The Global Piano
HOTTELET, RICHARD C.
The Global Piano The Act of Creation: The Founding of the United Nations By Stephen C. Schlesinger Westview. 374 pp. $27.50. Reviewed by Richard C. Hottelet Former CBS News...
...As the War intensified, Roosevelt coined the name United Nations for the alliance against the Axis powers...
...In the United States, public support for the UN was by no means unanimous, and Roosevelt fanned it with a publicity campaign under Archibald MacLeish and his assistant, Adlai E. Stevenson...
...In Article 42, referring to the right of a member state to send its troops through a second state to help defend a third, the Russian term for "passing through" implied a right not only to go in and out but also to remain...
...It was only natural that this name should stay with the peace effort, which rested on the Big Four who bore the brunt of the fighting: Britain, the Soviet Union, China, and the United States...
...Movie stars Lana Turner and Rita Hayworth were accredited correspondents, as were gossip columnists...
...This is the price which each nation will have to pay for peace...
...The story of how the United States invented the United Nations and was the prime mover in hammering out its Charter takes on a special meaning in the light of recent events...
...But there is nothing in the Charter that impinges on American interests...
...Nearly 60 years have passed since the UN Charter was ratified...
...The Kremlin never stopped pushing...
...Thousands of American and foreign reporters assembled in San Francisco, creating on occasion a carnival atmosphere...
...They marked a sinister escalation: The millions of soldiers killed in World War I were followed by tens of millions of civilian dead in World War II...
...It was a trade-off, acknowledgment that Soviet domination of the region was a fact not to be altered but also not one to frustrate Washington's desire to preserve the United Nations...
...neither the United States nor the Soviet Union would have joined the UN without this guarantor of their sovereign interests...
...His main concern was that both the United States and the Soviet Union would participate...
...Although Roosevelt knew Moscow would be difficult, it was Truman who faced the full blast of Soviet ambitions...
...A Security Council not free to discuss problems was not worth having...
...It was the universal expression of a need to find a way to resolve the clash of interests that had exploded in two world wars within a single generation of the 20th century...
...One of his biographers pointed to Kennedy's UN work as the beginning of his political career...
...The goal back then was a global security system that would avoid the mistakes made 20 years earlier in the League of Nations...
...They also argued against the United States presidency of the conference, proposing a Big Four rotating chairmanship instead...
...The American Russian specialist, Charles Bohlen, joked that his British colleague, Isaiah Berlin, had saved the British Empire with the stroke of a pencil...
...It was there that he first seriously examined national security issues and the mechanics of international negotiation...
...Britain at once demanded a correction...
...They have done so peacefully, in the main, with Vietnam and Algeria two exceptions...
...When the conference ended, with the Charter approved, a word by word examination of the Russian-language text revealed that the Soviets had further ideas...
...At Yalta in February 1945, it had been agreed that the countries of Eastern Europe occupied by the Red Army would be allowed to choose their own governments...
...Similarly unicef, the Children's Fund, can be found wherever there is a call for help with family preservation, inoculation, nutrition, health care and schooling...
...UN agencies have in the past few turbulent decades adapted to unimagined exigencies...
...The UN's Economic and Social Council, meant to match the Security Council's influence, has been little more than a second fiddle...
...FDR considered the creation of the UN "supremely urgent," he told New York Times correspondent Anne O'Hare McCormick in the last interview he gave before he died in April 1945...
...Mindful of Woodrow Wilson's failure to cultivate Senate support for the League ofNations, Roosevelt made sure the American delegation was bipartisan...
...Starting in 1958, well over 100 newly independent territories have swelled the membership to 191...
...In 2001, the United States declared war against international terrorism under the self-defense provision of the Charter's Article 51...
...For this, McCormick thought, he would make all the advances, ignore rebuffs, take long journeys, offer concessions, and accept compromise...
...He accepted the American position on the veto...
...For a time smaller problems gummed up the San Francisco Conference too...
...The George W. Bush Administration sees the United States as the 800 pound gorilla entitled to do precisely what it pleases...
...The United States and others insisted that the Poles, who had fought the Nazis in exile and in the underground, be included in the new regime...
...Nongovernmental organizations have won for themselves a prominent place within a UN that is, after all, an organization of governments...
...Like a piano, the United Nations remains a policy instrument that can be played well or badly—depending on the player...
...So the United Nations was less a product of idealism than of necessity, responding to traumatized nations worldwide with a simple proposition: It was not machinery to right wrongs and solve political riddles, but to keep them from attempted solution by force of arms...
...Reviewed by Richard C. Hottelet Former CBS News correspondent Circumstances have made this book very timely...
...Halfway through, the conference was saved when Truman gave in on Poland, sending Roosevelt's old confidant, Harry Hopkins, to Stalin with the message that Soviet rule in Eastern Europe would not be challenged...
...He witnessed the beginning of the East-West rivalry and met some of the men who would be prominent in his Administration...
...It was already agreed that the veto would apply only to substantive matters, however, when Moscow's chief delegates, Foreign Minister Vyacheslav M. Molotov and Ambassador Andrei A. Gromyko, contended that vetoes should also block discussion, on the logic that discussion was the preliminary to action that was vetoable...
...The High Commissioner for Refugees has brought help to tens of millions of displaced persons...
...it made war more difficult...
...And the men and women writing the Charter in 1945 had no idea that a nuclear multiplier of catastrophe was being made ready in Los Alamos...
...What was this organization that U. S. leaders thought so important...
...In today's Washington these words would mark him as a wimp or a security risk...
...In a different section, the Russian version indicated that all British mandated territories were to be released immediately...
...The international relinquishing of sovereignty," he wrote, "would have to spring from the people...
...Another potential conference breaker was the deadlock over the great power veto in the UN Security Council...
...Stalin demanded that a Communist group of his choice take power in Warsaw and represent Poland in writing the UN Charter...
...The United States refused to budge...
...JFK also saw that nations jealously protect their prerogatives...
...It has never been materially amended, but events have altered the world organization's performance in striking ways...
...Press interest in the Charter process was enormous...
...The Military Staff Committee that was to direct members' armed forces placed at the disposal of the Security Council was a dead letter from the start...
...Stephen C. Schlesinger reminds us that even before World War II the State Department took the first steps to prepare for the postwar period, in response to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's warning of the need for a "final peace...
...Accordingly, the UN has improvised a variety of peacekeeping and peace enforcement operations, and has sanctioned interventions by its members to deal with civil war, ethnic strife and failed states...
...it included the leading Senate Republican, Arthur H. Vandenberg of Michigan, and the Democratic Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Commiftee,Tom Connally of Texas...
...The dictator's mood abruptly changed...
...The UN force that fought in Korea and affected the course of history in East Asia was a coalition of the willing led by the U.S., as was the one deployed in the Gulf War of 1991...
...The issue was not a matter of eliminating the veto, as most of the smaller nations wished...
...The World Food Program has distributed sustenance by the millions of tons...
...But there was serious reporting in the 150,000 words filed daily to newspapers around the globe...
...That includes launching an unnecessary war in Iraq and, while desperately looking for a way to exit from disaster, ironically appealing to the UN for help...
...All his hopes of success in life and immortality in history," she wrote, "were set on getting an international security organization in motion...
...But neither man saw the UN as a world government, or the Charter as holy writ...
...Truman shared FDR's feelings...
...The Trusteeship Council, charged with windingupoldLeaguemandates, was outdone by the cavalcade of decolonization set in motion by the General Assembly...
...they believed that, like the U. S. Constitution, the Charter would be amended to adapt to changed conditions...
...The sometimes windy, confused or meretricious behavior of UN members can offend the United States...
...The Russians pressed for immediate admission of Byelorussia and Ukraine to UN membership, giving the USSR three votes in current and future proceedings...
...There was fury when Stalin added injury to insult by arresting 16 Polish democratic delegates who went to Moscow to claim Yalta's promise...
...Elsa Maxwell described the Russian delegates as "a bunch of magnificent he-men...
...The first test case was Poland...
...We must face the fact that the people have not been horrified by the War to a sufficient extent to force them to go to any extent rather than have another war...
...President Harry S. Truman admonished the delegates to the San Francisco Conference in June 1945, "We all have to recognize—no matter how great our strength—that we must deny ourselves the license to do always as we please...
...Twenty-seven-yearold John F. Kennedy covered the conference for the Chicago Herald American...
...In short, whatever Washington's neocons may mutter, the UN cannot make the United States do anything against its will or prevent it from doing what it deems necessary...
...About the conference he said, "You must measure its accomplishments against its possibilities...
...The Charter's emphasis on human rights, though, has had a profound impact on governments and their international relations...
...The Polish issue, observed one writer, hovered over San Francisco "like a foul bird," even seeming at times to threaten the whole enterprise...
Vol. 86 • September 2003 • No. 5
