Undiplomatic Memoirs : U.N. Insider Brian Urquhart Candidly Recalls 40 Years on the Power Circuit

Six years into what was otherwise an idyllic childhood in the British countryside, Brian Urquhart’s artist father hopped on his bicycle and rode away forever. Firmly refusing to acknowledge the abandonment, his mother took a job teaching in a girls’ school to make ends meet. Young Brian was enrolled there, the lone boy amid 200 girls.

Soon he was transferred to another school, a place straight out of Dickens. For recreation, the “elderly bachelor” headmaster, “who was, I now see, homosexual, sadistic and alcoholic,” had a penchant for beating his students.

Later there was Oxford, a magical place in those prewar years. But war came. Urquhart became a British intelligence officer, miraculously surviving a 1,200-foot fall from an unopened parachute. He locked horns with his superiors, vociferous in his opposition to the Arnheim operation that would cost 17,000 lives. In 1945 he became the second man recruited to a fledgling organization called the United Nations.

This is not, it is wise to point out at this juncture, the plot outline for a novel by Graham Greene. True, Brian Urquhart does have the thick, silvery hair assigned to all fictional diplomats, and his face--”like something out of an Egyptian tomb,” as he describes his own visage--is creased with the lines earned by a man whose idealism has weathered 40 years of global strife. He is at once colorful and learned, quoting freely from Sir Isaac Newton or the Old Testament. Urquhart is witty too, another requirement, it would seem, of the real or romanticized diplomat.

At 68, he is also opinionated, particularly about those world leaders with whom he has worked over the years.

One year after his retirement from his post as U.N. under secretary general, he has written a memoir, “A Life in Peace and War” (Harper & Row, $25), marked by strong views about many of his well-known colleagues in the world diplomatic corps.

Former U.N. Secretary General Kurt Waldheim, now the president of Austria, is a “living lie,” Urquhart writes, a man who “lacked the qualities of vision, integrity, inspiration and leadership that the U.N. so desperately needs.” Privately, Urquhart contends that Waldheim “duped” his fellow officers of the U.N. by concealing his record of service in Hitler’s army. “I don’t respect him,” Urquhart said. “What he did was completely outrageous. To tell lies like that, particularly since we all spent a great deal of time defending him on the basis of what we thought was his war record.”

‘Flat Lies Inexcusable’

Waldheim’s “greatest transgression,” Urquhart said, was “to tell flat lies. That is inexcusable.”

By contrast, Urquhart praises former U.N. Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold as “an exceptional man with a strong and independent sense of mission” whose “informality and modest manner concealed a strong and determined nature and an almost evangelical passion for his work.” His book, however, characterizes Hammarskjold as difficult, with “relentlessly high intellectual and ethical standards” that made him “intolerant of incompetence and impatient with slow or confused performance.”

Urquhart describes former U.S. representative to the U.N. Jeane Kirkpatrick as an “embattled defender of the faith, venturing out from (her) fortress in the U.S. mission mostly to do battle with the infidel, to chastise offenders and to worry about the loyalty of putative allies.” Kirkpatrick and her associates in the U.S. mission, Urquhart writes, “seemed to be more preoccupied with punishing reprehensible behavior or trying to score points off the Soviet Union.”

“She had a very fixed idea of what she was there for,” Urquhart said. Often, he added, that preconception led to an unfortunate kind of stridence.

“My view is that a great power has to conduct itself with a great deal of serenity and perspective,” Urquhart said in discussing his book. Even though “it is absolutely true that the whole U.S.-bashing business in the U.N. had gone much too far,” he said, “I don’t think it can afford to get upset if people say nasty things. I don’t think you can conduct a policy on that basis.”

Like his book, a conversation with Brian Urquhart is sprinkled with the great names of contemporary diplomatic history. Of Adlai Stevenson, President Kennedy’s U.N. delegate, Urquhart remembered, “he was a wonderful man and a charming man. I don’t know if he had the ruthlessness to be President.” Besides, Urquhart said, sometimes Stevenson was prone to inappropriate remarks.

“Perhaps because of his lack of rapport with the Kennedys, he too often seemed unsure of or sorry for himself and made lackluster wisecracks,” Urquhart said, “which did no credit to his view of his responsibilities.

Former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt was “absolutely amazing,” he said, a woman who had “an extraordinary capacity for presenting complex ideas in simple language.”

Ex-President Jimmy Carter: “In fact, his record on foreign policy has been excellent.” British Prime Minister Winston Churchill? “The interesting thing was that he remained a very comic man.” One-time Secretary General U Thant, in Urquhart’s view, was “completely untouched” by the self-importance Urquhart said plagues most public figures, and former U.N. Under Secretary General Ralph Bunche, about whom Urquhart is writing a second book, “never took himself too seriously either.”

“He was an extraordinary man,” Urquhart said. “He was a person of enormous integrity. He was imaginative, with a strong character, very down to earth. He took his job seriously, but not himself.”

But years of observing such peculiar interaction of human nature and international politics as the war in the Falkland Islands (“aptly described at the time,” in Urquhart’s opinion, “as two bald men fighting over a comb”) have convinced Urquhart that such modesty is rare. On the subject of “where and when egomania starts in public life,” he remarked, “there is a moment in the lives of most public figures when you suddenly realize they are addressing themselves, not the people they are supposed to be talking to or about.”

This condition, he has come to believe, “is irreversible. It’s a disease.”

Public Versus Private

Certainly, Urquhart said, “a certain degree of megalomania is required to keep you going along” in highly public capacities. In Urquhart’s case, however, he spent little time in the public eye. Envoys of many nations detoured to seek his insights high in the glass tower that houses the United Nations here. “I was a civil servant,” Urquhart said. “I was not supposed to be publicly prominent, and I would not have wanted to be. I think it is much more fun to do things, to get on with things.”

Urquhart writes that he was raised by a mother whose favorite word was worthwhile, a “moral criterion,” he explains, that she applied to “plants, books, entertainments and distractions of all sorts”--and certainly to one’s chosen career path. Convinced by the nightmare of World War II of the “essential pointlessness and idiocy of war,” Urquhart signed on with the infant United Nations determined that nothing could be more worthwhile than to prevent such disasters from ever occurring again.

“Most of the problems we got were the ones no one else could solve,” he said.

On the other hand, as Urquhart is fond of pointing out, solutions were not always possible, or even desirable.

American Optimism

“I don’t know when this thing crept in that all problems can be solved, and should be,” he said. His theory is that this notion “is a product of the immense American optimism generated by winning World War II.” These days, in the wake of this country’s defeat in Vietnam, and in the constant shadow of a nuclear menace: “I think we are all a little bit more humble now.”

Yet Urquhart’s experience as a negotiator--in the Congo, in Namibia, in Cyprus, Lebanon and elsewhere in the Middle East--has demonstrated to him that “the effort to solve problems is a very important element in trying to maintain some kind of stability.” He likens the negotiation process to “the stabilizers on a ship. They keep the thing upright, which is better than nothing.”

Even “if you do not succeed,” he said, “I think the effort to solve problems is extremely important. If everybody gives up, you automatically hand things over to the extreme.”

Crises surface and resurface, popping up around the planet like so many infectious conditions, Urquhart believes, “because people quickly forget the lessons they have learned.” Governments in particular, he declared, “have short memories.”

For a short time, “war clarifies everyone’s minds,” he said. “And then you go backward.”

Ensconced now in a comfortable position (and an equally commodious office) as scholar-in-residence at the Ford Foundation here, Urquhart said some of his former U.N. colleagues still “come pottering in here when they get exasperated” about complaints that only increase Urquhart’s concern that petty international differences and ideological disputes are detracting from the technological revolution he regards as the real issue of a world community facing a new century.

The effects of that technological revolution, he said, “are now sort of avalanching. There is no way that governments can cope with all the results of the technological revolution by themselves.”

Because “we have suddenly extended the borders of knowledge and technological information without really understanding it,” Urquhart said, “the greatest question of the last decade of this century is whether nature can maintain its balances.” In the face of the “tremendous strains we have put on it,” he wondered, “will nature be able to go on delivering the way it has delivered?”

To cope with this question, Urquhart added, nations “are going to have to clean up their little disputes, get rid of the residual problems and get down to the future. If we don’t do that, it will be a disaster.” And the future, he concluded, “shouldn’t be a disaster. It should be an opportunity.”

Availing himself of his own opportunity to pen his memoirs, Urquhart struggled so hard that his wife, the former Sidney Canfield of Walnut Creek, Calif., suggested he title the volume “Advise and Resent.” For the British edition, in fact, she offered up what became the jacket photo: a laugh picture she took of her husband holding a globe that had cracked down the center.

The image was entirely appropriate, Urquhart said. “Yes, quite.”