THE RIGHT BOOKS

“Old-timers at the UN,” Arieh Eilan writes, “describe the 38th session as ‘quiet and dull.’ It began, however, with a prominent non-event”—the shooting down by a Soviet fighter of Korean Air Lines Flight 007, referred to in not one of the three hundred resolutions offered by the General Assembly. The Soviet Union sailed through the 38th session like a cruise ship to Bermuda, though Foreign Minister Gromyko, clearly expecting heavy weather, declined at the last moment to embark.

This kind of behavior has come to be expected of the General Assembly, the debilitating boredom of which is relieved only by the scope it gives to, say, MacNelly, with his drawings of freaks wearing propeller-hats and sitting behind name-plates identifying them as the representatives of Bangthe-dish or Boreo-Boolaga. Nevertheless, as Eilan cautions, “As the endless debates in the seven main committees begin their repetitious routine on agenda items that have changed little in the last decade and a half, one becomes aware of something more menacing than boredom. One senses that what is under attack is the very essence of every political tradition that stems from the meeting of free men around the village well.” In The General Assembly: Can It Be Salvaged? (Heritage Foundation, 214 Massachusetts Avenue, N.E., Washington, D.C. 20002; $5.95), Eilan, former ambassador-at-large from Israel, reviews the multiple failures of this unsavory mob and suggests ways of bringing it to heel.

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Chilton Williamson Jr.

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“Old-timers at the UN,” Arieh Eilan writes, “describe the 38th session as ‘quiet and dull.’ It began, however, with a prominent non-event”—the shooting down by a Soviet fighter of Korean Air Lines Flight 007, referred to in not one of the three hundred resolutions offered by the General Assembly. The Soviet Union sailed through the 38th session like a cruise ship to Bermuda, though Foreign Minister Gromyko, clearly expecting heavy weather, declined at the last moment to embark.

This kind of behavior has come to be expected of the General Assembly, the debilitating boredom of which is relieved only by the scope it gives to, say, MacNelly, with his drawings of freaks wearing propeller-hats and sitting behind name-plates identifying them as the representatives of Bangthe-dish or Boreo-Boolaga. Nevertheless, as Eilan cautions, “As the endless debates in the seven main committees begin their repetitious routine on agenda items that have changed little in the last decade and a half, one becomes aware of something more menacing than boredom. One senses that what is under attack is the very essence of every political tradition that stems from the meeting of free men around the village well.” In The General Assembly: Can It Be Salvaged? (Heritage Foundation, 214 Massachusetts Avenue, N.E., Washington, D.C. 20002; $5.95), Eilan, former ambassador-at-large from Israel, reviews the multiple failures of this unsavory mob and suggests ways of bringing it to heel.