The Academics Who Built the United Nations: Leo Pasvolsky and Sir Charles Kingsley Webster

On the afternoon of August 8th, 1945, President Harry Truman sat down in the Oval Office to sign into law the United Nations Charter with a ten-cent desk pen.1 Only hours later, the scourge of war was still to bring untold sorrow to mankind, as an American bomber dropped a 21-kiloton nuclear weapon over Nagasaki. But after more than five years of planning and negotiation, powers great and small, and senators Democrat and Republican, had finally agreed to the shape of a new international organization. They hoped that the United Nations would provide a venue to peacefully resolve disputes, promote economic and social development, and serve as a midwife for a new age of global cooperation. That same day former Secretary of State Cordell Hull, ailing from tuberculosis, called in a typist to dictate a letter to his closest advisor, economist and think-tank staffer Dr. Leo Pasvolsky. Hull had spent twelve years at the helm of Franklin D. Roosevelts State Department, and would soon win the Nobel Peace Prize for co-initiating the United Nations. In the letter, he acknowledged the crucial role his dear friend played in bringing about the signing. You were in this work from the beginning. You were the center around which it revolvedAs the Charter developed word by word and sentence by sentence, you screened every idea proposed for inclusion. You thought out the implication of every expression included. You are the first authority on that international instrument. The United States and the world will always be indebted to you for the great contribution you made in the development of the Charter. It was a high
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First photograph: Marie Hansen, Leo Pasvolsky, September 1, 1943, Time & Life Pictures, Washington DC. Second photograph: P. A. Reynolds and E. J. Hughes, The Historian as Diplomat: Charles Kingsley Webster and the United Nations, 1939-1946 (London: Martin Robertson, 1976), cover photograph. Associated Press, Charter Is Signed with Cheap Pen, The Free Lance-Star(Fredericksburg), August 8, 1945. 2

privilege for me to be closely associated with you in this work during these several years.2 One week earlier, the head of the British Foreign Offices United Nations planning staff, Gladwyn Jebb, had written a letter with similar intent. Jebb had brought diplomatic historian Sir Charles Kingsley Webster into government and relied on him to shape British policy towards a future organization. Do let me say, Jebb wrote, how conscious we all are here of the immense contribution you have made, not only to this country, but to the whole organization. It must be an abiding satisfaction to you to see so many of your own ideas taking form & substance & after all that is the only real satisfaction we can have in this lifethe memory of work well done.3 Drs. Pasvolsky and Webster were trained academics and arrived at many of the same ideas for a new international organization. This is partially due to the fact that they sought to revive certain League of Nations innovations that their colleagues and superiors would have rather discarded. Both understood that although the League had its faults, it should not have borne the brunt of the blame for the Second World War. They sought to learn the lessons of the League by both correcting its deficiencies and allowing its successes to flourish in a reformed international organization. Perhaps their relatively dispassionate academic work and extended historical lens allowed the two to see past the emotional disappointment with the League and not discard the framework entirely, as their coworkers and heads of state initially sought to do.

Cordell Hull to Leo Pasvolsky. August 8, 1945. Cordell Hull Papers, Library of Congress. He went on: Your work was all-important in the preparation of the Four Nation Declaration at Moscow in 1943; you played a preponderant part in the Dumbarton Oaks Conversations in 1944; and your contribution at the San Francisco Conference in 1945 was of the utmost importance. 3 Gladwyn Jebb to Charles Webster. July 31, 1945. Reynolds and Hughes, The Historian as Diplomat, 108. 3

The two men provided the vision for the United Nations and shepherded it

through the negotiations. They developed a concept of an organization based on universal, as opposed to regional, lines. The Great Powers on the Security Council would have final say on political issues, but would act with the consent and advice of weaker nations. It would incorporate the old technical organizations of the League of Nations, have a vibrant Assembly open to all sovereign states, provide the machinery to facilitate disarmament, support an Economic and Social Council, and support its work with an international armed force. In order to realize their shared conception, they convinced their bureaucracies and heads of state, which had divergent ideas, to come to a consensus and secured the agreement of the USSR and smaller powers as well. Both academics were not senior staffers and had been brought into government service on a temporary wartime basis. So how did these two men imprint their views on the original mold of the United Nations so dramatically? First, they planned in a field where planning really could make an impact. They had years to consult with outside experts, analyze past efforts, conduct studies, formulate their own ideas, and solicit senior-level backing. In the middle of the war, they were not planning contingencies for an invasion force, but rather the creation of a document. They could map out other countries negotiating strategies reasonably accurately, and worry only about the unpredictability of public opinion. Second, they cultivated the trust of senior policymakers who were busy waging total war and were happy to outsource planning work to competent staffers. By the time the wars end was in sight and senior policymakers had the time and inclination to consider issues of international organization, the planners already had a fully formed approach. For the busy Secretaries and Heads of

State, signing off on Pasvolsky and Websters plans was the path of least resistance. Third, they cordoned off international organization planning as a specialty field. Like issues of monetary policy or engineering, they portrayed themselves as experts to whom politicians should by and large defer. Though FDR and Churchill considered themselves grand statesmen and proposed off-the-cuff ideas on international organization during summits of the Big Three, they eventually came around to the views of their expert planners.4 In spite of Pasvolsky and Websters dramatic impact on the shape of the United Nations, the contemporary literature on the origins of the UN almost entirely ignores their personal contributions. In the past fifty years, the only one journal has mentioned Webster in connection with the founding of the United Nations.5 Pasvolsky has fared only slightly better. Just one peer-reviewed article since 1945 has explored his work on the Charter, and in that article he had to share the twenty-five pages with profiles of two less influential State Department colleagues on postwar planning, Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles and Ambassador William Bullitt. 6 Journalist Stephen Schlesingers
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Reflecting years after the UNs creation, Webster wrote, The shape which it finally assumed ran contrary to the first ideas of the three great war leadersthese men thought in terms of the development of the Great Power alliance of the war. Charles Webster, The United Nations: The Record of Ten Years, The Listener, July 7, 1955, 6. 5 Ian Hall, The Art and Practice of a Diplomatic Historian: Sir Charles Webster, 1886 1961, International Politics 42, no. 4 (2005). Reynolds and Hughes, The Historian as Diplomat. 6 Kenneth Weisbrode, The Master, the Maverick, and the Machine: Three Wartime Promoters of Peace, Journal of Policy History 21, no. 04 (October 2009). Pasvolskys scholarship on the collapse of the Hapsburg Empires currency union has recently gained some interest as a case study for the current Eurozone crisis. Pasvolsky, Leo. Economic Nationalism of the Danubian States. New York: Macmillan, 1928. Two other chapters in books have considered Pasvolsky, though not in the specific context of his impact on the UN Charter. One explored Pasvolsky and his Brookings colleague Moultons economic philosophy, while another looked at him in the context of other Russian intellectual immigrants. Malcolm Rutherford, Vision Accomplished: Harold Moulton and Leo Pasvolsky of the Brookings Institution as Champions of a New World Order, in The Economic Mind in America: Essays in the History of American Economics (New York: Routledge, 1998). 5

recent book Act of Creation has sought to revive Pasvolskys reputation, but his foremost contemporary defender portrays him more as a diligent subordinate than a font of policy proposals and skilled bureaucratic maneuverer.7 So why have historians overlooked the two? After all, innumerable scholars have tackled FDR and Churchill, and few topics have been analyzed more extensively than the origins of Cold War. There are numerous reasons for the dearth of attention. First, before the collapse of the USSR, few scholars were interested in the UNs origins, presumably due to the Cold War gridlock that froze United Nations initiatives. Two large bureaucratic histories of the State Departments policy planning efforts were written by former Pasvolsky hires shorty after the UNs creation, but after these works the next book-length narrative on the origins of the UN was not published until 1990.8 Second, neither Pasvolsky nor Webster have compelling personal lives and have not left particularly rich archival material. Pasvolsky did not keep a diaryaccording to the current Brookings Institutions archivist, record keeping was not [Pasvolskys] strong point!and Websters is abbreviated.9 Unlike Undersecretary Sumner Welles, they did not drunkenly proposition male porters, and unlike Ambassador William Bullitt were not

David C. Engerman, Modernization from the Other Shore: American Intellectuals and the Romance of Russian Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003). 7 Stephen C. Schlesinger, Act of Creation: The Founding of the United Nations: A Story of Superpowers, Secret Agents, Wartime Allies and Enemies, and Their Quest for a Peaceful World (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2003). 8 Harley A. Notter, Postwar Foreign Policy Preparation: 1939-1945. (Washington: Department of State, 1949). Ruth B. Russell, A History of the United Nations Charter: The Role of the United States, 19401945 (Washington: Brookings Institution, 1958). Robert C. Hilderbrand, Dumbarton Oaks: The Origins of the United Nations and the Search for Postwar Security (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990). 9 Sarah Chilton, Re: Undergraduate Archives Inquiry--Leo Pasvolsky, e-mail message to author, November 19, 2012. 6

possessed with self-righteous arrogance. 10 The two men were muted visionaries and bureaucratic schemers, not prophets or prima donnas. Third, neither man wrote with panache. Unlike Welles or George Kennan, Pasvolsky and Webster were workmanlike writers who authored straightforward speeches and memoranda. Though Webster did end up writing the UN Charters preamble, his speech for Secretary Eden to deliver during the San Francisco Conference was rejected on account of its Ciceronian quality.11 Fourth, constructing a history of policy planning is a challenging endeavor.12 In exploring Pasvolsky and Websters contributions to history, one must track threads of influence while wading through reams of policy memoranda. If one is interested in World War II conferences, the summit meetings of FDR, Stalin, and Churchill in Tehran and Yalta on their surface contain much more drama than bureaucrats negotiating in Formulation Committees at Dumbarton Oaks and San Francisco.13 Finally, and most importantly, the cold war froze many of their plans for the United Nations. If the UN had become the organization of Pasvolsky and Websters hopes, surely more scholars would have explored their contribution. Many of their initiatives, from widespread disarmament to the creation of an international army, would never come into existence. The full effects of their planning were not truly realized until
10

Irwin Gellman, Secret Affairs: Franklin Roosevelt, Cordell Hull, and Sumner Welles (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995). Christopher D. O'Sullivan, Sumner Welles, Postwar Planning, and the Quest for a New World Order, 19371943 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). Benjamin Welles, Sumner Welles: FDR's Global Strategist (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997). 11 Gladwyn, review of The Historian As Diplomat: Charles Kingsley Webster and the United Nations 19391946, by P. A. Reynolds and E. J. Hughes, International Affairs 53, no. 3 (July 1977): 481. 12 Kenneth Weisbrode, Article Review of Simon Rofe's Pre-war Post-war Planning February 27, 2013, http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl?trx=vx. 13 As Webster wrote, since the Steering Committee only dealt very generally with a few main points, the Dumbarton Oaks Proposals were in fact drafted by the Formulation Committee. Charles Webster, The Making Of The Charter Of The United Nations, History 32, no. 115 (1947): 26. 7

1990, when the UN could finally operate as they hoped it would: not as an arena in which Great Power conflict which blotted out any other type of cooperation but as a place where those Powers could find common ground to address pressing international issues import. The two men met for the first time in 1941 and realized that their ideas for a future world organization were remarkably similar. Over the next three years building to the ossification of American and British instructions for their Dumbarton Oaks delegations, Pasvolsky and Webster built the architecture and set the parameters for subsequent discussions. By the time the two met again in the summer of 1944, they had already conceived of the UNs final structure. The personal meetings of the Big Three Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalinhad guaranteed that some sort of international organization would come into existence. But it was in the conference room battles of Whitehall and Foggy Bottom, in which the two academics reigned supreme, not in Tehran, Dumbarton Oaks, Yalta, or San Francisco, that the UN took shape. The thesis begins its exploration of transatlantic international organization policy planning on the British Isles, but the structures of the two main sections run in parallel. It begins by exploring Webster and Pasvolskys experiences at the Paris Peace Conference and how their interwar scholarship came to shape their views on international organization. Next it walks though the views of their bureaucratic rivals and heads of state, and shows how the two men reshaped their nations policy. Though by this point Pasvolsky and Webster had successfully established the architecture of the UN, it briefly examines their contributions during the Dumbarton Oaks and San Francisco conferences. Lastly, it concludes an evaluation of academics-turned-diplomats analogical reasoning,

their own preliminary appraisal on their UN, and a reappraisal in light of the UNs sixtyeight year existence. Webster in Paris Charles Kingsley Webster, the son of a Liverpool shipping agent, was the sixth of seven children. He attended a public boarding school and won a scholarship to read history at Kings College, Cambridge. Fluent in Europes leading languages, he completed his dissertation on the Holy Alliance in 1910 and spent the next four years conducting archival research on the Continent. Websters physical frame was large and loosely assembled, and his dress unkept.14 The Roman-nosed, chinless extrovert who smoked a pipe and wore a bowtie was very much a don of pre-First World War vintage.15 He never sought to popularize his history, writing, according to his obituary, perhaps too long to suit modern tastes with a style that projected austere professional confidence.16 Students found his lectures virile and arresting, and colleagues viewed Webster as formidably impatient of cant but human and kindly underneath.17 Websters first opportunity to apply lessons of history to contemporary politics came at the end of the Great War. Poor eyesight prevented him from fighting, but after nine months handing out guns and helmets he got himself transferred to military
14

G. N. Clark, Sir Charles Kingsley Webster, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2004, accessed February 22, 2013, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/36807. 15 Jebb, Memoirs of Lord Gladwyn, 120. 16 Obituary: Charles Kingsley Webster, Times (London), August 23, 1961. 17 Charles Kingsley Webster, The Harvard Crimson (Cambridge), March 26, 1932. Jebb, Memoirs of Lord Gladwyn, 120. Michael Howard, The Bomber Gets Through: The Strategic Air Offensive against Germany, 1939-45 (4 Vols) by Webster, C. K. (author); Frankland, Noble, Dr (author), Times Literary Supplement, no. 3112 (October 20, 1961): 745. Jean Krasno, The Founding of the UN: International Cooperation as an Evolutionary Process, Academic Council on the United Nations System, February 27, 2009, http://acuns.org/wpcontent/uploads/2012/06/The_Founding_of_the_United_Nations__International_Cooperation_as_an_Evolutionary_Process.pdf. 9

intelligence work.18 As the war reached its conclusion, he was sent to the Foreign Office to write a short work on the 1814-5 Congress of Vienna, where Britain, Russia, Prussia, Austria, and a host of other nations sought to rearrange Europe after defeating Napoleon.19 Webster was only supposed to write a short work on espionage during the Congress, but he could not resist penning a hundred-page manuscript and concluding his limited assignment with fifteen pages of General Observations on the Congress of Vienna and the Applicability of its History to the Present Time.20 Websters attempt to apply his academic studies towards a practical end and contained the seeds of his future methodology when working in the 1940s.21 Webster began his diplomatic playbook with explicit recognition that diplomacy has changed since monarchs waltzed and schemed through Viennas ballrooms. The Paris Peace Conference called together representatives from around the world, not just Europe. Furthermore, public opinion had been awakened and was demanding new
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G. N. Clark, Sir Charles Kingsley Webster. Reynolds and Hughes, The Historian as Diplomat, 1-2. 20 Charles Webster, The Congress of Vienna, 1814-15 (London: Oxford University Press, 1919), 175. In the interwar years he came to use this type of reasoning in various public spats he engaged in in dueling letters to the editor. In the mid-1930s, for instance, Webster wrote sharp letters to the editor in The Times criticizing British policy by comparing current action regarding the Spanish Civil War to The Advice of Palmerston and Castlereagh. Webster, Charles K. British Policy in Spain. The Times (London), August 12, 1935. 21 The thirty-three year old Webster was a bit too optimistic about the impact of his monograph. He stated quite directly that this history will be almost certainly studied with a view to precedent by the Governments concerned and even believed it possible that its transactions may be specifically quoted in order to support the point of view of one Power or another. Webster, The Congress of Vienna, 176. Unfortunately for the prospects of peace and stability in the subsequent decades, Wilson, Clemenceau and Lloyd George did not find the time for the Congress of Vienna. Webster reflected with disappointment in the preface to a new 1934 edition that when the Prime Minister of New Zealand in a Committee of Ten meeting mentioned a comparison to Vienna to Wilson, the American dismissed any comparison out of hand and hoped that even by reference no odour of Vienna would again be brought into their proceedings (vi). After that moment, Webster writes in his unfinished autobiography, my evil smelling monograph could not therefore be used in the discussions of the heads of states and so far as the record goes it was never mentioned again there. Websters academic work did have at least one tangible effect in Paris. He recalled Metternichs success at obtaining state secrets through employing servants to collect the contents of wastepaper-baskets of the diplomatists, and urged Whitehall to take caution. In Paris, the British hired only British waitresses and chamber maids and were especially diligent in burning sensitive documents. Charles Webster, Draft of Autobiography, Papers of Sir Charles Kingsley Webster, London School of Economics. 10

international control, which far exceed in intensity any such demands placed on diplomats in 1815.22 The historian supplied his readers with a flurry of recommendations. Though he later lamented that few of his recommendations from the Congress of Vienna were put into effect in Paris, Webster personally applied many of his own suggestions when working on the UN Charter. For instance, he stressed the need to establish agreement between Great Powers before involving other nations.23 Equally important, addressing contentious questions among powerful allies before the war ended would allow for a much simpler harmonization of positions. He warned his contemporaries that the Statesmen at Vienna more than once bitterly regretted that they had not been more successful in reaching a solution of such problems before peace was made.24 During WWII, Webster used this lesson to impress upon his superiors the importance of establishing the UN before the conclusion of hostilities. Webster concluded his work on the Congress of Vienna with a warning for his Foreign Office colleagues not to disregard fate of minorities and smaller powers. In Vienna the Great Powers contended with and ultimately dismissed Talleyrands sacred principle of legitimacy. Yet by 1919, Webster noted, since the principle of rights of small nationalities is universally conceded, it cannot be shelved in the same way as at

22 23

Webster, Congress of Vienna, 176. Ibid., 184. 24 Ibid., 179. In his inaugural address as Wilson Chair, Webster quotes this paragraph and regrets that no statesman at Paris heeded his advice. I am still of the opinion, he writes, that had those in authority been able in the autumn of 1918 to spare a moment or two to consider these matters, some, at any rate, of the confusions and difficulties of the Paris Conference might have been avoided. Charles Webster, The Study of International Politics (Cardiff: Univ. of Wales Press Board, 1923), 16-17. Margaret MacMillan skillfully details the waning control Wilson, Lloyd George, and Clemenceau retained over events the more their armies demobilized and the more time elapsed from the conclusion of war. Margaret MacMillan, Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World (New York: Random House, 2002). 11

Vienna.25 During both World Wars, he impressed upon his colleagues the importance of creating an organization before the end of hostilities and ensuring that small powers not feel completely dominated by most powerful nations. In 1922, Webster accepted a post at University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, which provided ample funding for travel and allowed him to take on visiting professorships abroad. In his inaugural lecture as the Woodrow Wilson Chair of International Politics, Webster addressed the question: can the statesman make real use of the knowledge which the Historian has garnered, whether the effect of the historian is for good or ill, and if there is any way to remedy the defects.26 In his answers to these questions, he showed that though he was convinced that historians could serve a vital purpose for statesmen, successfully deriving lessons from history required adherence to three precepts. First, the history drawn upon must be crafted from solid fact. If History is to be an aid to the elucidation of present-day problems, Webster wrote, it must become far more scientific and far less perfunctory and haphazard than it is to-day.27 He resented that much of the historical knowledge which was offered as the basis for action was spurious...alchemy rather than science.28 Second, national bias and a glorification of national prejudices need be excised. And lastly, historians should aim to educate not just statesmen but the peoples which they represent. Teachers must add now the
25 26

Webster, The Congress of Vienna, 185. Webster, The Study of International Politics, 7-8. 27 Ibid., 19. Perhaps revulsion toward his former academic supervisors historical methods prompted this devotion to rigorous research. One modern historian called Cambridge Professor Oscar Browning the most inaccurate man ever to hold a Cambridge lectureship in history. He once advised Webster, the real foundation of history is psychology, not original documents. Documents are always misleading and often false. Make up your mind about a man first, then correct it by documents. Ian Hall, The Art and Practice of a Diplomatic Historian: Sir Charles Webster, 18861961, International Politics 42, no. 4 (2005): 47980. 28 Webster, The Study of International Politics, 21, 24. 12

necessity of training [citizens] to be members of the community of nationsthe whole mass of the people [must be] informed of the nature of the world in which they live and the countless ties which bind all the nations together.29 Webster concluded with a rhetorical flourish. Acknowledging that Humanity is moved by its emotions, and the springs of action lie deep in the hearts of men, Webster called for knowledge or reason to dig as it were a channel for the immense and potent forces that lie within humanity. If scholars and teachers fail, the new and formidable masses of energy produced by the War will overwhelm the world.30 Webster took his own guidelines to heart when serving in the Foreign Office. Webster Reflects on the League On June 26th, 1945, representatives from fifty nations gathered to sign the UN Charter. Charles Webster had spent the past two years working in the Foreign Office on the UKs planning staff for an international organization. That night in his well-furnished suite in the Mark Hopkins Hotel, Webster reflected on his contribution to the Charter, writing in his diary, Today has been the culmination of all my hopes (and fears)and I can scarcely bring myself to realize all that has been accomplished.31 He boldly declared, It was I who founded the new methods of harmonizing the Great Power Alliance theory and the League theory.32 In order to understand which ideas Webster advocated during his time in the Foreign Office and evaluate his impact on the Charter,

29 30

Ibid., 23. Ibid., 29. 31 Webster, diary entry of June 26, 1945. Printed in Reynolds and Hughes, The Historian as Diplomat, 69. 32 Ibid., 71. Percy B. Shelley, The Masque of Anarchy, a Poem (London: Edward Moxon, 1832), 2. Lord Byron had similar feelings as Shelley and composed the following epigram for Castlereagh upon hearing of his death: Posterity will neer survey/A nobler grave than this:/Here lies the bones of Castlereagh:/Stop, traveller, and piss! John Bew, Castlereagh: A Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 548. 13

one must first examine his scholarly output on 19th century British diplomacy and the League of Nations. Websters works published in the 1920s and 30s on British Foreign Secretaries Lords Castlereagh and Palmerstons efforts to develop and sustain conference, or Congress, diplomacy greatly influenced his views on the possibilities and limitations of international organizations. He drew inspiration and encouragement from the two statesmen, and believed that the League of Nations was an evolutionary rather than revolutionary development from the British diplomats Congress System. His interpretation of their actions ultimately expressed itself in his positions on the optimal role of the United Nations in world affairs. Lord Castlereagh, the subject of Websters fawning two-volume political biography published in the interwar years, was almost universally derided. Many thought the Irishman a traitor to his native land and a reactionary who helped craft an international order that propped up autocracies for a century. Contrary to Shelley's poem The Masque of Anarchy that begins I met Murder on the way/He had a mask like Castlereagh, Webster considered the Foreign Secretary a hero with a visionary conception of diplomacy.33 Castlereagh developed a core insight to shape European politics for decades: that the system of diplomacy by conference was one as suitable for peace as for war. In this conference system that he formed, all the Great Powers were thus pledged to meet together when necessity arose to discuss the common problems of

33

It was not only the intelligentsia who hated Castlereagh. His house was a seen of constant mobbing, and his windows were repeatedly broken. Once in Dublin a putrid dead cat was launched at him andhit him in the faceThen, composing himself, he turned in the direction of the assailant, took off his hat and bowed; despite his unpopularity, this uncharacteristic act of showmanship earned him thunderous applause. Bew, Castlereagh: a Life, 152, 463. 14

Europe and reconcile their interests with one another.34 More than any other statesman of the alliance, Webster wrote, Castlereagh was the guardian of the peace of Europeit must always be remembered that this new system of diplomacy was his invention and by him imposed upon Europe.35 Webster recognized great power cooperation as absolutely essential to maintaining international stability. The Congress system helped facilitate understanding between the most powerful nations in Europe by enshrining a tradition of meeting to settle differences before resorting to force. Even though the council only met in times of crisis, the esprit de corps that developed between the diplomats reshaped European politics. During Congresses, They were able to obtain results which would have been impossible under the normal mode of diplomatic procedure.36 Websters dual convictions that great power cooperation was essential to stability and that this cooperation could be facilitated through frequent multilateral diplomatic exchange shaped his recommendations for the UN Charter. Webster saw the League of Nations as lying on the same historical continuum as the Congress System, but the leading statesman advocating the League thought otherwise. Woodrow Wilson, addressing the Senate, declared that the new organization could utterly destroy the old order of international politics. Such histrionics were not only for public consumption; during a private discussion with heads of state in Paris, he exploded at a reference to the Congress of Vienna, which he thought epitomized the corrupt backroom bargaining of 19th century European diplomacy. Wilson said that he
34

Charles K. Webster and Sydney Herbert, The League of Nations in Theory and Practice (London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1933), 15. 35 Charles K. Webster, Some Aspects of Castlereagh's Foreign Policy, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 3rd ser., 6 (1912): 87-8. 36 Charles K. Webster, The Art and Practice of Diplomacy (London: Chatto & Windus, 1961), 66-7. 15

hoped that even by reference no odor of Vienna would again be brought in to the [Paris] proceedings.37 Webster, however, was under no such illusions that the weight of history did not bear down on the Paris proceedings. For him, the League of Nations system was an extension of the international arrangements his heroes Palmerston and Castlereagh first pioneered. According to Webster, the purpose of the League was to set up a system of collective security which was, though President Wilson was not aware of the fact, only a more scientific development of the doctrine of the balance of power as laid down by Pitt, Castlereagh and Palmerston.38 The conference system was executive, legislative, and mediatory, and in these functions it anticipated part of the machinery of the League of Nations.39 According to Webster, the Leagues scientific improvements on the Congress model were two-fold. First, it gave the conferences an official structure. The system was so inchoate and so little elaborated that it depended almost entirely on the personal disposition of the statesmen of Europe. One malevolent or stupid man could easily prevent it from functioning. It never became, therefore, the normal and obvious method of procedure.40 The institutionalization of the League of Nations changed this, and made it the clear locus of international dispute resolution. The second major innovation of the League was the explicit inclusion of lesser powers in the diplomatic process. During the conference system, while smaller powers were, according to deliberations at the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1818, allowed to participate in debates concerning
37

Marc Trachtenberg, The Cold War and After: History, Theory, and the Logic of International Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 16. 38 Charles K. Webster, The Art and Practice of Diplomacy, 29. 39 Webster and Herbert, The League of Nations in Theory and Practice, 20-1. 40 Ibid. 16

their interests, in practice they were often literally barred from the rooms where decisions were made.41 The League of Nations system overcorrected this deficiency. In the League, all states great and small had to agree unanimously to a course of action.42 The problem with this solution was that, according to Webster, during the Leagues reign no Great Power was prepared to allow a really equal voice in a major settlement to smaller Powers.43 Though the system did not account for the need for Great Power unity, its inclusion of small powers to the central decision-making Council marked progress from the conference system. These two main innovations allowed the League to function more effectively than the system of periodic conferences in facilitating international co-operation. The Leagues permanence and inclusion allowed public opinion to dissuade conflict. Webster wrote, Neither the system of alliances nor the Concert of the Powers has rallied the force of public opinion so immediately or as directly as the system of obligatory conference,

41

As Webster wrote, The first real conference, that in Belgium, was duly summoned by the King of the Netherlands who expected his representatives to sit with those of the great powers round the council table. In fact in a short time they were relegated with those of the Belgians to the ante-chamber. The King never ceased to protest this, claiming that by the Protocol of Aix-la-Chapelle, on which at their first meeting the great powers had based their action, he was entitled to participate in the discussions. He was told that he was participating by being informed from time to time of the discussions of the great powers. Webster, The Art and Practice of Diplomacy, 60. The text of the Protocol runs as follows: In the case of these meetings having for their object affairs specially connected with the interests of other states of Europe, they shall only take place in pursuance of a formal invitation on the part of such of those States as the said affairs may concern. Gerry J. Simpson, Great Powers and Outlaw States: Unequal Sovereigns in the International Legal Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 127. In my personal experience at the US Delegation to the UN, I have found that this issue still continues to confront diplomats. The most sensitive discussions, for instance those passed between Americans and Chinese negotiating on sanctions on North Korea, do not allow for direct participation of concerned countries or even allies on the Security Council. Japanese and South Korean diplomats can only participate through meetings afterwards with Americans in which they are informed from time to time of the discussions of the great powers. There then develops competitions and jealously as to which countries diplomats are more rapidly and fully informed. 42 Charles Ellis, The Origin, Structure and Working of the League of Nations (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1929), 124. 43 Webster and Herbert, The League of Nations in Theory and Practice, 178. 17

which is the heart of the [League].44 Also, the creation of the body allowed for it to develop into the breeding ground of non-political forms of cooperation.45 Webster includes chapters in his 1933 book The League of Nations in Theory and Practice on the impressive accomplishments on Financial Reconstruction, the International Labor Organization, Transit and Communications, Social and Humanitarian Activities, and Intellectual Co-Operation. Without the Leagues establishment and prestige, these other activities would have had a much harder time growing independently. The Conference system was the worlds first machinery explicitly designed to substitute diplomacy for war. The League improved significantly on the periodic conferences of Great Powers by inviting the small powers to take part to a permanent conference and creating an institution to which all other international organizations could connect. As Webster wrote in 1933, an international security organizations great strength lies in the fact that there is no real alternative. The world is gradually discovering that it must provide itself with machinery for international co-operation if civilization is to survive. This statement must have loomed over Websters work in the Foreign Office, when he had a chance to use his critical historical gaze to help craft a third system. Webster in Wartime Ten days after Hitler invaded Poland, Webster left his post at the London School of Economics to serve his government in the Foreign Research and Press Service (FRPS). One of his earliest assignments was to dissect the causes of the failure of the League of Nations. In a tightly argued thirty-page memorandum Webster argued, League history
44 45

Ibid. Ibid., 301. 18

is not a record of continuous failures and that to exaggerate the margin by which [the League] failed is a mistake.46 On social issues such as slavery and refugees the League unequivocally succeeded, and it did help to preserve peace and promote international cooperation for a number of political issues.47 Webster's defensive tone in the memorandum is understandable given that he was trying to defend an organization meant to secure peace underneath a canopy of Luftwaffe planes and anti-aircraft fire. Webster attributes this initial success mainly to the Leagues elastic constitution. It had the great merit of ensuring that the League would be an almost infinitely flexible instrumentNo door was closed, and the whole future development of the League would depend on the attitude that its members might adopt towards it.48 Thus, despite the massive setback of the US Senate's refusal to ratify the Covenant, the League accrued prestige in the post-war years through a series of political settlements. This period of progress was sustained by the positive intentions of its member states. Though the League supplied the machinery and lubrication to help nations committed to peaceful resolutions arrive at satisfactory resolutions, if powerful nations pursued bellicose policies, there was little the League could do to prevent conflict. Webster argued that since the League could be nothing more than an instrument at the disposal of its members, the blame for its failure lies not in its nature. Those responsible for the current war are the three Great Powers who reverted to policies of aggression which were wholly inconsistent with the Covenant.49 He concludes by subtly attacking
46

Webster, Memorandum on the Causes of the Failure of the League, 7th July 1942. Papers of Sir Charles Kingsley Webster. 47 Ibid. 48 Ibid. 49 Earlier in the memorandum, Webster specifically takes aim at Sumner Welles for attributing its failure to being never enabled to operate as its chief spokesman had intended, as an elastic and impartial instrument 19

the cynicism of his colleagues and asserting that the Leagues model was successful enough for the Foreign Office to use as the blueprint for a new organization. One of his responsibilities for FPRS was to poll American public opinion on a future international organization. Webster spent April and May of 1941 speaking with various think tanks, university faculty, and civic groups.50 But his most fateful encounter came when Webster spent an afternoon in the office of Pasvolski [sic]. Webster, in his typically clipped diary notes, wrote that the two discussed approach to peace aims.[Pasvolsky] had himself always insisted peace aims being worked out in action and no clean slate at end of war. Was quite sound on transitional period and its importance in constructing permanent machine, also on necessity of publicity and discussion.51 Webster understood that one of the Covenants central failings was its inability to secure approval in the US Senate. Like the bureaucrats in the State Department, Webster was acutely conscious of how average Americans and Republican senators would perceive the plans. Like Pasvolsky, Webster crafted policy that accounted for American public opinion. He avoided proposals that might push a Great Power to either fail to sign the Charter or leave the organization in frustration.52 At Dumbarton Oaks and San Francisco, the two were to spend months in close proximity, collaborating to finalize the language of the Charter.

in bringing about peaceful and equitable adjustments between nations as time and circumstances proved necessary. Ibid. 50 On one occasion in New York, Webster was asked, What has the old tie gang ever done for the U.S. and why should we send our boys to die to prop up their Empire? Another American questioned, Why is British news always late? Papers of Sir Charles Kingsley Webster. 51 Webster, diary entry of April 7, 1941. Printed in Reynolds and Hughes, The Historian as Diplomat, 14. 52 Paul Kennedy, Reforming the United Nations: Mission Impossible? London School of Economics, News and Media (podcast), October 11, 2007, http://www2.lse.ac.uk/newsAndMedia/videoAndAudio/channels/publicLecturesAndEvents/player.aspx?id =295. 20

Webster found his work on the margins of government in FPRS reasonably

rewarding, but he aimed to have a more direct influence on policy. As a senior Foreign Office official said in 1940, the good brains such as Professor Websterare dragging only small carts when they might be dragging big ones.53 Webster, according to his future boss Gladwyn Jebb, obviously had his heart on penetrating the Foreign Office. According to Jebb, the two men got along because Webster was fundamentally a Great Power man.54 Jebb brought Webster into the Foreign Offices Economic and Reconstruction Department in the spring of 1943. This office, which Jebb headed, led Whitehalls planning and negotiation for a new world organization. The Foreign Office, unlike the State Department, did not maintain a tradition of incorporating many political appointees or academics into positions of influence.55 Yet Webster found his critical approach to the past more valued than it had been in Paris. The Prof, as Jebb referred to him, quickly established himself as a pundit. His great advantage was an encyclopaedic knowledge of the Congress in Vienna, the Paris Peace Conference, and the League of Nations.56 In contrast with the State Department, which had by this time spent four years drafting policy, the Foreign Offices plans were amorphous enough for Webster to have the decisive influence on their shape. Initially however, many members of the British establishment did not agree with Websters views on creating a permanent, universal, and influential international organization. Leo Amery, Colonial Secretary, argued for a thinly veiled policy of
53 54

Reynolds and Hughes, The Historian as Diplomat, 13. Gladwyn Jebb, The Memoirs of Lord Gladwyn (New York: Weybright and Talley, 1972), 120. 55 Christopher Hill and Pamela Beshoff, Two Worlds of International Relations: Academics, Practitioners and the Trade in Ideas (New York: Routledge, 1994), especially 41-54. 56 Jebb, The Memoirs of Lord Gladwyn, 120. The famous historian Arnold Toynbee was also considered for the position, but Jebb rejected him fearing that his very Christian background might make him too disposed to turn the other cheek to the Germans. 21

isolationism.57 Stafford Cripps, then Speaker of the House of Commons, advocated regional confederations and occasional great power conferences.58 Even Jebb initially began with, in his own words, a prejudice against anything based on the model of the League.59 Most officials in Whitehall envisioned some sort of direct revival of the conference system, with little concessions to a century and a quarters worth of changes.60 Churchill himself proved to be the greatest obstacle to a permanent organization at the center of world affairs that included small-power participation. The Prime Ministers main aim, akin to American diplomat Sumner Welles view, was to create a more regionally oriented structure for world organization. Churchill preferred a Council of Europe alongside two others for Asia and the Americas.61 A Supreme World
57 58

Jebb, The Memoirs of Lord Gladwyn, 118-9. Reynolds and Hughes, The Historian as Diplomat, 16-17. Jebb, The Memoirs of Lord Gladwyn, 120-2. Reynolds and Hughes, The Historian as Diplomat, 16-17. 59 Gladwyn, review of The Historian As Diplomat, 480. Webster credits himself for showing Jebb the light. Early he writes, Gladwyn never remembers that 18 months ago he was talking much the same nonsense as the P.M. is talking now. Webster, diary entry of May 23, 1944. Printed in Reynolds and Hughes, The Historian As Diplomat, 36. Later, reflecting on his role in the creation of the UN, Webster writes, [Jebb] is not aware how much his own ideas have changed under my influence. He was quite ignorant of his subject when he became head of the Reconstruction Dept. He had all the ideas of his generation and distrusted and disliked the League. Of course both Eden and Cadogan took a very different view, and, if they had not done so, my efforts would have been of no avail. Webster, diary entry of June 26, 1945. Printed in Reynolds and Hughes, The Historian As Diplomat, 70-1. 60 Mark Mazower, Governing the World: The History of an Idea (New York: Penguin Press, 2012), 199. 61 E. J. Hughes, Winston Churchill and the Formation of the United Nations Organization, Journal of Contemporary History 9, no. 4 (October 1974) 187. Hughes writes, one of the features of planning for the United Nations was the attention paid to avoiding the failures of the League. Churchill had witnessed that failure in Manchuria, without feeling that Britain should be involved. As a result of both personal and League experience, he was probably convinced that one of the realities of international life was that a state would only act when its interests were affected. Regionalism was an attempt to overcome this problem. See also: Klaus Larres, Making Europe Strong Again: Churchill, the United States, and the Creation of a New European Order, 1940-1943, in The Special Relationship (France: Universit De Rouen, 2003). Churchill outlined these ideas for world organization in a memorandum entitled Morning Thoughts in February 1943. Jebb sought fit to write a parody entitled Early Morning Thoughts. Jebbs proposals, making light of Churchills emphasis on Anglo-American cooperation and regionalism, sought out a fusion of the USA, Great Britain and the British Commonwealth and Empire, combined Chiefs-of-Staff organization in Washington, a really workable Cordon Sanitaire extending from the North Cape, southwards and eastwards, to Mukden, a Council of Asia using basic Pidgin and a Council of the Americas employing basic American. Jebb, The Memoirs of Lord Gladwyn, 130-1. 22

Council, which the PM did not allot much substance, resided above the regional councils and was little more than an evolution from the Concert of Europe to the Concert of the Big Three.62 To accompany these organizations Churchill emphasized the importance of a strong Anglo-American alliance, with the US dedicated to playing a large global role. However, Churchills proposals stayed reasonably vague because his default attitude towards post-war international organization planning was, according to historian E.J. Hughes, obstinate apathy.63 As the PM confided to then Undersecretary of State Stettinius in April 1944, the US and UK had to see the war through first and take up world organization afterward.64 After all, he had advised his planners to not overlook Mrs. Glass Cookery Book recipe for jugged harefirst catch your hare.65 Webster entered the Foreign Office with very few officials agreed with his ideas. However, he quickly made his mark on major Foreign Office memoranda to be approved by the Cabinet on world organization. These documents came to serve as the basis for the British delegations negotiating positions at the crucial Dumbarton Oaks and San Francisco Conferences that crystallized the UN Charter. Beginning in May of 1943, Webster began to re-orient Whitehall and 10 Downing away from regionalism and towards a permanent global organization with small power representation. Jebb had already received Cabinet approval for a memorandum authored
62

E. J. Hughes, Winston Churchill and the Formation of the United Nations Organization, Journal of Contemporary History 9, no. 4 (October 1974), 187. 63 Ibid., 193. Secretary of State Eden initially had minimal interest in the UN. At one point, Eden boasted at not having read a single one of [Websters] Dumbarton Oaks Telegram. Webster, dairy entry of November 14, 1944. Printed in The Historian as Diplomat, 53. 64 Hughes, Winston Churchill and the Formation of the United Nations Organization, 189. 65 Townsend Hoopes and Douglas G. Brinkley, FDR and the Creation of the UN (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 69. In 1941 Churchill told State Department staffer Clark Eichelberger at a luncheon, he was too old to have anything to do with postwar planning, that it would be the job for Franklin Roosevelt. Clark M. Eichelberger, Organizing for Peace: A Personal History of the Founding of the United Nations (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 224. 23

on January 16th, 1943 entitled The United Nations Plan. This plan explained that any future world order must be predicated on the unity of the Great Powers. Though the British government generally agreed to this idea prior to Websters arrival, as Jebbs biographer notes, Jebb greatly exaggerated how much his Four Power Plan paper served as an essential basis for the discussions at Dumbarton Oaks. According to this historian, there was hardly a shadow, as yet, as to how the proposed Organisation might actually function. 66 The next memorandum, completed on July 7th 1943 after Webster had been in the Foreign Office for three months, United Nations Plan for Organising Peace, contains clear markings of the historians influence. His suggestions directly derive from lessons learned during his years of studying the conference system and the League of Nations. First, he wrote in a note amending Jebbs initial draft that it is essential to discover the appropriate language in which to present the plan of leadership to the small powers. To this effect, he argued that small powers should be granted adequate representation on the World Council and be allowed to influence its decisions, even if the Great Powers must unanimously agree to final judgments.67 In particular, he called on the UN to respect the principle which goes back to the Conference of Aix la Chapelle of 1818 that when Great Powers discuss issues directly relevant to smaller powers, they should be able to sit on the Council. The earlier draft made no mention of small power representation on the Security Council.68
66

Sean Greenwood, Titan at the Foreign Office: Gladwyn Jebb and the Shaping of the Modern World (Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 2008), 152-5. 67 Foreign Office: Memorandum, United Nations Plan for Organising Peace, July 7, 1943. Printed in Reynolds and Hughes, The Historian as Diplomat, 126-34. 68 From the January 1943 memo: The most desirable political set-up at the end of the war would be a Council consisting of representatives of the British Commonwealth, the United States, the U.S.S.R. and 24

Second, Webster argued against spasmodic as opposed to fixed Great Power

meetings of the World Council that earlier drafts promoted. The lack of regularity of place and time and a central secretariat would lead to a return to the Concert system which, in fact, often means crisis meetings and the reluctance or even refusal to be present on the part of one of the powers. Webster cited former British Secretary of State Austen Chamberlains view that the regularity of the meetings of the principal statesmen [was] one of the greatest contributions of the League to international affairs.69 Without regular meetings, great powers would not develop the habits of conferring during crises and statesmen would not gain the familiarity necessary to conduct relations with a modicum of personal trust and goodwill. By convincing his superiors to adopt the two changes he advocated on the World Council, namely the inclusion of small powers and regular caucusing, he developed policy that closely mapped the Security Councils final structure. Lastly, Webster argued for the inclusion of a general body including all nations. A general assembly of nations, he wrote, acts as an advertisement for world solidarity as well as a vent for suppressed emotions, especially those of vanity.70 He also supported the creation of a secretariat in order to facilitate creation of the agenda and make arrangements for the Council and Assembly meetings. Both of these suggestions, not in the January memo, were duly included in the July 1943 version.71

(pro forma) China, to ask, as it were, as a provisional Executive Committee of the United Nations. Reynolds and Hughes, The Historian as Diplomat, 122. 69 Webster, note entitled Some Considerations on a United Nations Organisation, no date. Printed in Reynolds and Hughes, The Historian as Diplomat, 19-20. 70 Ibid. 71 Foreign Office Memorandum, United Nations Plan for Organising Peace, July 7, 1943. Printed in Reynolds and Hughes, The Historian as Diplomat, 126-34. 25

Thus early in the process Webster made a significant mark on British policy

towards a world organization. He was able to do so in part because bureaucratic positions were more fluid as fewer people had turned their attention to this secondary issue. After all, in the first half of 1943 Montgomery defeated Rommel, the Battle of the Atlantic raged, British forces captured 250,000 prisoners of war in Tunisia, the invasion of Sicily began, and the RAF Bomber Command began bombing the Ruhr. In the midst of such dramatic developments, why would anyone in the British government be much interested in vague memoranda on a future world organization? By shaping opinion on the UN before it had time to harden, Webster was able to reorient much of the British bureaucracy, including Secretary of State Anthony Eden and Undersecretary for Foreign Affairs Alexander Cadogan, towards his vision. Churchill remained the lone holdout for a more regionally oriented organization. Without consulting Whitehall, he sent a memo entitled Morning Thoughts in February 1943 to FDR to support a rudimentary regional organization, and advocated much of the same in Tehran. Yet Churchill paid little attention when the Foreign Offices final plans for Dumbarton Oaks, the conference held in Washington DC at which the US, UK, USSR, and China would negotiate the shape of the UN, came up for his approval. As Webster wrote in his diary, The P.M. walked out, said he was not much interested and the Cabinet passed the papers without discussion!72 In the end, it was not the Prime Ministers nebulous visions but the diligent historians robust universal organization that the UK adopted as its preferred policy. This final document approved by the Cabinet in May 1944 was entitled Memorandum: Future World Organization. It asserted in language characteristic of Websters voice and
72

Webster, diary entry of July 7, 1944. Printed in Reynolds and Hughes, The Historian as Diplomat, 37. 26

ideation, Nothing has been more clearly proved during the present war than the interconnexion of peace and security in all parts of the world. The future organization must recognize this fact and be a world organization.73 It stressed that the establishment of a centre where the principal States of the world can be harmonized is in the great tradition of British policy, built on the legacy of Castlereagh and Palmerston.74 It was not bound by the rigid definitions that constrained League action but simply set up guiding principles and the machinery to adapt to future needs. And it was complete with World Council, World Assembly, Secretariat, and provisions to supervise economic, social and technical organizations. Webster had singlehandedly convinced the British foreign policy establishment to adopt his conception of a future international organization. As Jebb acknowledged in a review of Websters wartime diary he penned in 1977, the gradual modification of the various Foreign Office papersso as to get them more into harmony with the idea of a world organization resembling in many ways the old League of Nations, was to a large extent [Websters] work.75 Sailing to attend the Dumbarton Oaks Conference in late July 1944, Webster must have been satisfied knowing that he had largely written his own instructions. Upon arriving on American shores, Webster was to re-encounter the diplomat Leo Pasvolsky, a man who had also constructed his countrys plans for a future world organization.

73

Foreign Office, Memorandum: Future World Organization, May 8, 1944. Printed in Reynolds and Hughes, The Historian as Diplomat, 135-155. 74 Ibid., 136. 75 Gladwyn, review of The Historian As Diplomat, 479-80. 27

 Pasvolsky in Paris

Born in Pavlograd in 1893, Leo Pasvolsky immigrated to New York at the age of twelve on account of his anti-czarist parents.76 He studied political science at City College of New York and edited the Russian Review and Russian-language daily Russkoye Slovo.77 His sister Clara sang Russian-language music as a recitalist, but numerous reviewers noted certain flaws in her vocal technique.78 Pasvolsky may have debated Trotsky during the Communist leaders visit to New York in 1916.79 Though he initially celebrated the demise of the tsar and the rise of White Russian leader Alexander Kerensky during the 1917 Revolution, he shortly soured on the Bolshevik-led government. The migr advocated Western military intervention and used his fluent Russian to translate the Sission Documents, later found to be forged, which alleged a German-Bolshevik conspiracy to topple the tsar. A wartime Washington Post article described him as a ball of energy, round of body and face, who could impersonate Mr. Five-by-Five were it not that he stands a dignified 5-feet-4.80 Another story charitably noted that Pasvolsky will never win any prizes in a handsome man contest, while his

76 77

Schlesinger, Act of Creation, 33. Lenine and Trotsky Will Fall, Say Conservatives, Slav Radicals Here Express Faith in Bolsheviki, The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, February 17, 1918. The article cited him as strongly pro-Ally and an opponent of the Petrograd radicals. When asked why Trotsky suspended hostilities, Pasvolsky responded, Hehad promised peace to the unthinking masses. They were permitted to assume power because they had promised peace and they had to make good, no matter how nave and idiotic the brand of peace they furnished. 78 Music of Yesterday, New York Tribune, April 2, 1917. 79 Donald T. Critchlow, The Brookings Institution, 1916-1952 (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 1985), 74. 80 Richard G. Massock, Peace Conference To Need Facts; They'll Be Ready, The Washington Post, March 21, 1943, sec. B. The song Mr. Five-by-Five, a #1 Harlem Hit Parade R&B single in 1942 sung by Ella May Morse made light of Jimmy Rushings size. It had the chorus Mr. Five-by-Five, hes five feet tall and hes five feet tall and hes five feet wide/he dont measure no more from head to toe than he do from side to side. Ella M. Morse, Mr. Five-by-Five, Ella Mae Morse with Freddie Slack and His Orchestra, 1942, vinyl recording. 28

State Department colleagues joked that he was Friar Tuck, the third pig whose house the big bad wolf could not blow down, and the brain that walked like a man.81 As an unmarried twenty-six year old deeply interested in international politics, Pasvolsky, like Webster, found a way to get to Paris during the Peace Conference. He paid his way by cabling back news reports on developments in Paris and Russia for his fathers Russkoye Slovo, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle and the New York Tribune. Articles sent across the Atlantic fixated on the economic consequences of the settlement. For instance, in May 1919 Pasvolsky published an article entitled Allies May Yet Lose War in which he warned that Germanys spirit of economic aggression would extend eastward and come to exploit the nascent Russian state.82 Upon returning to the US, Pasvolsky moved to DC and was employed as a research economist at the Brookings Institution. In that position he co-wrote a book on Russia with the Brookings director, Harold Moulton, who was to become his lifelong coauthor. Pasvolskys prescription for his homelands woes foreshadowed the ideas he would later promote as the basis for global cooperation. By exporting its abundance of commodities, maintaining a stable currency, and paying back its foreign debts, Russia could become part of the global economy. In particular he stressed the importance of trade and foreign investment in reshaping Russias political landscape.83 This belief that
81

Peter Edson, Leo Pasvolsky Plays Lead Role in Peace Setup, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, July 19, 1945. Joseph E. Johnson, Oral History Interview with Joseph E. Johnson, interview by Richard Mckinzie, The Truman Library, June 29, 1973, http://www.trumanlibrary.org/oralhist/johnsonje.htm. In his diary, Vice President Henry Wallace referred to Pasvolsky as an old dodo. Henry A. Wallace and John Morton Blum, The Price of Vision: The Diary of Henry A. Wallace, 1942-1946 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973), 263. 82 Leo Pasvolsky, Allies May Let Lose War, New York Tribune, May 10, 1919. 83 Leo Pasvolsky and Harold Glenn Moulton, Russian Debts and Russian Reconstruction; a Study of the Relation of Russia's Foreign Debts to Her Economic Recovery, (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1924). David C. Engerman, Modernization from the Other Shore: American Intellectuals and the Romance of Russian Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 150. 29

international trade possessed the capability to bind nations together reemerged in his proposals for the United Nations Charter. In the 1930s Pasvolsky travelled through Europe, attending world economic conferences in Geneva and London as an observer for Brookings, and wrote with Moulton extensively on European economic challenges.84 The two believed that many of Americas interwar economic struggles derived from poor international trade policy. American efforts to achieve economic autarky would only backfire, they argued, as the United States fiscal struggles were inextricably linked to the international economy. In particular, the collection of intergovernmental debt and war reparations in the interwar years hurt both creditor and debtor countries. Tariffs aimed to protect domestic industries only clogged wider channels of international trade, induced exchanged demoralization and withered growth prospects.85 Pasvolsky in particular worried that raw material cartels could squeeze American and global growth.86 In 1937, Pasvolsky secured a meeting with Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles, and used his time to advocate a laundry list of policies aimed at liberalizing trade and the creation of an International Fund to help relieve foreign exchange crises.87 While in Washington, Pasvolsky developed a very, very close relationship with Roosevelts Secretary of State, former Tennessee senator Cordell Hull.88 The two were an unlikely pair, but shared core policy prescriptions that came to guide their work
84 85

Massock, Peace Conference To Need Facts; They'll Be Ready, 1943. Harold G. Moulton and Leo Pasvolsky, War Debts and World Prosperity (New York: Brookings Institution, 1932), 422. Malcolm Rutherford, Vision Accomplished: Harold Moulton and Leo Pasvolsky of the Brookings Institution as Champions of a New World Order, in The Economic Mind in America: Essays in the History of American Economics (New York: Routledge, 1998), 86. 86 Rutherford, Vision Accomplished, 91. 87 Ibid. 88 The oral history subject emphasized to his interviewer, I don't know whether you realize how close he was. Joseph E. Johnson, Oral History Interview, interview by Richard Mckinzie, 1973. 30

together. Cordell Hull grew up in the haze-hung mountains of northern Tennessee. A 1940 Life magazine article profiling Hulls background was replete with stories of his fathers moonshining and revenge killingshe only did what any real person would do, said the Secretary. Born in a log cabin, Cordell helped raft logs down to Nashville and could flick flies off a steers rump with a blacksnake whip, but most of his neighbors remembered him as always studyin or sittin on a stump with a book in his hands.89 One would not expect a short, round, Russian economist to become a close professional ally with the tall, gaunt son of a Tennessee moonshiner. Perhaps their shared status as outsiders penetrating the northeastern, Ivy League-educated foreign policy community brought them together. This social background, combined with their similar policy views, drew the two men close. Early in his Congressional career Hull decided to focus on tariffs and trade policy, realizing that he needed to specialize to get ahead in the House and that so-called dry statistics were as interesting to me as a dime novel.90 Like Pasvolsky, he relished policy study, preferring to spend his Sundays penetrating deeply into the intricacies of fiscal subjects.91 His maiden speech to Congress in 1907 railed against the king of evils, our present tariff.92 In 1916, as World War I raged, he came to see both the domestic and international benefits of free trade. Hull believed that unhampered trade dovetailed with peace, and by eliminating economic rivalry through lowering barriers

89

During the Civil War, three Yankee soldiers in order to steal a silver-mounted hawg rifle shot out his eye and left him for dead. The Hulls of Tennessee: They Produced a Great Secretary of State, Life, March 18, 1940. 90 He was first drawn to tariff questions back in 1888 during the debate over the Mills Bill. Cordell Hull and Andrew Henry Thomas. Berding, The Memoirs of Cordell Hull (New York: Macmillan, 1948), 46, 83. 91 When considering the question of the income tax, he wrote to Secretary of State Elihu Root for information on how other countries taxation regimes functioned. Ibid., 50. 92 Ibid., 52. 31

to trade, we could go along way toward eliminating war itself.93 Even at this early point, he recognized the potential for American leadership to spark trade liberalization and called on then Secretary of State Lansing to hold a permanent international trade conference in Washington following the wars conclusion.94 He claimed to have influenced Wilsons commitment to the removal, of all economic barriers and the establishment of equality of trade conditions in the Fourteen Points declaration on postWWI settlement policy. Yet with protectionist Republicans in power after the war, Hull was unable to influence policy outcomes and fumed at ever-rising tariff barriers. Roosevelt appointed Hull as Secretary of State in 1933, mainly to shore up support among Southern Democrats and to have a subordinate who was inexperienced enough on the issues not to challenge him.95 Undeterred, Hulls first order of business was to pass a free trade bill to unwind the domestic and international effects of the Smoot-Hawley Tariffthe highest tariff in U.S. history, which had been passed in 1930. A year into his office he secured congressional support of the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act, which allowed the President to negotiate and enact bilateral tariff reductions without Congressional approval.96 It was at this time that Hull first appointed Pasvolsky to work on the Trade Agreements Act.97 Their similar views of the importance

93

He very early on expressed frustration with preferential tariffs, and came to heated exchanges with Churchill a quarter century later on the issue. Ibid., 81-4. 94 Ibid. 95 Exiting Secretary Stimson wrote in his diary on his meeting with Hull shortly after his nomination, Hull told him that he had few objections when Roosevelt told him that he intended to be his own Secretary of State. Irwin Gellman, Secret Affairs: Franklin Roosevelt, Cordell Hull, and Sumner Welles (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 21-2. 96 Douglas A. Irwin, Petros C. Mavroidis, and A. O. Sykes, The Genesis of the GATT (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 9-12. 97 Mable S. Call, Recent Leader For Peace in The American Peace Society. LEO PASVOLSKY, World Affairs 119 (1956): 118. 32

of using free trade to bolster international stability surely helped Pasvolsky secure his job and contributed to their increasing professional intimacy. By 1936 Pasvolsky had ascended to the Office of the Secretary, having accepted Hulls offer to work as his Special Assistant.98 In this position, according to Hull, Pasvolskys capacities were splendid, his service exceeding valuable.99 He left Hull in 1938 to return to his position at Brookings, but after Hitler invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, Hull quickly reached out to his close associate to rejoin the Department again as his Special Assistant. One of Pasvolskys staffers recalled Pasvolsky telling the story of Hull calling him up while he was vacationing in Maine in the summer of 1939, saying they tell me Im a damn foolbut I think Europe is going to have a war, and I think it's very important for us to be prepared for our role in relation to that war, and I want you to come back to Washington and work with me on postwar planning.100 In his years as Secretary, Hulls State Department grew intensely divided on account of personality and policy clashes. Those loyal to Hull came to be known as Hulls Men.101 In many ways, however, the extent to which Hull trusted and relied upon Pasvolsky for postwar planning may cause one to count the Secretary, at least on this issue, as a Pasvolsky Man. Surely as Hulls health worsenedhe suffered from tuberculosis and often took months off workPasvolsky took on more and more autonomy.102 Reflections of contemporary State Department officials illustrate the extent of Pasvolskys influence. Dean Acheson in a private letter referred to that little rat Leo
98

G. William. Domhoff, The Power Elite and the State: How Policy Is Made in America (New York: A. De Gruyter, 1990), 119. 99 Hull, Memoirs of Cordell Hull, 1626. 100 Joseph E. Johnson, Oral History Interview, interview by Richard Mckinzie, 1973. 101 Irwin, Mavroidis, and Sykes, The Genesis of GATT, 12. 102 As one contemporary put it in his diary, Hull in the later years often sick, away from his desk, and incapable of supervising his staff. Gellman, Secret Affairs, 311. 33

Pasvolskys United Nations, and lamented, How he possessed poor old Cordells mind.103 In Achesons memoirs, he reflected on how the Hull-Pasvolsky establishment operated. Leo Pasvolsky was Mr. Hulls principal speechwriter. Or, one might say, he wrote Mr. Hulls principal speech; for, whatever the occasion or title, the national trade and the true road to it through agreements reducing tariffs. When a speech impended, we would all be summoned to Mr. Hulls overheated office and given copies of Leos draft. Presiding at his large desk, Mr. Hull wouldannounce, We will now go over the speech pawagwaph by pawagwaph. This, of course, made impossible any discussion of the theme or its appropriateness or treatment.104 As another oral history from a different postwar planning staffer revealed, so far as the proposals which became the UN Charter are concerned, Pasvolsky was pretty much writing his own ticket.105 Pasvolsky and Hull applied a more practical and less theoretical attitude toward deriving of the lessons of the League than did Webster. Yet Pasvolsky believed that after this second world war, the central problem confronting mankind will be exactly the same as that which confronted us after the last war, and pushed his staff hard to study

103

John L. Harper, American Visions of Europe: Franklin D. Roosevelt, George F. Kennan, and Dean G. Acheson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 256. Robert L. Beisner, Dean Acheson: A Life in the Cold War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 532. 104 Dean Acheson, Present at the Creation; My Years in the State Department (New York: Norton, 1969), 44, 64. Note the Groton, Yale, and Harvard Law-educated Achesons derision aimed at Hulls cartoonish Tennessean accent. For one example of Hulls many speeches authored by Pavolsky on the impact of trade on international politics, see his address on Trade, Prosperity and Peace delivered in 1938. Audio is available at http://research.archives.gov/description/2173179. 105 Donald C. Blaisdell, Oral History Interview with Donald C. Blaisdell, interview by Richard D. McKinzie, The Truman Library, June 27, 1973, http://www.trumanlibrary.org/oralhist/blaisdel.htm. Hulls memoirs do not show quite the extent of Pasvolskys influence as related by other State Department officers recollections. Perhaps the elder statesman did not want to divest much of the glory, or expose just how much he delegated the details to his subordinate of his crowning achievement for which he won a Nobel Prize. 34

the League.106 In nearly all the studies Pasvolsky commissioned alongside policy options for the current US position have sections entitled League of Nations Experience.107 More than any particular aspect of the League architecture, both Hull and Pasvolsky fixated on the Senates rejection of the Treaty of Versailles. In the State Department it was considered common knowledge that Americas absence doomed the League from the start.108 During every step in the five years of planning and negotiation, Hull and Pasvolsky calculated their decisions impact on Congressional and public opinion in order to ensure widespread support for their creation. As one oral history recalled, the whole thrust of Hull's preparation and Pasvolsky's had been Let's not let it happen again. So that we all were imbued with an awareness of the importance of keeping the U.S. Senate aboard.109 Though Hull admitted to not paying much attention to the Committees work through mid-1943, his main contribution was to learn from the mistakes made in 19191920 and ensure that post-war planning remain a nonpartisan arena. To do so, he invited senior Democrat Tom Connally, internationalist Republican Warren Austin, and, later, co-author of the Neutrality Acts Republican Arthur Vandenberg.110 Pasvolsky was to play a crucial role in securing support among Republican senators, as according to Sandifer, [Vandenberg] had been influenced more than he realized by Pasvolsky's

106

Leo Pasvolsky, The Problem of Economic Peace, in Basis for the Peace to Come (New York: Abingdon-Cokesbury Press, 1942), 84. 107 For instance, see Permanent International Organization: Functions, Powers, Machinery, and Procedure. July 23, 1943. Parallel Texts of Tentative Proposals and League of Nations Covenant, July 21, 1944. Pasvolsky Papers, Library of Congress. 108 Some contemporary scholars are more wary of this thesis. See Patrick O. Cohrs, The Unfinished Peace after World War I: America, Britain and the Stabilisation of Europe, 1919-1932 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 109 Joseph E. Johnson, Oral History Interview, interview by Richard Mckinzie, 1973. 110 Hull, The Memoirs of Cordell Hull, 1635. 35

thinking, since he prepared the agenda and sort of guided the discussions.111 In January 1945, Vandenberg delivered the speech heard round the world, in which he publicly renounced his past isolationism and promised to do everything within my power to make the basic idea of Dumbarton Oaks succeed.112 Pasvolskys influence on American policy is more difficult to track than Websters on British policy. Unlike Webster, Pasvolsky neither kept a diary nor reflected specifically on his role during the war. The State Department had over sixty staffers working on UN planning, while the Foreign Office only had a handful of men on the task.113 Yet Pasvolsky as the head of planning for the UN after August 1943 occupied a more senior position in the State Department than Webster did in the Foreign Office, and he acted with the complete confidence of the Secretary of State. Furthermore, he hired the scholars to work in the Division of Special Research, and surely selected those who agreed with his opinions on international organization. He ran important committee meetings and maintained final approval over many official documents. Finally, he was a master bureaucratic tactician. In an oral history interview, former state department official and Division of Special Research staffer Durward Sandifer said: Pasvolsky was a genius at manipulating people who were opposed to his point of view. I've seen him sit in committees with highranking military leaders, who were in disagreement with him, but he was very subtle in his argumentation and his techniques for achieving his objectives. He would sort of move around them and have them surrounded before they realized what was happening,

111 112

Sandifer interview http://www.trumanlibrary.org/oralhist/sandifer.htm http://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/resources/pdf/VandenbergSpeech.pdf http://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/common/generic/Speeches_Vandenberg.htm 113 Massock, Peace Conference to Need Facts, 1943.

36

and they would agree with his views in some of these committees.114 Pasvolskys position, intellectual arsenal, overarching vision, interpersonal skills

and unquestioned backing from Hull allowed him to personally guide US policy on postwar international organizations. Yet he had to put his considerable persuasive talents to work in order to convince the President, the Soviet Union, and small powers skeptical of his vision. Policy Planning at the State Department

Hull (left) and Welles following a meeting with the President, 1940.115
114

Oral History Interview with Durward V. Sandifer, interview by Richard McKinzie, The Truman Library, May 29, 1973, http://www.trumanlibrary.org/oralhist/sandifer.htm. Such masterful handling of difficult questions and questioners can also be witnessed during Pasvolskys congressional testimony presenting the UN Charter to the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. 37

Hulls soon-to-be bureaucratic archrival Sumner Welles, the highest-ranking

official under him, initially led the State Departments planning operations.116 Welles grew up in New York, attended Groton and Harvard, and was close to FDR from a very young age. While Hull and Pasvolsky were both very forthright and gregarious, Welles was a reserved and withdrawn functional alcoholic with a deep, pontifical voice.117 Churchill, who made the phrase no comment famous, said he first heard Welles use the saying.118 On Roosevelts advice, he joined the Foreign Service straight out of Harvard and made his name as the architect of the Good Neighbor Policy. Welles and Pasvolsky both believed one of Wilsons major failings was in outsourcing planning to his advisor Colonel Edward Houses extra-governmental research group called the Inquiry. Wilson never involved the Executive Branch in planning and as such was forced to rely exclusively on Colonel House at the Paris Peace Conference. In order to correct this error and provide the State Department with planning options, Welles in late 1939 established the Advisory Committee on Problems of Foreign Relations.119 From the start, the influence of American domestic politics weighed heavily on postwar planning efforts. During this period the Neutrality Acts and public opinion bound the Administrations options. Such a vague title was chosen in order to obscure the true nature of the committees work; if Congress or the press had got
115 116

Harris & Ewing, Cordell Hull and Sumner Welles, 1940, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. The bureaucratic feud grew bitterly personal as the war years went on. Though William Bullitt was lead rumormonger of Sumner Welles drunken homosexual advances on black train porters, Secretary Hull was supportive of an effort. After influential New York Times columnist James Reston wrote a piece praising Welles career, Hull called him in the next day and showed him an FBI file full of accusations of Welles homosexuality. James Reston, Deadline: A Memoir (New York: Random House, 1991), 103. 117 Gellman, Secret Affairs, 304. 118 Robert H. Pilpel, Churchill in America, 1895-1961 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976), 216. 119 Christopher D. O'Sullivan, Sumner Welles, Postwar Planning, and the Quest for a New World Order, 1937-1943 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 33-4. At the time Hull worried that it would bolster isolationism by opening up sore wounds on the League of Nations. See Simon Rofe, Pre-war Postwar Planning: The Phoney War, the Roosevelt Administration, and the Case of the Advisory Committee on Problems of Foreign Relations, Diplomacy & Statecraft 23, no. 2 (June 2012). 38

wind of the project, they would surely have criticized State for dragging the US into war and concocting means to restrict American sovereignty. This first effort, however, was severely understaffed and its efforts, according to Welles, were desultory.120 Pasvolsky spearheaded the revival of State Department postwar planning towards the end of 1940. He proposed the establishment of a Division of Special Researchyet another obscure titlein order to restart postwar planning. 121 Though initially understaffed, its functions accelerated after FDR heartily approv[ed] the proposal to expand its work and to create a high-level Advisory Committee on Post-War Foreign Policy in late December 1941.122 Before Pearl Harbor, FDR was wary of outspoken public mention of the creation of a new international organization for fear of antagonizing isolationists. He balked from Churchills suggested language for the Atlantic Charter of calling for an effective international organization, opting instead for disarmament pending the establishment of a wider and permanent system of general security.123 After the Japanese attack, however, FDR in consultation with Welles began developing his own ideas for an international organization. He preferred to have international organizations focusing on economic and social issues fully divorced from the United Nations. Roosevelt once laughed off Hulls suggestion that there should be a permanent secretariat, noting sarcastically that of course he would lend Hull the Pentagon or the Empire State Building to house the international bureaucrats.124 FDR, like Churchill, seems to have used thinking about the postwar organization as a wistful escape from the rigors of
120 121

Townsend and Brinkley, FDR and the Creation of the UN, 43-5. Notter, Foreign Policy Preparation, 41-55. 122 Ibid., 63-5. 123 Schlesinger, Act of Creation, 37. 124 Hull, Memoirs of Cordell Hull, 1642-3. 39

wartime command. Roosevelt enjoyed musing about how the meetings should be held in places like the islands of Flores and Niihau and the Black Hills of South Dakota.125 During the war Secretary Hull grew increasingly frustrated with Welles. His subordinate began delivering unapproved speeches on his conception of a postwar organization only a month after Pearl Harbor, and continued to do so after Hull instructed him to stop. He also pushed for a Senate resolution supporting an instrument for maintaining the peace. Hull believed that Welles disobedience undermined the cause by making the public digest the idea of an international organization before he was sure they would accept it. Hull was also jealous of Welles access to FDR, as he frequently infuriated Hull by trumping the discussion in saying that he had just spoken to the President and secured his approval on a contentious topic. Hull felt overshadowed by the attention-seeking and disloyal Welles, who according to one staffers diary committed the fatal mistake of speaking as though he were Secretary of State, when there is an alive and very active Secretary of State in the immediate vicinity.126 Welles both influenced FDRs views on international organization and strongly advocated them in State Department committee fights. Both Pasvolsky and Webster agreed to neither revive the League of Nations nor base a future organization on the Kellogg-Briand Pact; they agreed, in essence, to start with a clean slate.127 Welles, however, had a vision that fundamentally contradicted Pasvolskys conception of a globally oriented organization tasked with promoting economic development and preserving the peace. Welles, drawing on his experience devising and implementing the
125 126

Hilderbrand, Dumbarton Oaks, 106. Benjamin Welles, Sumner Welles: FDR's Global Strategist (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), 333-4. Benjamin Welles is Sumners son. 127 Ibid. 40

Good Neighbor Policy, advocated a regionally oriented United Nations organization with open spheres of responsibility.128 In June 1943 Welles presented a draft constitution to the President that reflected his ideas about regional organization incorporating points from his weekly discussions with FDR.129 The points that it stressed map closely to the views FDR espoused in Tehran. One staffer remarked that by September 1942 a struggle for power had developed, with Welles and Pasvolsky at odds.130 Hull and Pasvolsky believed strongly that a UN organized on regional lines would harm Americas chances of winning the peace. They worried that regions would turn into exclusive spheres of influence for Great Powers that may lead to questions of balance of power.131 The US had, at least under Roosevelt, exercised economic and other self-restraint with the American republics, but other nations could not be trusted to do the same with their neighbors. They were concerned that if the US participated in a European or Asian regional council, America would be forced to mediate between other dominating powers. Lastly, they feared domestic opinion would sour on our participation in regional councils save one in the Western Hemisphere. Hull and Pasvolsky felt that the American people were more ready to take responsibilities in a world organization than in any regional plan.132 Luckily for Hull, he held a trump card more powerful than any of his arguments in favor of universalism: the rumors that in 1940 returning from Speaker Bankheads funeral in Alabama a drunken Welles propositioned multiple black male Pullman porters. FDR heard the whispers and in 1941 asked J. Edgar Hoover to investigate the claims, not
128 129

OSullivan, Sumner Welles, Postwar Planning, and the Quest for a New World Order, 68. Welles, Sumner Welles: FDRs Global Strategist, 334. 130 Hilderbrand, Dumbarton Oaks, 18-19. 131 Hull, Memoirs of Cordell Hull, 1644. 132 Ibid., 1645. 41

to ferret Welles out but rather find out if he was susceptible to blackmail.133 Hoover met with FDR and told him that the allegations were true, but for the next three years the President sought to keep his advisor in office. In late 1942, Hull, fed up with his subordinate, had a surreptitious meeting with J. Edgar Hoover to obtain his file on Welles incident on the train.134 Ambassador Bullitt and Hull together brought the issue to a head. Bullitt began speaking to reporters and Republican congressmen, hoping that FDR would be forced to fire Welles before it became public.135 Perhaps smelling blood, in July 1943 Hull suspended the activities of the planning subcommittee Welles chaired.136 On August 15th, Hull finally forced FDR to make Welles step down by issuing an ultimatum that either he or Welles must go.137 Though FDR greatly trusted his longtime advisor, he could not risk firing the immensely popular and Congressionally influential southern Democrat.138 Welles refused Hulls offer of a farewell tour as a roving ambassador in Latin America, and proffered his letter of resignation the next day. That evening, one subordinate wrote, I never saw [Hull] in a better humor.139
133

Gellman, Secret Affairs, 236. Homosexuality considered not just a taboo but also a security risk. Americans suspected that foreign governments would try to blackmail any official they knew to be gay. 134 Ibid., 307. 135 Ibid., 307-15. Though Hull did not spread the rumors nearly as actively as Bullitt, he was not above it. After influential New York Times columnist James Reston wrote a piece praising Welles career following his resignation, Hull called him in the next day and showed him an FBI file full of accusations of Welles homosexuality. James Reston, Deadline: A Memoir (New York: Random House, 1991), 103. 136 Georg Schild, Bretton Woods and Dumbarton Oaks: American Economic and Political Postwar Planning in the Summer of 1944 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995), 58-9. 137 Welles, Sumner Welles: FDRs Global Strategist, 346. 138 FDR was disappointed in Welles resigning. During his meeting on August 15th, he said, I have known you since you were a little boy before you went to Groton. I have seen you develop into what you now are. I need you for the country. After all, whom have I got? Ibid., 347. 139 Gellman, Secret Affairs, 317-8. Welles and Hull had one final confrontation a day after Hull had his subordinate fired. Hull declared that he based my request [that Welles be fired] on your personal habits. For more than two years, I concealed it from my wife. It was brought to her attention by wives of prominent members of Congress. You knew it was known to them, to the Soviet government, the Free French, the British and South American countries. You should have come to me. Your continuation in office would be, for the President and the State Department, the greatest national scandal since the 42

Welles was forced out of office at a crucial moment in postwar planning. The

combined advocacy of Welles and FDR may have been able to maintain a regional model for Americas plans. However, FDR was too distracted and non-committal to force his view upon Hull and Pasvolsky, especially since he lost his last advocate for a regional organization within the State Departments bureaucracy. It was early enough in the process that Pasvolsky and Hull had ample time to change the plans and convince FDR to adopt them before Dumbarton Oaks forced America to adopt solid bargaining positions. In October 1943, at the Moscow Conference of Foreign Ministers the US, UK, USSR, and China committed themselves to the creation of an international organization. Secretary Hull convinced the other ministers to agree to a statement recognizing the necessity of establishing at the earliest practicable date a general international
existence of the United States. Welles suffered a heart attack the next day. Welles, Sumner Welles: FDRs Global Strategist, 348-9. After government, Welles continued publishing on world affairs but he grew addicted to sleeping pills and was never able to control his drinking. He attempted suicide in 1948, was found freezing in a ditch, and had to have fingers and toes amputated. Hollywood rumor magazine Confidential in 1956 made widely known the story of Pullman porters. The story said that Roosevelt found his tall, aloof and fastidious friend had a side to his character that was more Bohemian than Social Register. He died in 1961 of pancreatic cancer.

Truxton Decatur [a pseudonym], We Accuse...Sumner Welles, Confidential, May 1956. 43

organization, based on the principle of the sovereign equality of all peace-loving states, and open to membership by all such states, large and small, for the maintenance of international peace and security. USSR Minister Molotov, UK Minister Eden, and Hull all agreed that their governments should meet in the near future to discuss specifics. Though the Four-Nation Declaration went a long way toward ensuring that some organization would be created, the ministers did not delve beyond platitudes.140 During the Tehran Conference in November 1943, President Roosevelt advocated for one last time his and Welles regional conception. However this final summit did little to impact the UNs ultimate structure. FDR had yet to see Pasvolskys fully-formed plan, and Hull was mistaken when he wrote in his memoir he had been able to convince FDR to adopt a universal as opposed to regional framework.141 When FDR took Stalin aside to pitch him his ideas for a new international organization at the Tehran Big Three summit, he echoed many of Welles ideas articulated in his June 1943 draft. Like Welles, he envisioned a three-part organization. First, a general assembly would meet in various places around the world and discuss global issues. Second, an executive committee consisting of the big four and six or seven representatives from other regions would handle nonmilitary questions such as health, economic, and food policy. Lastly, the Four Policemen, the US, UK, USSR, and China, would have the power to deal immediately with any threat to the peace or any sudden emergency. Regional

140

The Moscow Conference, October 1943: Joint Four Power Declaration, The Avalon Project, accessed March 25, 2013, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/wwii/moscow.asp. Harley A. Notter, Postwar Foreign Policy Preparation: 1939-1945. (Washington: Department of State, 1949), 194-9. David J. Dolff, The Creation of the United Nations Organization as a Factor in Soviet Foreign Policy, 1943-46, diss., University of Alberta, 2010, 67-75. 141 Hull, Memoirs of Cordell Hull, 1637. As summer [of 1943] arrived, Hull wrote, Roosevelt began to turn toward our point of view. 44

organizations would be encouraged but have little autonomy over security questions.142 However, like in Moscow, the discussions at Tehran made little impact on the final design of the UN aside from reinforcing Big Three support for its eventual existence. It was in the American planning for Dumbarton Oaks that Pasvolsky and Hull set out the plans that by and large turned into the final form of the UN agreed to at San Francisco. These plans were developed and would be crystallized at the staff, not principals, level. Pasvolsky Ascendant After Welles left government, Pasvolsky and Hull were able to rewrite the State Departments plans and convince FDR to adopt their proposals. Most importantly, the President consented to Pasvolskys plan to eliminate the Four Policemen body and create a Security Council. The Council would add non-permanent members elected from a universal rather than regional pool. Their draft envisages an organization on the universal pattern, only granting that regional developments were not precluded so long as they are consistent with the universal organization. The draft brought together Welles Great Power executive committee and broader non-security related Council into one body that distinctly resembles the final Security Council. Pasvolsky believed that in this formulation smaller powers would feel more ownership and be more inclined to support a system that by virtue of the veto would the Great Powers would ultimately dominate. Unlike in Welles final draft, the Councils members would not be apportioned regionally but all members would be eligible to run for election. In a

142

Notter, Postwar Foreign Policy Preparation, 154-6. 45

meeting in February 1944, FDR consented to these changes, leading Pasvolsky to note, the regional principle goes out.143 At this time FDR also accepted Pasvolskys expanded conception of a UN organization that would house technical organizations and work to collectively address economic and social issues. Drawing on his early academic work that emphasized the interdependence of national economies and the contributions trade barriers made to increasing tensions, Pasvolsky hoped the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) would help eliminate the causes of war by promoting development and sound policy. He believed that ECOSOC, operating under the authority of the General Assembly, would help coordinate the activities of organizations like the International Labor Organization and the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration.144 By splitting the responsibilities for political and economic affairs into two Councils, Pasvolsky thought he was applying a lesson from the Leagues failures. The Leagues Council, charged with handling both issue areas, was only staffed with political experts and was diverted from its efforts to keep the peace by having to spend half its time on economic issues.145 Harkening back to his earlier scholarship, Pasvolsky believed that economic stability and free trade were the foundations of international order. A strong ECOSOC would help to further those ends.
143

Hilderbrand, Dumbarton Oaks, 34-5. The new draft also brought a new emphasis one of Pasvolskys pet ideas: it called for the UN to facilitate global disarmament by mandating and inspecting minimum and potentially maximum levels of national arms. The Charter of the United Nations. August 14, 1943. Printed in Notter, Postwar Foreign Policy Preparation, 526-534. According to an oral history, Pasvolsky's whole thesis was: We should not only have a ceiling over arms; we should have a floor under arms. Joseph E. Johnson, Oral History Interview, interview by Richard Mckinzie, 1973. 144 State Department Memorandum, Relation of ILO to the Projected International Organization. Participants, Secretary of Labor and Mr. Pasvolsky. Sept 9 1944. Pasvolsky Papers. Earlier drafts had ECOSOC operating under the Councils auspices and with the power to issue binding decisions. Russell, A History of the UN Charter, 309-317. 145 Hilderbrand, Dumbarton Oaks, 88. 46

At the Atlantic, Moscow, Tehran, and Yalta conferences, the Big Three

committed their nations to the creation of an international organization. However, the leaders laid out only the most primitive of skeletons due to lack of interest, time, and familiarity with the issues. Pasvolsky and Webster added bones, tendons, and muscle to the vague ideas their superiors espoused. They advocated for the creation of a General Assembly. They ensured the UN would tackle economic and social issues. They provided for the UN to incorporate the Leagues technical and specialized organizations. They finalized the conception of the Security Council. It was truly the academics-turnedbureaucrats who breathed life into FDR and Churchills wistful wartime yearnings for a body capable of preventing another such ghastly conflict. Dumbarton Oaks and San Francisco On July 31st Webster arrived on US soil after a seven-day transatlantic voyage aboard super-dreadnought HMS Queen Elizabeth en route to the Dumbarton Oaks Conference. The historian was pleasantly surprised upon first reading the American proposals. It is amazing that they had made such far reaching suggestions, he scribbled in his diary. I wish I dare have been so bold in my papers. But they would certainly have been rejected, if I had, on the plea that the Untied States would not consider such things!146 Before the conference began, Webster had the opportunity to meet for the second time the main author of the American memoranda that had so pleased him. The worlds two most influential international organization architects reunited on the afternoon of August 16th. That day Webster met Pasvolsky in his State Department office, and two days later dined with Pasvolsky and his wife at the University Club.
146

Webster, diary entry of August 8, 1944. Printed in Reynolds and Hughes, The Historian as Diplomat, 40. 47

Webster surely appreciated Pasvolskys erudition, noting appreciatively in his diary that P is most anxious clearly to meet our ideas and he understandsmy papers better than anyone else who has read them. With his next remark, Webster encapsulated the attitude both he and Pasvolsky would come to adopt at Dumbarton Oaks and San Francisco: [Pasvolsky] understandsthat all we can do is to try experiments to see if mankind can work out a method to preserve international stability.147 While the two men advocated their largely overlapping policy prescriptions, they both understood that it was not worth risking the entire organization just to preserve a few phrases in the Charter, and sought to forge compromises to safeguard its creation.

Webster (standing, second to the right) and Jebb (seated, far right) pose with the UK delegation at the opening of the Dumbarton Oaks Conference, August 1st, 1944.148

147

That night Webster intuited, P is clearly the dominant figure of the whole U.S. shew. Webster, diary entry of August 18, 1944. Printed in Reynolds and Hughes, The Historian as Diplomat, 43. 148 Thomas D. McAvoy, August 1, 1944, Time & Life Pictures, Washington, DC. 48

The international architecture Webster and Pasvolsky had built over the past four

years survived Dumbarton Oaks, Yalta, and San Francisco almost entirely intact. A number of recent books have delved deeply into the debates at these two conferences, and certainly at times disputes on the nature of the veto and the relationship between regional organizations and the UN reached a crisis level. Yet this new literature does not properly appreciate quite how much the UN Charter derives nearly verbatim from the final American and British policy papers that Pasvolsky and Webster largely authored.149 Webster first proposed the inclusion of a Purposes and Principles section in his May 1944 memo in order to establish simple and flexible conditions under which member states may take action, in contrast to the League of Nations rigid legal framework. Webster proposed adding clauses on the maintenance of international peace and security, cooperation on welfare issues, sovereign equality, and the fulfillment of charter obligations. In particular, Websters phrase first supplied in the 1944 memo that the UN should serve as a centre in which the political action of States can be reviewed and harmonised recalls his early scholarship on how the Congress system provided an international locus where powers Great and small could discuss pressing issues. Largely at Websters insistence, much of the Charters first chapter draws on his language first proposed a year before San Francisco.150 The Soviets at Dumbarton Oaks added little of substance, and the Charter underwent comparatively minor tweaks in San Francisco as the Great Powers refused to

149 150

See Sleshinger, Act of Creation and Hilderbrand, Dumbarton Oaks. Foreign Office Memorandum, Future World Organization, May 8, 1944. Printed in Reynolds and Hughes, The Historian as Diplomat, 138-140. UN Charter, printed in Russell, A History of the UN Charter, 1036. 49

countenance wide-reaching changes.151 Indeed on the first day of the Dumbarton Oaks conference, the USSR delegation agreed to the US and UKs proposals for a small Council to discuss matters of security, a General Assembly of all member states, and an international secretariat.152 Throughout the conference, the USSRs representatives, harried for time and generally less interested in the organization, contributed little. Gromykos deputy at Dumbarton Oaks let Pasvolsky know, If anybody in Moscow had attempted to start work [on postwar planning] in 1942 he would have been the laughing stock of the place. As late as the foreign ministers conference in Moscow, Molotov confided to Hull that the Soviets were somewhat behind.153 Wartime demanded much more of the USSR than the US, leaving less time and manpower second-tier issues, the Soviets in general placed less stock in the organization. Stalin was happy to trade what he perceived as American acquiescence to Soviet dominance in Eastern Europe for support of FDRs organization. The Soviets at Dumbarton Oaks only pressed for a strong veto, suggested the creation of an international air force, and advocated for the exclusion of economic issues from the UNs purview in order to focus the organization.154 Both Webster and Pasvolsky sought to find compromises in order to ensure the UNs creation, but Pasvolsky was particularly well situated to play the role of conciliator. His fluent Russian surely made it easier for him to persuade the Soviets to accept his policies. As one of Pasvolskys colleagues related in an oral history, When the issues would get so sharp that Pasvolsky was afraid they might be hung up, he'd say, Look,
151

Pasvolsky did take the time to call his old friend and former boss Cordell Hull every week or so to update him on the proceedings. April 28, 1945 and May 3, 1945, informal readouts by Carlton Savage. Pasvolsky Papers. 152 Dolff, The Creation of the United Nations Organization as a Factor in Soviet Foreign Policy, 122. 153 Schild, Bretton Woods and Dumbarton Oaks, 70. 154 Ibid., 71. 50

we'd better think about this one some more, and just lay it aside and move on to the next. It was one of the most skillful jobs of managing with intellectual authority, a very difficult task.155 Even Webster saw fit to acknowledge in his diary that P on the whole handles all this with great skill and patience and he can, if necessary, translate into Russian when [Soviet diplomat] S[obolev] is doubtful about the exact meaning of words.156 These interpersonal and linguistic skills enabled Pasvolsky to reconcile delegations on a number of delicate points. In one instance, through skillful negotiation and extensive familiarity with the subject, he was able to neutralize the USSRs view that the UN should not concern itself with social and economic matters. When the head Soviet delegate Andrei Gromyko said that 77% of the matters the League addressed were ones of general welfare, Pasvolsky offered a skillful riposte.157 He began his answer by agreeing with Gromykos central thesis, that welfare questions distracted the League Council, and countered by emphasizing that in his plan the Security Council could devote its efforts only to political questions. The Economic and Social Council would be able to coordinate international activity so that the UN could employ every available avenue to promote peace. Pasvolsky finished his answer by preemptively assuaging the most common Soviet concern: Great Power prerogative. If a welfare issue grew so pressing as to threaten the peace, Pasvolsky reminded the Soviets, the Security Council always retained the right to consider it.158 Due partially to Pasvolskys persuasion, Gromyko lifted his opposition to ECOSOC, thereby ensuring that every main structure which Pasvolsky and Webster
155 156

Joseph E. Johnson, Oral History Interview, interview by Richard Mckinzie, 1973. Webster, diary entry September 4, 1944. Printed in Reynolds and Hughes, Historian As Diplomat, 46-7. 157 Dolff, The Creation of the United Nations Organization as a Factor in Soviet Foreign Policy, 123. 158 Hilderbrand, Dumbarton Oaks, 88-90. 51

proposed appeared in the Charter. This pattern of Pasvolsky securing approval of the US-UK drafts through assuaging Soviet fears repeated itself throughout the two conferences. Websters most important contribution after drafting the Dumbarton Oaks instructions involved the Charters famous preamble. During a meeting with Commonwealth representatives a month before venturing to San Francisco, aged South African Field Marshal Jan Smuts, who helped write the League Covenant, had, according to Webster, drawn up a rather terrible preamble. Smuts recognized Webster, the two talked of Paris 1919 days, and Smuts accepted Websters offer to revise his draft. That night Webster and his typist stayed awake past midnight reconciling a draft he wrote in 1944 with Smuts stilted version.159 Webster added language on respect for the obligations of international law and treaties, the employment of international machinery for the promotion of the economic and social advancement of all peoples, the maintenance of peace and security, and the acceptance of principles and the institution of methods to ensure that armed force is only used in the interests of the community of nations.160 Webster later wrote that his aim was to add humanity and warmth and make, as it were, an appeal to posterity.161 These four phrases Webster inserted into

159 160

Webster, diary entry of April 15, 1945. Printed in Reynolds and Hughes, The Historian As Diplomat, 57. Webster and Smuts Draft Preambles to the Charter, April 10-12 1945, printed in Reynolds and Hughes, Historian as Diplomat, 166-7. Nearly all of the literature surrounding the Charters preamble attributes its wording entirely to Smuts. For instance, see Mark Mazower, No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 61. 161 Charles K. Webster, The Making Of The Charter Of The United Nations, History 32, no. 115 (1947): 26. Dean Gildersleeve, a female member of the US delegation, proposed the final formulation of the famous first sentence. She wrote, WE THE PEOPLES OF THE UNITED NATIONS DETERMINED to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which in our time has brought untold sorrow to mankind. Russell, A History of the United Nations Charter, 913. 52

Smuts draft survived San Francisco almost entirely intact and appear prominently in the Charters preamble.162

Leo Pasvolsky chairs the San Francisco Conference Coordination Committee, May 24th, 1945.163

At the San Francisco Conference held from May to June in 1945, Pasvolsky and Webster worked in tandem for the last time. Unlike in Dumbarton Oaks, the two had to contend with over a thousand proposed amendments from forty-eight other nations. Yet the Great Powers held the final say on any changes adopted, and chose to alter little from what they had agreed upon a year prior. As Webster wrote, none of the alterations affected very much of the fundamentals of the Dumbarton Oaks Proposals, which he
162

Charles Webster, The Art and Practice of Diplomacy, The Listener, February 28, 1952, 337. Many members of the US Delegation were highly critical of the Preamble. State Department staffer and renowned poet Archibald MacLeish, commenting on the Smuts-Webster draft, wrote, I have never seen a more complete literary and intellectual abortion. He hoped it would move mens mind, and to do so, it should be written not constructed like a cross-word puzzle out of political and academic odds and ends. Assistant Secretary Archibald MacLeish to Messrs. Stettinius, Pasvolsky, and Hiss. June 8 1945. Pasvolsky Papers. 163 Rosenberg, The San Francisco Conference: Coordination Committee Meeting, May 24, 1945, UN Photo, San Francisco. 53

and Pasvolsky had jointly constructed.164 After the proceedings to a close, Webster took stock of their shared creation and evaluated its prospects. In his diary, he struck a reasonably hopeful note. I believe we ought to get on with [the Russians] if we try hard enough, he wrote, though I dont pretend it will be easy. On this last thing depends the future of the United Nations Organisation even more than on the shape we have given to it. But the machinery which we have made should make such agreement possible if it is desired.165

164

Charles Webster, The Making Of The Charter Of The United Nations, 37. Webster and the contemporary literature in particular highlight the insertion of references to human rights and Articles 51 and 52, which countenanced the creation of NATO and SEATO under the UN aegis. Sir Charles Webster, The United Nations: The Record of Ten Years, The Listener, July 7, 1955, 6. One oral history, reflecting on the San Francisco Conference, related a memorable anecdote during which a Texan senator completely outshone the normally commanding Webster. [Senator] Connally was sent on behalf of the US delegation to read the law, the riot act, to the other smaller countries on the question of the vetoto tell them that if you dont lay off on this veto youre not going to have a Charter. Youre going home without it. The place next to the US place was occupied by the British, the UK next to the US in alphabetical order around the table. The British on this occasion were represented bySir Charles Webster. There was old Connally waving his arms as he spoke as though he were addressing 50 thousand people down there in Austin, Texas on the fourth of July. I watched this poor old Charles Webster slump lower and lower and lower to avoid having his head knocked off by this waving arm and finally you could barely see the top of his head over the table. Jean Krasno, The Founding of the UNInternational Cooperation as an Evolutionary Process, Academic Council on the United Nations System, February 27, 2009, 30-1, http://acuns.org/wpcontent/uploads/2012/06/The_Founding_of_the_United_Nations__International_Coope ration_as_an_Evolutionary_Process.pdf. 165 Webster, diary entry of June 26, 1945, printed in Reynolds and Hughes, The Historian as Diplomat, 73. Webster also noted that he cant help liking the Russians even the toughs. 54

Charles Kingsley Webster addresses a committee meeting on the structures and procedures of the Security Council, June 14, 1945.166 Pasvolsky spent the rest of his life at Brookings, leading the think tanks International Studies Group and penning Problem Papers, similar to business school case studies, on US foreign policy that universities employed as a teaching tool.167 Pasvolsky lent office space to Cordell Hull, who wrote his memoirs presumably a stones throw away from Pasvolskys desk. He died before finishing his history of the UN Charter, though Ruth Russell, who Pasvolsky had hired into the State Department in 1940, completed his manuscript.168 Charles Webster used his final years to collaborate with a former RAF pilot on the official history of the Allies strategic bombing campaign over Germany. Both academics, though married for decades, did not father children. Yet in conceiving of the UN and shepherding their ideas through years of negotiation,
166 167

Mili, The San Francisco Conference, 25 April-26 June 1945, June 14, 1945, UN Photo, San Francisco. Pasvolsky used such Problem Papers at the State Department and modeled his Brookings publications on official memoranda, in order to prepare students for future work as government staffers. Notter, Postwar Foreign Policy Preparation, 151. 168 Russell dedicated the book to Pasvolsky. Russell, A History of the United Nations Charter, xi. 55

Webster and Pasvolsky sired a legacy that has matured into historys closest approximation of a parliament of man. While politicians have long sought to use history to guide policy, frequently they have accepted simplistic interpretations to ruinous effect. French military planners believed their Maginot Line would protect them from a German invasion as similar defenses had in the Great War. Lyndon Johnson escalated American involvement in Vietnam partially because he thought he faced another Munich.169 However, Pasvolsky and Webster were able to draw judiciously from the past, understanding both its advantages and limitations. How did these men utilize history to craft effective policy, unlike so many other seasoned statesmen? To start, they had spent decades mastering the case material. But more importantly, their analytical training taught them to question received wisdom and refuse to accept seemingly obvious conclusions without investigation. Webster had stressed a rigorous historical method to his students and wrote history almost entirely from archival research.170 Likewise, Pasvolskys early scholarship drew heavily from data he collected, and once at State he demanded his staffers thoroughly investigate international institutions. Once in government they had years to study the past and refine their recommendations. Lastly, they were able to confirm their views became official policy. All their knowledge would have been for naught had they not possessed the ability to convince their bureaucracies and heads of state to adopt their shared vision.

169

Perhaps the oddest analogy in American presidential history belongs to Woodrow Wilson. In the early years of WWI, he mentioned, Madison and I are the only two Princeton men that have become President. The circumstances of the War of 1812 and now run parallel. I sincerely hope they will not go further. Analogies 4. 170 Obituary: Charles Kingsley Webster, Times. 56

So what came of their exercise in applied history? Pasvolsky lived until 1953,

and Webster until 1961, so both had the opportunity to witness the UNs first years. They both understood that what they had created was capable of housing and facilitating Great Power cooperation, but were under no illusions that it could function without general Great Power commitment to the organization. The UN could never amount to more than the sum of its membership. Soviet behavior, however, surprised and dismayed. Whatever reasons had prompted the Soviet leaders to take a very active part in the negotiations that led to theUnited Nations, Pasvolsky fumed in 1952, ever since the Organizationbegan to operate, the Soviet Union has pursued a policy of nonco-operation and obstruction.171 Webster three years later echoed the thought. The Soviet Union, he wrote, was far more obstructive than even the most pessimistic had prophesied.172 Soviet vetoes had smothered Council initiatives to create a Military Staff Committee, address disarmament, and regulate atomic weapons. The creation of NATO, SEATO, and the Warsaw Pact meant that regional organizations that Webster and Pasvolsky worked so hard to marginalize came to play a central role in the Cold War. Nevertheless, the two believed that they had at least partially succeeded. Webster thought that the creation of the UN had helped the US replace its traditional policy of isolation with one of world leadership and co-operation.173 He in particular praised the UNs stance against aggression in Korea as a defining achievement. Both applauded the UNs economic, social, and technical initiatives. Pasvolsky surely took pride when his brainchild ECOSOC shepherded the birth of the General Agreements on Tariffs and Trade. This organization grew into historys most successful trade liberalization
171 172

Leo Pasvolsky, The Veto Problem, World Affairs 115, no. 3 (Fall 1952): 67. Sir Charles Webster, The United Nations: The Record of Ten Years, 5. 173 Ibid., 6. 57

mechanism, helping shepherd tariffs reductions the young Brookings scholar would not have dared to imagine. 174 Their reflections, however, do not supply a complete picture of the UNs impact over its sixty-eight years. In 1955 Webster lamented that it had not become a center for harmonizing the actions of nations. Yet during Cold War the UN provided a venue for Great Powers to interact on a regular basis. It inculcated habits of consultation and helped diffuse tensions in times of crisis. Most importantly, since the creation of the Security Council, the Permanent Five have yet to wage war against one another. As David Bosco wrote, the UN created a space and process through which the worlds great powers struggle to contain conflicts and compromise. 175 The end of the Cold War gave rise to renewed expectations of international collaboration. Though the promise of a new world order remains unfulfilled, the modern UN system has surpassed Pasvolsky and Websters hopes. Pasvolsky surely spoke for both men when he penned the following passage: I often ask myself this question: Would the world situation during the past four years have been better, if the United Nations did not exist? I doubt itThe existence of the United Nations and the new spirit of collective responsibility for the peace and wellbeing of the world that has been engendered by the agreement on, and adherence to, its Charter by an overwhelming majority of the nations, have stood us in good stead during these perilous and difficult years and will continue to stand us in good stead.176 Word Count: 13,413
174

Leo Pasvolsky, The UN in Action, in Edmund J. James Lectures on Government (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1951), 74. From GATT to the WTO and Beyond Research Guide, Georgetown University Law Library, January 2007, http://www.law.georgetown.edu/library/research/guides/FromtheGATTtotheWTO.cfm 175 David L. Bosco, Five to Rule Them All: The UN Security Council and the Making of the Modern World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 6. This achievement mirrors what Webster attributed to the Congress System. See Paul W. Schroeder, The Transformation of European Politics, 1763-1848 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994). 176 Leo Pasvolsky, The UN in Action, 83. 58

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Bibliographic Essay
Since the spring of 2012, when I knew I would be spending the fall working at the US Delegation to the UN, I wanted to write on some aspect of the United Nations. Paul Kennedys Parliament of Man gave me a broad perspective on the workings of the organization and David Boscos Five to Rule the World introduced me to the drama of the Security Council. Initially I was drawn to the UNs multilateral sanctions, as it involves Great Power tussles and draws headlines. Most of the literature surrounding sanctions consists of one-off case studies of particular sanctions regimes, so there was room to craft a longitudinal study of how the Council had sought to coerce without force. However, I could not find any personalities that defined sanctions, and wanted to be able to craft my thesis around people, not UN Security Council Resolutions. Professor Cohrs course in international history drew me towards a topic that transcended national boundaries. As my language skills are limited, I sought to explore some aspect of US-UK relations. Professor Freemans course on early American political history exposed me to the excitement and contingency inherent in the making of a constitution. I also learned of the potential for individuals to dramatically shape drafting. Lastly, from Professor Meads courses on American religion I grew intrigued by millennial moments. Who would have thought that one point in American history 74% of approved of the idea of an international police force?177 Earlier I had read Margaret MacMillans Paris 1919 and was struck by one line about a young British staffer who tried to instruct his superiors on the lessons of the Congress of Vienna. Intrigued by the story of peace conferences, I thought it might be
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Townsend and Brinkley, FDR and the Creation of the UN, 67. 70

interesting to compare two. I then read David Kings Vienna 1814 and Stephen Schlesingers Act of Creation. The later book brought Leo Pasvolsky to my attention. Recalling MacMillans mention of Webster, I thought it might be interesting to compare their influence. Since they were both academics, I knew I would also be able to track the evolution of their thinking on international organizations through their scholarship. Since Schlesingers book, written for a wide audience, gave Pasvolsky a rather prominent role, I imagined there would be significant scholarship around his contribution to the Charter. However, to my surprise he was portrayed as a marginal player in the limited scholarship surrounding World War II postwar planning for international organizations. Much had been written about the more personally dynamic Sumner Welles and William Bullitt. Though the two men did play significant roles in US foreign policy, neither was as influential on the UN as Pasvolsky. Many of these books did not even cite Pasvolskys archives. I was able to explore his archival material in the Library of Congress over winter break. Webster was even more overlooked. The few books that did explore the creation of the UN focused almost exclusively on American planning. If they did examine the Foreign Offices memoranda, it was only for a few brief pages that tended to focus on Jebbs Four Power Plan. Upon reading Websters diary, I realized that his influence on British planning and the language of the UN Charter was profound, but I needed to further investigate his memoranda to trace his impact. Luckily I had a friend in London willing to photograph his papers at LSE. The major books on the UNs creation all provided slightly different perspectives. Reading Schlesingers book, I was struck by how little of substance seemed to have been

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altered at San Francisco, so I figured that the real idea generation must have occurred at the other major conferences. But in Plokhys Yalta and Hilderbrands Dumbarton Oaks neither of their progatonists really grappled with the fundamental structure of the United Nations. At these conferences the US, UK, and USSR tangled over veto power, but not many other questions of substance. The formulation of the UNs structure happened before such conferences. Townsend and Brinkleys FDR and the Creation of the UN seemed to have an incorrect focus, as FDRs ideas for the UN changed so drastically over the course of the war. The President must have got his final ideas from somewhere, and he did not have the time to carefully draft out the Charter article by article. At this point in my research I simultaneously began reading Webster and Pasvolskys early scholarship and dove into reams of Foreign Office and State Department memoranda. The two men were prolific writers both before and within government. I believe I came close to reading the entirety of their official memoranda, but was not able to do the same for their academic writing. Also, while oral histories and memoirs provide some window into office politics, a complete understanding of the relationships and meetings that gave birth to policy will perhaps forever remain somewhat opaque. I enjoyed the detective work of tracing how their ideas developed and influence was felt, as well as how the language they proposed ended up in the final UN Charter. Lastly, in my reading I grew frustrated when authors wrote sentences like Stalins views and motives are more difficult to plumb.178 While Soviet archives were less important than American and British archives for my thesis, as almost all of the ideas for the UN originated either in the State Department or Foreign Office, it would have
178

Hilderbrand, Dumbarton Oaks, 60. 72

been interesting, for instance, to learn what the Soviet diplomats privately thought about Pasvolsky and Webster. Dolffs dissertation exposed me to a small slice of Soviet archival material, but his focus was more on the origins of the Cold War. Soviet world organization policy planning remains a significant hole in the scholarship. I would like to thank Professor Van Vleck, Elizabeth Silliman, Kevin Ho, Peter Damrosch, Marc Wallach, Debra Fine, and Martin Schneider for their insightful comments and support throughout the drafting process.

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