FDR and the Creation of the U.N.

In a sad way, the drama of this book has been snuffed out by current events. Historians Townsend Hoopes and Douglas Brinkley have put together a solid analysis of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's vision of four (the British persuaded him to add France and make it five) policemen ordering the world as permanent members of the Security Council, in a new global organization called the United Nations. If the book had been published four or five years ago, we would have had a sense of this vision fulfilled.

After the Persian Gulf War, U.N. diplomats and bureaucrats felt that the Security Council could, in fact, order the world. So long as the Big Five of the United States, Russia, Britain, France, and China agreed, the council could do anything. With cold war animosities gone, agreement could be reached more often than not. But then came Somalia, Bosnia, and the Clinton administrators decision to drastically downgrade the U.N. as an instrument of foreign policy.

Can there be any more pitiful example of U.N. impotence than its recent performance in Zaire? The U.N. did nothing to protect the Hutu refugees in its care from slaughter by Tutsi soldiers. In the last months of 1996, the Canadians were preparing to lead a U.N. force into Zaire to protect the refugees, but U.S. officials undermined the mission by insisting that almost all the refugees had already returned to Rwanda. Relief workers protested this claim, but by the time the evidence proved the official American contention wrong, all enthusiasm for a Canadian-led intervention had dissipated. If FDR's five policemen cannot even keep order in Zaire, where can they? As a result of the organization's present weakness, a reader comes to this account of the U.N.'s origins with a strong taste of regret. So little of its vision has been fulfilled.

Nonetheless, the history makes for an interesting read. Roosevelt, mindful of the humiliation of the League of Nations in the 1930s, wanted a strong U.N. that would use military power to put down aggression. He pushed his idea on his allies throughout World War II. Winston Churchill did not feel much like talking utopia while caught in terrible battle, but he did not want to offend his rich and powerful source of supplies and troops. Likewise, Stalin was far more concerned with battle than postwar planning, but he could see nothing wrong with Five Policemen, so long as he was one of them.

State Department planners filled in the details of Roosevelt's sketchy ideas, and this book makes it clear that the U.N. was organized along the lines set down by American bureaucrats. Like other U.N. historians, Hoopes and Brinkley assign major roles to Secretary of State Cordell Hull and his little-known aide, Leo Pasvolsky. The two authors do not go in much for personality portraits, not even of FDR, but they do a good job in their descriptions of Hull and his frustration over working for a president who belittled him.

The authors describe all the contentious issues: a veto for the Big Five on everything except a Security Council decision to discuss a matter, seats for the Ukraine and White Russia even though they were then no more independent of Moscow than New York and California were of Washington, a seat for Argentina despite its embrace of Hitler, the charter's inclusion of the right of countries or organizations like the Pan-American Union to defend themselves. Although Hoopes and Brinkley come up with only a few revelations about the U.N.'s origins -- I did not know, for example, that FDR wanted the Security Council to be headquartered on an island in the Azores -- all the essential sources are mined in this readable account.

STANLEY MEISLER, a foreign affairs writer with the Los Angeles Times, is the author of United Nations: The First Fifty Years.