The Quiet Man

Draped in red velvet and the blue-and-white flag of the United Nations, the coffin of former U.N. Secretary-General U Thant last week was honored at the world organization's New York headquarters in an unprecedented lying in state. Thant, 65, retired three years ago after a record ten years as Secretary-General, to be succeeded by Austria's Kurt Waldheim. Since that time, ridden by cancer and unable to return to his native Burma because of political enemies at home, Thant had lived quietly in a New York suburb and worked on the memoirs of a diplomatic career that had thrust him unexpectedly into the vortex of world affairs.

Thant took over a U.N. on the edge of collapse. His predecessor, Dag Hammarskjold, had acted with fierce independence by sending U.N. troops into the Congo to save the rebellious former Belgian colony from disintegration. Soviet Leader Nikita Khrushchev charged that Hammarskjold had acted without a Security Council mandate, and demanded a troika, or three-man rule, to take charge of the U.N. After Hammarskjold's death in 1961, the U.S. as a compromise sought a less forceful Secretary-General. U Thant, a onetime schoolteacher, emerged as a man without enemies.

Thant's role as Secretary-General, as he perceived it, involved mediation with the superpowers rather than confrontation. His greatest accomplishment in that respect was an appeal for peace in the midst of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, which allowed both President Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev to pull back from the brink, in response to Thant, without losing face. Even so, Thant was never able to reach a really friendly accommodation with either Moscow or Washington. He and the Soviets were seldom in accord, and he particularly resented Moscow's refusal to pay its share of U.N. peace-keeping costs. With the U.S. he was even more acerbic, constantly criticizing the U.S.

role in Viet Nam.

Drastic Changes. Thant's most memorable miscalculation occurred in 1967, when Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser demanded the withdrawal of U.N. peace-keeping forces from the Sinai, and Thant acceded by summarily ordering them out. By removing that barrier, he opened the way to the Six-Day War. Thant afterward defended his decision as "the most misunderstood, misstated and distorted episode in U.N.

history"--arguing that the withdrawal was necessary since the U.N. force was stationed on Egyptian territory.

As his health began to fail, Thant had other cataclysmic U.N. changes to supervise. One was the dramatic arrival of the Chinese Communists to replace the Nationalists, who had helped found the organization. Another was the increasing Third World representation within the U.N., which has broadened Afro-Asian participation but diminished the organization's impact.

Despite all the disagreements, those who came to know this shy, devout and scrupulously courteous man generally came to admire him. Says TIME'S Louis Halasz: "Perhaps the most important thing about Thant was that there was absolutely no malice in him. He was often naive, even gullible, but he had strong convictions, and I found it impossible not to like him."

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