Sir Brian Urquhart Interview: Institute of International Studies, UC Berekely
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You were there and watched Eleanor Roosevelt at work in these efforts [in establishing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights]. How would you characterize her?
I had a huge admiration for her and I had quite a lot to do with her actually. She was a remarkable, an absolutely unique person. I don't think there's ever been anyone like her. The State Department, like any foreign office, often gets things wrong, and they were very worried that Mrs. Roosevelt wouldn't be tough enough to deal with the Russians, represented by Andrei Vishinsky, the great prosecutor, on this whole thing of getting the Declaration of Human Rights accepted by the Assembly. Never did they make a greater mistake. She kept right at it. She was, after all, the widow of the great president of the United States so it was very difficult for the Russians to dismiss her at any level. And then she would go after Vishinsky in this almost motherly way. She'd get totally fed up with Soviet boilerplate, when Vishinsky was saying, "This is outrageous; you can't infringe the rights of governments; they're the things that matter." And she would turn on him in this rather kindly way and say, "Mr. Vishinsky, we're not dealing here with the rights of governments, they're far too much already. We're dealing here, Mr. Vishinsky, with the rights of people, of men, of the right of man to be free. Man, Mr. Vishinsky, not governments." And Vishinsky would not be able, for once, to think of anything to say. She was extraordinary, and she got it through, I don't know how she did it. She was an amazing woman.
The Declaration was an extremely important milestone in human civility. We haven't got there yet, but it's made an extraordinary difference to the way in which people behave already.
Another American that you observed and worked under and who made quite an impact was Ralph Bunche. Tell us a little about him.
I suppose he's the greatest friend I ever had in my life and also my mentor for most of the years I was in the UN. He was an absolutely extraordinary person and again, someone who now seems to be shamefully forgotten.
Ralph
was an African American. He was born in Detroit. He lost his parents when
he was eleven years old and he went and lived in what is now Watts, in Los
Angeles, with his grandmother, who was illiterate but was a person who believed
that, especially for Black Americans, education was the only way to go. She
insisted on Bunche not only finishing high school but also going to UCLA. Instead
of the usual things that Black Americans studied in those days (accounting
and that kind of thing) she insisted on him studying political science, and
he went on to become an immensely successful academic figure.
He was, very early on, struck with the parallel between the race problem in the United States and the problem of colonialism in the world at large, where you had an enormous proportion of the population subjected, completely against their will, to the caprices of the small white population. So he began, very early on, to study both of these things. He was a very important figure in the early Civil Rights Movement; he founded the National Negro Congress in 1936, which was the first attempt to have an across-the-board, all-class, Negro representative organization (unfortunately, it got taken over by the Communist Party later on and he denounced it); and he wrote a great deal of the early literature, including a book called A World View of Race in 1936, which made the parallel between colonialism and racism in the United States and analyzed the underlying motivations for each. They were very important works at the time.
He also did a major study of colonialism in Africa, which was quite an unusual subject in those days. He also began a major study of the non-white population of South Africa, and he was six months in South Africa doing that. But then he became the chief assistant to Gunnar Myrdal, a Swedish social economist who was commissioned by the Carnegie Corporation to write a book on the race problem in the United States. The book was An American Dilemma which is a landmark in the writing about this subject.
And this would have been during the war?
No, they started in 1938. Bunche was Myrdal's research director and actually wrote the first draft of a very large part of the book. He was a person of great intellectual ability. He had an exceptional analytical mind and was capable of working indefinite hours if he thought it was important. And he made it possible for Myrdal to write this absolutely ground-breaking book, which came out in 1944 finally. Bunche was obsessed with Hitler. He had actually read Mein Kampf and believed that it wasn't just the Jews who were threatened racially by Hitler but Black people as well, whom Hitler didn't even regard as human. He spent a great deal of time trying to arouse American Black consciousness of the Nazi threat, because the Communist Party at that time was saying that this was just a white man's war and it had nothing to do with ethnic minorities of any kind, and that Blacks would be very wise to stay out of it and refuse to serve in the army. Bunche was radically opposed to this view, since he'd actually read the literature.
He joined the OSS. He was their principal African expert, and finally went into the State Department in the last year of the war, into the section which was preparing for the San Francisco Conference and writing the UN Charter. He drafted two chapters of the Charter, chapters XI and XII, which are the chapters on non-self-governing territories and trusteeship.
Then Bunche came to the UN, first of all to set up the Trusteeship Department, and he also had a great deal to do with the movement for decolonization. He was the dynamo of that movement, because he knew more about it than anybody else did, including most European colonial experts, so he was very important. Then he got side-tracked again, he got sent to Palestine in 1947, with the commission of the UN which was supposed to decide on what was going to be done about Palestine when the British left. This was a kind of a Marx Brothers mission. Bunche said it was the worst group of people he'd ever had to work with and I think he was right. And he ended up writing both the majority and the minority report of that commission because none of the members were capable of writing anything, so he wrote both. He said he felt like a ghost-writing harlot because he managed to take both points of view and make them perfectly reasonable. And, of course, the partition route was taken by the General Assembly.
Did Bunche ultimately win the Nobel Prize for this?
Well, that was in the next stage because then, the moment the British left, the Israelis declared statehood and five Arab countries invaded Israel. This was in May, 1948. The Security Council of the UN appointed a mediator, first of all to try to get the war stopped, and secondly, to negotiate a settlement of the Palestine problem. We all thought in those days, idiots that we were, that there wasn't any problem that a bit of good negotiation wouldn't solve. And the mediator, Count Folke Bernadotte, asked for Bunche as his right-hand man. Bernadotte had never been to the Middle East, didn't know anything about it, so Bunche went with Bernadotte and was the person who really did all the leg work. And they got a truce in the war. They set up the first peacekeeping operation to monitor that truce. And then they set about trying to negotiate a settlement which, predictably, raised tremendous ill feelings on both sides (Arab and Israeli).
Bernadotte was assassinated by the Stern gang in Jerusalem in September 1948, and Bunche took over and became the mediator. Actually, he should have been killed with Bernadotte, which was the intention. But fortunately he had an English secretary and the Israelis, at that point quite rightly, were very suspicious of the British and they held her up at the Mandelbaum Gate in Jerusalem, and Bunche refused to leave her. And so they were twenty five minutes late for the rendezvous with Bernadotte, and Bernadotte went off with one of the French observers, who was killed with him. So Bunche, miraculously, survived. He didn't get any further with a permanent settlement, but he recommended to the General Assembly that there had to be some serious legal basis for peace in the Middle East, even if wasn't a settlement. You had to have an armistice which everybody had to sign and which gave legal obligations to both sides.
Nobody wanted to have anything to do with negotiating an armistice because they thought it was completely impossible, so Bunche got stuck with being the mediator. He did that on the island of Rhodes, in the Mediterranean, in early 1949. Everybody thought it was impossible but he actually did it and showed himself to be a negotiator of incredible skill. The great thing about Bunche was that everybody who dealt with him, even those who disagreed with him, knew he was absolutely fair and honest. He never would tell anyone something that wasn't true. And he understood, better than anybody I've ever seen, the concerns and fears and worries that are on the minds of people in conflicts, so that he could come up with ideas which would suddenly meet the fears these people hadn't been willing to express in public. The result was that he enjoyed the complete confidence of the people he dealt with.
If anybody ever deserved the Nobel Peace Prize, he did. Actually, typically of Bunche, when he was told he had been awarded the Peace Prize he wrote a letter to the committee saying that he was terribly sorry, he deeply appreciated all this, but he could never accept it because he was in the UN Secretariat and you didn't work in the Secretariat to win prizes; he was only doing his job. Nobody had ever done that before so the Nobel committee got very upset. They were Norwegian and they got hold of the then Secretary-General, Trygve Lie, who was also Norwegian, and said, "This is absolutely terrible. This is a terrible blow to the Nobel foundation, what are you going to do?" And Lie then ordered Bunche to accept the prize. He told Bunche, "You have to, even if you don't want it, for the good of the United Nations."
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