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“SENATOR PELL AND THE U.N. CHARTER” mentioning the U.S. Dept of State was published in the Senate section on pages S9577-S9578 on June 30, 1995.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
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.
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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