Word: thant
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...Dwight Eisenhower. "Any unilateral action would be a serious mistake." Officially, the Administration agreed, pinning its public hopes on the United Nations to settle the crisis before the Israelis lose patience and try to break the blockade themselves. But many U.S. policymakers are disenchanted with U.N. Secretary-General U Thant, not only for his blatant partisanship on Viet Nam, but also for his aphronic action in pulling the entire U.N. peace-keeping force out of the Sinai desert, particularly since Nasser originally asked him to remove it from only half of the 120-mile truce line. In a rare public...
Perhaps the most ingenuous attempt to find a solution was made by United Nations Secretary General U Thant, who flew off to Cairo on short notice to chat with Nasser. After running the gauntlet of workers chanting "God is great, long live Nasser, Egypt will win!" and being forced to cool his heels for 24 hours at Cairo's Nile Hilton, Thant finally got to see Nasser at a four-hour "working dinner," at which he mostly listened. He accomplished little, and returned a day earlier than planned to the U.N., where he handed the Security Council an unremarkable...
Secretary General U Thant somehow missed the cue. He could have won time and allowed tempers to cool by stalling on the removal or referring the Egyptian request to the Security Council. Instead, to almost everyone's astonishment, he used narrowly legal reasoning to order the U.N. troops pulled out -without even consulting the Security Council or the seven nations that contribute to the peace-keeping force. With that action, which was met with incredulity and dismay in Western capitals, Thant and the U.N. just about forfeited any effective peace-keeping role. Nasser himself may have been surprised...
Meanwhile, the air at home was filled with anxious talk of a wider war. U.N. Secretary General U Thant, neither the most impartial nor the most precise of observers, said that Viet Nam may prove to be "the initial phase of World War III." In the Senate, Republican Cooper feared that the U.S. may be approaching the "point where the last possibility for a peaceful settlement of the war will be foreclosed...
...years that Egyptian and Israeli troops had been in each other's gun sights, and it came at a time when the Arab-Israeli conflict, charged on both sides with the emotions of a holy war, had reached the flash point of hysteria. To U.N. Secretary General U Thant, the situation was "more menacing than at any time since the fall of 1956." At week's end he planned to fly to Cairo to try and ease the tensions...