A Shade of Difference (10 page)

He finds it difficult not to feel that this is, as Bob Munson remarked to him the other day with a surprising melancholy, a haunted autumn; indeed, a haunted era. “The weather’s too beautiful,” the Majority Leader had said; “I don’t trust it.” Whether there are valid grounds for this premonitory sadness, the President does not know; probably no more than at any time in the past decade or, if the world is so fortunate as to have one, the next decade. But he, too, cannot escape the frequently recurring feeling that things everywhere are moving toward some sort of climax, one that may come a month from now, a year, two years, a day, a minute: who knows? Ever since the last war the Russians have engaged in a relentless and unceasing campaign to push tensions everywhere to their absolute peak; and the human animal does not live forever under such conditions without an explosive release into violence—it is simply beyond human nature.

War may come, the President feels, for no other reason than that the Soviets have deliberately created so many tensions in so many places that there is nothing else that can logically happen except war; and he sighs again as he contemplates the possibilities of such a holocaust and wonders what, if anything, a man even in his position can do to stop it.

Sometimes he considers the struggling masses of the earth and it seems to him that their leaders are no more than chips on a tide, flung this way and that by the necessities of national security and self-interest and the pressures of the inarticulate yet insistent millions below. No sane man aware of the facts wants to destroy the world; but who, nowadays, is sane, and who has all the facts? Even he, on whom so many heavy responsibilities and desperate hopes devolve, often thinks that he possesses no greater light to see by than anyone else in the fitful darkness that rests upon the twentieth century.

Lost in such thoughts he does not realize for a moment that he has stopped with his sandwich halfway to his mouth and is staring blankly out at the Washington Monument, the river, and autumn-tawny Virginia beyond. Then he starts, gives his head a rueful shake, and bites firmly into the ham and lettuce sandwich sent up from the White House kitchen. He had asked for chicken, he recalls with an ironic smile: even here, the President is powerless to set the course. Like the rest of the world, he will take what the kitchen sends him and make the best of it.

He wonders if anyone else undergoes such prolonged and self-scarifying appraisals as he has found himself called upon to undertake since he entered the White House; and concludes that probably many do, though possibly none with quite the direct and agonizing personal involvement of the President.

“The buck stops here,” Harry Truman had put it, in a sign he kept on his desk. “I am all alone,” Harley’s own predecessor had remarked in a tone of absolute desolation, in a secret telephone call Harley had never told anyone about, on the morning after Brigham Anderson’s death. In a world of problems that range from men on the moon to the relatively minor yet important matter of a difficult member of the United States delegation at the UN, the President now realizes to the full the import of both these comments, at once curiously pathetic and deeply terrifying, on the office he now occupies.

As for the United Nations, which he has thus returned to in the course of his absent-minded and preoccupied lunching, he wonders how the session is going today and what Orrin will have to report when he calls in later. The Problem of Gorotoland is not a simple one either, filled as it is with implications of an argument with allies, and the President contemplates it with real misgivings. Trouble anywhere is sooner or later trouble for the United States in these times, and in the person of the M’Bulu of Mbuele he can sense all sorts of potentials for trouble. He thinks for a moment of putting in a call to the Secretary-General, just to get another point of view on the situation, but then abandons it for the time being. The S.-G. he considers a friend of his, they had enjoyed a warm and cordial talk when he addressed the opening session of the General Assembly—but the thought occurs to him that perhaps he should hold in reserve against a time of real need any further direct contact. It might be interpreted now as going behind Orrin’s back, and that would be most unfortunate. Nonetheless he wonders whether the Secretary-General, agent of an organization with such great potential capabilities but so little real power, is ever moved by such philosophizings as those which come to him who has so much real power as head of a state whose capabilities are felt wherever men live.

If he were to make the phone call, instead of abandoning it for a later day, he would find that the Secretary-General, sitting in his office on the thirty-eighth floor of the Secretariat building, is indeed filled with a comparable concern. He has changed the chaste decor left him by his predecessor—there is more color in the room and a livelier atmosphere in which to conduct negotiations—yet far below in the General Assembly Hall, the Security Council, the noisy lounges, and the bustling corridors, the rulers of earth remain as obdurate and contentious and far apart as ever.

For this, the S.-G. thinks moodily, he is not to blame, yet he cannot avoid feeling, as other idealistic men in his position have felt before him, that he bears a major responsibility. Like them, he has come into office to find his powers ill-defined, his duties circumscribed by the conflicting national interests of more than a hundred nations, and his office the focus for a constant tug of war between the Communist and non-Communist worlds. Indeed, he would not be here were it not for this constant conflict; and the fact that he is here, in and of itself automatically makes him almost impotent.

Remembering his election, outcome of two months of bitter struggle between East and West, the S.-G. sometimes wishes one of the other candidates had received sufficient votes: then at least the issue would be clear. But the East would not accept the West’s candidates, the West rejected those of the East. Finally his name had been mentioned, almost as an afterthought, by the British. Within two days sentiment in the lounges, the corridors, and the delegation headquarters scattered through midtown Manhattan had coalesced in his favor and he had been elected.
“Il n’est pas un Pape de Rome,”
Raoul Barre had commented to the prime minister of the Secretary-General’s country.
“Il est un Pape d’Avignon.”
And in truth, for ineffectualness and inability to do the things the salvation of the world so clearly demanded, he was.

For this state of affairs, he reflects, the Communists are largely responsible, for their constant attacks upon the office of the Secretary-General and their steady hammering at the morale of the Secretariat have inevitably, in time, begun to produce some of the results they desire. The attack begun by the late Chairman of the Council of Ministers during his raucous attendance at the Fifteenth General Assembly has borne its evil fruit and been continued by his successors. Now both the office of the Secretary-General and the Secretariat are closer to real impotence than they have ever been.

Even during the high point reached in the early stages of the crisis in the Congo, their powers and influence at best had not been very great; now they have declined to a sort of innocuous and ineffective housekeeping that not all the earnest editorials at the time of his election have been able to redress.

“It is with renewed hope,” the
New York
Times
had commented then, “that the world hails the election of a new Secretary-General. Now, if ever, the United Nations has a chance to halt the decline of recent years and climb back to the high plateau of goodwill and sound endeavor that men everywhere still hope to find in the world organization.”

Well, the hope had not been justified, because men everywhere did not hope to find the goodwill and sound endeavor so dutifully invoked by the
Times.
A
great many of them just hoped to find one more mechanism for their own unchanging plans for world conquest. And their campaign to reduce the United Nations to just such a mechanism has made ominous and steady strides ever since. Endless debates, endless arguments, endless demands for impossible concessions, disorderly sessions of the General Assembly, frivolous demands for special sessions of the Security Council—there is no limit to the vicious ingenuity with which they frustrate the decent hopes of mankind.

Now, he thinks as he goes into his private apartment off the office to see whether his heavy beard needs a quick shave before he goes down to lunch with Terence Ajkaje and the Soviet Ambassador in the Delegates’ Dining Room on the fourth floor, all is tenuous and uncertain and the future is dimmer than it has ever seemed, even in the great slab-sided glass monolith that houses the United Nations. “We fly on a wing and a prayer,” his American deputy had told a luncheon meeting of the United Nations Correspondents Association a week ago, “if we fly at all.”

Yet there is, he tells himself with a sort of angry hopelessness, such great potential for good in the flimsy shield, riddled with national self-interest and competing sovereign claims, which men erected in San Francisco in 1945 in one more desperately hopeful attempt to protect themselves against the dismal winds that howl down the reaches of history. Only yesterday he had stopped by the offices of the Technical Assistance Fund on the twenty-ninth floor and been shown proudly by its director an enormous map of the world with little colored pins scattered over the surface, each representing a UN mission. Sometimes the mission consisted of eight or ten people; sometimes, in the vast expanse of some desert nation or the steaming jungles of another’s almost impenetrable heartland, the pin would represent just one man—just one, for so many hundreds of thousands of square miles, so many millions of people. But it was a start—it was a start. Here and there in the darkness the UN was lighting little lights.

“Maybe a hundred years from now it will all add up to something,” he had remarked somewhat bitterly to the director, a doughty little Welshman grown gray in the service of the world organization.

“It is the hope in which we live,” the director had replied; and had added gravely, “In which we
have
to live.”

Technical assistance—the United Nations Children’s Fund—the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees—the United Nations Korean Reconstruction Agency—the United Nations High Commission for Refugees—the United Nations Emergency Force—the United Nations Special Fund—the Economic and Social Council—the Trusteeship Council—the Economic Commissions for Europe, Asia, and the Far East, Latin America and Africa—the United Nations Conciliation Commission for Palestine—the United Nations Advisory Commission on the Congo—the United Nations Refugee Assistance for South Africa—the United Nations this, the United Nations that—

It is a proud roll call, even if it does represent a defiance pathetically tiny of the forces that conspire to threaten humankind everywhere. At least, the Secretary-General thinks with an ironic grimness, you can get East-West agreement on stamping out malaria in the jungles, and on inoculating natives against yaws, and on teaching a peasant how to plow a straight furrow, and on building a dam here and there to protect the crops and generate power. Maybe that, in the long run, is a work of the United Nations far more hopeful and far more lasting than all the bitter political wrangles that go on in the Assembly and the Security Council. Here in Turtle Bay on the East River, in the sheer marble-and-green-glass shaft of the Secretariat, he is aware that dedicated people from all the races of man are working in the light of a fragile promise and a desperate hope. They are people as human, as imperfect, as subject to red tape and petty ambition and simple error as people everywhere, yet for the most part he has found them to be earnest and idealistic and devoted to the world organization and the good of humanity. He sometimes wishes that those who freely criticize the UN could know, as he knows, the patient, persistent, day-by-day work of the organization as it attempts, so doggedly and under such great handicaps, to push back the night that threatens to engulf the world. The night is so black and the light is so feeble. But it shines. That is the important thing: it shines.

And so, he thinks with an abrupt bitterness as he pauses for a moment to stare out his apartment’s glass wall at the steel and concrete crags of Manhattan that balance his office’s East River view over Brooklyn on the other side, one manages to convince oneself that it all adds up to something and really does encourage hope, and that the vicious political conflicts of the UN are really less important than its small, snail-like progressions in the area of social, economic, and human relations. One can almost persuade oneself that a Communist pounding on his desk to stop free debate, or an African sneering at a white man, or a white man bitterly denouncing another white man, can all be wiped out by sweetness and light in the Economic and Social Council or a tentative glow of compassion in the Children’s Fund. It would be nice to think so, but he knows the thought is not tenable for long. It is the fearful bitternesses that really matter; it is the terrifying divisions that really control man’s fate, not the temporary and tiny co-operations.

And here he knows, as any honest man must know, that the outlook is not promising and the future is not bright. Ever since Geneva the neutral states have been beating a path to his door. The burden of each has been essentially the same: Protect us.

“Protect you!” he had finally blown up at the smugly self-righteous representative of Ghana. “Protect you, when you did everything you could to subvert the Congo, and always try to play your own imperialist game in Africa! Why should I protect you, even if the Charter and the big powers gave me the authority to do it?”

The Ghanaian had been angrily resentful and accused him of being a lackey of the British; but the S.-G.’s barb had sunk home, and it had been fully justified. They all wanted to follow their own cheap, self-serving little ends, and then when the going got rough they wanted a man whose powers they had blandly connived to diminish to come running and help them out. When they get scared, he thinks, they turn tail fast enough; but it is almost too late for them to do so, because bit by bit they have helped to whittle away the always flimsy powers of his office until now it is an almost empty shell.