The Lonely Americans
UNITED NATIONS
From MURRAY KEMPTON
UNITED NATIONS, N.Y.
WASHINGTON put the best face it could on the opening of the General Assembly—Vice- President Humphrey radiating our half-forgotten innocence and the New York Times explaining that U Thant would depart only because he could no longer endure the French and the Russians.
Still, we shall have a horrid three months. Vietnam has finally poisoned our position here as Algeria did France's. Amintore Fanfani began his farewell address as the old Assembly's president by- placing his Christian Democratic duty above his anxious experience of friendship with us and descanting at length upon Pope Paul's cry for peace. Afghanistan's Abdul Pazhwak ended his speech of welcome as the new Assembly's presi- dent by saying that war itself is wrong and that no side can think itself right. We are the only belligerent upon this stage; it is to us that every exhortation is to be delivered and every reproach imputed.
Inevitably, foreign offices are engaged and UN missions neutralist. One senses the paranoia, per- haps in one's self, perhaps in one's State Depart- ment. No officer of our UN mission appeared all the first day except in the company of his oppo- site from State, as though under guard; Frank Carpenter, our mission's press officer, appeared for his usual briefing flanked by a Deputy Assistant Secretary; Ambassador Goldberg entered the chamber with a silent, gloomy and watchful Secretary of State Rusk by his side. With time, all ambassadors become men of the UN institution, and we are at a moment when anyone associated with the United Nations is a security risk.
Mr Carpenter's job had never seemed quite this hopeless. At one moment in his briefings, one of the television reporters reminded him that the Secretary-General had said the day before that Hanoi had not definitely rejected his three- point formula for negotiations. Had the United $tates accepted or rejected it, she asked? 'I'll have to refresh my memory on that,' our press officer answered. Were we then to believe that the State Department has forgotten whether it accepted or rejected a proposal solemnly submitted to it by the Secretary-General of the United Nations?
Apparently any American enduring this Assembly will be required, as a patriot, to be- lieve anything. Washington accepts the fact that U Thant is leaving and tells us his departure is to be blamed on General de Gaulle and the Soviets. But there is very little in what the Secre- tary-General has said over the past few weeks which indicates that he is seriously depressed by the conduct of any nation except our own. No Secretary-General has lately had the co-operation of the Russians or the French, Dag Hammar- skjold was able to increase his authority against their absolute antipathy. U Thant would have been foolish to expect any change from them; what has altered his condition has been the defec- tion of the United States, the only one of the two great powers virtuous enough or self- righteous enough to entertain the illusion of some parliament of man.
Mr Hammarskjold was fortunate in his presence; he was the man of the institution. While U Thant is only a man of the institution, U Thant has the disability of being from the east, and thus subject to the condescension which it is so difficult for us to avoid when we think about those dear little people. The east is an area to which we are used to sending mission- aries, and unused to sending governors; our tone there is thus habitually preachment and our expectation the salvation of souls. U Thant simply does not have the social position to sug- gest that he is detached about his salvation.
Dag Hammarskjold had that position. He had, in addition, the immense advantage of never being in a position where it was necessary for him to confront us; his engagements were in areas where the United States had only the most abstract interests; and, for the great part of his tenure, the United States was under the direc- tion of President Eisenhower, a distinctly non- activist temperament and one disinclined to worry about creating policies in places where none had existed before. We were ready in those days to settle for the UN policy in the absence of interest or policy of our own. U Thant had the misfortune of dealing with a world in which the United States .felt its self-interest at stake in both the. Dominican Republic and Vietnam; he was helpless in both confrontations; and, if he reacted against us from pain to his pride in his office, that is understandable.
It is certainly understandable to Ambassador Goldberg; but it is clearly difficult to translate into coherent terms for President Johnson or Secretary Rusk. Mr Goldberg seems as much the UN's ambassador to Washington as he is the United States ambassador to the UN. He is popular at the UN and admired for his patience with his principals; the game here, after his address to the Assembly, was less to find whether the position of the United States had really changed than to detect the small ways in which the Ambassador had been able to elude his Washington custodians and to adumbrate posi- tions which are more his than theirs. If the result dissolved into vagueness, the fault was generally accepted as theirs and not his. Mr Goldberg has, after all, made clear enough his depression with Secretary Rusk's fixed resistance to the faintest recognition of China here to make his colleagues certain that he has conveyed it to the President.
He gives us the advantage, here, of suggesting at least. that America's councils are divided and that there is hope for a change. But, as we are,
we are responsible for making total the isola- tion of the UN from the support of any of the great powers, and therefore for driving U Thant away. And, by December, barring some escape from the war, we are likely to have suffered enough from the torments of this Assembly ses- sion to make the United Nations for our govern- ment little more than a bitter thought; we shall be as cynical, if less amusing than, the French, as helpless, if less wise than, the British.
And we shall come to believe that the Rus- sians were right about the UN all along. The Russians have always argued that it was ridiculous for the great powers to sit dwarfed among the pygmies in the General Assembly and play at submitting themselves to its judg- ment. The place to quarrel, the Russians said, was in the Security Council, where any owner of property is protected by his veto against incon- venience and by custom against heartfelt insult.
That acceptance may be mere common sense. It was rather ridiculous for a nation as old as ours and as full of sin to cling as long as ours has to ideas of the perfectibility of man. Still, there is the problem that we may not know that we have abandoned those ideas; the State De- partment seems, for example, marvellously re- sistant to the recognition that U Thant and Pope Paul may be talking about us. We do not reject; we have merely ceased to listen; our piety has outlived our belief. We cannot even expect the customary advantages from the loss of innocence, because we do not know that we have lost it. We are alone here, and we shall have to listen to three months of sermons whose pieties are so like our own that we have no way to express our resentment except in silence and disaffection.
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