50 Years Ago, Hopes Soared as U.N. Began Life

In 1945, when Sens. Tom Connally and Arthur Vandenberg left Washington to serve as delegates to the San Francisco conference that created the United Nations, their colleagues could not contain their enthusiasm.

Democrats and Republicans applauded lustily, hugged the two senators and wished them well. It was “a sudden stirring of emotions such as the staid old chamber had seldom witnessed,” Vandenberg wrote in his diary.

Now, as San Francisco celebrates today’s 50th anniversary of the signing of the U.N. Charter, Congress is in a surly mood about the United Nations. Republicans who control both the Senate and the House want to slash U.N. funding and limit its ventures.

Hopes that the anniversary would provide a time for self-congratulation and excited planning have been dashed by peacekeeping failures in Somalia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. Instead, a defensive, unsettled feeling prevails at the United Nations, powered partly by anger over the world body’s use as a scapegoat, partly by fear over what Congress might do.

Academics and public-spirited citizens are proposing a host of changes for the United Nations in its second 50 years. Only last week, both a Ford Foundation committee and a European-based commission recommended creating a U.N. rapid-reaction force consisting of 10,000 volunteers who could rush to global trouble spots.

But U.S. lawmakers have always resisted financial support for a standing U.N. force under the direction of the secretary general.

And in the wake of the United Nations’ recent travails, Congress is looking to pare back, not expand, the organization. Its annual peacekeeping price tag has reached $4.1 billion, and the United States foots the bill for 31% of it. Meanwhile, costs are rising dramatically.

San Francisco will try to recapture some of the old atmosphere when President Clinton and U.N. Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali join the commemoration in the same opera house where the U.N. Charter was signed half a century ago.

A Formidable Task

City officials face a formidable task. The almost naive enthusiasm with which Americans regarded the United Nations in 1945 has given way to a more skeptical--some would call it merely realistic--view of what the world body can accomplish.

When the conference opened April 25, 1945, San Francisco was still on a wartime footing. Although the war in Europe was winding down and would end in less than two weeks, war continued to rage in the Pacific. It was a year of earthshaking events, and the San Francisco conference had to share headlines with the Yalta conference, the death of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the victory over Adolf Hitler, the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the surrender of Japan.

“The conference didn’t seem like such a big deal because the war with Japan was not over,” recalled Times Washington correspondent Ronald J. Ostrow, who as a 13-year-old Boy Scout ran messages to the American delegates. “The thing we really focused on in San Francisco was the war with Japan. I would wake every morning to whuuup-whuuup whuuup-whuuup --the sound of the heavy steel anti-submarine nets opening to let a ship into the bay. And there were still antiaircraft guns on Marina Boulevard.”

The impetus to create the United Nations came largely from Roosevelt, who died two weeks before the San Francisco conference opened. The President had long planned on a powerful international organization after the war to replace the toothless League of Nations. He explained to reporters what he had in mind: If an aggressor “started to run amok and seeks to grab territory or invade its neighbors,” the new international organization “would stop them before they got started.”

Minutes after Harry S. Truman was sworn in as President on April 12 upon Roosevelt’s death, White House Press Secretary Steve Early told him that reporters wanted to know if the San Francisco conference was to take place as scheduled.

“I said it most certainly was,” Truman recalled later. “I said it was what Roosevelt wanted and it had to take place if we were going to keep the peace. And that’s the first decision I made as President of the United States.”

A few weeks before the conference opened, the Soviet Union shocked Washington by announcing that Foreign Minister Vyacheslav M. Molotov was too busy to attend. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill called this obvious downgrading of the conference “a grimace” that “leaves a bad impression on me.” After Roosevelt died, however, Soviet leader Josef Stalin relented and agreed to send Molotov as a gesture to the President’s memory.

An army of outsiders from 50 countries descended on San Francisco for the conference: 1,726 delegates and assistants, 1,058 international civil servants acting as the conference’s secretariat, 2,636 newspaper and radio reporters and a support staff of 4,500, including telephone and telegraph operators and many volunteers.

In addition to Molotov, the delegations were headed by such well-known statesmen as Secretary of State Edward R. Stettinius Jr., British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, Canadian Prime Minister Mackenzie King, Czech Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk and South African Prime Minister Jan Christian Smuts.

Hiss a Key Official

State Department official Alger Hiss, who would be convicted five years later of perjury in one of the most sensational spy trials of the era, served as secretary general of the conference. That put him in charge of the secretariat that produced the drafts of the charter for approval by the delegates.

The U.S. delegation had two young staff members who would generate headlines on their own in a few years: Adlai E. Stevenson III, the future Democratic presidential candidate and U.N. ambassador, who briefed the American press, and Ralph Bunche, the future U.N. undersecretary general and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, who advised the delegates about African colonial issues and the old League of Nations mandates.

After the opening session of the conference, Bunche wrote his wife, “I did feel a bit proud this afternoon at being the only Negro who sat on the first floor.”

The international secretariat included Claiborne Pell, a young U.S. Coast Guard officer whose father had been the chief American diplomat in Lisbon during the war. Pell, a senator from Rhode Island for the past 34 years, is now the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. “I think I’m the only one who worked at the conference who is still in public service,” he said recently.

Pell labored in San Francisco over the drafts for Article 43 of the U.N. Charter, which obligates members to provide military forces when needed.

Interviewed in the Capitol, the 76-year-old Pell pulled a copy of the charter from his pocket and pointed to the article. “I usually carry one with me,” he said, holding up the small blue booklet. While he does not remember the day-to-day details of the conference, he said, he can still feel the impact of “the tremendously creative climate.”

The conference for the most part proceeded smoothly because most issues had already been ironed out by the United States, Britain and France at the Dumbarton Oaks conference in Washington in the summer of 1944 and at the summit of Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin in the Black Sea port of Yalta in January, 1945.

But a sour note marred the San Francisco meeting’s opening. Roosevelt had agreed to let the Soviet Union have two extra seats (ostensibly for Ukraine and White Russia), but several Latin American countries said they would not vote for Ukraine and White Russia unless Argentina was accepted as well.

That was a nettlesome issue. The fascist-like Argentine government had traded with Hitler for years and had not declared war on the Axis powers until two months before the San Francisco conference opened. The United States did not want to reward this apostate, but it gave in as the only feasible way to avoid a clash with the Soviet Union.

The conference almost collapsed on the issue of a veto in the United Nations’ decision-making Security Council. Both the United States and the Soviet Union insisted on a veto. The Americans were sure the Senate would never ratify a U.N. treaty if it felt the organization could force the United States to act against its will. But the Soviets insisted on the right to stop the Security Council from even discussing a matter that offended them. This was too much of a veto for the Americans.

“We all knew that we had reached the ‘zero hour’ of this great adventure,” Vandenberg, a Republican from Michigan, wrote in his diary. “With what seemed to be finality, the Soviets said they could not accept our proposal for ‘free discussion.’ We all knew that none of the rest of us can accept the Soviet view. Did it mean the immediate breakup of the conference? Did it mean going on to a charter without Russia?”

By mid-May, the impasse was so great that Eden and Molotov returned home.

Stalin Puzzled

In desperation, Truman asked Harry Hopkins, once Roosevelt’s closest aide, to leave his sickbed and fly to Moscow. Truman instructed Hopkins to “make it clear to Uncle Joe Stalin that I knew what I wanted--and that I intend to get peace for the world for at least 90 years.”

In the discussions in Moscow, Stalin seemed puzzled by all the fuss. He told Molotov in front of Hopkins that the dispute sounded like “an insignificant matter.” The Soviet leader then accepted the U.S. position: The Security Council would have the right to discuss any conflict, but the Big Five members--the United States, Russia, Britain, France and China--could veto any resolution. The Soviet back-down saved the conference.

In San Francisco, some smaller nations, still fretting about the veto, tried to further limit its use. But Connally, a Texas Democrat, lectured those delegates: “You may go home from San Francisco, if you wish, and report that you have defeated the veto. . . . But you can also say, ‘We tore up the charter.’ ”

He then held up a copy of a draft of the charter and tore it into little pieces. The histrionics carried the day; the challenge to the veto wilted.

Charter Approved

On June 25, 1945, the chiefs of the 50 delegations unanimously approved the U.N. Charter, including the preamble written by the American poet Archibald MacLeish that begins: “We the peoples of the United Nations, determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind. . . .”

The actual signing of the charter took two days, with the Americans going last.

Truman personally delivered the charter to the Senate the next week. “The choice before the Senate . . . is not between this charter and something else,” Truman said. “It is between this charter and no charter at all.”

The Senate had humiliated President Woodrow Wilson and rejected membership in the League of Nations after World War I. But history would not repeat itself.

The Senate ratified the charter by a vote of 89 to 2. Five senators were absent. Following the procedure set down in Article 110, the charter came into force when the Big Five nations and a majority of the others deposited their formal instruments of ratification with the U.S. secretary of state. That moment was reached Oct. 24, 1945, a day the United Nations now celebrates as its birthday.

The United Nations now has 185 members, and the leaders of all have been invited to U.N. headquarters in New York for a massive 50th birthday party.

But if the United Nations was born in New York, it was conceived in San Francisco four months earlier.