The UN: A Man Who Casts No Shadow

THEY'RE back at the old game," a member of the United Nations Secretariat said bitterly last week. "Instead of looking for the most able man, they're looking for someone who has five legs and maybe a dozen arms. That kind of monster simply doesn't exist."

If he doesn't exist, he may have to be invented--in a hurry. On Dec. 31, Secretary-General U Thant, 62, suffering from a bleeding ulcer and general exhaustion, will end his two-term, ten-year stewardship. That leaves the 130 delegations little more than a month to find someone acceptable to all of the contentious Big Five and also to a majority of the Third World. According to Finnish Delegate Max Jakobson, the ideal candidate for the $65,000-a-year post would have to be "a person who is of no religion and of no race, a person who has no attachments to ideology or political convictions or to any particular tradition, a man who casts no shadow."

Thinker and Doer. Jakobson, the strongest of half a dozen leading contenders, hardly fits his own description. At 48, he is a sturdy, affable former journalist who fought against the Russians in the Winter War of 1939-40 and later wrote a scholarly but unflattering book about the Soviet attack. Jakobson has strong support in London and Washington, where the State Department rates him "a thinker and a doer." Paris has been cool partly because he does not speak particularly good French. In addition, Jakobson is Jewish, and the Arabs, who have not said anything so far about his candidacy, may yet make strong complaints to their allies in Moscow.

The Chinese? They presented their credentials to U Thant in the hospital last week, and then, according to a U.N. official, "they mumbled something about hoping that he would continue in the job." Officially, the Chinese would say nothing about the search for a successor except "We are very new here." The neutral Finns have long been on relatively cordial terms with China (they recognized Peking in 1950), and this is thought to be in Jakobson's favor. But the Chinese entered the U.N. with such a resounding bid for support from the Third World (see following story) that they may eventually oppose any European for the U.N.'s top job.

The other hopefuls:

> Kurt Waldheim, 52, former Austrian Foreign Minister and Conservative candidate for the Austrian presidency. A hard-working professional diplomat, he is Washington's second choice, but neither the Russians nor the Chinese are likely to be enthusiastic about him.

> Endalkachew Makonnen, 44, Ethiopia's Oxford-educated Minister of Communications. He has the advantage of being the leading candidate from Africa, which has 42 votes in the Assembly, but the disadvantage of not being stationed at the U.N. during the last-minute lobbying. Indeed, as of last week, two other Africans had put themselves forward as prospects--Issoufou S. Djermakoye of remote Chad, and Nsanze Terence of tiny Burundi.

> H.S. Amerasinghe, 58, Ceylon's chief U.N. delegate since 1967. An outgoing bachelor, Amerasinghe usually sports a pink rose in his lapel. His prime asset is that he is an Asian.

> Felipe Herrera, 49, a Chilean economist, head of the Inter-American Development Bank for eleven years, now a professor at the University of Chile. Because Chile's leftist government endorsed Herrera, the U.S. took the unusual step of publicly stating that he was unacceptable.

Officially, nobody is supposed to campaign at all. Unofficially, the various candidates are paying an unusual amount of attention to the 42 African votes, nearly one-third of the total. Jakobson has been dining discreetly with a number of African representatives at Le Perigord, a fancy French restaurant near his office; Waldheim went on a goodwill tour of Africa. Less prominent contenders can be observed buttonholing potential supporters at the coffee bar in the U.N. delegates' lounge.

Not at All Impartial. The U.N. Charter originally specified only that the General Assembly should vote on a candidate recommended by the Security Council. The first Secretary-General, Trygve Lie of Norway, was an energetic labor leader who earned the enmity of Russia by organizing the U.N. defense of South Korea. When he left office, the Soviets objected to more than a dozen prominent candidates and finally agreed to the obscure Dag Hammarskjold only because they mistakenly thought he was a colorless bureaucrat. When Hammarskjold proved to be a vigorous leader who heavily committed U.N. troops and funds in the Congolese civil war, the Soviets began insisting that he be replaced by a three-man "troika." They dropped that demand only when they got the kind of neutral they wanted: U Thant.

The U.S. officials blame Thant for much of the organization's ineffectuality. They consider him unimaginative, vacillating and not at all impartial. Specifically, they accuse him of dithering during the 1967 Middle East war, of doing nothing about the India-Pakistan crisis, and of continually criticizing the U.S. role in Viet Nam. "Look, no one can expect a guy to be totally neutral --he'd have to be inanimate," says one such critic. "But he certainly can be impartial, and that possibility altogether escaped U Thant."

It is conceivable, of course, that all the present candidates to succeed him will be rejected in favor of some technocrat with no known enemies, such as Canada's Maurice Strong, 42, a wealthy former financial executive and top-level civil servant who also has the unusual distinction of speaking Eskimo. At a trade convention in Manhattan last week, Strong urged that the new Secretary-General revitalize the organization by drastically cutting its staff and undertaking "a major redeployment of resources." Others have suggested that the U.N. Secretariat abandon its traditional but none too successful efforts at peace making for a less political role in problems like population pressure and environmental threats. Before that can be attempted, however, the elusive man with no shadow must be found.

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