Secular Pope

By Friedel Ungeheur

HAMM ARSKJOLD

by BRIAN URQUHART 597 pages. Knopf. $12.50.

Brian Urquhart is not the first to make the point that the United Nations did not work out as originally planned. But in this book, a comprehensive political analysis of Dag Hammarskjoeld's seven years as the U.N.'s Secretary-General, Urquhart for the first time chronicles in precise detail how close one man often came to making the curious organization do what it was supposed to. The author has worked for the U.N. since its inception and is now an Assistant Secretary-General. He is also the first man to be given access to Hammarskjoeld's private papers. He sees the former Secretary-General as a man supremely equipped with the inner resources, courage, stamina and imperturbable tact to make the U.N. work. The book uses considerable inside knowledge as it follows Hammarskjoeld through every major crisis of his day: McCarthyism, the aftermath ot Korea, Suez, Hungary, Lebanon, Algeria, the Congo.

In each the Secretary-General, who once jokingly called himself a "secular pope," was quick to assert the authority of the world organization. At the height of the Suez crisis in '56, he dictated the first three pages of a plan for a special emergency force during lunch, had it completed before dinner. Over British and French vetoes in the Security Council and a Soviet offer to deploy its own troops, he managed to get it ratified by a majority of the General Assembly. U.N.E.F. was his most successful innovation. It served as the model for international forces in the Congo and Cyprus. It also more or less kept the lid on the Middle East for ten years.

Hammarskjoeld did not often get his way, of course. There was little the U.N. could do about Khrushchev's brutal repression of the Hungarian uprising.

Even in such a relatively benign matter as the release of eleven U.S. flyers shot down over China during the Korean War, John Foster Dulles first urged Hammarskjoeld to intervene, then refused to allow their families to travel to Peking at Chou En-lai's behest. As a result the flyers' release was delayed eight months. Chou chose Hammarskjoeld's birthday as the time to hand them over.

Urquhart does not much deal with Hammarskjoeld's private life, though he squelches for good the rumors of his alleged homosexuality. Because the theme of the book is Hammarskjoeld in action, the forces that so often frustrated him do not receive enough analysis.

Nor does the fundamental dilemma from which the U.N. and its Secretary-General have increasingly suffered:

how to create from the original consensus by the nations of the world that the U.N. should exist, a power strong enough to constrain the power of any one of them.

sbFriedel Ungeheuer

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