World Policy Journal
Volume XX, No 3, Fall 2003

Remembering Ralph Bunche
Lawrence S. Finkelstein ^*

 

Diplomats, even those renowned in their lifetimes, are destined, it seems, to be forgotten by fickle publics. So it has proved with Ralph Bunche. In 1950, the year he won the Nobel Peace Prize, New York City gave him a ticker tape parade on Broadway. Today, he has faded from the memory of most. This unjustly forgotten Nobel Laureate deserves recognition more than anyone else for formulating the U.N. principles of peacekeeping. He also helped shape the United Nations Charter and negotiated the Israeli-Arab armistice lines that endured from 1948 until the Six-Day War in 1967. His biographer and longtime U.N. colleague, Brian Urquhart, called Bunche (who died in 1971) the most remarkable public servant he had known.

He left his mark at home as well as abroad. An African American, born a century ago in Detroit, Bunche was an early campaigner for civil rights and a principal collaborator with the eminent Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal in preparing the landmark study, The American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (1944).

It was this writer’s good fortune to have worked under Dr. Bunche when, as a civil servant in the State Department and the U.N. Secretariat, he was helping to plan the United Nations and then bringing it to life. Perhaps his most significant characteristic was his drive to excel. It was there from childhood, and he drove himself harder than anyone else. This seemingly inherent instinct was reinforced by the conviction that he could help his race by showing that a black man could be an achiever in a white society.

His stamina was phenomenal. His recollection of the first round of armistice negotiations between Israel and Egypt on the island of Rhodes illustrates the point. He told friends that conditions were primitive. The facilities of the Hotel des Roses were limited. The cuisine was execrable. At the final stage of negotiations, the participants were stretched to the limit. All suffered from dysentery, including himself. But, as he remarked, "I was the strongest. I outlasted them." He exercised his prerogative in chairing the meeting to keep all parties negotiating nonstop until they could no longer resist agreement. Thus, according to its recipient, was the Nobel Prize won. ¹

He was modest in demeanor and shunned ostentation. He wanted to turn down the prize, saying that those who served the United Nations did not do so for personal rewards. Secretary General Trygve Lie had to order him to accept because doing so would benefit the newborn organization. Dr. Bunche’s reluctance by no means meant that he felt insecure. He knew he had achieved a great deal and showed his pride in small ways. He would, for example, point to the gold UCLA basketballs adorning the chain attached to his vest—tokens of his place on the UCLA team that won the Southern Conference championship three years running.

He was loyal to his friends, to the institutions he served, and to his convictions. He believed in rules, but could bend them when required by his convictions. Thus, during the San Francisco Conference in 1945 at which the United Nations was launched, he surreptitiously passed to an Australian delegate the draft declaration of principles for governing dependent territories, classified "secret," that the U.S. delegation was not authorized to introduce. This draft in essence became Chapter XI of the U.N. Charter.

He was a tough and resilient negotiator. Once he reached a conclusion, he stood behind it stubbornly. Once, at a critical moment during a very tense international crisis, he said he knew he was doing the right thing because he was taking flak from both sides. His sense of humor, especially his ability to laugh at himself, proved a solvent for tension. He loved and enjoyed people, though he could be scathing in his private appraisals. He suffered stoically when differences divided him from treasured colleagues. He was a good talker and an excellent listener. The latter attribute was perhaps most important in explaining his success as a diplomat. He quickly grasped another negotiator’s bottom line, and showed extraordinary skill in phrasing the ideas that bridged the differences between opponents. He had no superiors as a diplomatic draftsman.

He kept secrets scrupulously. As a negotiator, he inspired trust and could be relied upon to keep his word. Brian Urquhart recalls that at one point after wresting agreement during Israeli-Arab truce negotiations, he remarked that he was about to destroy all notes of his confidential talks with contending delegates so that in the future none might be embarrassed. Although suffering spells of bitter depression when things were going badly, he was essentially an optimist. He believed throughout his career that the world could and would be a better place. He served his causes completely, at great cost to his always fragile health, despite contention with colleagues whom he respected, and notwithstanding the pain caused his family by the priority he gave to his humanitarian mission.

The Ladder Upward
First, last and always, Ralph Bunche saw himself as a Negro (the preferred term during his lifetime), proudly and without reservation. He was greatly influenced by his devoted grandmother Nana, whose pride in her identity provided a model for her grandson. He suffered from, and resented, racial segregation, and always sought to overcome it for "my group."

Young Ralph excelled as a student in Detroit, and then in Los Angeles, where his family moved in 1917. He graduated summa cum laude from UCLA and was class valedictorian; he had been a debater, a varsity athlete, and a contributor to the college newspaper, all the while working to earn his keep. After going on to graduate school at Harvard, he became in 1934 the university’s first African American to earn a Ph.D. in government, having written a prize-winning dissertation. Initially, he had proposed a thesis on the League of Nations and the suppression of slavery. Then he considered comparing Brazil’s multiracialism with America’s continued segregation. Finally, he settled on a thesis that contrasted France’s administration of two African territories: Dahomey, then an outright French possession, and neighboring Togoland, which France administered under a League of Nations mandate. His dissertation anticipated the themes—Africa, race, colonialism, and international organizations—that proved central to his career in the years that followed.

Further field studies in 1936–37, mainly in Africa, broadened his skills and strengthened his résumé. To prepare for his travels, he became the postdoctoral student of three leading anthropologists, Melville Herskovits at Northwestern University, Bronislaw Malinowski at the University of London, and Isaac Shapira at the University of Capetown. While in London, he met many Africans who were destined for leadership, among them Jomo Kenyatta, later to become Kenya’s first president, with whom he studied Swahili. Among Ralph Bunche’s legacies are 14,000 feet of film he shot in Africa with a camera lent to him by Eslanda Robeson, Paul Robeson’s wife. ²

His Harvard studies intermingled with a very different professional career as a faculty member at Howard University in Washington, D.C., beginning in 1928 after he received his M.A. from Harvard. He founded and chaired the political science department at the university. He wrote prolifically about race and civil rights, including A World View of Race (1936) and the four major studies he contributed to Myrdal’s American Dilemma. Howard’s cadre of leading black intellectuals not only provided stimulus to the young scholar but also inspired him to become a leading activist on these issues. In 1936, he co-founded the National Negro Congress, which grew out of a conference at Howard on "The Position of the Negro in the Present Economic Crisis."

It was his growing reputation as an Africanist and student of colonialism that prompted an invitation to join the U.S. government. He made the move because, unlike other black leaders, he believed that the European war and Nazism threatened African Americans as well other Americans. He thus accepted an offer to join the Office of Coordinator of Information as a senior civil service analyst in the Africa and Far East section. When OCI became the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in 1942, he was named chief of the Africa section in the research and analysis branch. Impressed by his work, senior State Department executives overcame resistance to the appointment of a black official and arranged his transfer to State’s postwar planning unit. He joined the U.S. delegations to a number of major conferences concerned with postwar international institutions. His performance in dealing with the issues of colonialism at the San Francisco Conference at which the United Nations Charter was approved led to his being recruited by the U.N. Secretariat in April 1946 as acting director of the Trusteeship Division. That December, he became a full-fledged international civil servant as the division’s director. Thereafter, he served the United Nations with total dedication almost until his death a quarter-century later.

Bunche’s job performance earned him appointment, which he did not relish, to the committee set up in 1947 to resolve the future status of Palestine. When the committee could not decide between partition and federation, he managed the remarkable feat of drafting proposals for each in the committee’s report to the General Assembly. What he learned then about the Middle East, and about how the United Nations worked, stood him in good stead when, with Count Folke Bernadotte, the U.N. mediator, he negotiated various Arab-Israeli truces in 1948. The truces required impartial supervision, and the task fell to Bunche, who without precedents to aid him, had to create the organization’s first peace-keeping operation, the U.N. Truce Supervision Organization, or UNTSO, which remains in operation to this day.

When the Swedish diplomat was assassinated in September 1948, Bunche became acting mediator. (But for an unforeseen delay that prevented Bunche from sharing the same vehicle in Jerusalem, both men might have been slain by a Jewish extremist opposed to partition). ³ He was thus in place to perform his Nobel Prize–winning feat of concluding armistices in 1949 between Israel and four of its Arab neighbors, in extended negotiations on the Island of Rhodes.

The Suez Crisis of 1956 required insertion of a multinational peacekeeping force as a buffer between Israel and Egypt. Bunche had a major role in creating and guiding UNEF, the United Nations Emergency Force, drawing on the guidelines already laid down for UNTSO. He also authored the "peacekeeping manual" used by the United Nations for decades. Until his death in 1971, he was the United Nations chief troubleshooter, a role he performed in Lebanon, Bahrain, the Congo, Cyprus, and Kashmir.

Ralph Bunche’s career was marked by breadth of vision. He fought for Negro rights, seeing them as universal human rights. He firmly believed that what he did for his race served America, and that his service to America was good for his race. He saw that peace was more than the avoidance of war. He stated his credo relatively early in his career, in 1942: "The real objective must always be the good life for all of the people...peace, bread, adequate clothing, education, good health and, above all, the right to walk with dignity on the world’s great boulevards." He worked with Eleanor Roosevelt on the revolutionary U.N. Declaration of Human Rights. He was always proudly an American who dreamed the American dream of democracy. He knew that as an international civil servant he served both his country and the world.

The world today sorely needs Ralph Bunche’s gifts, his worldview, his passion honed by tact, his intelligence informed by experience, his prestige at home and abroad, and his devotion to his favorite Scriptural passage: "They shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more." •

Notes

For further information on the Ralph Bunche Centenary Commemoration Committee, see www.RalphBuncheCentenary.org.

1. Author’s recollection of a conversation at Lake Success after Dr. Bunche’s return from Rhodes, sometime in 1949.

2. Some of that footage appears in A Black Scholar Investigates Colonialism, one of 14 modules based on the documentary film Ralph Bunche: An American Odyssey, produced by William Greaves and shown on the Public Broadcasting System.

3. Bunche recounted this episode in "The Psychology of Humanity: A Conversation with Ralph Bunche and Mary Harrington Hall," Psychology Today, April 1969, pp. 4–5; see also Brian Urquhart, Ralph Bunche: An American Life (New York: W. W. Norton, 1993), p. 178.

*Lawrence S. Finkelstein is retired from a career in government, U.N. and nongovernmental service, and academia. He is a founding member of the Ralph Bunche Centenary Commemoration Committee.