Word: hammarskjold
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...Kleffens, 60, a familiar U.N. figure. But when the conference got under way, the man in charge was a slim and sandy-haired Swede with an easy smile, a sensitive mouth, and eyes the same color as the light blue U.N. flag. He is Dag Hjalmar Agne Carl Hammarskjold, Secretary-General of the U.N. and the world's No. 1 international civil servant...
...millions who cannot pronounce his name ("Just call it Hammer-shield," he says. "That's what it means"), Dag Hammarskjold is "Mr. U.N." He is the man whose job it is to stand between the representatives of Israel and the Arabs, India and Pakistan, the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. Hammarskjold does not fancy himself as a "World Moderator," as the U.S. Government once suggested the Secretary-General should be called. He sees himself more modestly as the U.N.'s chief servant, ready to do the bidding of his bosses, the 60 nations. In the name of the United...
...Hammarskjold is a quiet man, the exponent of "quiet diplomacy." Yet in this polished Swede, with his distaste for cocksure statements, lurks a calm, dogmatic conviction: that some day the U.N. will glow in the minds of men because there is no alternative...
...Hammarskjold's sense of mission derives from two opposing forces that seem forever to be driving him on. Hammarskjold, by his own reading of himself, is simultaneously a mystic and a materialist, a romantic and a realist. As a student, he was deeply influenced by the negativist philosophy of Axel Hagerstrom, who taught that metaphysics is dishonest and only matter real. The influence lingers: when Hammarskjold is talking business, he is as hard as stone. Yet the "Great Deflater," as an old friend calls Hammarskjold, writes intense romantic lyrics and goes roaming through the Lapland mountains in search...
History's verdict on the U.N. is still in the jury box. But Dag Hammarskjold is confident what it will be. "The U.N. is not just a product of do-gooders." he says. "It is harshly real." He once told an interviewer: "The day will come when men will see the U.N. and what it means clearly. Everything will be all right-you know when? When people, just people, stop thinking of the United Nations as a weird Picasso abstraction, and see it as a drawing they made themselves...