Previous U.N. Leaders: Performance Reviews

Boutros Boutros-Ghali is only the sixth U.N. secretary general in history. His predecessors also struggled with defining their roles.

Trygve Lie

Nationality: Norwegian

Term: 1946-53

Career: A former wrestler, Lie sat silently through the first three weeks that the Security Council met. Then he astounded and angered the ambassadors by presenting a memo on a Soviet-Iranian territorial dispute. They looked on him as a bureaucratic servant. But Lie persisted and established the principle that the secretary general is a major player on the world scene.

Dag Hammarskjold

Nationality: Swedish

Term: 1953-61

Career: He was selected because the Security Council regarded him as diffident, technocratic and cautious. But Hammarskjold became the most daring and imaginative leader the United Nations has ever had. His boldness, especially on the Congo crisis, frightened governments. The Big Five, while paying tribute to his greatness, have ever since shied away from appointing anyone so bold.

U Thant

Nationality: Burmese

Term: 1961-1971

Career: He has long been treated with disdain for heeding the demand of Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser and withdrawing U.N. peacekeeping troops from the Sinai in 1967, setting off the Six-Day War. Many Cold War events, such as the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 and the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, took place during his term, when the United Nations was regarded as hopelessly weak. U Thant was barely noticeable.

Kurt Waldheim

Nationality: Austrian

Term: 1972-1981

Career: Waldheim was always visible, constantly talking with the press, though never saying much. Brian Urquhart, who served four secretary generals, once described him as “an energetic, ambitious mediocrity.” The later disclosure of Waldheim’s war record with the Nazis, which he had concealed, was a major embarrassment to the world body.

Javier Perez de Cuellar

Nationality: Peruvian

Term: 1982-1991

Career: A cautious and longtime U.N. bureaucrat, Perez de Cuellar was the compromise candidate after the United States kept vetoing Salim Salim of Tanzania and the Chinese kept vetoing Waldheim. His term brought the Lebanon hostage crisis to an end and produced the first evidence--in Namibia and El Salvador--that, as the Cold War wound down, there was a new role for the world body. He helped pave the way for an activist United Nations.