Saints and Statesmen

"I intend to leave after my death a large fund for the promotion of the peace idea, but I am skeptical as to its results. The savants will write excellent volumes. There will be laureates. But wars will continue just the same until the force of circumstances renders them impossible."

So said Alfred Bernhard Nobel, the multimillionaire inventor of dynamite, six years before his death at 63 in 1896 and eleven years before the inauguration of what has become the world's most honorific--and occasionally quixotic--award. Since 1901 a five-person Norwegian Nobel Committee has bestowed gold medals bearing the motto Pro Pace et Fraternitate Gentium (For Peace and Brotherhood of Nations) and cash awards ranging from $30,000 to $173,700 to 59 men, five women and eleven organizations. Nineteen times the committee made no awards at all -- of ten because of wars more terrible than even the father of dynamite could have envisioned.

In the process of choosing Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin, the Nobel Committee scrutinized 50 nominees, including Polish Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski, Finnish President Urho Kekkonen, and the beleaguered committee of Soviet dissidents who have monitored the 1975 Helsinki human rights accords. The selection committee, chosen -- at Nobel's behest -- by the Norwegian parliament, cloaks its deliberations in se crecy but draws on a wide range of sources for nominees. Among those consulted: representatives of the Norwegian Nobel Institute, officials of various governments, scholars and previous Peace Prize laureates. Sadat, says Nobel Institute Director Jacob Sverdrup, received "between ten and 20" nominations (including one from 1973 Laureate Henry Kissinger); Begin received "many, but fewer."

Sadat is the first Egyptian and Begin the first Israeli to win the Peace Prize, joining a roster of 19 other nationalities. More Americans have won the Nobel than any other group: 16 in all, including Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Ralph Bunche, General George C. Marshall (the only career military man ever to win) and Martin Luther King Jr.

Historically, the choice has tended to fluctuate between the idealistic and the more or less pragmatic -- saints or statesmen. It has also reflected the wish of Nobel, who specified that the recipient be "the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity among nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses." The first winners were Switzerland's Jean Henri Dunant, founder of the International Red Cross and originator of the Gene va Convention, and France's Frederic Passy, a noted pacifist who convened the first International Peace Congress in Paris in 1889. The first female recipient (in 1905) was Austrian Baroness Bertha von Suttner, a longtime confidante of Nobel's known popularly as "Peace Bertha," who founded the Austrian Peace Society in 1891. Possibly the award's most hapless recipient was Carl von Ossietzky, a German soldier turned peace activist who attacked the rising might of the Nazis and his country's secret rearmament. When Von Ossietzky won the prize in 1935, he was in a Nazi concentration camp; Adolf Hitler was so enraged by the decision that he forbade Germans henceforth to accept the Peace Prize.

As the Nobel Committee has learned, its prize is less often the reward for "successful efforts at peace than it is -- as it was with Von Ossietzky -- for a valiant try. In their continuing maneuvers toward Middle Eastern peace, Sadat and Begin might well ponder the case histories of some of their fellow laureates: Aristide Briand and Gustav Stresemann, the French and German statesmen who won the 1926 prize for the ill-fated Locarno peace trea ties, in which Belgium, France and Germany agreed never to fight again; American Diplomat Frank Kellogg, who was the originator of the Utopian Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928, in which 15 powers, including Germany and Japan, agreed to renounce war as an instrument of national policy; and former United Nations Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjoeld, who was named posthumously as lau reate in 1961, while his U.N. peace keeping force soldiered on in the bloody morass of the Belgian Congo.

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