The Week

The odds against anyone writing an interesting still less an amusing, book about the United Nations are very heavy. This increasingly ridiculous institution lumbers on, producing vast quantities of words, written and spoken, and is only not an object of universal derision because most people, wisely, just take no account of it at all. Nonetheless, William F. Buckley Jr. has pulled it off; his United Nations Journal is both enlightening as an account of how the U.N. works, and a pleasure to read. Of course, he started with an intrinsically funny situation, viz. his own appointment to the seat sanctified by Eleanor Roosevelt, adorned by Marietta Tree, and graced, or if you like embellished, by Daniel Patrick Moynihan-the U.S. representative on the Human Rights Committee. Could any succession to these worthies seem less appropriate than Buckley? Has anyone ever been a more bizarre champion of human rights, which anyway, as Buckley would be the first to agree, don’t exist, and if they did could not possibly be sustained by the U.N., a majority of whose members flagrantly disregard all rights, human and other, and not a single one of whom could with hand on heart claim to observe them as stated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted and proclaimed by the General Assembly on December 10, 1948.

Buckley obligingly provides the text of the Universal

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William F. Buckley Jr.

The odds against anyone writing an interesting still less an amusing, book about the United Nations are very heavy. This increasingly ridiculous institution lumbers on, producing vast quantities of words, written and spoken, and is only not an object of universal derision because most people, wisely, just take no account of it at all. Nonetheless, William F. Buckley Jr. has pulled it off; his United Nations Journal is both enlightening as an account of how the U.N. works, and a pleasure to read. Of course, he started with an intrinsically funny situation, viz. his own appointment to the seat sanctified by Eleanor Roosevelt, adorned by Marietta Tree, and graced, or if you like embellished, by Daniel Patrick Moynihan-the U.S. representative on the Human Rights Committee. Could any succession to these worthies seem less appropriate than Buckley? Has anyone ever been a more bizarre champion of human rights, which anyway, as Buckley would be the first to agree, don’t exist, and if they did could not possibly be sustained by the U.N., a majority of whose members flagrantly disregard all rights, human and other, and not a single one of whom could with hand on heart claim to observe them as stated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted and proclaimed by the General Assembly on December 10, 1948.

Buckley obligingly provides the text of the Universal