel, carpets from India and Iran, and dramatically barren decoration by the Scandinavians. The U.N. Plaza has become Manhattan's top tourist attraction.
The nerve center of the Secretariat is the immaculate 38th floor, paneled with Norwegian spruce and aflame with modern paintings: Picasso, Matisse, Braque. There, amid his paintings, toying with a small cigar at his clean Swedish-made desk, sits the man in charge of it all: Dag Hammarskjold.
Impossible Job. "My first job," says Hammarskjold, "is to run this House" --his name for the Secretariat. The Secretary-General hires and fires the U.N.'s multilingual employees, deals with New York City over U.N. parking privileges, approves the monthly bills for 100 tons of paper. 200,000 outgoing phone calls, and 335 cleaners who sweep 2,000,000 sq. ft. of flooring and seven miles of carpets. Hammarskjold runs his House with all the frugal efficiency of a well-brought-up Swedish housewife. He lopped $1,000,000 a year off the Secretariat's budget, last week ordered U.N. employees assigned to the San Francisco meeting to travel by air coach (estimated saving: $7,000).
More important, the S.G. has the right to draft resolutions and take part in all U.N. debates. His duty, laid down in the charter, is to "bring to the attention of the Security Council any matter which in his opinion may threaten . . . international peace." In practice, this means that the S.G. may inject himself into any international dispute he thinks he can help to settle. Trygve Lie, Hammarskjold's Norwegian predecessor, sometimes gave the impression that he thought he could settle anything. Earnest and eager, Lie once hawked his personal plan for 20 years of peace from one world capital to another. He got nowhere with it. Ruefully, Trygve Lie warned his successor: "This is the most impossible job in the world."
The Quiet Man. Where Lie throve on publicity, Hammarskjold avoids it. "You know, people don't mind taking advice," he says, "but they don't like being publicized as taking advice." Hammarskjold operates best in the quiet of his office. A continuous stream of U.N. ambassadors tap on his door, present him with their problems and seek his good offices. Interviewed by the New York Times's A. M. Rosenthal, the S.G. once tried to pin down the exact nature of what he does for them. "Go-between" he rejected: "That's a busybody . . . Catalytic agent? A little better. Clearinghouse, link. That's better still."
Hammarskjold's big achievement has been to build up the delegates' trust in his tact, discretion and perspicacity. He has made the S.G.'s office "available." "That's not an obscure diplomatic word," he explained meticulously. "It means that here sits a man who the delegations know can be used to check their own opinions against the opinions of other countries, who will pass on not their confidences but the conclusions he has drawn from them, who perhaps can advise, who perhaps is in a better position to judge than any single delegate."
Who? Two years ago, Hammarskjold was almost unknown outside Sweden. Official biographies were not helpful: little emerged except that Hammarskjold was Minister Without Portfolio in the Swedish Foreign Office and had lectured in economics. Arriving in New York, Hammarskjold let it be known that his hobby was mountaineering, his favorite pastime reading (T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner, Thomas Mann) and his favorite artists the moderns.
Red Castle. Ever since, he complains, he has been labeled by his enthusiasms. But they do reflect him. Hammarskjold is a nature mystic, as are many of his countrymen ; he was raised in a lasting mold of aristocratic aloofness, intellectual precision and governmental pomp and circumstance. He was born in the little town of Jonkoping, onetime matchmaking capital of the world. 180 miles southwest of Stockholm. His family got its name from Sweden's hero King, Charles IX. who rewarded one of Dag's ancestors with a knighthood and the name Hammarskjold in token of his valor in the year 1610. Five Hammarskjolds in the last two generations have served Sweden as Cabinet ministers, and one, Dag's father Hjalmar, was Prime Minister (1914-17).
Dag grew up at Uppsala (pop. 150,000), the ancient Swedish university town whence his father, as the royal governor, ruled the province of Uppsala. The Hammarskjolds made their home in Uppsala Castle, a gaunt, towered pile that has brooded over the yellow-bricked city for more than 400 years. Like most castles, it was drafty, but Dag had a cozy room not far from the huge State Hall where his father held official receptions and the servants sometimes dried the family wash.
The Hermit. From the red castle on the hill, Dag walked to school along the same winding paths and medieval streets his three brothers had taken before him.
He studied at Uppsala for 20 years--at Aunt Hildur's private school, where he learned the three Rs and collected bugs in a bottle; at the sternly classical high school, where one of his classmates was Jarl Hjalmarson, now the leader of the Swedish Conservative Party. At Uppsala University Dag took a B.A., majoring in philosophy and French literature. He is also a bachelor of laws and a doctor of economics. Dag was a brilliant scholar; he had little time for social life. In his 205, he wrote a paper called Konjunktur-spridningen (The Spread of the Business Cycle). It was couched in language so abstruse that few of his colleagues understood it, but Dag prefaced it with a quote from Alice in Wonderland: " 'That's nothing to what I could say if I chose,' the Duchess replied in a pleased tone."
Man on a Bike. Dag followed family tradition, went into government service. He was Under Secretary of Finance in charge of the Budget at 31. At night, Stockholm cops would point to a single light burning in the Treasury building and say, "Hammarskjold's still counting." Occasionally he would stop at the barber's shop for a 7 a.m. shave on his way home from the office.
Hammarskjold's relaxations were even more strenuous. Weekends, Hammarskjold would often disappear to climb a mountain, alone. "On vacations." says his brother Sten, "he still puts on an open-neck shirt and shorts, and with his hair streaming in the wind, pedals his bicycle furiously along the roads of Sweden." On one occasion, Hammarskjold cycled to a town in the south of Sweden and asked for a hotel room. The clerk examined the sweaty, youthful figure in shorts, with rucksack, and told him to try the youth hostel. The chairman of the board of the Bank of Sweden, Dag Hammarskjold, did as he was told.
U.N. Draft. It was Hammarskjold's rare combination of brilliance, discretion and modesty that first attracted the British and the French, who proposed him for Secretary-General. The-first rumors reached him in his Stockholm apartment one night in 1952, but thinking it was a joke, he replied: "Amused but not interested." Then came confirmation from the U.N. "It was like the draft," he says: looking back. "But an obligation can develop into a privilege, and it really has."
Man with a Mission. In Manhattan, Dag Hammarskjold lives in an eight-room apartment on Park Avenue at 73rd Street. He furnished it himself, simply but well, as befits a man who earns $20,000 a year, tax free, and gets another tax-free $35,000 for expenses. His household consists of a Swedish butler, a Swedish housekeeper, a Norwegian secretary and an American chauffeur who drives him to the U.N. building five days a week, and to his 80-acre estate in New York State on weekends. Hammarskjold is the most eligible bachelor in New York, but he keeps himself to himself. He goes bareheaded all the year round, wears ready-made blue or grey lounge suits, loafers, and bright bow ties. When he works he smokes a pipe; when he chats, a little cigar. He eats lightly and enjoys good wine.
Dag Hammarskjold's sense of mission derives from two opposing forces that seem forever to be driving him on. Hammarskjold, by his own reading of himself, is simultaneously a mystic and a materialist, a romantic and a realist. As a student, he was deeply influenced by the negativist philosophy of Axel Hagerstrom, who taught that metaphysics is dishonest and only matter real. The influence lingers: when Hammarskjold is talking business, he is as hard as stone. Yet the "Great Deflater," as an old friend calls Hammarskjold, writes intense romantic lyrics and goes roaming through the Lapland mountains in search of a mystic ideal. In many men, such a dichotomy could lead to complications. But Hammarskjold's mind seems to have found a satisfactory synthesis. His philosophy is complex but its basic rule is clear: "self-surrender" to an ideal which can be made reality through faith and material hard work.
Ideal or Reality? The U.N., he thinks, is such an ideal, corresponding to a felt need in all humanity. But can it be made reality while men are men, and nations nations? The world is not yet ready, and may never be, for a world government. It does need multilateral diplomacy. The mere existence of the U.N. sometimes makes a settlement possible because nations that will not yield an inch before their next-door neighbor will beat a retreat more gracefully in response to an appeal from the U.N. It gives the Communists a soapbox, but it also provides small nations with a useful forum for world debate; at its best, it gives everyone a court of appeal before the bar of world opinion.
History's verdict on the U.N. is still in the jury box. But Dag Hammarskjold is confident what it will be. "The U.N. is not just a product of do-gooders." he says. "It is harshly real." He once told an interviewer: "The day will come when men will see the U.N. and what it means clearly. Everything will be all right--you know when? When people, just people, stop thinking of the United Nations as a weird Picasso abstraction, and see it as a drawing they made themselves."
*Blocked by the Soviet Union: Austria, Ceylon, Finland, Ireland, Italy, Japan. Jordan. Nepal, Portugal, Korea. Opposed by the West: Albania, Bulgaria, Hungary. Mongolian People's Republic, Rumania. Up for consideration: Laos, Libya, Viet Nam, Cambodia, Viet Minh, North Korea. Not interested: Switzerland, which thinks the U.N. would "endanger our neutrality."
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