These days the United Nations is on my mind. In April 1998 for the first
time in five years I will teach a course whose focus is how the U.N. was made.  It is quite a story. In my opinion, the way in which Americans, both in and out of government, worked together was uniquely participatory and democratic. Never before or since have the President, the Secretary of State, the Department of State, the U.S. Senate and the U.S. House of Representatives and private American exhibited so much team work in the making of American foreign policy.  It was brilliantly done. The makers of the U.N. avoided all the major errors of President Woodrow Wilson who in 1918 - 1920  designed the League of Nations but failed to persuade the Senate to authorize the United States to join the League. The way the United Nations was created 1939 - 1946 was arresting. It worked because of deliberate, proactive State Department outreach to the American people.

Indeed, that inclusive approach to foreign policy did what was intended.  It was easily understood and immensely popular. It has never been tried again:  a great loss to American democracy.  If any future President wishes to make the Congress and American publics  partners (albeit junior partners) in the making of foreign policy, he need look no farther than to how the United Nations was in fact planned and created.

I spent 1991, my final year as a Foreign Service Officer of the Department of State,  at a Government think tank in Arlington, Virginia. There I researched the making of the League of Nations and the United Nations. I concluded then and believe now that this was the State Department's finest hour. Especially was it the finest hour of Secretary of State and former U.S. Representative and Senator Cordell Hull of Tennessee. 

Remembering all the mistakes of Woodrow Wilson, Hull systematically avoided repeating them. 

--Wilson had left the planning of post-World War I foreign policy until six months after America's declaration of war in April 1917. Hull initiated post-war planning days after Hitler's invasion of Poland in 1939, over two years before Japan attacked at Pearl Harbor and Hitler then declared war on the United States in 1941. 

--Wilson had brought no members of Congress with him to Paris in 1918. As early as 1942-43 Hull invited both distinguished private thinkers and U.S. Representatives and Senators into post-war planning. The seven persons who were the official United States delegates at San Francisco in 1945 also included two Representatives and two Senators--of both major political parties. 

--Wilson had no elected members of the Republican party with him in Paris in 1919. Hull set in motion creation of a bipartisan U.S. Delegation to the San Francisco conference which from April to June 1945 wrote the United Charter. 

--Wilson had no women delegates with him in 1919 at the Paris Peace Conference. The U.S. had Virginia Gildersleeve at San Francisco. 

--Finally, an earlier Senate twice rejected American participation in the League of Nations. But the 1945 Senate quickly approved the U.N. Charter and America's membership by a vote of 89 - 2. 

Hull had corrected the mistakes of Woodrow Wilson.

There is a recent book focused on the making of the United Nations. It is by Townsend Hoopes and Douglas Brinkley: FDR AND THE CREATION OF THE U.N. It was published in 1997 in New Haven by Yale University Press (xii, 287 pp.)   This book is a disappointment. For it uncovers very few new facts. And it sketches the impact of the principal actors in the making of the United Nations very differently from the way it really was.

The book's nominal hero is President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Fair
enough, so far as it goes. For as historian Ruth Russell once argued, the important thing is not who first thought up an idea or proposed it to others but whether and when the President or other top "official" American foreign policy makers accepted it and implemented it.  The trouble is that Franklin Roosevelt's ideas about the League of Nations and international organization changed over and over and in the end pretty well resembled what Secretary of State Cordell Hull had been proposing for a long time: a league of equal sovereign states delegating responsibility for crisis management to a Security Council.

The book's real hero is Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles. That, too, is fine so far as it goes. Welles led an internal State Department study which recommended a post-war international organization for keeping the peace which was at least eighty percent identical with the much maligned League of Nations. And such is what we now have.

The greatest sins of FDR AND THE CREATION OF THE U.N. are sins of omission. For Townsend Hoopes and Douglas Brinkley mention only in passing individual contributors whose creative roles were far greater than the public remembers. Admittedly, few today can identify Columbia University's Professor James T. Shotwell or his collaborator Clarke M. Eichelberger. But they triumphantly rallied American public opinion behind the idea of the United Nations. Who can name the members of the U.S. delegation to the San Francisco charter-writing conference such as Dean Virginia Gildersleeve of Barnard College or U.S. Representative Sol Bloom?  Yet it is to Bloom that we owe the beginning words of the United Nations Charter, "We, the peoples of the United Nations." Is not that an improvement over Jan Christiaan Smuts's original draft proposal, "The High Contracting Parties?" 

From the time former President Theodore Roosevelt, in accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in 1910, first embraced "a league to enforce peace," most of the ideas behind the United Nations have been contributed by American citizens. And most of those ideas also sprang from the minds and hearts of essentially private persons, not from elected officials or Government bureaucrats. The book by Hoopes and Brinkley downplays private contributions to the vanishing point. And yet it was the huge contributions by private Americans which made the United Nations, as originally designed and created, a thoroughly and democratically American product.

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for Asheville TRIBUNE