United Nations

A History

Stanley Meisler

• Publisher: Grove Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780802194992
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Diplomacy & Treaties
• Index: Politics & International Relations

"This is a definitive account of the United Nations for a general audience, told by a master." —Jim Hoagland, The Washington Post United Nations: A History begins with its creation in 1945. Although the organization was created to prevent war, many conflicts have arisen, ranging from the Korean War, to the Six-Day War, to genocide in Bosnia and Rwanda. Stanley Meisler's in-depth research examines the crises and many key political leaders. In this second edition, Meisler brings his popular history up to date with accounts of the power struggles of the last fifteen years, specifically spotlighting the terms of secretaries-general Boutros Boutros-Ghali, Kofi Annan, and Ban Ki-moon. This is an important, riveting, and impartial guide through the past and recent events of the sixty-five-year history of the United Nations. "Balanced and insightful, this book is a must for anyone who wants to understand where the U.N. has been and, more importantly, how we might best use its potential for the future." —Thomas R.Pickering, former US ambassador to the UN

1

The Beginnings:
From Dumbarton Oaks
to San Francisco

At 7:09 p.m., the twelfth of April, 1945, two and a half hours after the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S Truman held a Gideons’ Bible in his left hand and took the oath of office as thirty-third president of the United States. About two dozen onlookers—cabinet members, congressional leaders, Roose­velt aides, Bess Truman, their daughter, Margaret—had assembled in the cabinet room of the White House for the swift ceremony. Chief Justice Harlan Stone administered the oath to Truman while both stood near a marble mantelpiece beneath a portrait of Woodrow ­Wilson, a symbolic witness. Wilson had galvanized the allies to victory in World War I but had fumbled the peace, failing to win ­Senate approval for even a toothless League of Nations. As World War II rushed through its final months, Roosevelt—and now Truman—knew that a wartime president had to avoid the pitfalls of Wilson in peacetime yet build on what he had attempted.

After the ceremony, Truman asked the members of Roosevelt’s cabinet to remain behind so that he could formally request them to stay on the job as he coped with the awesome mantle dropped on him so suddenly. Before he could address them, Steve Early, Roosevelt’s press secretary, interrupted and whispered that the White House newspapermen wanted to know if the San Francisco conference on the United Nations was going to take place as scheduled in less than two weeks. “I said it most certainly was,” Truman recalled later. “I said it was what Roosevelt had wanted, and it had to take place if we were going to keep the peace. And that’s the first decision I made as President of the United States.”

It was a fitting first move. In the short years between the climactic months of World War II and the onset of the Cold War, Americans had high hopes for a future United Nations. Although there were some suspicions, Americans brimmed with admiration for the bitter and furious defenders of Moscow and Leningrad and Stalingrad and for the relentless Soviet counteroffensives that followed. Americans could envision the Soviet Union joining the United States in policing the peace in the brighter new world that would arise from the carnage. There were dissenters. Some were isolationists who still abhorred entangling alliances. But pragmatic intellectuals like Walter Lippmann also joined the naysayers. “We cannot repeat the error of counting upon a world organization to establish peace,” he warned. “The responsibility for order rests upon the victorious governments. They cannot delegate this responsibility to a world society which does not yet exist or has just barely been organized.” But, for most Americans, hopes drove out doubts.

* * *

The United Nations was forged in a pair of extraordinary conferences—at Dumbarton Oaks from late August to early October 1944 and at San Francisco from late April to late June 1945. The Dumbarton Oaks conference was limited in numbers but not power. Only Britain, Russia, the United States, and China took part. At San Francisco, however, fifty governments, almost all anti-Axis belligerents, met to ratify a U.N. charter, accepting somewhat grudgingly what the Big Four had imposed. The noisiest disagreements­—pitting the Soviet Union against its English-­speaking partners—had to be settled through compromise outside the conferences, requiring a good deal of cajoling by Roosevelt in person at Yalta and by Truman through emissaries in Moscow.

The United Nations was mainly an American idea, and its structure today closely follows the plans prepared by American diplomats during World War II. Even before the United States entered the war, President Roosevelt had asked Secretary of State Cordell Hull to set up a State Department team of planners for peace. Roosevelt himself talked often of the need for “Four Policemen”—the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, and China—to order the postwar world. The policemen would operate out of a station house run by an international organization, but it would be the strength and unity of the policemen that gave that organization its vitality. He did not mind fitting his scheme into the framework of some kind of League of Nations, but he envisioned a league of awesome power. When the Dumbarton Oaks conference was announced, Roosevelt, meeting reporters in his shirtsleeves on a warm day, explained what he had in mind: If some aggressor “started to run amok and seeks to grab territory or invade its neighbors,” the new organization would “stop them before they got started.”

Winston Churchill, fearful of the postwar machinations of Joseph Stalin, was more concerned with molding a West European–American alliance to balance the power of the Soviet Union. He derided the Americans for setting off on the wrong track. He also suspected the American visionaries of plotting the dismemberment of the British Empire. Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles, after all, had told a Memorial Day audience in 1942, “The age of imperialism is ended.” Churchill did not see the point of the early American planning. He had his hands full with a war. In 1942, he told Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden that postwar studies should be assigned “mainly to those on whose hands time hangs heavy” and that all the planners should “not overlook Mrs. Glass’s Cookery Book recipe for jugged hare—first catch your hare.” But Churchill did not intend to antagonize Roosevelt. While Churchill looked on the early American planning as naïve and premature, he and his diplomats went along, humoring the Americans they needed so desperately as allies.

Stalin’s postwar vision was closer to that of Churchill than Roosevelt. He intended to conquer an Eastern European buffer belt that would protect the Soviet Union from any future German or other European aggression. Since Roosevelt’s vision of Four Policemen leading a universal peacekeeping organization did not seem to clash with his postwar plans, Stalin accepted it. “I think Stalin, with all his nastiness, scheming and beastliness with regard to his own people,” says Russian historian Henry A. Trofimenko, “was serious about that. . . . He was quite prepared to police the world together with the United States, conveniently picking up in the process some neglected chunks of land.” Stalin just wanted to make sure this new organization did not isolate him.

Throughout the war there were hints of what was to come. As early as August 1941, four months before Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt and Churchill included a call for the postwar “establishment of a wider and permanent system of general security” in the Atlantic Charter that they signed aboard the British battleship Prince of Wales off Newfoundland. The hint might have been stronger. Churchill was ready to slip a reference to an “effective international organization” into this declaration of principles by the leaders of the two most powerful English-speaking democracies. But isolationist sentiment still ran strong in prewar America, and the president did not want to provoke the American public and Senate with reminders of the scorned League of Nations. He rejected any wording that promised anything so specific as an international organization.

Roosevelt’s objection would soon have a familiar ring to the British and, later, the Russians. Throughout the arguments at Dumbarton Oaks, San Francisco, Yalta, and Moscow, American diplomats liked to justify their stubbornness by invoking the nightmare of the Senate rejection and humiliation of Woodrow Wilson and his League of Nations after World War I: if they yielded on this or that point, the Americans would argue, the same dismal fate would await the U.N. It was both a haunt and a convenient club for bargaining.

* * *

Washington in August rivals West Africa for muggy heat, and Eden asked the State Department to find a cooler site for the first conference in 1944. But American officials looked on the conference as too vital to allow American delegates too far from headquarters. Alger Hiss, a young State Department officer who would be imprisoned six years later for perjury in a controversial espionage case that skyrocketed the anti-Communist career of young Congressman Richard Nixon, suggested Dumbarton Oaks, a secluded mansion with acres of sculpted garden on high land above Georgetown in northwest Washington. Harvard University, which had received the mansion as a gift from Ambassador Robert Woods Bliss and his wife in 1940, agreed to lend the estate to the U.S. government for the rest of the summer. An enormous horseshoe-shaped table was assembled to replace the pianos and antique furniture of the mansion’s ornate Music Room, and the Dumbarton Oaks conference opened on August 21, 1944.

The Americans, in an ebullient mood, catered to the needs and sensibilities of their guests. Hiss provided a member of the British delegation with the schedule of remaining home games for “the Washington American League club, also known as the Senators.” To avoid offending the Soviet delegation, an accommodating official removed a portrait of the late Polish pianist-statesman Ignacy Jan Paderewski from a wall in the Music Room; Paderewski was too closely identified with the government that Stalin and Hitler overthrew in their joint invasion of Poland in 1939.

On the first Friday, Undersecretary of State Edward R. Stettinius, the head of the American delegation, arranged for a U.S. Army plane to fly the delegates to New York for a weekend on the town. They gaped at seminude showgirls in Billie Rose’s Diamond Horseshoe after midnight and hobnobbed backstage with the Rockettes after a movie and stage show at Radio City Music Hall the next day. Andrey Gromyko, the Soviet ambassador to Washington and chief of his delegation, refused to go. Sir Alexander Cadogan, the British permanent undersecretary for foreign affairs and chief of his delegation, described Billie Rose’s nightclub as an “astonishing scene” and wrote his wife that Americans were “extraordinary people” who were “in some respects rather like ourselves but (as you can see) so utterly different.” When asked by reporters a few days later if it was true that the delegates had attended a nightclub floor show in New York on the past weekend, Stettinius denied it.

* * *

Three very different men dominated the conference. Stettinius, forty-three, the Lend-Lease administrator and former chairman of U.S. Steel, had only recently replaced Sumner Welles as undersecretary after a well-publicized spat between Welles and his boss, Secretary of State Cordell Hull. Stettinius, a man with a toothy grin, bushy black eyebrows, and prematurely white hair, had secured a reputation in Washington as an efficient administrator with a flair for public relations. Cadogan recorded in his diary that Stettinius reminded him of “a dignified and more monumental Charlie Chaplin.” Few contemporary chroniclers were that kind in their descriptions of the amiable lightweight who would replace Hull within a year. Dean Acheson remarked that Stettinius had “gone far with comparatively modest equipment.” Ralph Bunche called him “a complete dud, whatever the press may say about him. He is simply in a job for which he has utterly no qualifications and about which he knows nothing.”

Gromyko, thirty-five, even younger than Stettinius, was not well known even though he had been stationed in Washington for five years. Rarely seen at diplomatic parties and rarely in a joking mood when he did show up, he was once described as “the oldest young man in Washington.” Stalin had promoted him to take the place of Maksim Litvinov as ambassador only a year before the Dumbarton Oaks conference. Litvinov, a former foreign minister fluent in English, had enjoyed spirited popularity in Washington, and there were some rumors that he had been replaced by Stalin to show displeasure with the delay in launching an invasion of western Europe. In Moscow, a story, probably apocryphal, spread that some Americans, jealous of Litvinov’s access to Roosevelt, had lobbied against him, prompting an angry Stalin to scold them, “Well, you seem not to like a smart and brainy guy from Moscow—so I’ll treat you with Gromyko.” Cadogan described Gromyko as “a very nice and sensible fellow,” although, by the end of the conference, he began to regard the Russian delegates on the whole as “slow and sticky and rather stupid.” Gladwyn Jebb, Cadogan’s deputy, found Gromyko “imperturbable, sardonic, scrupulous, humorless and formidably exact.”

Cadogan, a far more experienced diplomat than the other two, headed the League of Nations section of the foreign office before World War II and, as permanent undersecretary, now held the highest bureaucratic rank in his ministry. Stettinius admired him as “calm, intelligent . . . very quick on the trigger.” The conference wore down the nerves of the sharp-witted Cadogan. After a month, he attended an embassy cocktail party and looked on it as “a foretaste of hell.” “A million people in a small, hot room,” he wrote, “and a noise in which one couldn’t hear oneself scream.”

The makeup of the conference raised eyebrows. Roosevelt insisted that China be included as the Fourth Policeman because he wanted it to replace Japan someday as the power of Asia in the postwar world. The idea of China developing into a world power struck Churchill as ludicrous. He would have preferred France at Dumbarton Oaks, for he looked on a rejuvenated France as the vital balance in Western Europe against any westward moves by the Soviet Union. But Roosevelt, though he finally accepted the principle of France as Fifth Policeman, disliked General Charles de Gaulle enough to veto his movement’s participation at Dumbarton Oaks, hoping that someone else could rise up and supplant him as the knight of a free France. Churchill called China a “faggot vote”—casting its ballot slavishly with the United States—and referred to Chinese diplomats as “pigtails.” Despite this grumbling, he did not oppose Roosevelt’s decision to make China one of the Big Four.

But the Soviet Union, since it had not yet declared war on Japan, refused to share the table with China during the conference, forcing the delegations to meet in cumbersome phases. The Big Three first ironed out the main features of a future United Nations. Then the British and American delegations presented the agreements to the Chinese in the second phase. There was little that delegation chief V. K. Wellington Koo, the Chinese ambassador to London, could do but acquiesce.

* * *

Stettinius and the other delegation chiefs decided to keep all proceedings of the conference secret, doling out worthless press releases that set down the schedule of sessions but little more. But they were undercut by James Reston, on his first major assignment for the Washington bureau of the New York Times. Reston had run into young Chen Yi, a member of the Chinese delegation who had once worked as an apprentice at the Times. While talking over those days, Reston discovered that Chen had copies of all the position papers tabled by the four delegations. Reston persuaded Chen that “it would be a pity not to share these wonderful proposals and suggestions with the peoples who had suffered so much.” Chen opened up his bulging briefcase and handed Reston all the papers. “I ran, literally ran, all the way to the office and turned them over to Arthur Krock,” Reston recalled in his memoirs. Krock, the bureau chief, “looked like a guy who had just won the Kentucky Derby.” The main competition for the Times in those days was the New York Herald-Tribune, and Krock decided to give “them the Chinese torture treatment by publishing the U.S. text one day, the Soviet the next, and so on.”

The publication of the papers infuriated the delegation chiefs. Gromyko called on Krock and accused the Times of taking part in a conspiracy to divide the wartime allies. Stettinius called on British Ambassador Lord Halifax and wrongly accused the British delegation of “this outrageous breach of security.” Stettinius then rushed to New York and warned publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger that the conference might collapse if the Times continued to publish the papers. Reston wrote a letter to Stettinius assuring him that the British were not his source. Lord Halifax told Reston that, while he accepted this assurance as true, he would never again have anything to do “with a man implicated in this affair.” The Times continued to publish the papers.

The other correspondents, suspecting that the State Department was feeding Reston while shunning them, angrily confronted Stettinius and demanded more news. Stettinius, Gromyko, and Cadogan agreed to meet the press a little more than a week after the conference opened. Two hundred correspondents assembled for a news conference in the Music Room. But the three negotiators, as Cadogan put it, intended only to “tell them that we weren’t going to tell them anything.” The Detroit Free Press said that Stettinius’s replies to questions “could have been written on a postal card a year ago.” Stettinius tried to hold a news conference of his own in September, but, despite his cheery attempt to call reporters by their first names, proved as ill at ease and uninformative as before. The Dumbarton Oaks conference shattered Stettinius’s reputation as a master of public relations and enabled Reston to win th...