The Last Best Hope at Forty

The fortieth anniversary of the United Nations is upon us, and I decided a few weeks ago, in the closing days of Jeane Kirkpatrick’s tenure as our ambassador, to honor the occasion by visiting the United Nations’ New York headquarters. For good measure, it turned out to be International Youth Year, and the final year of the Decade of Equality for Women. With no little sense of awe I made my way into the General Assembly building and past the Meditation Room—its “altar” is a massive block of iron ore, no doubt donated by Sweden—and soon enough I found myself at a people’s checkpoint, where I was required to surrender my driver’s license for the duration of my visit.

On to the Public Information Department. As part of the overall charade called “World Peace,” a number of UN employees seemed to be playing a subsidiary game called “Newspaper.” All around me was an extraordinary quantity of press releases and a forbidding array of UN documents (“UNDRO News,” “UNCTAD Bulletin”), with chaps coming out of cubbyholes every few minutes to replace old press releases with new ones—Assembly Plenary take 7, for example, incorporating some fresh-off-the-press comments by the delegate from the Ukraine. (“Aggressive activities of the imperialists,” he advised, were “diverting vast sums into the arms race.”)

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Tom Bethell

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The fortieth anniversary of the United Nations is upon us, and I decided a few weeks ago, in the closing days of Jeane Kirkpatrick’s tenure as our ambassador, to honor the occasion by visiting the United Nations’ New York headquarters. For good measure, it turned out to be International Youth Year, and the final year of the Decade of Equality for Women. With no little sense of awe I made my way into the General Assembly building and past the Meditation Room—its “altar” is a massive block of iron ore, no doubt donated by Sweden—and soon enough I found myself at a people’s checkpoint, where I was required to surrender my driver’s license for the duration of my visit.

On to the Public Information Department. As part of the overall charade called “World Peace,” a number of UN employees seemed to be playing a subsidiary game called “Newspaper.” All around me was an extraordinary quantity of press releases and a forbidding array of UN documents (“UNDRO News,” “UNCTAD Bulletin”), with chaps coming out of cubbyholes every few minutes to replace old press releases with new ones—Assembly Plenary take 7, for example, incorporating some fresh-off-the-press comments by the delegate from the Ukraine. (“Aggressive activities of the imperialists,” he advised, were “diverting vast sums into the arms race.”)