NON-CIRCULATiNG 
YUN INTERVIEW  
LAWRENCE FINKELSTEIN 
.... NOVEMBER 23. 1990  
LAGRANGE. ILLINOIS  
JEAN KRASNO. INTERVIEWER 
TABLE OF CONTENTS UNj ^ ' j J l ~ ~ v . 
FOUNDING OF THE UNITED NATIONS; THE SAN FRANCISCO CONFERENCE 
UN LIBRAE 
NOV 4 19::-
Finkelstein's Role at the Conference 1-3 
Participants at the Conference 2,6,10,23 
The US Delegation 4,5,20 
NGOs at the Conference 6,7 
Conference Secretariat 7 
Structure of the Conference 8-10 
Nelson Rockefeller's Role at Conference . . . .10-13 
Status of Argentina 11 
Regional Organizations 12-15 
Language in the Charter 14,15,17,20-23 
Dumbarton Oaks 15,18,27,43-45 
The Veto 16,26-33,42,44 
Non-self-governing Territories 
and Trusteeship 16-19,21,22,39,40 
Yalta 17,27,37 
Self-determination 22,23 
Soviets and Beginning of Cold War 24-26,36 
Atmosphere at San Francisco 25,33,34,42,69 
Agreement Among the "Five" 26,27,29,36,37 
Chain of Events Theory 29 
1 
The Addition of France to the "Five" 35,36 
The Three Soviet Members 37 
The Train to the Conference 38,39 
Structure of the Security Council 43-46 
Role of Security Council 46,47 
The General Assembly 48-50 
Economic and Social Dimensions 51,53,55 
Human Rights 51-53 
The Preamble to the Charter 55-57 
Military Role of the UN 57-64 
UN Participation Act 59-61 
Role of the Secretary-General 64-68 
UN Membership 68 
2 
JK: For the record I would like you to explain what your role 
was during the Conference in San Francisco in 1945 for 
the founding of the United Nations. 
Finkelstein: 
Well, that i s easy to do. I had been in the Office of 
Special P o l i t i c a l Affairs in the State Department which 
was the office responsible for preparing for the drafting 
of the UN Charter and the Conference in San Francisco. 
I had been there at f i r s t as an intern starting in July, 
1944, and then I guess I was hired as a junior 
professional person early in 1945. My work had been 
primarily concerned with the non-self-governing 
t e r r i t o r i e s part of the UN Charter. I worked in what was 
the Division of Dependent Area Affairs in the Office of 
Special P o l i t i c a l Affairs. There I had worked under 
Benjamin Gerig who was the chief of the division and who 
was also a figure in the American delegation at the 
Conference. Ralph Bunche at some time became the 
associate chief of the division. That may have been 
later but he had moved over from the Office of Strategic 
Services shortly before I joined as an intern in the 
middle of 1944. I worked with James Frederick Green who 
i s the man whose picture i s shown with President Truman 
on the platform when Truman gave his f i n a l address and I 
guess signed the UN Charter for the United States at the 
end of the Conference. Thomas F. Power was a member of 
that staff. He went on to a career in the United Nations 
and died a couple of years ago. Elizabeth Armstrong is 
another person who was in that group. She i s long dead. 
Emil Sady came along perhaps a l i t t l e later after the 
Conference. He became a State Department professional 
working on non-self-governing t e r r i t o r i e s . I guess he 
worked in the UN later, also. So, that was the context. 
I was delighted to be, what seemed to me, given a 
real break to be allowed to go to the San Francisco 
Conference where I was assigned to what was called the 
correspondence unit, 3 or 4 supernumeraries who were 
there to answer the mail received by the delegation which 
was quite voluminous. We did i t by categorizing incoming 
letters and sending out form responses for the most part. 
Then just at about the middle of the Conference the 
more senior people who had had the responsibility of 
preparing the minutes of the US delegation were 
overburdened with other responsibilities. Those two 
people were Dorothy Fosdick and Ralph Bunche. So, I was 
asked to replace them which I did for the second half of 
the Conference beginning sometime around the middle of 
May t i l the end of June. That involved s i t t i n g in the 
back of the room when the delegation met, ordinarily once 
a day, five days a week or sometimes six, occasionally 
two meetings in one day. I had to prepare two sets of 
minutes, a synopsis, very short, no more than a two page 
summary and the other as complete a record as I could 
make, as verbatim as possible. I would go back to the 
office which we had. It really wasn't much of an office. 
It was the gold room of the Fairmont Hotel, a great big 
cavernous space with desks and lots of people doing a 
variety of tasks. I had a string of secretaries who were 
recruited locally and who were quite good. I ran about 
dictating these extensive minutes. A l l this had to be 
done by the next morning. As you can imagine for a youth 
l i k e myself that was a formidable experience. 
There were significant people in the room comprising 
the delegation and the senior advisors to the delegation. 
There were significant issues being discussed. I was 
there as a f l y on the wall and, although i t was a 
pittance, I was being paid to do i t . I t couldn't have 
been better. 
JK: How were the delegations composed? And how were the 
committees set up? 
Finkelstein: 
I just happened to be looking at Alger Hiss's recent book 
and he reminded me that the delegation was essentially 
constructed by President Roosevelt before he died. As 
nearly as I can t e l l from that, the State Department 
recommended the composition of the delegation to 
President Roosevelt who accepted their proposal with one 
exception. I don't want to be misinterpreted on that. 
He didn't turn them down on any but, there was one member 
of the delegation who apparently was not on that l i s t who 
turned up as a delegation member later and I'm not sure 
how that happened. That was Harold Stassen. But the 
original l i s t proposed to the President according to Hiss 
consisted of the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations 
Committee who was a Democrat, Senator Tom Connally, his 
Republican opposite number, the senior Republican member, 
Arthur Vandenberg, a potential Presidential candidate i t 
was thought at the time, and their equivalents from the 
House Foreign Affairs Committee, Congressman Sol Bloom of 
New York and Congressman Charles Eaton of New Jersey. 
Edward Stettinius was the chairman of the delegation. 
Although nominally the chairman was Cordell Hull, he was 
i l l and couldn't come. Hull was not in San Francisco, 
ever, during the Conference. 
JK: What was Edward Stettinius's position in the government 
at that time. 
Finkelstein: 
I think he was Secretary of State at the time. He was 
replaced shortly after the Conference by James F. Byrnes 
who was Truman's appointment. But I think he was 
Secretary at this time. Virginia Gildersleeve, former 
Dean of Hunter College, maybe s t i l l Dean at that time, 
was the one woman on the delegation. Then subsequently, 
somehow or other, Harold Stassen materialized and became 
a member of the delegation. He had been governor of 
Minnesota. He was a l i b e r a l Republican. He was in the 
Pacific as an assistant to Admiral Halsey in the Pacific 
naval campaign. He was quite an impressive fellow. 
JK: I understand that the present Senator Claiborne Pell was 
also in San Francisco. Do you r e c a l l what his position 
was? 
Finkelstein: 
Yes, i t ' s interesting. Thank you for reminding me. I 
guess he was in the navy. 
JK: I think he was actually in the Coast Guard. 
Finkelstein: 
This would have to be checked on the record but, I 
believe that he was a junior member of the staff of a 
sister division to mine in the Department of State, the 
Division of International Security Affairs. That's my 
best guess because he did spend some time working there. 
r The head of that division was Joseph Johnson who later 
became the President of the Carnegie Endowment for 
International Peace, where he hired me and he was my boss 
for a number of years. He died just a few weeks ago. 
Another person, who was there and who was in naval 
5 
»- 1 
uniform because I remember meeting him on the special 
tra i n from the East Coast to San Francisco, was Bernard 
Brodie who was a lieutenant in the navy. I hadn't heard 
of him before but Bernard later became known as an 
outstanding scholar of national security aff a i r s and a 
leading figure in the Yale Institute of International 
Affairs. Then I guess he moved down to Princeton with 
the others. And he was at the Rand Corporation. So, i t 
i s good to know that he was there. 
One thing that has probably come up before but that i s 
worth mentioning i s that the Conference involved a 
considerable innovation in Conference procedure because 
the US delegation took the i n i t i a t i v e in creating a 
category of participants who were consultants to the 
delegation. These were people who represented major non­
governmental organizations in the United States including 
the big trade unions, the CIO and AF of L at the time, 
major lay religious organizations, B'nai Brith and the 
National Conference of Churches of Christ in America, 
etc. The NAACP was among them. Those organizations are 
a l l l i s t e d in an appendix to the o f f i c i a l report of the 
US delegation to the President after the Conference was 
over. There i s such an o f f i c i a l Conference report. I 
have a copy of i t upstairs. 
JK: Where would that o f f i c i a l Conference report be located? 
Finkelstein: 
6 
I would think any library would have i t . I've held onto 
my original copy which I carried from San Francisco with 
me. But i t i s an o f f i c i a l document of the delegation to 
the President included in the papers of the executive 
office. Any good library would have i t . It i s a public 
document. What should I 
say about this? The Conference had a secretariat. 
JK: There were a number of Americans in the secretariat. 
Finkelstein: 
I think the secretariat was not exclusively American but 
was certainly predominantly American. The Secretary 
General was Alger Hiss. He was supposed to be there in 
an international capacity as the servant of the entire 
Conference and not in his capacity as a US government 
o f f i c i a l because he was not a member of the American 
delegation. Then there was, of course, as was 
traditional in conferences of this kind, a plenary 
meeting. That i s a big meeting of a l l the delegations 
which was the sovereign body of the Conference. It was 
that body which took the f i n a l vote at the end approving 
the Charter which had been drafted. Then for working 
purposes the Conference was broken up into four 
commissions known by their Roman numerals I - IV. Each 
of those commissions had two or more committees known by 
their Arabic numbers, 1, 2, 3, whatever. For example, I 
forget what i t was called but probably the committee on 
7 
trusteeship and non-self-governing te r r i t o r i e s , or 
something l i k e that, was commission II, committee 4. The 
one that dealt with questions l i k e the veto and the 
workings of the UN Security Council was commission III, 
committee 3. 
JK: So, then the delegates from the various countries might 
be represented on various different committees. 
Finkelstein: 
These were f u l l membership bodies. So, every 
participating government was entitled to participate in 
every one of those committees. Sometimes when the going 
got rough or the work got heavy or a particular task had 
to be accomplished the committees broke up into 
subcommittees or working parties which were smaller. 
They would pull in the participants whose presence was 
necessary to get the job done or whose interests were at 
stake. It was a very large, quite cumbersome and very 
complex business. Then there were several small expert 
kinds of bodies which had to do some of the mechanical 
work of the Conference. I can't reproduce them a l l from 
memory. I haven't thought about this in a long time. 
But one that was particularly important was called the 
coordination committee. This was a small body in which 
high level technical experts from the five great powers 
present participated. I forget whether there were others 
also i n that committee. Theirs was the task of weaving 
8 
i i 
*- t 
together and technically correcting and making perfect 
the text that emerged for the various segments of the 
Charter out of this committee process. Theirs was the 
task of reconciling the incompatibilities that emerged 
from this process in which different committees dealt 
with different problems in different parts of the 
Charter. The American on that was Leo Pasvolsky who had 
been the special assistant to the Secretary of State for 
this whole process and was the highest ranking continuing 
o f f i c i a l of the Department of State for these matters and 
to whom my section and division reported. He was the top 
man in the process. He represented the United States in 
that coordination committee. He had a great influence. 
JK: The Soviet on that committee, was that Sobolev? 
Finkelstein: 
No, i t was Galunsky, the Russian principal legal advisor. 
The record i s available and i t i s easy to check on 
things l i k e that. You know that after the Conference a 
series of volumes were published recording the 
Conference. They were called the UNIO documents, the 
United Nations Information Office, and I think there are 
14 volumes on the San Francisco Conference. In that you 
would find a l l the information about the structure of the 
Conference and who were the participants. 
JK: As long as we are talking about some of the people who 
9 
were involved, there were others l i k e Nelson Rockefeller 
who were there. What was his role? 
Finkelstein: 
I think at that time Nelson Rockefeller was Coordinator 
of Interamerican Affairs, which was a body created during 
the war to perform as a sort of antecedent to the 
American Aid program. He had run a vigorous program of 
American assistance in Latin America. Although I think 
he was not yet Assistant Secretary of State for Latin 
American Affairs, at some point he did become that. He 
was there as an o f f i c i a l of the government who was an 
advisor to the delegation, and a very active one. Now 
that you mention i t , I was a l i t t l e surprised reading 
Hiss's book the other day to learn something I hadn't 
known. An issue that arose was the status of Argentina 
which had not declared war against the Axis. 
Consequently, as a result of the decision reached in the 
Yalta Conference i t should not have been e l i g i b l e to be 
a member of the San Francisco Conference. Hiss's story 
i s that he, and he said the whole American delegation, 
were astonished when a group of Latin American countries 
took the floor in one of the early plenary meetings to 
propose that Argentina be invited to participate. In the 
circumstances, that could not be permitted but Argentina 
was i n the end invited to join the Conference. The 
speculation was that this had been engineered by Nelson 
10 
Rockefeller working on his own, not as a matter of us 
government policy, with the Latin Americans contrary to 
the commitment made by President Roosevelt to Stalin at 
Yalta. The American delegation was extremely embarrassed 
about this and sort of got preempted by this ploy that 
Rockefeller was involved in. This happened early in the 
Conference long before I was involved in taking the 
minutes. So, I don't have any f i r s t hand knowledge of 
any kind. But I do know that later on he was a very 
vigorous advocate of a special view of American interests 
vis-a-vis the Latinos which had him confronting the 
Secretary of State who was the head of the delegation, 
head on. I once saw them jaw to jaw at the penthouse 
which was part of Stettinius's suite and where the 
delegation sometimes met. 
JK: Do you r e c a l l the issue they were discussing? 
Finkelstein: 
I was far enough away that I couldn't hear what they were 
talking about but I could read the body language that 
those two were disagreeing with each other. At that time 
the issue had arisen of the Latin Amercian wish to 
emphasize regional over global machinery particularly for 
handling issues of peace and security. There i s an 
interesting tale here. 
JK: The role of regional organizations vs the role of a 
global organization. 
Finkelstein: 
That i s an issue that has plagued the organization 
throughout i t s history. What had happened was, going 
back to President Roosevelt and Secretary Hull, they had 
taken i n i t i a t i v e s through a series of inter-american 
conferences i n the 1930s which had produced what was 
known as the era of good feeling between the Latinos and 
the United States. The collaboration during the war had 
been mutually beneficial and very effective with the main 
exception of Argentina. As a consequence at the end of 
the war the Latinos were quite comfortable with the 
United States and very uneasy about the role of the 
Soviet Union as a communist state in the UN. They were 
troubled by the emphasis of the US policy in placing the 
primary responsibility for peace keeping in the UN 
Security Council where the Latinos were afraid Latin 
American issues of peace and security might encounter a 
veto from the communist, non-catholic, anti-religious 
Soviet Union. So, at that time in 1945 the Latinos were 
much more comfortable sharing the inter-american bed with 
the United States than the global bed with the Soviet 
Union. And so, they were pushing very hard for 
exceptions to the globalist orientation of the Charter. 
JK: That i s an interesting interpretation of why that came 
up. 
12 
Finkelstein: 
I'm sure I'm right in that general presentation of the 
case. I t reads rather strangely in the ligh t of later 
deterioration of relations between the United States and 
the Latinos as a whole. After some time in the mid x50s 
the relationship began to change for the worse and i t is 
s t i l l hard for me to believe that things were so 
comfortable in 1945 as to produce that Latin pressure on 
the United States to adulterate the global principle of 
the Charter. I suspect that Nelson Rockefeller was 
advocating that point of view against the universalist 
tendency of the Secretary of State, who in any case was 
quite uncertain about i t , Leo Pasvolsky, and the two 
Presidents, Roosevelt and Truman who would come under 
that group. 
JK: So, the Latin American point of view was that they would 
prefer that matters of dispute or threats to the peace be 
handled regionally before the United Nations would take 
i t on. 
Finkelstein: 
They certainly wanted to have that option preserved. 
This pressure from the Latinos was one of the factors 
that entered into the adoption of Ar t i c l e 51 of the 
Charter which preserves the right of individual and 
collective self-defense. They were also pressing on the 
provision which found i t s way into A r t i c l e 53. I have a 
13 
* T 
•>' T 
copy right here that I'm trying to check. Ar t i c l e 52 has 
to do with regional arrangements and A r t i c l e 53 also. I 
remember vi v i d l y that the f i r s t day that I began to take 
minutes in the delegation meeting one of the issues was 
one that had been on the agenda before and stayed on the 
delegation's agenda some time after the day of which I am 
speaking. It had to do with the question of whether in 
A r t i c l e 53 toward the end of the f i r s t paragraph the word 
should be on the "request" of the governments concerned 
or with the "consent" of the governments concerned. 
This had to do with the transition from regional 
authority to deal with enforcement action where there 
were threats to the peace to the taking over of 
responsibility by the UN. The Latinos wanted the word 
"request" because i t l e f t the i n i t i a t i v e with them and 
the alternative would have l e f t the i n i t i a t i v e with 
members of the Security Council. The difference was not 
obviously a t e r r i b l y great one but, i t really roiled the 
Conference and occupied 20 minutes or so of the 
delegation's time for many mornings. A l l of this i s a 
part of that issue having to do with the Latinos' 
preference for certainty that peace and security measures 
in the hemisphere could be dealt with by the inter-
american system, then the Panamerican Union later to 
become the Organization of American States, rather than 
to risk the uncertain fate that would be theirs in the UN 
14 
Security Council. 
JK: So, there was a concern for the language that went into 
the Charter to keep i t clear that the points were being 
made correctly and that the sources of power were 
designated spec i f i c a l l y . Was there an effort to make the 
language flexible, also? 
Finkelstein: 
No, well I shouldn't say, no. This example i s one of a 
word carrying a very substantive burden. It was an issue 
of disagreement among the states for which the word was 
intended to be the solvent. That's why i t was so 
bi t t e r l y contested and consumed so much time over so many 
meetings and so extended a period in the Conference. 
That sort of issue didn't often arise because by and 
large the Conference had the benefit of a draft of the 
Charter which had been prepared by the Great Powers 
meeting the previous summer in the Dumbarton Oaks 
conversations where most of the issues about the 
structure and the main directions of the organization had 
been, for a l l intents and purposes, settled. So, they 
had this draft Charter l a i d before them at the beginning 
of the Conference in San Francisco. That stood up very 
well because, among other reasons, the Great Powers, the 
United States, the Soviet Union, England, France, and 
China, were determined to maintain their cohesion and 
thus were unwilling to risk opening up what they had done 
15 
to serious amendment by outside pressures. So that much 
of i t was pretty well set and a great deal of what went 
on was the examination of what the Great Powers' draft 
meant and what i t s implications were. The alterations 
and amendments tended to be marginal to the main 
agreements that had already been reached. 
Now, in some cases that was not true. One of the 
issues was the extent to which the veto was to apply. 
The other major issue was the issue of non-self-governing 
t e r r i t o r i e s and trusteeship because that had not been 
incorporated in the Dumbarton Oaks discussions. 
JK: That was one of the questions I wanted to ask you, 
whether or not that had been settled ahead of time. Was 
this discussed at Yalta? 
Finkelstein: 
Yes, i t was discussed at Yalta to the extent of getting 
an agreement that this could be an issue to be dealt with 
at the San Francisco Conference. 
JK: But the issues themselves were not settled there? 
Finkelstein: 
Absolutely, and I can t e l l a l i t t l e b i t about that. What 
happened at Yalta was an agreement that San Francisco 
might address general principles of the post war colonial 
order and might consider establishing a trusteeship 
system. I believe the language adopted there was very 
close to the language which found i t s way into the 
Charter with respect to trusteeship, namely that such a 
trusteeship system might apply to t e r r i t o r i e s — this is 
Ar t i c l e 77 of the Charter — which had been held under 
mandate under the League of Nations system, territories 
which might be taken away from enemy states as a result 
of the Second World War, and te r r i t o r i e s which might 
voluntarily be placed under the system by the colonial 
powers. But basically the agreement at Yalta was that no 
specific colonial issue was to be dealt with at the 
Conference, just the framework for an international 
system. That agreement was pretty well adhered to in the 
San Francisco Conference. One of the things that the US 
delegation did, led in this respect by Governor Stassen, 
was to defend that principle against attempts by others 
to introduce different colonial issues of contention. 
Those i n i t i a t i v e s were taken but, they were a l l defeated 
and contained. 
The thing that I wanted to emphasize that I think i s 
fascinating i s that the reason that the colonial agenda 
was not as far advanced by the time the San Francisco 
Conference began as were most of the other issues of the 
Charter was that there had been a deep s p l i t in the US 
government on this issue going back for years. This 
emerged sharply in the late spring of 1944 as planning 
for the Dumbarton Oaks conversations was moving into an 
advanced stage. There had been a lo t of preparation in 
17 
the State Department of drafts for a trusteeship plan and 
a declaration having to do with principles of colonial 
government. There had been some consultations with the 
Br i t i s h . Most thought that this plan was ready to 
proceed but, i t was the military services which threw a 
monkey wrench into the works for two reasons. The f i r s t , 
they were very concerned that these questions would 
involve t e r r i t o r i a l issues which might open up disputes 
among the countries s t i l l conducting the war against the 
Axis. We are talking about 1944. Their main argument 
was that they didn't want to introduce any unnecessarily 
contentious issues that might cause s p l i t s particularly 
between us and the Russians. The second issue was the 
belief particulary in the navy that i t had to have the 
islands which we were winning island by island from the 
Japanese, some of which had been under League of Nations 
mandate after WW I but others which had not. So, the 
navy was against any concept of trusteeship which might 
internationalize those islands and thus deprive the navy 
of US sovereignty over them. On this they were clearly 
opposed by the President himself but, somehow or another 
the navy managed to keep the issue alive. It persisted 
in the internal debates in Washington right up to the eve 
of the San Francisco Conference. Indeed they were 
settled only by a late hour decision, perhaps the last 
one President Roosevelt reached before he died in Warm 
18 
Springs. The f i n a l shape of the US proposals did not 
appear u n t i l a working group on the train going from the 
East Coast to San Francisco on the way to the Conference 
reworked the proposals and came up with the draft that 
the United States introduced at the Conference. It was 
really a per i l s of Pauline. 
JK: During the Conference in San Francisco i t s e l f then there 
was not disagreement amongst the American delegation on 
that issue? Had i t become settled? 
Finkelstein: 
No, by the time the Conference began there was a US 
position which by and large was accepted by the 
delegation. But we started this line of conversation 
dealing with the importance of individual words and 
discussions and precise language. One of those arose in 
this context. That was namely the question of whether 
independence should be stated as a goal of the 
administration of colonies and/or the trusteeship 
t e r r i t o r i e s . That did s p l i t the American delegation. For 
reasons that have never been entirely clear to me, 
Governor Stassen believed i t was necessary to avoid the 
establishment of independence as the goal for 
ter r i t o r i e s under colonial rule. I think that he 
believed that that was a condition of getting approval by 
the colonial powers of the Charter provisions dealing 
with colonial issues. So, he brandished the club in 
19 
behalf of softer language. 
I was not present, obviously, but I was told later 
by somebody who was that on the way to the meeting in the 
automobile his advisors urged Governor Stassen not to 
take the i n i t i a t i v e in defending the Brit i s h position 
opposing the word independence. He ignored their advice 
and made a very powerful and effective speech against 
including the word independence. That got very negative 
headlines i n the national press and indeed around the 
world because here you had the representative of the 
great champion of colonial independence. That had been 
an important theme for Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The US 
i t s e l f a former colony founded in a war of revolution 
against a colonial regime had a representative standing 
up and opposing independence. Professionally many 
thought that i t hadn't been necessary because the British 
were perfectly capable of defending their own case. It 
i s a b i t of a mystery to me why he should have done that. 
In any case, a kind of a compromise agreement was 
reached under which the word independence was included as 
an objective with respect to the trust t e r r i t o r i e s , which 
were to have a special international status. It was to 
promote their progressive development toward self-
government or independence as may be appropriate to the 
particular circumstances of each territory and i t s people 
* * 
and the freely expressed wishes of the peoples concerned. 
But i t was not included in that part of the Charter 
devoted to a l l other colonies which were by far the most 
numerous. There the language i s to develop self-
government — this i s Art i c l e 73b of the Charter — to 
take due account of the aspirations of the peoples, etc., 
carefully avoiding the word "independence" as such. So, 
here i s another case where the language agreed upon was 
strongly debated because the language represented 
conflicting views as to what the purpose should be. 
JK: Also, the use of the term self-governing, how was that 
interpreted because certainly not a l l the nations 
involved at that time were democracies? Were there 
various interpretations of that term? 
Finkelstein: 
I don't think i t had anything to do with the form of 
government within the country. I think i t had to do with 
the conduct of affa i r s autonomously from the colonial 
power. It's funny. I've written about this in something 
that hasn't been published. The Americans thought that 
they were advocating self-determination when they were 
proposing a trusteeship plan which was to provide 
guidance and oversight rather than self-determination. 
Self-determination i s an act of deciding and trusteeship 
did not provide for such autonomous decisions by the 
peoples of the trust t e r r i t o r i e s that they could be 
21 
independent in whatever course they chose from previous 
administering power. So, I think there was some 
intellectual confusion in the American position. They 
confused trusteeship with self-determination. When they 
spoke of developing self-government, the language that 
got into A r t i c l e 73 of the Charter, I think they 
conceived of that as akin to the notion of self-
determination . 
JK: The language i s very close. 
Finkelstein: 
The right to adopt their own laws rather than have the 
colonial power adopt them. 
JK: So, there could have been a compromise of language there. 
Finkelstein: 
Well, there was. They put the word "independence" in one 
part and not in the other. That's the compromise they 
consciously reached. Although, i t was interpreted by 
Stassen and others as broad enough to incorporate 
independence. It didn't exclude independence. Self-
government might come to mean independence. But clearly 
they shied away from putting so hard edged a word in that 
part of the Charter because of the resistance of the 
colonial powers to doing that. 
JK: That i s really very interesting and i t i s fine to go off 
into those areas because those are things that I wanted 
to cover anyway. I just wanted to come back again to 
cover a l i t t l e b i t more of the structure of the 
Conference i t s e l f . We talked about the controversy over 
Argentina's participation in the Conference and later on 
they were accepted. How was i t decided as to who would 
represent Poland at the Conference? 
Finkelstein: 
I'm not sure that my memory i s going to enable me to 
answer that question. One thing that happened which had 
a tremendous negative impact in San Francisco was that 
the Russians . . . Let's back up a l i t t l e b i t . There 
had been two ostensible governments of Poland during the 
war. One was the government of exiles in London which 
had dealt with the Brits and us and who we acknowledged 
to be the government of Poland. There was also the so 
called Lublin government which was the government of the 
communists which was supported by the Soviet Union. The 
Russians had agreed that the London group should go to 
Moscow, there to meet with the Lublin group to negotiate 
an agreement as to the government of Poland. When the 
London group arrived in Moscow the Russians arrested them 
and clapped them in j a i l , a clear act of infamy and 
malfeasance. This burst over the San Francisco 
Conference li k e a thundercloud as you can imagine. 
The Russians were very d i f f i c u l t to get along with 
in many respects at that Conference from the f i r s t 
minutes. But this was clear evidence that the harmony 
that the UN scheme required among the Great Powers did 
not exist. You had what was later to be called the Cold 
War i n progress. It was really regarded as a dirty blow. 
It challenged the authenticity of the Soviet claim to 
want to be a partner in this organization which was being 
designed at San Francisco. I'm sorry I just can't 
r e c a l l the resolution of that Polish question was. What 
delegation should be seated in the Conference, you'll 
have l e t me pass on that. I have a feeling that there 
was a vacant seat, that Poland was considered a member 
but no delegation was accredited. 
JK: You were mentioning the anxieties that the Soviet Union 
would not ultimately cooperate within the United Nations, 
in general what was the atmosphere in San Francisco in 
terms of optimism for the United Nations? 
Finkelstein: 
Very mixed. Just to give you an example which in i t s e l f 
i s not a very important one but, nevertheless, indicative 
of the mood. Previously when international conferences 
had been convened the norm had been that the chairmanship 
or the presidency should be held by the host country. 
The Russians were not having any of that at San 
Francisco. They made an issue of i t in the early hours. 
That had been the plan that as the host the United States 
would have the chairmanship. They contested that and 
thus out of that resulted the awkward, rotating four 
power chairmanship that actually was adopted for the 
Conference. It was not a matter of great substance but 
an indication of how unwilling the Russians were to play 
the game as the rest of the powers thought i t ought to be 
played. They were obstreperous and d i f f i c u l t up and down 
the line, very determined to assert their own interests 
and defend them vigorously. As I said before, they like 
the others in the group of five were very cautious about 
disrupting the consensus that had been reached among them 
when i t was under attack by the 45 or 46 others present 
at San Francisco. By and large, they did succeed in 
presenting a united front and in cases l i k e the 
trusteeship issue where the position had not been created 
before the conference they were reasonably successful in 
coming to an agreement and defending i t against external 
assault. So, there was agreement but, i t was necessary. 
This was pragmatic self-interest. They were real tough 
when i t came to arriving at that agreement among the five 
but, once the agreement among the five existed, they were 
pretty good about helping to defend i t . 
The more direct answer to your question about 
optimism i s this. The c r i t i c a l issue in the Conference 
i t s e l f had to do with the veto. There should be no 
misunderstanding about this. The United States was just 
as firm i n needing a veto in the Security Council as were 
the Russians. 
JK: Wasn't that agreed upon before arriving in San Francisco 
at Dumbarton Oaks? 
Finkelstein: 
That principle was well established. They had l e f t i t 
unsettled at Dumbarton Oaks because some dimensions, some 
aspects of this there was not agreement on. But they had 
reached an agreement at Yalta. Basically the principle 
that there should be a veto was settled. The United 
States needed i t because nobody believed that the United 
States Senate would give i t s advice and consent to 
ra t i f i c a t i o n of the Charter in the absence of a veto for 
the United States to prevent a majority acting against 
the United States or deciding that the United States 
should be committed to enforcement action anywhere in the 
world when the United States didn't wish to do that. So, 
the veto was v i t a l to the US as well. So, the question 
was not whether there should be a veto but how far down 
in the process of decision making the veto should apply. 
Here the United States wanted to avoid the application of 
the veto to decisions that an issue should be discussed. 
The Russians were arguing that the decision to discuss 
should be subject to the veto as well. 
JK: And Molotov was very outspoken on that. 
Finkelstein: 
That's right, Molotov was outspoken. This was an issue 
that divided the big five and also involved a great deal 
of, minimally speaking, curiosity and real anger among 
the 46 others who resented the notion of the veto to 
begin with and who knew that they were going to have to 
swallow i t because there would be no Charter without i t 
and they couldn't afford not to have the Charter. So, 
they were in the position of being rough shod over by the 
big five anyway. They were mad as h e l l about i t . That 
included a l o t of Latin Americans. In the leadership of 
this resistance was Herbert Evatt of Australia. This was 
not just a North-South issue. It was a small country/big 
country issue. Even the Canadians were unhappy. 
JK: This resistance was to the major power veto in general or 
to the veto on the discussion, or both? 
Finkelstein: 
They wanted to cut back the veto in any way they could. 
That over simplifies and over generalizes but, basically 
that was the position they were in. Therefore, on this 
particular issue, of course, they were for the softer US 
view that there could be discussion without a veto. That 
issue was solved in two different ways. One was that 
when President Truman sent Harry Hopkins to Moscow 
sometime in May he got Stalin to overrule Molotov. 
Stalin thus agreed with the US interpretation of how far 
the veto power should extend in the Charter. So, that 
resolved the US/Soviet dispute and at this point you had 
* t 
x >-
the five power agreement. Then you had the five powers 
with a big wall with stakes and spears sticking out with 
shields defending i t s e l f and hoards of smaller countries 
outside wishing to batter down the protection. What 
happened i s that the five powers consulted with each 
other and arrived at what ended up being a very tough 
statement which they presented to the rest of the 
countries. I t was their interpretation of the extent to 
which there would be a veto. 
The theory underlying this tough agreement of the 
five, which they defended against the others and really 
imposed upon them in the end, i s an interesting concept 
called the chain of events theory, i f you are interested 
in following up on i t you'll find a very f u l l exposition 
by Leo Pasvolsky in the minutes of the American 
delegation published in a volume of Foreign Relations of 
the United States for 1945. There i s a volume of that 
o f f i c i a l document series for the Conference and in that 
there are the minutes of the US delegation. Buried in 
those minutes are Leo Pasvolsky's exposition, a very 
j e s u i t i c a l exposition on this chain of events theory. 
Ruth Russell has written about this and I've written 
about i t . 
The chain of events theory was really simple and 
quite simple minded. It was that i t was appropriate for 
the Great Powers to in s i s t that the veto extend quite 
28 
deeply into the process of Security Council decisions 
because once an item was on the agenda there could "ensue 
a chain of events" which could lead to the invocation of 
those threats to the interests of the Great Powers which 
the veto was designed to protect. Threfore, the veto 
ought to be available earlier in the process to prevent 
such a chain of events from developing and threatening 
the autonomy of the Great Powers. That has been 
c r i t i c i z e d because the Charter i t s e l f draws a very clear 
distinction between i t s peaceful settlement procedures in 
Chapter VI and the powers of the Security Council to take 
enforcement actions under Chapter VII. That line of 
demarcation was clear enough so that many have argued 
that there i s no chain of events and that was a phony 
rationale. I always thought that Pasvolsky understood 
that the Russians had to have i t . Although we were 
somewhat looser as to where in the procedure a veto must 
apply, we could probably have lived with the protection 
of the enforcement powers part of the Charter. He had to 
defend a deeper extension of the veto because i t was 
necessary from the Russian point of view and he wanted to 
be sure that the Russians would not have reason to drop 
out. 
So, i t came out that, although there can be no veto 
on discussion as such or on a decision to put an item on 
the agenda of the Security Council, beyond that the veto 
i s pretty pervasive. That statement of the five powers 
that I refered to, that they imposed upon the rest of the 
Conference, also included the so called double veto. 
Namely that i f there were dispute as to whether the veto 
should apply or not, that decision i t s e l f would be 
subject to a veto. 
JK: Was there disagreement among the American delegation on 
the issue of the veto? 
Finkelstein: 
Yes, there was considerable. Nobody challenged that 
there must be a veto. That was accepted by everybody. 
But there were disagreements in the delegation about how 
far i t should go. The two Congressmen, Eaton and Bloom, 
really didn't matter very much. They were not powerful 
figures in that delegation. But the two Senators were of 
c r i t i c a l importance. So, you often had a kind of 
liberal/conservative division between Stassen and Dean 
Gildersleeve on the one hand and the two Senators 
representing the conservative side on the other. 
I ' l l t e l l you a story. It's a wonderful anecdote. 
My duties kept me busy most of the time and I didn't get 
to see many meetings of the Conference. But I did make 
an effort to be there on the occasion when Senator 
Connally, the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations 
Committee, whose vote and leadership were going to be 
c r i t i c a l to the decision whether or not the United States 
was going to join the United Nations. 
JK: He was a very influential and powerful person. 
Finkelstein: 
Oh yes, because he and Vandenberg between them were 
expected to control the Senate Foreign Relations 
Committee which was going to be the body to vote on 
whether or not the Senate should be asked to give advice 
and consent to the Charter. We have come lately to talk 
of the two level game of international diplomacy, the 
international negotiation and the domestic negotiation as 
linked. It was operative in that delegation. Anyway, 
Connally was sent in behalf of the US delegation to read 
the law, the r i o t act, to the other smaller countries on 
the question of the veto. He was sent deliberately 
because everybody understood that he would control 
whether or not there could be Senate approval. He was a 
large imposing man, a very memorable character. He 
always wore a black string t i e and he had a twenty gallon 
hat. He was a Texan. He wore a sort of preachers black 
coat. He was marvelous and he played i t up. He b u i l t up 
this personna. He was a fourth of July orator, a stump 
orator with oratund rhetoric. He was a l o t of fun. 
There he was and he went down to this committee III, 3, 
to t e l l them that " i f you don't lay off on this veto 
you're not going to have a Charter. You're going to go 
home without i t . " 
There are two funny things. 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 by a mild mannered, 
very distinguished professor of history who later became 
Sir 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 f i n a l l y you could barely see the top 
of his head over the table. 
The other anecdote i s even funnier. This i s the 
same meeting and the same occassion and i t has to do with 
the interpreters. As you can imagine the mood in that 
room was extremely tense. The tension was so great that 
i t was palpable. You could feel i t . Here was Connally 
coming to read the r i o t act to this large group of 
smaller countries to whom the issue was very important. 
It was a matter of passion. Connally stood up and he 
began i n effect by saying, "here we are, come together in 
this beautiful c i t y of San Francisco to reach an 
agreement on the United Nations Charter and wouldn't i t 
be a damn shame i f we had to go home without one." It 
was a real tough message. That i s not exactly what he 
said but, i t ' s close enough. That was the essence of i t . 
For the conference they had rounded up interpreters who 
had worked for the League of Nations and who were very 
s k i l l e d . In those days you had consecutive 
interpretation not simultaneous interpretation. The 
interpreter would stand with a pad of paper taking some 
notes as the speaker delivered his remarks. Then 
afterwards he would render them in the other language. 
In this case, i t would have been French. After Connally 
did this tremendously offensive speach the interpreter, 
who was called Kaminker (there were two Kaminker brothers 
at the League of Nations) stood up and started to read i t 
back in French and he began, "nous sommes assembles i c i 
a l a belle vue de Chicago." And the room dissolved in 
laughter. The tension was broken and to this day I don't 
know whether he did that deliberately or not. Well, the 
Conference succeeded and he made a great contribution. 
JK: That's great. Well, now we've been talking about the 
five great powers but, at the time who was representing 
France? The war in Europe had just ended right around 
that time. 
Finkelstein: 
This was the government of France represented. De Gaulle 
was the president. They had some old prewar diplomats. 
Those names are a l l available. I'm sorry they are not 
just popping into my head. They had a regular strong 
delegation. After the Conference started, sometime late 
in the proceedings but, possibly in the weeks just before 
the Conference, they were added to the Great Powers. 
JK: They had not been participating before that. 
Finkelstein: 
The B r i t i s h pushed for that. Churchill wanted that. 
With Hull fading in influence, I suppose his resistance 
mattered less. Hull was very angered. FDR didn't like 
de Gaulle. He was a very d i f f i c u l t character. So, 
relations with France were prickly throughout. De Gaulle 
earned the h o s t i l i t y of Cordell Hull who could be a very 
b i t t e r enemy when he undertook the invasion of those two 
l i t t l e islands in the North Atlantic, Saint Pierre and 
Miquelon, sometime in late 1940, which represented a 
direct challange to the American policy of protecting the 
Vichy government's rights against change. I don't 
remember a l l the details. There i s a considerable 
literature on this i f anybody i s interested. But de 
Gaulle sent this submarine in and they landed troups and 
ran up the Fleur de Lis and the Gaullist colors. So, he 
had an up h i l l road gaining anything from the United 
States after that. The truth i s , not to be taken 
offensively, that France was not a Great Power on the 
scale of Britain or the United States or the USSR. 
Incidently, the American Joint Chiefs of Staff were 
very perceptive about the post war power relationships. 
The record i s very clear that by 1944 they were saying 
requested representation for the 16 Republics. That 
proposal has taken on a different perspective in 1990. 
Roosevelt understood that that was very prickly 
p o l i t i c a l l y in the United States and toyed with the idea 
of countering with the proposal that the then 48 states 
of the United States would be given membership, as well. 
But, that would have been foolish. So, we reached a 
compromise agreement to l e t Belorussia and the Ukraine 
have membership. This i s my personal view now in 1990 
looking back on i t . It was not an important issue. It 
was understood at the time that i t really didn't make 
much difference. It gave them two additional voices. It 
turns out i t took more time in running meetings because 
you had two other people with the right to speak. The 
voting situation never proved to make those two votes 
c r i t i c a l i n any sense. It just was a non-issue. 
JK: Was there any consideration for accepting that as a trade 
off for accepting Argentina? 
Finkelstein: 
No, I don't think so. I think that Roosevelt's 
commitment was made. I never heard that. I just don't 
remember. 
JK: Also, you've mentioned a couple of times that you had 
taken the tr a i n out to San Francisco from the East Coast. 
Did many of the international participants take the train 
to San Francisco? 
Finkelstein: 
This was wartime, remember. Transportation was very 
d i f f i c u l t . There were several special trains. They had 
to be specially routed because of the demands of wartime 
transportation. The US forces met up with the Russians 
in Europe on the day the Conference started, the 25th of 
A p r i l . The war was s t i l l going on in 1945. May 8th was 
the end of the European war. Plans were beginning to be 
made for the conduct of the war in the Pacific. So, 
everything was a l l knotted up. I was told this had never 
happended before. My train was routed through the yards 
in Chicago without our disembarking, without getting onto 
another train. Then continued westward on a route that 
went southwest through St. Louis down to El Paso and 
across the desert to Los Angeles then up the coast to San 
Francisco. That had to be arranged especially because of 
the d i f f i c u l t y . 
I don't remember foreign delegations on that train. 
There was a large group of Americans including Bunche and 
Gerig. Ralph and I shared a compartment. He looked at 
skinny l i t t l e me and said, "you take the upper." A lot 
of the delegation staff were there. I was very junior, 
very unsophisticated in the ways of the world. I 
wouldn't have known how to deal with a foreigner, anyway. 
So, they may have been there without my knowing i t . It 
was a big train, a long train with dining cars. They 
37 
treated us well. 
Then after the Conference there was a special train 
back. We went up the coast to Portland and then southern 
Washington and across North Dakota. 
JK: I was wondering whether taking the train which took a 
long time and covered a l l across the United States might 
somehow be impressive to foreign delegations as to the 
size and diversity of such a vast country. 
Finkelstein: 
I'm pretty sure at least some delegations or staffs 
anyway did cross the country on the train and that 
impression was made. I didn't get to see them. I don't 
know why. 
I did say that the US trusteeship plan was put 
together in that four days on the train. 
JK: Uninterrupted time. They couldn't get phone c a l l s . 
You have mentioned Ralph Bunche a number of times. How 
influential was he in San Francisco? Was he a powerful 
figure at a l l ? 
Finkelstein: 
I have very l i t t l e f i r s t hand basis for answering that 
because he was off working on trusteeship and I was doing 
these other things. We saw each other from time to time 
but basically we were not in very close contact. He was 
a relatively junior person. I don't re c a l l that he ever 
appeared before the delegation. The representation on 
38 
those issues was generally handled by Stassen himself. 
Although he may have been there from time to time sitting 
behind Stassen. I just don't remember that. I think he 
was not a major power. I think he was emerging at this 
point. He was obviously extremely able and competent, a 
good draftsman, a tough, hard negotiator. So, that 
probably he was making his mark then. The big important 
decisions were made by the delegation or sometimes, as in 
that incident of Stassen's position on independence, by 
the delegates themselves. I don't think that there was 
a time when the seat in committee II, 4 was not occupied 
by Stassen himself. I noticed later at the f i r s t General 
Assembly that when the US representative on these matters 
was John Foster Dulles, he often wasn't there. So, Ralph 
Bunche got to s i t as the representative of the United 
States on the UN General Assembly committee dealing with 
trusteeship and non-self-governing t e r r i t o r i e s . I don't 
think that happened in San Francisco. 
JK: How powerful a person was Stettinius? Was he 
influential? 
Finkelstein: 
The two Senators were the real power of the delegation. 
The real intellectual and oratorical force within the 
delegation meetings was stassen. Stettinius was a pretty 
pompous, very good looking, tan, pearly white teeth, 
white hair, physically f i t , very self-conscious fellow, 
39 
but very insecure. He was supposed to be the person who 
talked to the President about these matters. So, in that 
sense as the chairman of the delegation and as the 
Secretary of State, he must have had a considerable 
influence i n helping to shape the President's decisions 
when issues were being argued and there were s p l i t s in 
the delegation. So, institutionally, he was placed to be 
a powerful figure but, I have no access to that. I have 
no idea what went on in the conversations between 
Stettinius and Truman which happened everyday. He was on 
the phone a l l the time. So, I really have no judgement 
on that. But, most people thought that he wasn't very 
bright that he was kind of slow witted. 
After the Conference was over Truman named someone 
else Secretary of State. He obviously did not have the 
confidence of the President. 
You asked much earlier about optimism. I meant to 
mention this. I have a probably unique view that 
Stettinius made a tremendous contribution to the success 
of the Conference because he was irrepressibly optimistic 
about i t , even during those days when there was the veto 
issue. And please don't misunderstand this, the veto 
issue in my judgement came very close to wrecking the 
Conference. The disagreement over the extent of the veto 
between Moscow and the United States was a c r i t i c a l , 
determining issue. If the Hopkins mission had not 
produced i t s successful outcome the Conference might very 
well have fa i l e d over that issue. During those days the 
tensions were extreme. I have some letters of mine 
upstairs reflecting my feelings at the time that the 
thing was very chancy and that i t might just bust up. 
During a l l those days Stettinius pretended to refuse to 
believe that. He kept up a very optimistic patter of 
reassurance l i k e a coach patting the players on the back 
and t e l l i n g them not to worry that everything was going 
to come out fine. And he smiled a l l over the place both 
within the delegation and in the international forum. I 
think that was very helpful. Nobody quite believed i t 
but, s t i l l i t helped to offset the gloom which otherwise 
was pervading the place. I thought that was an important 
contribution. 
JK: Now, we could move to some discussion about the Security 
Council. We were talking about the veto which takes 
place in the Security Council. How much of the structure 
of the Security Council had been set up ahead of time in 
Dumbarton Oaks, in terms of who would be on the Security 
Council, how many, what kind of vote the non-permanent 
members would have and so forth? 
Finkelstein: 
I believe that essentially the job was done before the 
Conference was started. The membership was fixed at 
eleven. I don't know at what time they decided there 
would be five veto votes because as you pointed out the 
French were not at Dumbarton Oaks. They didn't get into 
this and become the f i f t h member u n t i l later. So, now 
I'm speculating but, that must have been part of the deal 
by which i t was agreed that they would be admitted to the 
Conference and would come and participate. Although I 
don't think that was in the Dumbarton Oaks text. I'd 
have to go back and check but, I assume that the five 
powers agreed on that and got everybody else to agree 
that there would be five permanent members of the 
Security Council and those would be the ones whose 
affirmative vote would be necessary to get a decision of 
substance. 
Of the total size of the Council, i t was fixed at 
eleven. The issue of how far the veto would extend down 
the chain of decisions in the prodedure, those issues 
were not resolved at Dumbarton Oaks. That part of the 
Charter proposal was l e f t blank at that point or 
bracketed. It was not resolved altogether at Yalta 
either. So, those questions were f i n a l l y settled in the 
Conference. But as for the rest of i t I think the 
structure of the Security Council and the general outline 
of i t s powers was pretty well established before they got 
to San Francisco. 
There were issues we talked about before l i k e self-
defense. Ar t i c l e 51 was not in the Dumbarton Oaks 
provisions. That i s the one that recognizes that there 
i s a right of an individual or a collective self-defense 
i f there i s an armed attack against a member. We also 
mentioned the wrestling over the relationship between the 
universal and the regional organization. There was some 
fussing too about the authority of the Security Council 
in relation to the continuing authority of the victorious 
powers in the war over the defeated enemy. There were 
some provisions that got into the Charter protecting the 
continuing rights of the occupying powers for peace and 
security vis-a-vis Germany and Japan before the UN should 
be given that responsibility. I don't really remember 
how far the Dumbarton Oaks discussion had gotten in 
dealing with those issues. I think they probably ran on 
into the Conference. Basically, I'm pretty confident 
that the essential deals on the Security Council had been 
struck before then. 
JK: Was there some discussion in San Francisco on the role of 
the General Assembly vs the role of the Security Council? 
Finkelstein: 
Yes, I'm glad you raised that question. Interestingly in 
the US delegation there was strong advocacy for 
increasing the role of the General Assembly on the part 
of the Republicans, Vandenberg and John Foster Dulles, 
who was not a member of the delegation but who was there 
as a senior advisor representing Governor Dewey with whom 
he had been very close and who was expected to be, as he 
became, a candidate for the presidency. This was 
Roosevelt's device for insuring a collaborative 
relationship with the leadership of the Republican Party. 
It was not the only device but, i t was the main one. 
Dulles was there as Dewey's man. Dulles and Vandenberg 
were pressing for more authority for the General 
Assembly. I think i t was those two who also pushed for 
more emphasis on the concept of justice in the Charter. 
Sometimes the word justice i s in there and that is 
directly attributable to Dulles' and Vandenberg's 
advocacy of that. 
It i s an interesting point and i t has some 
contemporary relevance. What principles are to guide the 
Security Council? I think that what they did at 
Dumbarton Oaks and San Francisco was to create an organ 
whose important decisions would be determined by the 
votes. When does the Security Council act? It acts when 
the five Great Powers don't cast a veto and when there 
are enough other votes to constitute the requisite 
majority for a decision. That i s an important 
observation because i t says that the Security Council was 
intended to be a p o l i t i c a l organ, an organ representing 
the agreement necessary to allow i t to succeed and not an 
organ guided by principles or c r i t e r i a of conduct. 
The c r i t i c a l threshold written into the Charter of 
that Chapter VII that I refered to before when we were 
talking about enforcement powers, i s when there is a 
situation where there i s a threat to the peace, a breach 
of the peace, or an act of aggression. Nowhere does i t 
say that the Security Council must determine that there 
has been an aggressor. It i s entitled to act i f peace is 
threatened or i f an act of breaching the peace has 
occured, not only i f there i s an aggressor. Nor does the 
Charter anywhere say that the Security Council must act 
against the aggressor. The Security Council whenever the 
votes are there may conclude that the aggression was 
j u s t i f i e d and that i t s pressures should be against the 
country which was the victim of aggression because i t s 
policy was a source of disorder that led to the breach of 
the peace. This i s kind of theoretical and abstract and 
that hasn't yet happened. But i t i s important to 
understand that this was a p o l i t i c a l conception of an 
organ acting on the basis of the necessary agreement 
rather than an organ bound to enforce law or impose law 
or to bring about just outcomes. 
John Foster Dulles particularly was a lawyer. He 
was a senior lawyer and managing partner of Sulivan and 
Cromwell. He had also been a prominant lay leader of the 
Protestant lay organizations in the United States. I 
think he had been president of the Churches of Christ in 
America or one of the major lay protestant organizations. 
It used to be said of him that John Foster Dulles carried 
a pair of brass knuckles in one pocket and the seven 
p i l l a r s of the church in the other. So, this notion of 
a p o l i t i c a l l y guided powerful body must have been very 
d i f f i c u l t for him to accept intellectually, morally, and 
s p i r i t u a l l y . He and Vandenberg were pressing for more 
references to justice. They were put in as adornments 
but in ways that really did not affect the decision 
making or the outcomes of the UN system. 
JK: I had understood that the Latin Americans were pressing 
for more power to the General Assembly because that was 
a larger representative body. 
Finkelstein: 
Just thinking about i t , i t i s almost self-evident that 
they would press for power for an organization in which 
votes had equal influence as distinguished from the 
Security Council in which the Great Powers had the veto. 
JK: The question was the distinction between the Security 
Council and the General Assembly. 
Finkelstein: 
It's interesting. I don't know that much attention was 
paid to the great power that the General Assembly was 
given which was to adopt the budget and to set the 
assessments for members and under the Charter those are 
legally binding. It may be the one power the General 
Assembly has to take decisions that bind the members. 
That has been the source of the enormous growth in the 
organization, namely combined with the power that the 
General Assembly has by majority vote to adopt a program 
to decide what the organization should do and the power 
to set the budget. You have an enormous influence and 
power exerted by the General Assembly. 
JK: So, in the Conference i t s e l f when those powers were given 
to the General Assembly then the General Assembly was not 
necessarily conceived of as a weak body. 
Finkelstein: 
Well, I don't think that people thought about i t very 
much. I think that the General Assembly was conceived of 
as a weak body. The predominant thought was the General 
Assembly was given, except for the one I mentioned, no 
powers of decision. It could do nothing which could 
oblige members to obey. It was, therefore, thought of 
as, I think i t was Vandenberg's term, the town meeting of 
the world, a place where people could get up and talk and 
pass resolutions and express their wishes but, in which 
nothing important could happen. The point I was trying 
to make a minute ago, and I guess I didn't do i t very 
clearly, i s that they didn't seriously enough consider 
the power that would be vested in the General Assembly's 
capacity by majority vote to adopt programs linked to the 
power to f i x the budget and assessments. That has been 
a real source of strength for the General Assembly. The 
UNDP, for example, the United Nations Development Program 
and a whole series of other important things that are 
done under UN auspices have been done by the General 
Assembly exercising that power to adopt a program by a 
majority vote. Nobody thought about that very much at 
San Francisco. They just didn't anticipate i t . The 
whole operational side of the things that the UN does, 
except for what i t was hoped i t would do in the peace and 
security f i e l d , everything else that the UN does really 
was not contemplated. 
One of the powers given in the human rights f i e l d , 
for example, they are very carefully limited to 
promoting. The notion was that the General Assembly, the 
UN, would be an institution in which you could do 
studies, discuss, adopt resolutions which would not be 
binding, prepare treaties which would take on their 
binding quality only from the r a t i f i c a t i o n acceptance by 
member states. None of this was thought to be the 
makings of a very powerful organization. I guess early 
on the UN decided to have a technical assistance program. 
Then President Truman in his point four in his inaugural 
address in 1949 put the United States on record as 
favoring the creation of a technical assistance program 
and the US then pushed for the adoption of a technical 
assistance program in the UN and other bodies throughout 
48 
the UN system. The operational c a l l i n g of the UN began 
to develop f a i r l y early in i t s history. It relied on 
this constitutional power to decide things by majority 
vote. 
JK? Was i t f e l t in San Francisco that the economic and social 
development through the function of the UN in that 
capacity related to peace and security? 
Finkelstein: 
Let me make an outrageous and probably exaggerated 
statement. For the US the UN was intended to be an 
organization to maintain peace and security. It was 
supposed to prevent the recurrence of the kind of 
aggression between the wars which had led to World War 
II. Yes, you are quite right, the economic and social 
dimensions of the Charter were viewed by the United 
States, not necessarily by a l l the others, primarily in 
terms of peace and security. They were auxiliary to the 
peace and security functions, the instruments for peace 
and security. 
That gives rise to an argument whether they are 
really subsidiary in the UN Charter or not. I think that 
i s a s i l l y argument because the p o l i t i c a l history of the 
organization demonstrates that these have taken on 
meaning i n their own right. They have their strong 
support and so, peace and security should no longer be 
thought of, i t seems to me, as the predominant function 
of the UN. The others are parall e l to i t . That, I 
believe, represents a change from what the United States 
planned i n i t i a l l y . 
JK: You memtioned human rights. The UN has contributed 
tremendously to the f i e l d of human rights. However, very 
l i t t l e of that was provided for in the Charter. 
Finkelstein: 
There i s a paradox here because human rights i s mentioned 
in the Charter and particularly i t i s mentioned in 
Art i c l e 55 of the Charter. That fact in i t s e l f has been 
a potent reason for the internationalization of human 
rights. Human rights was thought of as a matter of 
national concern, domestic jurisdiction. Article 2, 
paragraph 7 says nothing in the present Charter shall 
authorize the UN to intervene in matters which are 
essentially domestic in nature. That was intended to 
protect sovereign states against having an international 
organization meddling with respect to their domestic 
issues, particularly human rights. But at the same time 
the words "human rights" were in the Charter. It became 
very hard to argue, thereafter, that human rights are 
domestic issues when they are enshrined in an 
international treaty of such authority and global impact 
as the UN Charter. So, that i s how human rights got 
internationalized. It started very early with Eleanor 
Roosevelt by 1948. It seemed a long time coming then. 
But to look back on i t , i t happened very rapidly. By 
1948 you had the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. 
JK: So, i t was purposely put into the Charter but, the 
provisions for implementing were l e f t to . . . 
Finkelstein: 
The belief was that there would be no implementation. 
A l l you could do was discuss, consider, and study, and 
promote but not protect. There i s nothing in the Charter 
that authorizes the UN to intervene behind the walls of 
state sovereignty to protect people whose human rights 
are being abused by their government. Nothing in the 
Charter authorizes that. Yet, that capacity has been 
growing, too slowly some would say, but, s t i l l i t has 
been developing in the 45 years since the Conference. 
Another thing on the economic side, an anecdote, but 
this i s more than an anecdote. Remember we talked about 
the b i t t e r disputes over words. I noticed the f i r s t day 
I took minutes in the delegation that there was such a 
continual argument going on consuming a l o t of time in 
the US delegation everyday, had been going on and 
continued, having to do with the words " f u l l employment" 
in what became Art i c l e 55 in the Charter. The argument 
behind that i s ' t h a t in the United States 1945 was a 
period when consideration was being given to the adoption 
of a f u l l employment act in the United States. It had 
51 
not yet occurred. It was an issue of intense domestic 
p o l i t i c a l argument, the New Dealers on the one hand and 
the Republicans on the other. Therefore, Senator 
Vandenberg among others, was determined that the words 
" f u l l employment" should not appear in the United Nations 
Charter because that would be a lever which might be used 
in the continuing domestic argument over social and 
economic policy in this country. This argument went on 
for weeks and weeks with the American delegation 
instructing i t s representative, who as I re c a l l was Dean 
Gildersleeve, that she must not agree to, and she must 
obstruct the inclusion of the words " f u l l employment" in 
the United Nations Charter. 
At the same time in Britain you were having the 
Beveridge Plan. Churchill was succeeded the summer of 
1945 by a Labor government. We were out of step with the 
rest of the world because s o c i a l i s t concepts in the role 
of the government were taking over widely. So, in the 
end the words " f u l l employment" were included in what has 
become Ar t i c l e 55, subparagraph A, clause A, "higher 
standards of li v i n g , f u l l employment, and conditions of 
economic and social progress and development." That took 
place only over the bitter resistence of the United 
States which favored softer language like " f u l l e r and 
higher levels of employment." This i s an important 
anecdote because i t shows how the United States viewed 
52 
the United Nations. It was determined that the United 
Nations should not be a serious actor in imposing 
economic standards on the world. Even though the United 
States was the country which proposed that the Economic 
and Social Council be given status as a principal organ 
of the UN. I think the Br i t i s h had proposed that i t be 
subordinate to the General Assembly. And i t is 
subordinate to the General Assembly but, i t i s among the 
organs of the organization l i s t e d among the six of the 
Charter. I guess we were ambivalent about i t . We had 
the Roosevelt four freedoms behind us, the belief that 
economic and social matters are important in the search 
for peace and order in the world but, there was a 
reluctance to adopt principles which were divisive at 
home and which Senator Vandenberg was in a position to 
resi s t . I remember him saying and this was I think the 
f i r s t day that I was in those meetings and i t struck me 
and I've never forgotten i t . He said, "gosh, i f the 
United Nations put the words ^ f u l l employment' in this 
Charter my constituents back there in Michigan would say 
that I had sold out to Sidney Hillman." Sidney Hillman 
was the president of the International Ladies' Garment 
Workers Union i n New York, and was Jewish. So, Senator 
Vandenberg got in his licks for conservative economics 
and anti-semitism in one choicely turned sentence. 
JK: Who i s i t that actually wrote the preamble to the 
5 2 
Charter? 
Finkelstein: 
Well, there was a great schlemozzle over that. Field 
Marshall Smuts thought himself to be the one and he had 
a l i c k at the preamble. Nobody liked i t . At least in 
the American delegation there was a great deal of 
dissatisfaction with i t . Archibald MacLeish, who was the 
Librarian of Congress, was a consultant to the American 
delegation. He and Dean Gildersleeve, who also had a 
hand i n i t , were sent to try to make i t better. It i s 
not really a great document. 
JK: Had Smuts written a f i r s t draft? 
Finkelstein: 
I didn't say that because I don't remember at what stage 
he got into i t but, i t had his imprint on i t . He was 
defending i t . The Americans thought i t had to be made 
better. He was being kind of stubborn about i t . 
MacLeish did make i t somewhat better. 
JK: Did Virginia Gildersleeve work on i t also? 
Finkelstein: 
She was the delegate on the committee who had to deal 
with the writing of i t . There i s a point that's worth 
making. The preamble has a tremendous awkwardness. It 
starts off "we the peoples of the United Nations" but, 
then i t segues to a f i n a l clause which emphasizes not the 
peoples but their governments. This was the awkwardness. 
* r 
This was a Conference of sovereign states engaged in the 
creation of a treaty which would be the constitution of 
an organization of sovereign states. So, you did have a 
considerable tension between the notion of state 
sovereignty and the aspiration of many to make this 
somehow a more popular institution. So, they adopted 
that device in the beginning with "we the peoples of the 
United Nations" and then going on to "have resolved to 
combine our efforts to accomplish these aims accordingly, 
our respective governments . . . do hereby establish an 
international organization to be known as the United 
Nations." 
JK: So, the language then was purposeful. There was an 
attempt to reach a compromise between seeing the 
organization as a popular organization and one that was 
bu i l t around sovereign states. 
Finkelstein: 
When you compare this with the Declaration of 
Independence on li t e r a r y merit Thomas Jefferson wins 
hands down. 
JK: There are a couple of other issues I want to cover with 
you. One i s the enforcement of the Security Council 
decisions. Was i t envisioned in San Francisco that there 
would be a military aspect to the United Nations? 
Finkelstein: 
Sure, I think the Charter i s very clear that once you got 
55 
this decision in Art i c l e 39 by the Security Council, 
there i s a threat to the peace, a breach of the peace, or 
an act of aggression, the sky i s the l i m i t . The Security 
Council thereafter has v i r t u a l l y unlimited powers to act 
through taking temporary measures to prevent things from 
getting worse, to impose sanctions such as the disruption 
of diplmatic comunications, economic, and transportation 
relationships and then whatever kind of further measures 
involving the use of force that i t sees f i t to decide to 
impose. The qualification of that i s that the military 
forces to be available to the UN Security Council for 
such purposes had to be provided in the form of special 
agreements to be negotiated on the i n i t i a t i v e of the 
Security Council with member states which were to agree 
in those special agreements to provide forces and 
f a c i l i t i e s and access to the United Nations for i t s 
enforcement measures. Those special agreements under 
Ar t i c l e 43 of the Charter were on the agenda and a 
special effort was made to negotiate them in the early 
years of the UN but, nothing ever happened. No agreement 
was reached. No such agreement has ever occurred. Thus, 
the United Nations' arsenal i s empty. 
JK: But, i t was conceived originally that the UN would have 
a permanent force. 
Finkelstein: 
Yes, absolutely. There i s another point which has 
contemporary relevance. When the United States r a t i f i e d 
the Charter, the US Congress adopted the United Nations 
Participation Act, a law of the United States to provide 
for US representation in the UN and the expenses and so 
on. There i s in i t a provision in which the Congress in 
a l l deliberation and with the f u l l knowledge of the 
Constitutional provision that in this country i t i s the 
Congress that has the power to declare war, in that UN 
Participation Act the Congress says that once a special 
agreement i s in effect with Congressional approval 
committing US forces to the Security Council, the 
President need not thereafter ask for the consent of the 
Congress to make those forces available for use by the UN 
Security Council. 
In the circumstances of 1990, i f the Security 
Council were to take the i n i t i a t i v e to the United States 
and say let's negotiate a special agreement to place as 
available to the UN Security Council the forces the 
United States has in the Gulf, and the President were to 
go to the Congress and say, "please approve a special 
agreement authorizing those forces to be made available 
to the UN," thereafter, under the existing law the 
President would have the power to commit those forces to 
battle under the authority of the Security Council. That 
i s the law of the United States as i t stands today. I 
don't seriously believe that that scenario would work in 
57 
November, 1990, but, I go through a l l that to emphasize 
the point that the United States and the Senate in 
agreeing to r a t i f i c a t i o n by a vote of 89 to 2, and the 
Congress by approving the UN Participation Act, were very 
serious about a wish to have the United Nations security 
system as the primary resource of the United States in 
protecting i t s own national security. The UN security 
system was serious. It was regarded as the backbone of 
the organization. It was carefully considered by the 
Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The Joint Chiefs of 
Staff had to c e r t i f y that these arrangements were indeed 
in the national security interest of the United States 
and as a result of that the people and the Senate 
overwhelmingly accepted this collective security regime 
as the primary instrument for the protection of the 
national security of the United States thereafter. It 
broke down because you didn't have the cooperation with 
the Russians that was necessary to make i t work. I have 
not the slightest shadow of a doubt myself that in 1945 
that was what the US Congress and the President and the 
American people wanted. 
JK: What about the military staff committee? How did they 
envision originally that that would function? 
Finkelstein: 
Well, I don't think i t had been too well thought through. 
58 
The Charter i s quite clear that in exercising i t s 
enforcement functions the Security Council i s to be 
advised by the military staff committee which i s under 
i t s authority. The military staff committee i s to 
consist of the chiefs of staff of the five permanent 
members of the Security Council or their representatives. 
It i s to be the body to help plan the UN strategy. It 
has certain functions of advice with respect to the UN's 
role in arms control and so on under the Charter. The 
question of how i t would work, there i s a very strange 
provision in the Charter that says that this shall be 
l e f t for the future, which proves that they really hadn't 
gotten very far with i t . But i t i s interesting. 
That same UN Participation Act that I mentioned, this US 
legislation authorizing us to participate, clearly 
accepted this military staff committee arrangement when 
authorizing the President to commit American forces to 
battle under the Security Council. There i s in that Act 
no qualification of the Charter arrangements under which 
the UN "military staff Committee shall be responsible 
under the Security Council," I am reading now from the 
Charter, "for the strategic direction of any armed forces 
placed at the disposal of the Security Council." There 
i s a provision putting off for future decision an 
important dimension of the military staff committee's 
function, name how such strategic direction should be conducted. 
59 
JK: At any rate i t seems as though the concept really hadn't 
been thought through that carefully. So, the language 
isn't necessarily vague because of compromise but vague 
because i t really was not thought through. 
Finkelstein: 
A r t i c l e 47, clause 3 states that "the military staff 
committee shall be responsible under the Security Council 
for the strategic direction of any armed forces placed at 
the disposal of the Security Council. Questions relating 
to the command of such forces shall be worked out 
subsequently." I wasn't privy to those discussions and 
I've never looked into that provision but, i t makes sense 
i f you think about i t in this way. When you were writing 
the UN Charter you could not really anticipate what the 
circumstances would be in which the Security Council 
might decide to use force and in which the strategic 
direction would be provided by the military staff 
committee. Would you have forces provided equally by the 
Soviet Union, China, France, Britain, and the United 
States to deal with a threat to the peace in Latin 
America? Or i f the issue was going to be in Africa or i f 
i t was going to involve Asia, i f i t was going to involve 
small powers or big powers, you would have very different 
needs for the forces depending on the circumstances to 
which the Security Council was going to respond. 
Therefore, i t makes sense to say that there i s no way we 
60 
can anticipate what the command arrangement for UN forces 
should be in these circumstances that may be very 
different. What that says i s that you have to decide i t 
case by case. I don't think that i s foolish. I don't 
know how you could have done i t any other way. Maybe 
that i s a lack of imagination on my part. 
When in 1950 the UN Security Council did authorize 
the UN action, the police action i t was called, in Korea 
the command of the forces was given to the United States 
because we had the predominant military force there. 
Similarly, you might guess that i f the UN Security 
Council were to authorize the use of force in the 
Iraq/Kuwait a f f a i r today, because of the preponderance of 
the American forces there and because of the President's 
l i k e l y insistence that i t be that way, the command would 
be given to an American general, under the UN. The UN 
would designate the American as the Commander in Chief. 
You could visualize another circumstance in which 
the Brazilian general might be in charge or the Russian 
or the British depending on the nature of the problem. 
JK: Was there any discussion about the UN having a naval 
capacity? 
Finkelstein: 
In the negotiations which did occur, yes. There i s a 
provision in the Charter putting special emphasis on air 
forces to be immediately available because of the general 
belief in a i r forces and that command of the a i r was an 
important condition. Nothing i s excluded. When the 
United States put in i t s proposals as to the kind of 
force the UN should try to have as a basis for reaching 
these special agreements to make the forces available, we 
had a very f u l l y worked out military plan, so many 
divisions, so many naval ai r c r a f t carriers, destroyers, 
and cruisers, and so many a i r wing. The military staff 
committee met for years, not really negotiating, but 
squabbling over these plans. The American military took 
i t very seriously. They disagreed. The Russians wanted 
less emphasis on sea forces in which we were stronger and 
more emphasis on land forces in which they were stronger. 
Basically the thing broke down because you didn't have 
underlying agreement. 
JK: The other question I have for you i s about the role of 
the Secretary-General because he was given a prominent 
role in the concept of the Charter. What were some of 
the discussions about that and was i t considered 
important that he have a prominent role? 
Finkelstein: 
I hope I'm not wrong in saying this but, my impression 
was that not very much attention was given to those 
issues in the Conference. In a sense there had been a 
Great Power decision, and I think the United States led 
in this, that the head of the Secretariat should have a 
stronger legal base and be a more potent figure than the 
Secretary-General of the League of Nations. There was 
some dithering about what he should be called before they 
had arrived at the name Secretary-General. He i s under 
the Charter an organ of the UN, which gives him a 
certain independent base. He has clear authority to 
administer the Secretariat and the a f f a i r s of the 
organization. But he i s not intended to be a p o l i t i c a l 
leader of the organization. At least he i s not 
authorized to be, except for the provisions having to do 
with his e x p l i c i t authority to take i n i t i a t i v e when he 
believes peace i s threatened. That i s what was thought 
to be an important power in the Charter and that 
provision was carefully considered, A r t i c l e 99. "The 
Secretary-General may bring to the attention of the 
Security Council any matter which in his opinion may 
threaten the maintainance of international peace and 
security." That makes him constitutionally an important 
actor in the international system. Later on, of course, 
Dag Hammarskjold particularly used that as a basis for 
developing powers of i n i t i a t i v e and autonomy which he 
exercised very well and which have been supported by a l l 
subsequent Secretaries-General. But that provision 
i t s e l f has been rarely used. Secretaries-General have 
been very reluctant to take the i n i t i a t i v e authorized by 
that a r t i c l e i n the face of disagreement among the other 
powers that they should do so. 
JK: Was he seen as a mediator in the sense that his role has 
evolved into, or was his position primarily seen as 
administrative? 
Finkelstein: 
The position was considered primarily administrative. 
But i t was known that the Secretary-General of the League 
of Nations had subrosa quietly performed many mediatory 
roles. I don't think i t would have surprised any of the 
thoughtful people in San Francisco that that was l i k e l y 
to be a role for the Secretary-General. His function as 
the commander in chief and the p o l i t i c a l prime minister 
of the United Nations in the conduct of the UN's peace­
keeping functions since the United Nations Emergency 
Force in 1956, none of that was anticipated in the 
Charter. That i s the consequence of the collapse of the 
consensus needed to make the Security Council work using 
the military staff committee system as was intended. My 
hunch i s that i f you do maintain the kind of Great Power 
agreement we've seen emerging since about 1987, the 
Secretary-General's role w i l l necessarily diminish 
because the Great Powers, i f they are going to be acting, 
are unlikely to want to entrust the guidance of the 
a f f a i r to him. 
64 
I have written that with the Great Powers in the 
saddle they are unlikely to entrust the reins to the 
groom. It seems to me that we have to be prepared to see 
some diminution, thus, in this particular function of the 
Secretary-General which has been so important in the 
peace-keeping business. On the other hand, that could 
prove contentious because for the group of seventy-seven, 
the smaller countries, they may be uneasy about a Great 
Power condominium and, i f so, they may regard the 
Secretary-General as their agent. Thus, I foresee some 
possible f r i c t i o n over this issue in the months and years 
ahead. 
JK: What about the important role of quiet diplomacy and the 
good offices? 
Finkelstein: 
That i s alsways going to be desired. It i s interesting 
because one of the things that has occured i s that as the 
UN has been riven between the Cold War camps and North 
and South i n another way, the tradition has developed of 
regarding the Secretary-General as the neutral embodiment 
of the UN separated from the membership body. That goes 
back particularly to Dag Hammarskjold's mission to China 
to release the American airmen in 1958. He very 
carefully identified that mission as being in behalf of 
the organization on his own authority rather than in 
behalf of the Security Council which had been at war with 
65 
China. 
JK: I wanted to ask you something about the membership. Was 
i t considered that there would be universal membership in 
the United Nations? 
Finkelstein: 
Yes, i t i s a kind of half-breed arrangement because the 
s p i r i t and principle of universality undoubtedly 
dominated. On the other hand, the Charter contains a 
decision process for admitting members which allows the 
Security Council to veto. So, there i s that kind of 
approach to membership. I think the concept of 
universality really was accepted. The problem was that 
you had some former enemy states, Germany, which had to 
prove that they deserved membership. But the expectation 
was that over time they would become members. The big 
struggle was in the early years and the ice jam was 
broken in 1956 when a p o l i t i c a l bargain l e t in applicants 
from both sides which had been prevented from entering. 
I don't believe that any membership application has been 
obstructed since. I think that any country since then 
that wants in, gets in. 
JK: Well, we are near the end here and I want to thank you 
very much for taking the time to do this. If there are 
any further comments you'd li k e to add we could do that 
now. 
Finkelstein: 
Well, no, just that i t was a great, hopeful event. I 
guess the other thing that I should mention i s the s p i r i t 
of the time. This great war was nearing i t s end, 
democracy was victorious against fascism, the Great 
Powers had collaborated in conducting the war, far from 
perfectly but reasonably well. It was a time of great 
hope. I was caught up in i t . I was an i d e a l i s t and an 
optimist. The ci t y of San Francisco played i t s part. 
The hospitality was just extraordinary, the warmth of the 
reception, the hope the people of the neighborhood 
invested in what we were doing. It was really 
inspirational. I've never been involved in anything like 
that. I wish I'd been in Paris the other day. That may 
be the event that most resembles i t in our experience in 
the past 50 years. 
JK: Again, thank you very, very much. 
67 
Armstrong, Elizabeth 
Bloom, Sol 
Brodie, Bernard 
Bunche, Ralph 
Byrnes, James F. 
Churchill, Winston 
Connally, Tom 
de Gaulle, Charles 
Dewey, Thomas E. 
Dulles, John Foster 
E aton, Char1es 
Eden, Anthony 
Evatt, Herbert 
Fosdick, Dorothy 
Galunsky 
Gerig, Benj amin 
Gildersleeve, Virginia 
Green, James F. 
Halsey, Admiral 
Hammarskjold, Dag 
Hillman, Sidney 
Hiss, Alger 
Hopkins, Harry 
Hull, Cordell 
Johnson, Joseph 
INDEX OF NAMES 
2 
4, 31 
6 
1, 2, 39, 40 
5 
35, 54 
4, 31-34 
34, 35 
45 
40, 45, 47 
4, 31 
36 
28 
2 
9 
1, 39 
5, 31, 54, 56 
1 
5 
65, 67 
55 
3,7 
28, 42 
4, 12, 35 
5 
Kaminker, FNU 
MacLeish, Archibald 
Molotov, Vyacheslav M. 
Pasvolsky, Leo 
P e l l , Claiborne 
Power, Thomas F. 
Rockefeller, Nelson 
Roosevelt, Eleanor 
Roosevelt, Franklin 
Russell, Ruth 
Sady, Emil 
Smuts, Field Marshal 
S ob o1ev, Arkady 
Stalin, Josef 
Stassen, Harold 
Stettinius, Edward 
Truman, Harry 
Vandenberg, Arthur 
Webster, Sir Charles 
34 
56 
27, 28, 36 
9, 13, 29, 30 
5 
2 
I, 10, 11, 13 
52 
3, 4, 11-13, 19, 21, 
37, 38, 45, 52, 55 
29 
2 
55, 56 
9 
II, 28, 37 
4, 5, 17, 20, 23, 31, 
40, 41 
4, 11, 36, 41, 42 
1, 5, 13, 28, 41, 50 
4, 32, 45, 47, 49, 53, 
55 
33 
69 
UNITED NATIONS ORAL HISTORY PROJECT  
ORAL HISTORY AGREEMENT 
(Interviewee) hereby agree to 
participate in the United Nations Oral History Project, sponsored 
by the Yale University Institution for Social and Policy Studies, 
and consent to the recording by magnetic audio tape of (an) 
interview(s) with J ^ A A ^ra^no (Interviewer) 
on jl/ty. i-3, wee (Date) at C>,-a,4<^ (city), r t tc . / r ^ o r rstateT. 
It i s my understanding, that a typed transcript w i l l be made 
of such tape(s) and returned to me for any necessary corrections. 
I hereby agree that i f for any reason I have not returned the 
transcript with my corrections to the Institution for Social and 
Policy Studies within three months of the time i t was sent to me, 
the project Staff may edit the transcript and make i t available for 
research and other use as provided here below. 
In the understanding that the tape(s) and transcript(s) w i l l 
be preserved at the United Nations and made available for 
historical, schola*rIy and (as deemed appropriate by the United 
Nations) public information purposes, and that copies w i l l be 
placed on deposit at Yale University for research and study, I 
hereby grant, assign, and transfer legal t i t l e s and a l l literary 
rights in the tape(s) and transcript(s) to the United Nations. 
However, i t i s agreed that neither the United Nations nor Yale 
University w i l l publish or authorize publication of the 
transcript(s) or any part thereof during my lifetime without my 
written permission. 
(interviewee) (Date) 
C?(Interviewer) (Date) 
(For the Institution of Social 
and Policy Studies) 
(Date)