Battlefield of Peace

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Slowly, with dignity, dapper little Mongi Slim of Tunisia walked up the seven steps to the green marble rostrum and took his seat as president of the United Nations' 16th General Assembly. Before him were the diplomats who had elected him, a motley crowd of delegates from every corner of the world. "It is hard for me to express the great grief I experience," said President Slim, speaking in French. "The Secretary-General of the United Nations fell a victim to his duty. He died, one might say, on the battlefield of peace."

At these words, , the eyes of the listening delegates flickered to the place on Mongi Slim's right--Dag Hammarskjold's empty chair.

Once again the delegates had come to the U.N. with a dizzying assortment of problems and causes, ranging from nuclear tests and Red China's demand for recognition, to apartheid, Algerian freedom, South Tyrol terrorism and the future of Ruanda-Urundi. Everyone was only too eager to dump all the issues on the U.N.'s desks, whether there was any real prospect of solution or not. But all the possible agenda items seemed to fade beside the loss of Dag Hammarskjold. Every delegate knew that the whole future of the U.N. as a meaningful force for peace was in jeopardy. The U.N. now might well again become what it was all too often before the Hammarskjold era--a glass-and-steel soapbox.

Big & Little Hope. The U.N. was founded 16 years ago amid great expectations that were based on large hope but little reality. There was among the earnest founders at the San Francisco conference no common law, no common principle, no common view of man or the world--only a ritualistic insistence that mankind must have some sort of security from war.* After years of worldwide incantations about support for the U.N. and worldwide disillusionment with its performance, Dag Hammarskjold did one thing--he reduced the great but impossible hope of U.N. as the molder of world peace to the small but possible hope of U.N. as an arbiter, and even a policeman, in relatively minor trouble areas where the interests of the great nations were not directly involved.

Hammarskjold pushed that hope to its limits, and perhaps beyond, in the Congo. It is likely that, had he lived, his effectiveness as Secretary-General might have been near its end, anyway. The fact remains that as the exponent of the limited hope he had performed great service, the best measure of which was that the Russians had vowed to destroy him and his office ever since last year when he moved U.N. troops into the chaotic Congo, thus preventing a Moscow-run regime. A favorite motto of his was a quotation from Shelley's Prometheus Unbound; one should, he said,

...hope till Hope creates From its own wreck the thing it contemplates.

Last week even the limited U.N. hope was close to being wrecked; and the U.S., which lately has relied heavily, perhaps too heavily, on the U.N., stood committed to save what it could of the wreckage.

The U.S. must perform this salvage operation in a vastly changed U.N. The

U.S. once could count on regular majorities in the Assembly. Today, with U.N. membership risen from 51 to 99 (see box), the Assembly is dominated by Asia's and Africa's "new" nations--unstable, unpredictable, backward not only economically but backward in their acquaintance with liberty, their experience in government, and their ability to defend themselves. That is the setting of the battle which Secretary of State Dean Rusk, U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Adlai Stevenson, and President Kennedy himself were fighting in the aftermath of Hammarskjold's death.

Tears in the Lobby. When the news of Hammarskjold's missing plane clattered into Manhattan on the Telex line direct from Leopoldville, shocked secretariat officials rushed to the cable room on the U.N. skyscraper's 38th floor, hovered anxiously for hours over the machine. When the final bulletin confirmed the Secretary's death, one high-ranking officer turned to another. "I suppose we should lower the flag." he said dully. "Yes." replied the other, "perhaps we should." Below, news was already spreading from floor to floor. Pale and shaken employees gathered in groups in the corridors. In the lobby, an elevator starter sobbed openly.

From his wood-paneled suite high above Manhattan, Hammarskjold had operated his international civil service (5,000 employees in scores of countries) with quiet efficiency. He could fix a diplomat's parking ticket with the New York police, arrange the cleaning of the 5,400 windows at U.N. headquarters, send food to famine areas, or mediate a Middle East war threat with the same dispassionate precision. But in a rare lapse, as he left for the Congo fortnight ago, Hammarskjold had failed to designate an Acting Secretary-General to run the shop in his absence.

Thus, legally, his death left the United Nations headless. In a hurried meeting, several of the U.N.'s 13 under secretaries agreed informally that each should go on running his own department; notice went out from them to Dr. Sture Linner, the U.N.'s Congo chief, that he had full authority over U.N. field activities there. This typical civil servant's decision to hang on could keep day-to-day operations going temporarily, but it would clearly prove unworkable when major policy decisions were required--for instance, whether to reinforce or withdraw the U.N. units fighting for control of Katanga. Without a chief executive, the U.N. machinery soon would run down.

Kiss of Death. Hardly had the news of Hammarskjold's death arrived when Ambassador Stevenson met with his delegation staff, decided on a drive to install quickly some respected U.N. figure--probably an African or Asian--as a temporary administrator. Stevenson knew that it was useless to press for a permanent new Secretary-General, who is formally appointed by the Assembly but who must first get clearance in the veto-bound Security Council. There the Russians would inevitably climb into their troika--their insistent demand that the office of Secretary-General be replaced by a three-man, veto-bound U.N. executive, representing East, West and the neutrals. To make the point, Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko already was repeating a little rhyme to reporters:

Any one person cannot be; There must be three.

Stevenson wanted Mongi Slim to take on the job as interim U.N. Secretary-General in addition to his new duties as president of the General Assembly. Hastily, U.S. aides fanned out, urging other countries to propose Slim's election, explaining that the U.S. could not openly initiate the idea for fear Slim's endorsement by either of the big powers would be a kiss of death.

Several delegations pressed Ireland's retiring Assembly President Frederick Boland to move Slim's appointment immediately following the Tunisian's election as new president. But Boland declined, insisting that a squabble on the floor so close on the heels of Dag Hammarskjold's death would be undignified and inappropriate; it was, he said, a time for eulogy. The other obstacle was Mongi Slim himself; buttonholed by Stevenson and urged to take the job, he refused, saying he was reluctant to get Tunisia involved in so bitter a quarrel between Russia and the U.S., additionally felt that the work load of the two jobs would be too great.

Later the Tunisians changed their minds and seemed to agree to the plan--but they still wanted to think it over some more. The U.S. was not wedded to Slim as the only choice; other proposed names swirled through the delegates' lounge: Ireland's Boland (he flatly refused), Indonesia's Dr. Ali Sastroamidjojo, India's Ambassador to Washington B. K. Nehru (Jawaharlal's cousin), Burma's U Thant.

The Precedents. As the eulogies for Hammarskjold continued to pour from the rostrum and the corridor-politicking went on, many delegates were listening to the legalists who pointed out (correctly) that the framers of the U.N. Charter failed to provide for a transfer of the Secretary-General's powers in case of death, then went on to conclude (incorrectly) that the Security Council procedure, therefore, is the only legal path for a successor. But the U.S. could (and Secretary of State Rusk eventually did) point to two clear-cut precedents for handling temporary appointments in the Assembly, where the veto does not apply.

In 1946, Britain's Sir Gladwyn Jebb, executive secretary of the U.N., was named acting Secretary-General pending the choice of a permanent Secretary (Trygve Lie). In 1950 a similar procedure was used by the Assembly to keep Lie in office when the Russians in the Security Council vetoed his second term.*

A legal opinion supporting the 1946 action about Jebb had been contributed by a lawyer in the U.S. delegation. Stevenson read it over last week. Said he: "Why that's very good. I wrote it."

In the end, the question would be decided by neither of the deadlocked big powers but by the 46 Afro-Asian nations, which form no bloc but can often turn the tide in the General Assembly. Often in trying to woo these nations, Stevenson had become discouraged by their single-minded concern with "colonialism"--by which they always meant the West, rarely recognizing Russia's vast and ruthless empire building. But the U.S. still hoped that the small, new nations would recognize the danger to themselves in a U.N. deprived of strong leadership, since it was, after all, the U.N. that had largely assured their new prestige and power.

But Russia's pressure often was brutal; some Soviet delegates were hinting that Moscow might pull out of the U.N. altogether if it did not get its way. Moreover, as a lure, there were in fact two troikas now being proposed: Moscow's original demand for a trifurcate Secretary-General and a so-called "compromise" scheme of three under secretaries (one Communist, one Western, one neutral) to run the U.N. as a directorate. Any practical difference between the two plans could be discerned only by Communist or heavily clouded neutralist eyes. Still another variation of it was heartily plugged by Kwame Nkrumah's Ghana delegation.

Nose Count. Meanwhile India's waspish diplomatic swami, V.K. Krishna Menon, casting himself in the role of the great mediator, told everyone that neither the troika nor the temporary Secretary-General would work. He had no plan of his own, simply kept urging compromise. "You value this organization, don't you?" he would ask unaligned delegates. "Then you'd better get the U.S. and its allies to compromise, to meet the Russians halfway."

A nose count indicated a majority of the General Assembly against the troika and the Afro-Asians far from favoring it as a group. But a meeting of Africans and Asians hurriedly convened to discuss the matter did not entirely go along with the U.S.'s argument for an interim Secretary-General approved by the Assembly alone. The meeting broke up with nothing settled except the prospect that the argument might drag on for weeks. At week's end, however, the U.S. became convinced that it would be able to win the votes for a temporary administrator. Secretary Rusk came out in the open and said that this is what the U.S. wants--not without earning a rebuke from unnamed delegates, quoted in the New York Times, who seemed terrified that such relatively blunt language would annoy that new deity of the U.N., The Nonaligned.

The U.S. also could take solid comfort from the fact that Mongi Slim was president of the Assembly. Slim is a man of Western orientation, experienced in Western parliamentary tradition (see box). In the further maneuvering over the succession this week, Slim's presence in the chair means assurance at least that the West will get equitable treatment on the embattled Assembly floor.

In the Assembly's Steering Committee, meanwhile, meeting in the Trusteeship Council room under Slim's chairmanship, the regular Assembly business proceeded with the compiling of an agenda. As always, this was of special interest to the small countries that depend on the U.N. for a platform, for protection, and for the heady excitement of sharing in the management of the world. Their resolutions (such as the indignant motion of Yemen, the Sudan, et al. accusing Britain of armed aggression in the little desert sultanate of Oman four years ago) were all over the new agenda. In all, 90 items were on the list for full debate on the floor in the weeks ahead.

The China Issue. In the East-West power struggle the trickiest resolution by far would be an old familiar item, admission of Red China to the U.N.--either as an additional member or in place of Formosa's Chinese Nationalists who have held a Security Council seat since 1945. For a decade, U.S. policy has been to keep the question off the agenda, prevent even a debate. But the changed U.N. power balance has led to changed U.S. tactics, and the first test will occur in this week's Security Council meeting.

A Western motion on the matter sponsored by New Zealand and backed by the U.S. went to the Steering Committee last week even before Russia had time to present its own Communist resolution on the subject. By proposing debate, the State Department hopes to rally a majority of the Assembly behind its move to declare the whole matter of Chinese membership an "important question," i.e., substantive. Then the Communists will have to rake up an impossible two-thirds General Assembly vote to force China's Communists in.

But the majority Washington needs for its China maneuver depends on the votes of at least a dozen new African nations who have proposed an intricate bargain in exchange for their support. They want West Africa's little Mauritania to get membership this session. Cleverly, Moscow enters the picture with a threat to veto Mauritania unless one of its own pets, Outer Mongolia, a puppet republic embedded in Red China, gets in the club at the same time. So the Africans have told the U.S.: Accept both Outer Mongolia and Mauritania as U.N. members, and we will vote with you against Red China--at least this year. The U.S. assented. But Chiang Kai-shek's Chinese Nationalists indignantly promised to veto the Outer Mongolians, since Chiang considers them part of his China anyway. If he carries through his threat when the issue comes up before the Security Council this week, the U.S. fears that he may inadvertently help Red China get into the U.N.

Other key items due for debate by the new Assembly.

sb DISARMAMENT, based on the long preliminary talks between the U.S. and Russia, leading to formal reports by each to the U.N. last week, in which both nations agree in general to complete disarmament but do not see eye to eye on how to achieve it. Again the snag is inspection; the U.S. insists on it, Russia says talk about it later. At the U.N., Cambodia's Prince Norodom Sihanouk threw his weight behind the idea of inspectors from neutral nations.

sb NUCLEAR TESTING was put on the list by the U.S. and Britain over the strong protest of Russia and the Communist satellites, which demanded the question be debated along with the fuzzy, never-ending disarmament question. The U.S. feels that Russia, which exploded its 15th bomb in its latest test series last week, will not come out well in a full-scale debate on the subject of a proposed test ban.

sb COLONIALISM, as always, is the General Assembly's most fashionable issue. Portugal sat squirming last week as another resolution demanding freedom for Angola went on the agenda unopposed. Algeria will also be aired this session as will be apartheid in South Africa and demands for investigation of conditions of South West Africa's natives.

Behind the Eyes. Whatever emerges from this huge agenda, whatever becomes of the U.S. initiative to save the U.N., the world organization can never be the same again. That fact stems from causes far deeper than Hammarskjold's death--the very nature of the U.N. and the nature of Hammarskjold's policies in it.

Before Hammarskjold, the U.N.'s big achievement had been the intervention in Korea to halt the southward thrust of Asia's Communists.* It was essentially not a U.N. action but a U.S. action with U.N. sanction; in the field, it ended with tragic indecision. When he took over three years after the Korea decision, Hammarskjold, a Swedish diplomat whose name was not only unpronounceable but virtually unknown in the rest of the world, approached his task with modest caution. Few spotted the fire behind those distant blue eyes. Then came the 1954 U.N. resolution urging the release of the 15 U.S. airmen held prisoner in Communist China. Someone asked Hammarskjold if he planned to visit China in person to push the protest. "Wouldn't that be rather dramatic?" he inquired. But he turned up in Peking a few weeks later negotiating the prisoners' release. It worked, and suddenly, throughout the world, Hammarskjold's prestige soared.

The Shoe-Thumping Fellow. Dag Hammarskjold believed in "quiet diplomacy," an elegant discipline that few diplomatists of his era, surrounded by swift teletypes and curious reporters, were able to endure. Undramatically, he sent a United Nations Emergency Force into Egypt in the wake of the abortive British, French and Israeli invasion--and for the first time the world saw the strange sight of oddly assorted volunteers from various countries (Danes, Norwegians, Colombians) in blue helmets serving as an international army. Then came the U.N. "presence" in Lebanon and Jordan in 1958, the U.N.'s representative in Laos in 1959, last year's intervention in the Congo crisis.

Originally the Russians voted for Hammarskjold's request to send a U.N. force into the Congo, in a sense because Hammarskjold shamed them into it; later, they turned viciously against him when he refused to allow Russia in effect to take over from the U.N. in the Congo. Thumping his fists, waving his shoe, Moscow's Premier Nikita Khrushchev appalled the General Assembly as he campaigned for Hammarskjold's destruction. "Whose saint is he? . . . It is not proper for a man who has flouted elementary justice to hold such an important post," cried Nikita. Hammarskjold listened, immobile, his hands folded against his chin. Then, pursing his lips, he fairly spat his reply: "This may seem to provide a strong reason why I should resign . . . [but] by resigning I would at the present difficult and dangerous juncture throw the organization to the winds."

Later, in a remarkable, ironic letter to his brother in Sweden, Hammarskjold made clear how he felt about Khrushchev: "The big shoe-thumping fellow continues as a dark thunderhead to threaten all unrepentant 'nonCommunists' with hail and thunder and probably also locusts and other plagues traditionally favored by tribal gods."

The Globals. Hammarskjold's always correct, publicly nonpartisan stand against the "big shoe-thumping fellow" plainly showed his mettle. And yet, his concept of a strong U.N. executive had detractors, even angry foes, in the West as well as the East. Many Britons were bitter at U.N. "interference" during and after the Suez crisis in 1956. France's President de Gaulle, who sniffs his contempt for the "socalled United Nations," had grudging respect for Hammarskjold the man, but still heaped scorn on that whole vast category of what he calls apatrides--nonnationals whose patriotism is global, not local.

Finally, Hammarskjold's heavy and ultimately tragic military intervention in Katanga aroused more Western antagonism than almost anything else he had done. That failure was not merely an error of military judgment, but could be traced back directly to the inherent confusion about the U.N.'s function and powers in the world. Thus the U.S. is faced not merely with Russia's perennial wrecking tactics; the U.N. after all can serve as an extremely useful mirror to show these tactics to the world. Nor is the U.S. merely faced with the political irresponsibility of the "new" nations; there is still a good chance that the U.N. can serve as a school in which they can learn something about responsibility--as well as something about the true nature of the U.S.

Ultimately the U.S. faces in the U.N. a dilemma of political philosophy and law which, long before the present Hammarskjold crisis, led many Americans to think that Washington should place less reliance on the U.N. There is near unanimity among U.S. policymakers that everything must be done to save the U.N.; there is also growing awareness that, at the same time, other instruments of world order must be strengthened.

Memory of Metternich. Most conspicuous American advocate of this notion is Arkansas Senator J. William Fulbright, head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. In an article written weeks ago for the October issue of Foreign Affairs, Fulbright declares that the "grand innovation" of a U.N. as a global executive has failed "because it defied history and falsely assumed the existence of a community of the great powers." In the Security Council, the veto reflects the realities of power politics; in the General Assembly, anarchy rules. "A body in which Guatemala or Bulgaria exercises the same voting power as the United States or the Soviet Union can scarcely be expected to serve as a reliable instrument of peace enforcement or even of consultation."

Fulbright proposes an immediate start on a "concert of free nations'' that will knit more closely the Atlantic democracies, and those who would join them in a common goal. "This objective should be pursued as far as possible within the United Nations. In large measure, however, it must be pressed outside the U.N." With hearty approval, Fulbright cites Sir Anthony Eden's recent proposal that the Atlantic communities form a "political general staff," akin to the Combined Chiefs of Staff in World War II, to meet today's monolithic Communist threat. But Fulbright would carry the idea a step further: for the kernel of his plan, he turns to 19th century history and the remarkable alliance of Britain, Austria, Prussia, Russia--and later, defeated France as well--built at the Congress of Vienna in the wake of the Napoleonic wars.

Thus emerged the "concert of Europe," conducted by Austria's Metternich--"a genuine community of nations which identified their common interests in preserving a rough balance of power and the basic integrity of the treaty ... It kept the peace for a hundred years." Fulbright's community would be limited to free nations (the "inner community" for Atlantic powers, and the "outer community" of free nations elsewhere), could start in existing institutions, such as NATO and

OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development). Concludes Fulbright: "In the words of the Spanish philosopher Salvador de Madariaga: 'The trouble today is that the Communist world understands unity but not liberty, while the free world understands liberty but not unity. Eventual victory may be won by the first of the two sides to achieve the synthesis of both.' "

Neither Flight nor Threat. Amid the groping for new forms of Western political expression. President John F. Kennedy still had high hopes for the United Nations; indeed he was pondering ways to enlarge its influence, including its military power, still further.

During his weekend at Hyannisport, he discussed, phrased and rephrased the ideas for his General Assembly speech this week. Among Kennedy's main points:

> Member nations of the U.N. should set aside for emergency use special military units, ready at all times for action under the U.N.'s banner. If all the U.N.'s 99 members cooperate, troop units would be ready in every part of the world to rush into troubled areas and keep the peace.

> Complete and general disarmament in stages, with inspection by an international organization under U.N. auspices, to include the halting of production and testing and movement of weapons. "Today, every inhabitant of this planet must contemplate the day when it may no longer be habitable . . . The weapons of war must be abolished before they abolish us."

> The Russian troika proposal would mean little more than anarchy. "Even the three horses of the ancient troika did not have three drivers going in different directions. They had only one--and so must the United Nations."

>In Berlin the U.S. will not retreat.

What John F. Kennedy hoped to get across was a simple, eloquent thought: "Let us call a truce to terror. Let us invoke the blessings of peace... I pledge you every effort this nation possesses. I pledge you that we shall neither commit nor provoke aggression, that we shall neither flee nor threaten the use of force, that we shall never negotiate out of fear and never fear to negotiate."

* Reported TIME, July 2, 1945: "There was no simple touchstone, no all-embracing word to sum up the world organization that emerged this week from San Francisco. Augustus had sought the security of his world through Roman 'justice'; Gregory through Christian 'brotherhood'; Napoleon through 'law' and the Grand Army; Metternich through 'legitimacy'; Wilson through 'democracy.' The San Francisco conference had no comparable key; it just said 'security.' By stressing the goal rather than the path, it opened the door to all opportunities--and to all contradictions."

* Two and a half years later, the West threatened the same tactics to force Russian acceptance of Dag Hammarskjold. U.S. Delegate Henry Cabot Lodge marched up to Russia's Andrei Vishinsky and said: "If you don't take Hammarskjold, we'll continue Lie's term." Only then did Russia allow Hammarskjold's candidacy to get through the Security Council.

* Even this was partly an accident; the Security Council resolution to intervene passed only because the Russians, boycotting the sessions, were not on hand to cast their veto in the crucial ballot.

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