Neither Revelations Nor Gossip
HOTTELET, RICHARD C.
Neither Revelations Nor Gossip THE PLAY WITHIN THE PLAY THE INSIDE STORY OF THE UN By Hernane Tavares de S?? Knopf. 309 pp. $5.95. Reviewed by RICHARD C. HOTTELET UN correspondent, CBS...
...Its title promises either the tragic enactment of concealed truth, as in Hamlet, or a comedy of manners on the foibles and frustrations of the world community and its diplomatic representatives...
...But you are a bachelor and you don't have a permanent contract, and you belong in Princeton anyway...
...The author takes time out, at one point, to sneer at the idea that the United Nations is a mirror image of today's world...
...He has done nothing of the kind...
...I want to do a job of cold political analysis...
...Danaos replies, "So What...
...It never even tries for the rich pattern of laughter and tears, ambition, dream and disappointment which marks the lives of this unique community...
...I don't really want to help you if you don't want to be helped...
...I don't want to go back to Princeton," said Claude sulkily...
...The way old man Fowles taught us...
...If Senor Tavares does not like the Africans and spends a fair amount of time pointing out their weaknesses, professional and personal, he has an even lower opinion of the officials in the Secretariat...
...Only a man at the center can see the whole game and the motives of its players...
...Alexander Dallin's The Soviet Union at the United Nations is a fascinating inquiry into that problem...
...He portrays them as a collection of lazy, frightened boobies hiding from reality in a forest of memos, and he produces a conversation which appears, on its face, as one of the least plausible ever squeezed between the covers of a book...
...Now, all writers live in glass houses and it would be unseemly to seize upon anyone's misstep to condemn his entire effort...
...was one) through the collapse of that peculiar institution-an affair which has a direct bearing on the entire problem of the succession...
...This metaphor has been vastly overworked to excuse inefficiency, cowardice, intellectual dishonesty and various other shortcomings...
...The Congo account ends with a mistake, namely that the UN spent $ 10 million a week on the operation...
...There have been good, "informed, unsentimental" (to borrow the words of the jacket) books on the mechanics and the work of the United Nations...
...A journalist, however, forced to leap from crisis to crisis and from one issue to another, whose information oscillates wildly between too little and too much about a catch-as-catch-can with 100 players, suffers from discontinuity in his appraisal...
...The Old Hand, Mark P. Danaos, is trying to get young Claude Artemis to mark time in drafting a position paper on Cyprus...
...Even the war in Vietnam has not seriously impaired the rapprochement between the two...
...That was the monthly cost...
...The same goes for his assertion that "if Washington does not want something to be done either by the General Assembly or by the Security Council it will simply not be done...
...Alas, there isn't even good gossip in this book...
...Me, I have to hold on to this job because I'm paying alimony and I still owe a dozen payments on that boat I keep out on Long Island, and I certainly won't enjoy being transferred to Karachi or Accra or Asuncion...
...Precisely for that reason one would have welcomed a book by a man who was inside and close to the top of the UN Secretariat for five of its most interesting years...
...He would have described U Thant's relations with his "Principal Advisers" (of whom Tavares de S...
...Richard Gardner and Ernest Gross have written expert analyses...
...Reviewed by RICHARD C. HOTTELET UN correspondent, CBS News This dull, sloppy and superficial book advertises itself as "The Inside Story of the UN...
...Trygve Lie has given a comprehensive account of his years in office...
...Not yet, anyway...
...But strange errors of fact run all through the book: The insistence, for example, that the 19th General Assembly began on November 10, 1964, when it actually convened on December 1. And then there are the errors of substance: Ever since the Cuban crisis, says Senor Tavares, "the USSR has slowly but unmistakeably drawn closer to the U.S...
...But although he was there through all the years of the Congo problem, he devotes just five insipid pages to it...
...Claude balks...
...Danaos exploded: "Then go back to Princeton, damn you...
...Neither is given, not by a very long shot...
...Its revelations are little more than the suggestions that a maiden aunt in Jackass Flats might permit herself in musing about the UN's private life...
...There is, no doubt, a modicum of truth in this cardboard colloquy -as there is in the author's remarks about the Africans...
...To the amazement, one may be sure, of Ambassadors Goldberg and Fedorenko, he cites Kashmir and Cyprus as prime examples...
...So I won't be a hero...
...If you want an account of the straggle within the United Nations during those fateful days, compounded as it was by the Suez affair, look elsewhere...
...Apart from that, a good political reporter, setting out to write the "Inside Story of the UN," would at least have tried to tell about the infighting that followed Hammarskjold's death and led to the election of U Thant...
...Do you want to be a hero or do you want to keep your job...
...The two most coherent and informative sections of this book are a lengthy reprint of a UN Information Service press release of the final session of the 19th General Assembly and a collection of press dispatches and broadcasts from Hungary during the uprising of 1956...
...H. G. Nicholas has written an excellent short study of the UN as a political institution...
...in important [Security] Council debates and decisions...
...But a modicum is not enough...
...To be fair, the author was not in the Secretariat then...
...Tavares de Sa might have been the second senior official to speak out and bring the narrative up to date...
...So far, to my knowledge, only one journalist has written a good book about the UN -Joseph Lash, whose biography of Dag Hammarskjold includes the highlights of the Hammarskjold era...
...He would have told about the Congo-and he certainly (having gone along) could have provided more than a few anecdotes about U Thant's confrontation with Premier Fidel Castro in Havana...
...A good gossip columnist could have made quite an epic of Alex Quaison-Sackey's campaign for the Presidency of the Assembly and of the confrontation between New York and a changing cast of more or less exotic diplomatic characters...
...But there is no doubt that it is true, in the full contradictory, kaleidoscopic and amoral sense of international life...
Vol. 49 • December 1966 • No. 24
