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9. It Takes Life to Love Life
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9 It Takes Life to Love Life S omething in Hammarskjöld’s year-end message offended his industrious Swedish gadfly, Herbert Tingsten. The classic photo of Tingsten—vide Wikipedia—makes him look like a heavy in a 1940s film noir, but that may be misleading. As editor-in-chief of a major newspaper, Dagens Nyheter, Tingsten could and did pursue Hammarskjöld throughout the UN years, all the while exchanging occasional letters with him and seeing him time and again in New York, as if all were well. Hammarskjöld read Tingsten’s columns, though they could infuriate him; he expected more support at home. But the rough treatment—we’ll see a key example—surely heightened his vigilance, and in that sense their unarmed, long-distance combat did no harm. In the early days of 1954 he sent Tingsten the letter we’ve read about American hypocrisy (see p. 148). There were other thoughts in it: Allow me to send you a personal New Year greeting, somewhat saltier than the one that has caused concern at the D. N. [Dagens Nyheter]. Lord knows there is not one day without “messages” or many weeks without “statements” from me. And it’s not easy to keep high standards. . . . The worst thing about the sentence quoted by the D. N. is that I meant what I said—and that it had a specific object, misunderstood by no one here. It was a matter of criticism, not of edification. I think you would understand that better after some time here. But apart from this, consider that a poor devil who has to preach every Sunday might prefer to express his feelings in the kind of forum available to you. A happy and pugnacious New Year!1 Hammarskjöld makes light of his role as the public voice and mind of the UN, but in reality he knew its importance and gave it his all. He turned down many opportunities—Andrew Cordier recorded that in his first year he received 120 invitations and accepted just 30—but there must have been almost always a talk in the works for either UN or public meetings.2 There was some speechwriting capability at his disposal , but I don’t detect other minds and hands in his talks about the 182 Hammarskjöld | A Life human condition and the need for community; they are all of a piece, all bear his stamp. The year 1954 was on the whole kind to him. As we’ll see, Markings reflects a quieter season, more green tea than strong coffee, until early December when a great diplomatic challenge suddenly appeared. Throughout the year he was working nonstop, but that had long been his style. To his brother Bo he described “a workday—without breaks—that normally goes from 9 a.m. to 1 o’clock at night and even more, and a constant demand for unheard-of concentration (and very thick skin).”3 In January through May, his desk calendar reflects innumerable meetings identified as “reorg”—the reorganization of the Secretariat and UN structure as a whole, set in motion the previous year.4 In the Middle East, he was unable in the early months of the year to bring Israel and Jordan together under mutually agreed conditions to reaffirm their armistice agreement, just as he was unable, owing to a Soviet veto in the Security Council, to provide an on-site engineering team to evaluate a controversial Israeli hydroelectric and irrigation project under way at the Jordan River despite Syrian opposition. Blocked by the Security Council decision, for the first but not last time he untangled the strands of the situation and decided to institute, for purposes of the Secretariat only, an engineering study that would provide him a basis for knowledgeable participation in debate and decision at some later point. This in-house study team even dispatched to the site an advisory group—again strictly for Secretariat purposes, but the gain in knowledge paralleled what could have been accomplished by a positive Security Council decision. It was a clever solution, and no one seemed to mind. On a larger scale, preparations were under way for a multinational conference at Geneva (April 26–July 20, 1954), intended to hammer out a political settlement for the two Koreas now that a cease-fire had been signed and to open discussion about restoring peace in Indochina. This was the era of the climactic battle at Dien Bien Phu between French...