Harry Truman's Excellent Adventure - Matthew Algeo [70]
When Harry arrived for his tour, Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold greeted him in front of the Secretariat Building. Hammarskjold had just been installed the previous autumn, and the two men had never met. They shook hands for photographers, who begged them for “just one more” shot. “Photographers,” Truman warned Hammarskjold, “are tyrants.” Eventually the handshake ended and Harry and Dag went up to the secretary general’s top-floor office for coffee. Afterward, Truman stopped by the pressroom to chat with UN correspondents (and have another cup of coffee). In the Trusteeship Council chamber, a meeting was adjourned so he could shake hands with the delegates. Next door, in the Economic and Social Council chamber, Hammarskjold proudly pointed out the ceiling, which had been designed by an architect from his native Sweden. Pipes and ducts were left exposed, a symbolic reminder that the work of the United Nations, like the ceiling, would never be finished.
“Acoustically correct!” Truman declared.
With the former president setting a brisk pace, the tour lasted just forty minutes. “I feel top-notch about the whole thing,” he said at the end. “I am wishing all the success in the world to the United Nations. That will be my wish as long as I live.”
The United Nations hasn’t changed much since Harry visited in 1953—and I’m not talking about its seeming inability to solve the world’s problems. The buildings look much the same. Security, however, is a different story. A 1953 travel guide says visitors could feel free to “wander around in most of the public lobbies, lounges, and outdoor terraces and grounds.” There was no charge for admission. Today everyone must pass through a metal detector. There is absolutely no wandering. And a tour costs $13.50.
My tour group was led by a petite and brilliant woman named Julia. Her knowledge of the UN was absolute. She probably could have recited the member nations in alphabetical order. And she never referred to the UN as “the UN.” To Julia it was “the organ-eye-zation.” She was most efficient. Her only flaw was that she couldn’t decide what to do with her hair. Between each stop on the tour she’d either tie it up in a scrunchie or take it down again. It was distracting. Yet also enchanting.
We toured the chambers: Security Council, Trusteeship Council, Economic and Social Council. Then we came to a small exhibit on disarmament. It included artifacts recovered from the sites of the two nuclear weapons dropped on Japan in 1945—the Truman bombs. From Hiroshima there were cans and coins and bottles all fused into a charred lump by the heat of the blast. From Nagasaki, a stone statue of St. Agnes that stood less than a kilometer from ground zero, the back mottled and charred. None of this was here when Harry visited, of course. But, implicitly anyway, the exhibit questioned his judgment. The bombings killed more than two hundred thousand people. Truman always claimed he never had any second thoughts about authorizing the use of nuclear weapons against the Japanese. “They never would have surrendered otherwise,” he told an interviewer in 1955. “I don’t believe in speculating on the mental feeling and as far as the bomb is concerned I ordered its use for a military reason—for no other cause—and it saved the lives of a great many of our soldiers. That is all I had in mind.”
“I have never worried about the dropping of the bomb,” he wrote in 1964. “It was just a means to end the war and that is what was accomplished.”
Julia put her hair up and shepherded us to the General Assembly Hall, where all 192 member-nations have seats. (Actually, each gets six seats, three for delegates and three for alternates.) When Harry visited back in 1953, just sixty nations were represented in the General Assembly. In fact the