Word: hammarskjold
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Behind the Eyes. Whatever emerges from this huge agenda, whatever becomes of the U.S. initiative to save the U.N., the world organization can never be the same again. That fact stems from causes far deeper than Hammarskjold's death-the very nature of the U.N. and the nature of Hammarskjold's policies...
...Before Hammarskjold, the U.N.'s big achievement had been the intervention in Korea to halt the southward thrust of Asia's Communists.* It was essentially not a U.N. action but a U.S. action with U.N. sanction; in the field, it ended with tragic indecision. When he took over three years after the Korea decision, Hammarskjold, a Swedish diplomat whose name was not only unpronounceable but virtually unknown in the rest of the world, approached his task with modest caution. Few spotted the fire behind those distant blue eyes. Then came the 1954 U.N. resolution urging the release...
...Shoe-Thumping Fellow. Dag Hammarskjold believed in "quiet diplomacy," an elegant discipline that few diplomatists of his era, surrounded by swift teletypes and curious reporters, were able to endure. Undramatically, he sent a United Nations Emergency Force into Egypt in the wake of the abortive British, French and Israeli invasion-and for the first time the world saw the strange sight of oddly assorted volunteers from various countries (Danes, Norwegians, Colombians) in blue helmets serving as an international army. Then came the U.N. "presence" in Lebanon and Jordan in 1958, the U.N.'s representative in Laos in 1959, last...
Originally the Russians voted for Hammarskjold's request to send a U.N. force into the Congo, in a sense because Hammarskjold shamed them into it; later, they turned viciously against him when he refused to allow Russia in effect to take over from the U.N. in the Congo. Thumping his fists, waving his shoe, Moscow's Premier Nikita Khrushchev appalled the General Assembly as he campaigned for Hammarskjold's destruction. "Whose saint is he? . . . It is not proper for a man who has flouted elementary justice to hold such an important post," cried Nikita. Hammarskjold listened, immobile...
Later, in a remarkable, ironic letter to his brother in Sweden, Hammarskjold made clear how he felt about Khrushchev: "The big shoe-thumping fellow continues as a dark thunderhead to threaten all unrepentant 'nonCommunists' with hail and thunder and probably also locusts and other plagues traditionally favored by tribal gods...