Adlai Stevenson and Our Times

Abstract

I first met Adlai Stevenson during the meetings of the United Nations Preparatory Commission in London in 1945. The purpose of this commission was to design the actual structure of the new world organization on the basis of the Charter that had been signed in San Francisco four months earlier. Stevenson was the deputy to Edward R. Stettinius, the former Secretary of State who became the first United States Ambassador to the UN, but there was little doubt about who actually did the work.

Sir Brian Urquhart was the second member of the United Nations Secretariat to be recruited and served as personal assistant to Gladwyn Jebb, the Executive Secretary of the United Nations Preparatory Commission, and to Trygve Lie, the first Secretary-General of the UN. He first met Adlai Stevenson, U.S. representative, during the UN preparatory meetings in London in 1945. From 1953 to 1971, he worked with Ralph Bunche on peacekeeping, conflict control and the peaceful uses of atomic energy. The period included the setting up, deployment and direction of the first UN peacekeeping force (UNEFI) in the Suez Canal Zone in 1956, and two periods of service in the Congo—in 1960 as chief assistant to Bunche, who was the head of the operation, and in 1961–62 as UN representative in Katanga. In 1972, Urquhart succeeded Ralph Bunche as UN Undersecretary-General for Special Political Affairs. He retired from the UN in 1986. Brian Urquhart was born in Dorset, England in 1919. He was educated at Westminster School and Christ Church, Oxford. He served in the British Army from 1939 to 1945 in infantry and airborne units in England, North Africa and Europe. Sir Urquhart’s books include: Hammerskjold (1972), a biography of the second UN Secretary-General, A Life in Peace and War (1987), memoirs, and Ralph Bunche: An American Odyssey (1993). He currently resides in New York City.