U Thant has, in the West at any rate, been virtually written out of history. Very few people seem to remember his nobility of character, his integrity, or his courageous efforts over the Cuban missile crisis, the Vietnam War, and other international convulsions. His memoirs, which contain much original and interesting material, went virtually unreviewed and unnoticed. He is, in the popular Western memory, responsible for the 1967 war in the Middle East, a disaster which, virtually alone among world statesmen, he tried desperately to prevent. He proved on that occasion a useful scapegoat, but even so it is difficult to discern why such scant justice has been done to a decent, brave, and responsible man.
U Thant came to the Secretary-General's office at a catastrophic moment in the organization's history. The Secretary-General's authority to direct peacekeeping operations in critical situations had been challenged by the Soviet Union, and to a lesser extent by France, in a way which threatened to bring the work of the United Nations to a halt. This crisis was especially associated with the UN's Congo operation, but it also had deeper roots in perennial suspicions harbored by the Soviet Union, and also by de Gaulle, of any activity by the Secretary-General which was too independent or hinted at supranationalism. U Thant managed to pull the organization together and, by quiet but firm leadership, to bring it back onto a steady course at a time of storm and change.
U Thant was a devout Buddhist who had played an important role, as assistant and friend of U Nu, in Burma's accession to independence. For several years he had been Burma's Ambassador to the UN and was one of two people-Mongi Slim of Tunisia being the other-whom Hammarskjold had thought of as possible successors.
At first sight U Thant appeared emotionless and moon-faced, and he was, by Western standards, in some ways rather simple-minded. He enjoyed, for example, excruciating schoolboy jokes in which he had laboriously become word-perfect. His approach to issues was also simple. He had strong views of right and wrong. If he took advice, he followed it and took complete responsibility for his actions, regardless of their outcome. He accepted success and failure as part of life and was remarkably free of the desire to take credit, to justify himself, or to blame others when things went wrong.
All of this, and his strong Buddhist self-discipline, concealed his emotions and the irritation and frustration he must often, as Secretary General, have felt. He never lost his temper. In moments of unusual stress he would go so far as to tap his foot rhythmically, but his emotions were disciplined and turned inwards. He was a martyr to ulcers and other stress ailments in his last years.
U Thant's moral sense overrode his political sense and caused him to do what he believed right, even if it was politically disadvantageous to him. His stewardship had none of the flair or high personal style of Hammarskjold, but his undertakings were just as courageous. He regarded the Vietnam War as a moral, and to some extent even a racial, issue, and was appalled at the almost casual toll of Vietnamese as well as American lives. He doggedly pursued his efforts to find a way to end it long after the resentment of President Lyndon Johnson and Secretary of State Dean Rusk was publicly evident and they had rejected his proposal for talks in Rangoon which North Vietnam had already accepted. Dean Rusk, in a patronizing and sarcastic public speech which the subsequent tragedy in Vietnam renders even more grotesque, implied that in his efforts over Vietnam U Thant was working for the Nobel Peace Prize. It would have been hard to make a more vulgar or erroneous judgment of U Thant's character, or indeed a more foolish dismissal of a possible opportunity to reach an early end to the tragedy of Indochina. Ironically, U Thant's line of approach to ending the Vietnam War was taken up with ultimate success, four years and hundreds of thousands of casualties later, by Henry Kissinger.
U Thant showed courage and firmness in the Cuban missile crisis, the India-Pakistan war of 1965, the Bangladesh crisis, and on many other occasions. He spoke his mind quietly and unpretentiously, his words often being much stronger than his tone. When he called Tshombe and his associates a "bunch of clowns," or told the Soviet public, on Moscow Radio, that the Soviet people were misinformed about the Congo, he meant it.
He was addicted to strong cigars, especially Burmese cheroots, and strong sauces, including a knockout Burmese concoction made of dried fish which seemed to chime his complexion. I worked with him closely and became very fond of him. I wrote the bulk of his political speeches and reports.
U Thant was a family man and liked to go home at the end of the working day and read. He was an omnivorous reader of newspapers and journals. He was not involved in the social or artistic life of New York, which held no interest for him, nor he for it. He traveled far less than other Secretaries-General. He was very quiet, unobtrusive, and unostentatious.
From A Life In Peace and War. Copyright 1987 by Sir Brian Urquhart, published by HarperCollins, New York. Reprinted by Permission.
