Hammarskjöld: A Life

14. Face the Cold Winds

14 Face the Cold Winds “I think the United Nations should face the cold winds of the day,” he said to the UN press corps at one of their luncheons.1 When Hammarskjöld returned to New York from Cambridge, cold winds were blowing. The situation suddenly facing him seemed like a Suez Crisis in the making with Middle Eastern nations in conflict and jeopardy, soon a murderous coup, abrupt Western military interventions, Soviet threats, a deadlocked Security Council, and an emergency session of the General Assembly. But the Lebanon-Jordan crisis was short lived; by late autumn it had passed. A resourceful exercise in diplomacy in the General Assembly by many, by Hammarskjöld, and among the Arab member nations generated solutions that all could accept with a certain pride of workmanship. One lasting outcome was elegant: a new, modest, but effective UN presence in the region, and on that model soon in other regions of the world. Hammarskjöld worked tirelessly toward this happy dénouement. If we take time to follow this story in some detail, it is not so much for the sake of its baroque plotline as it is to know the context in which Hammarskjöld devised a new peacekeeping strategy. The situation was dangerous, although from his perspective as a veteran of conflicts in the Middle East, it was also familiar and grimly amusing: “As you can imagine,” he wrote to Lindegren in midsummer, “I’m living altogether in an ongoing robbers’ drama, with strong elements of Gilbert and Sullivan but also of Grand Guignol: this sounds entertaining, and it would have been entertaining were it not for the risk that it all end with Götterdämmerung.”2 Grand Guignol was a Parisian theater, shuttered in the early 1960s but famous in its time for elaborately bloody melodramas, precursors of the horror film. The Lebanon-Jordan crisis also, and more mildly, resembled a handheld board game popular in Hammarskjöld’s era in which one space in a grid was open, all others occupied by sliding squares numbered from one to thirty or so in random order. The goal was to slide squares in all directions around the open space to put the numbers in order. It took patience and flanking maneuvers to succeed, and you had to keep an eye on the whole board to move strays to their proper places. Something like 352 Hammarskjöld | A Life this happened in the Middle East: there was little room for maneuver, but enough. The crucial difference between the crisis and the game is that each square was a nation, political leader or faction, or outside force such as the United Nations, and some had no idea they were allocated just one square. In earlier years Lebanon had enough tranquility, and has always been beautiful enough, to project in other parts of the world a dream of many races and religions living in harmony in a pleasant place beside the sea. Khalil Gibran, the Lebanese American poet, would write of “temples roofed with dreams” in his native land. That dream of quiet polity was shaken in 1958 by a domestic conflict between Camille Chamoun, a Christian president seeking a constitutional change to permit him to stand for reelection, and an increasingly militant, predominantly Muslim opposition encouraged by Nasser’s Pan-Arabism and alleged to be supplied with arms by neighboring Syria. Since February of that year, Syria had formed a new combined nation with Egypt, the United Arab Republic (UAR), which gave political form to Nasser’s growing influence to the north. As the president of a UN member nation, Chamoun filed a complaint with the Security Council on May 22nd, claiming UAR interference in Lebanon’s domestic affairs and a threat to peace in the region. The Council took up the topic on June 6th, with Hammarskjöld deeply engaged both at the conference table and privately with delegations. A resolution adopted on June 11th instructed the secretary-general, as he wished, “to dispatch urgently an observation group” to Lebanon with the mission of verifying along the Lebanese-Syrian border whether arms, personnel, or other supplies were being clandestinely slipped into Lebanon to strengthen the opposition National Front, which controlled much of the border territory.3 The group was to document incursions, report to the UN, and thereby alert world public opinion. As his chief of staff, Andrew Cordier, was already on the way to the Middle East, Hammarskj öld managed to...