[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 109 (Friday, June 30, 1995)]
[Senate]
[Pages S9577-S9578]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


                   SENATOR PELL AND THE U.N. CHARTER

 Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, last weekend I was honored to 
have participated in the ceremonies in San Francisco commemorating the 
50th anniversary of the signing of the U.N. Charter. The event was an 
important reaffirmation of the commitment of member nations to abide by 
the rule of law.
  The ceremonies were enriched by the participation of those who had 
participated in the conference 50 years ago. We in the Senate are 
honored to have the beloved former chairman of the Senate Foreign 
Relations Committee, Claiborne Pell, counted among those who were 
``Present at the Creation'' of the Charter.
  Senator Pell served throughout World War II in the Coast Guard. He 
continued to serve his country, as he has all his life, when he was 
called to be a member of the International Secretariat of the San 
Francisco Conference, as it worked to draft the Charter. Senator Pell 
served as the Assistant Secretary of Committee III, the Enforcement 
Arrangements Committee, and worked specifically on what became articles 
43, 44, and 45 of the Charter.
  In an article in the New York Times by Barbara Crossette, Senator 
Pell recalls the trip to San Francisco:

       It started out just right, he recalled in a recent 
     conversation in his Senate office. Instead of flying us to 
     San Francisco, they chartered a train across the United 
     States.
       You could see the eyes of all those people who had been in 
     wartorn Europe boggle as we passed the wheat fields, the 
     factories, he said. You could feel the richness, the clean 
     air of the United States. It was a wonderful image. We shared 
     a spirit, a belief, that we would never make the same 
     mistakes; everything would now be done differently.

  Senator Pell's commitment to the Charter was properly noted by the 
President, when during his address in San Francisco on Monday, he 
stated ``Some of those who worked at the historic conference are still 
here today, including our own Senator Claiborne Pell, who to this very 
day, every day, carries a copy of the U.N. Charter in his pocket.''
  On Sunday, the Washington Post carried an article by William Branigin 
on the drafting of the Charter. I ask that it be printed in the Record.
  The article follows:
               [From the Washington Post, June 25, 1995]

  U.N.: 50 Years Fending Off WWIII--Charter Forged in Heat of Battle 
                   Proves Durable, as Do Its Critics

                         (By William Branigin)

       United Nations.--It was the eve of her first speech before 
     the 1945 organizing conference of the United Nations, and 
     Minerva Bernardino was eager to seize the opportunity to push 
     for women's rights. Then, while serving drinks to fellow 
     delegates in her San Francisco hotel suite, she fell and 
     broke her ankle.
       For the determined diplomat from the Dominican Republic, 
     however, nothing was more important than delivering her 
     speech. So after being rushed to the hospital in an 
     ambulance, she refused a cast, had doctors tape up her ankle 
     instead and enlisted colleagues the next day to help her 
     hobble to the podium.
       Bernardino, 88, is one of four surviving signatories of the 
     U.N. Charter, which was hammered out during the two-month 
     conference by representatives from 50 nations and signed in 
     San Francisco on June 26, 1945. With a handful of other women 
     delegates, she claims credit for the charter's reference to 
     ``equal rights of men and women.''
       Just as she witnessed the birth of the United Nations that 
     day in the presence of President Harry S. Truman, Bernardino 
     plans to be in the audience Monday when President Clinton 
     caps the 50th birthday ceremonies with a speech at San 
     Francisco's War Memorial Opera House, scene of the historic 
     conference. Truman, whose first decision after taking office 
     in April 1945 was to go ahead with the conference, had flown 
     to San Francisco to carry the charter back to Washington for 
     ratification by the Senate.
       Gathering for the anniversary are envoys from more than 100 
     countries, senior U.N. officials led by Secretary General 
     Boutros Boutros-Ghali, Britain's Princess Margaret and 
     several Nobel peace prize laureates, including Polish 
     President Lech Walesa and South Africa's Archbishop Desmond 
     Tutu.
       In creating the United nations 50 years ago, the more than 
     1,700 delegates and their assistants were driven by the 
     horror of a war that had cost an estimated 45 million lives. 
     Among the founders were prominent diplomats: Vyacheslav 
     Molotov and Andrei Gromyko of the Soviet Union, Edward R. 
     Stettinius of the United States and Anthony Eden of Britain. 
     The sole surviving U.S. signatory is Harold Stassen, the 
     former Republican governor of Minnesota and presidential 
     aspirant, now 88.
       The leading conference organizer was its secretary general, 
     Alger Hiss, then a rising star in the State Department. He 
     later spent four years in prison for perjury in a 
     controversial spy case that launched the political ascent of 
     Richard M. Nixon. Now 90, in poor health and nearly blind, 
     Hiss has been invited to the commemoration but is unable to 
     attend.
       ``We had a sense of creation and exhilaration,'' said Sen. 
     Claiborne Pell (D-R.I.), who was then a young Coast Guard 
     officer attached to the conference's secretariat. World War 
     II was drawing to a close, and the assembled delegates were 
     determined to put into practice their lofty ideals of a 
     peaceful new world order.
       As the United Nations celebrates its golden anniversary, 
     however, the world body seems to be under criticism as never 
     before. The credibility it gained after the end of the Cold 
     War and its role in the Persian Gulf conflict seem to have 
     been largely squandered by debacles in Somalia, Angola and 
     Bosnia, by its tardy response to carnage in Rwanda and by its 
     inability so far to undertake serious internal reforms.
       From relatively lean beginnings with 1,500 staffers, the 
     United Nations has burgeoned into a far-flung bureaucracy 
     with more than 50,000 employees, plus thousands of 
     consultants. In many areas, critics say, it has become a talk 
     shop and paper mill plagued by waste, mismanagement, 
     patronage and inertia.
       Although most Americans strongly support the United 
     Nations, a ``hard core of opposition'' to the body appears to 
     be growing, according to a new poll by the Times Mirror 
     Center for the People and the Press. It showed that 67 
     percent of Americans hold a favorable attitude toward the 
     United Nations, compared to 53 percent for Congress and 43 
     percent accorded the court system.
       However, the poll showed, 28 percent expressed a ``mostly'' 
     or ``very'' unfavorable opinion of the United Nations, the 
     highest of four such polls since 1990.
       In fact, after the demise of the ``red menace'' with the 
     end of the Cold War, the organization seems to have become 
     something of a lightning rod for extreme right-wing groups, 
     which see it as part of a plot to form a global government.
       For the United Nations, the 50th birthday bash is an 
     opportunity to trumpet a list of achievements. To celebrate 
     the occasion, the organization is spending $15 million, which 
     it says comes entirely from voluntary contributions.
       Over the years, U.N. officials point out, the world body 
     and its agencies have performed dangerous peacekeeping 
     missions, promoted decolonization, assisted refugees and 
     disaster victims, helped eradicate smallpox, brought aid and 
     services to impoverished countries and won five Nobel peace 
     prizes.
       At the same time, the anniversary is focusing attention on 
     the organization's shortcomings and on efforts to chart a new 
     course for its future. Among the proposals in a recent study 
     funded by the Ford Foundation, for example, are expanding the 
     Security Council, curtailing veto powers, establishing a 
     permanent U.N. armed force and creating an international 
     taxation system to help finance the organization.

[[Page S9578]]

       As the United Nations has expanded, some of its agencies 
     have lost their focus and become bogged down in tasks that 
     duplicate efforts elsewhere in the system or serve little 
     purpose but to employ bureaucrats, critics charge. Meanwhile, 
     financing problems have grown acute, especially with the 
     explosion in recent years of expenses for peacekeeping, a 
     function that was not specifically spelled out in the 
     original charter.
       The U.N. peacekeeping budget this year bulged to $3.5 
     billion, far exceeding the regular U.N. budget of $2.6 
     billion. Moreover, several countries, including the United 
     States, owe U.N. dues totaling hundreds of millions of 
     dollars. Unpaid peacekeeping dues for Bosnia alone come to 
     $900 million.
       The Bosnian quagmire has underscored the limits of U.N. 
     peacekeeping. Critics, notably in the U.S. Congress, have 
     tended to blame U.N. bureaucrats for the mess, while U.N. 
     officials say the operation exemplifies a penchant by member 
     states for setting heavy new mandates without providing the 
     resources to carry them out.
       ``Member countries should take advantage of the 50th 
     anniversary to really look hard at the U.N. and to revise and 
     strengthen it,'' said Catherine Gwin of the Washington-based 
     Overseas Development Council. ``Increased demands are being 
     made on an organization that has been neglected, misused and 
     excessively politicized by its member governments for years, 
     and it is showing the strain.''
       As the United Nations has expanded, forming entities that 
     deal with topics from outer space to seabeds, the original 
     purpose often has been overlooked. That is, as the U.N. 
     Charter's preamble states, ``to save succeeding generations 
     from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has 
     brought untold sorrow to mankind.''
       While scores of conflicts costing millions of lives have 
     broken out since that signing 50 years ago, some of the 
     organization's promoters say it deserves a share of credit 
     for averting its founders' worst nightmare: World War III. 
     Clearly, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the 
     subsequent nuclear standoff between the United States and the 
     Soviet Union may have been the main deterrents, but the world 
     body also played a role, U.N. supporters say.
       ``If we didn't have the United Nations, we would have had 
     another world war,'' said Bernardino in an interview in her 
     New York apartment, where she keeps an office filled with 
     U.N. mementos. On her desk is a large silverframed, 
     personally dedicated photograph of her role model, Eleanor 
     Roosevelt, and in her drawer is an original signed copy of 
     the U.N. Charter.
       At the time of the signing, U.S. public opinion held that 
     there would be a third world war by the early 1970s, Stassen 
     said.
       ``We believed we were going to stop future Hitlers from 
     future acts of aggression,'' said Brian Urquhart, a Briton 
     who joined the United Nations shortly after the conference 
     and rose to become an undersecretary general. ``There was an 
     enormous sense of confidence and optimism in the charter . . 
     . led by the Untied States. This was predominantly a U.S. 
     achievement.''
       Indeed, the United Nations was principally the brainchild 
     of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who gave the organization 
     its name and reached agreement on its formation with British 
     Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Soviet leader Joseph 
     Stalin.
       At the San Francisco conference, however, major problems 
     developed over 
     decolonization and the 
     Soviets' insistence on a broad veto power over virtually all 
     Security Council business, even the setting of agenda items 
     and the discussion of disputes. Initially, the Soviets had 
     also wanted 16 votes in the General Assembly, adding one for 
     each of their 15 republics. They eventually settled for three 
     after it was pointed out that by that logic, the United 
     States ought to have 49 votes.
       According to Stassen, who served as Minnesota's youngest 
     governor before joining the Navy during the war and who went 
     on to seek the Republican nomination for president four 
     times, his wife Esther played a key role in resolving the 
     veto impasse. Some of the Soviet delegates' wives had told 
     her that Stalin had set the veto position and none of their 
     husbands dared ask the dictator to modify it, Stassen said. 
     But if the Americans could present their arguments directly 
     to Stalin, he might change his mind, the wives advised.
       Stassen said he reported this to President Truman, who had 
     taken office upon Roosevelt's death. Truman dispatched Harry 
     Hopkins, Roosevelt's closest adviser, to Moscow, and Stalin 
     was persuaded to limit the veto to the Security Council's 
     final resolutions.
       The lone American woman delegate, Virginia Gildersleeve, 
     the dean of Barnard College, played a key role in drafting 
     the U.N. Charter's preamble.
       Stassen recalls her exasperation after the drafting 
     committee's first meeting, where language along the lines of 
     ``the high contracting parties have assembled and entered 
     this treaty'' was proposed. ``That's no way to start a 
     charter for the future of the world,'' fumed Gildersleeve. 
     ``It's got to say, `We the peoples of the United Nations . . 
     .''' Her proposal was ridiculed by diplomats, who insisted 
     that the charter could not be formed by ``peoples,'' but only 
     by the representatives of governments. Eventually, however, 
     she prevailed and eloquence overcame diplomatese.
       For Stassen, the defining moment came five days before the 
     signing when Secretary of State Stettinius, the conference 
     chairman, announced that there was nothing else on his 
     agenda. He then asked all heads of delegations who were ready 
     to sign the charter to stand.
       ``Chairs began to scrape . . . and suddenly the delegations 
     realized that every one of the 50 chairmen was standing, and 
     they broke out into applause for the first time in those 
     sessions,'' Stassen recalled.
       Still, the seeds of the Cold War evidently had been 
     planted. Pell, now 76 and the ranking Democrat on the Senate 
     Foreign Relations Committee, recalls walking to a restaurant 
     with a Soviet admiral when a big black car suddenly pulled 
     over and picked up the Russian.
       ``He wasn't supposed to go to lunch with capitalists,'' 
     Pell said.
       The senator also vividly remembers traveling to San 
     Francisco by train from the East Coast with other young 
     officers from Europe. As the train rolled past the seemingly 
     endless grain fields and the unscathed cities and towns of 
     America's heartland, the Europeans were stunned by the 
     contrast with their own war-ravaged countries. ``Their eyes 
     got wider and wider,'' Pell said, and they arrived in San 
     Francisco with a sense of awe for the power and resources of 
     the United States.
       Bernardino's most vivid memory was of the day the war in 
     Europe ended while the conference was underway in may 1945. A 
     Honduran delegate, who had just heard the news of the street, 
     burst into her committee meeting and shouted, ``The war is 
     over!'' and the room erupted in celebration, she said.
       For Betty Teslenko, then a 22-year-old stenographer at the 
     conference, the imposing cast of characters was most 
     impressive. One who deserved special credit as a mediator of 
     many disputes was the Australian foreign minister, Herbert 
     Evatt, whose broad accent prompted some good-natured ribbing, 
     she recalled. One joke that made the rounds: What's the 
     difference between a buffalo and a bison? Answer: a bison is 
     what Evatt uses to wash his hands in the morning.
       According to Teslenko, Hiss was so efficient in organizing 
     the conference that he became the choice of many delegates to 
     be the United Nations' first secretary general. However, an 
     unwritten rule that the organization's head should not come 
     from one of the five permanent, veto-wielding members of the 
     Security Council--the United States, Soviet Union, Britain, 
     France and China--made that impossible.
       For Piedad Suro, then a young reporter from Ecuador, the 
     conference was memorable chiefly for the difficulties of 
     finding out what was going on in the closed sessions--and for 
     a whirlwind courtship by the man who became her husband, 
     Guillermo Suro, the State Department's chief of language 
     services. Their son, Roberto Suro, is now a Washington Post 
     editor.
       ``That was where we dated and he proposed,'' Suro said of 
     the San Francisco conference. ``We became engaged the last 
     week and were married in New York two months later.'' She 
     denies, however, that her fiance ever gave her a scoop.
       As Truman arrived in San Francisco to witness the signing 
     50 years ago, an estimated 250,000 cheering people turned out 
     to greet his mile-long motorcade, giving him what The 
     Washington Post at the time described as ``the most 
     tumultuous demonstration since he entered the White House.''
       ``You have created a great instrument for peace,'' Truman 
     said at the signing ceremony to a standing ovation, ``Oh, 
     what a great day this can be in history.''
       Today a common view among both U.N. supporters and critics 
     seems to be that if the world body were to disappear, it 
     would have to be quickly reinvented.
       ``While it hasn't been altogether a 100 percent success,'' 
     said Sen. Pell, ``we're certainly far better off for having 
     the United Nations exist than we would be without 
     it.''
     

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