by Ravi Somaiya
President Nasser of Egypt brought every Arab chieftain he could find with him, including two kings. The Russian premier, Nikita Khrushchev, with a flair for drama disguised under a carefully constructed drabness, arrived with an entourage of nearly one hundred, including Communist bosses from Hungary, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia.
His intention, all but avowed, was to destroy Dag Hammarskjöld, whom he saw as an agent of the West, and to replace his role with a troika of diplomats that he felt could be more easily manipulated to his ends.
At least five street brawls had broken out in the days and hours leading up to the assembly’s opening. A crowd, including Ukrainian and Hungarian activists, had gathered to jeer in unison outside the Soviet delegation’s headquarters on Park Avenue. The NYPD intervened when they began throwing firecrackers at the legs of police horses, and punches at each other. They were aided by one irate resident who slung a basin of water out of her window into the melee.
Anti-Albanian Greeks clashed with anti-Greek Albanians outside the UN building itself in a flurry of sticks and umbrellas and placards. More than a hundred police officers charged in with nightsticks.
Nearby, pro-Castro Cubans and anti-Castro Cubans put on a similar performance, with variations. Pacifists, meanwhile, held their own protest. Their signs read, WELCOME! LET’S CO-EXIST!, STAY FOR PEACE AND TALK IT OUT, and HANDS OFF CONGO. No fights were reported.
The drama was raised to a fine pitch by the fact that fourteen African nations, newly independent—including Cameroon, Togo, Somalia, Niger, Chad, the Ivory Coast, Gabon, and Senegal—were to be admitted to the UN as the first piece of business.
As the delegates took their seats in the chamber, sitting behind nameplates, wearing translation headsets, in concentric arcs in front of a marble-backed stage, Khrushchev had a point to make to these new members.
With the glee of a naughty boy, he began to pound on the desk in front of him with both fists, a UN TV producer, Emery Kelen, recalled later. “His small, alert eyes sparkled with malice, and no trace of anger was visible on his face. He looked amused, self-satisfied as a child who has just played a successful prank,” Kelen said.
His foreign minister, Andrei Gromyko, sat next to him and joined in halfheartedly, confirming a statement that Khrushchev had once made: “If I tell my foreign minister to sit on a block of ice and stay there for a month he will do it without back talk.”
He wanted to discredit the organization, and Hammarskjöld, with a ludicrous scene. Khrushchev had risen through a brutal and deeply unfair system. He had nothing to fear from an operator—there were none he felt he could not outmaneuver. A man like Hammarskjöld who could not be bought or bullied was a different proposition.
Dag Hjalmar Agne Carl Hammarskjöld was born in July 1905, the smallest of four sons of Hjalmar Hammarskjöld, a widely disliked former prime minister of Sweden, and Agnes Hammarskjöld, a woman described as so sensitive it was occasionally hard to tell if she was laughing or crying.
He grew up in a pink medieval castle on a hill in Sweden’s bucolic center. The castle, a squat, dusky edifice with a low gray roof and towers on either end, was Hjalmar’s official residence, granted to him in his new position as governor of Uppsala—the name of both an agrarian region in the middle of Sweden and its main town. It overlooks Sweden’s most storied university and the cathedral that is the seat of the archbishop.
In an essay he wrote about his youth in the castle, Dag remembered the ghost of a former queen who would wander the corridors dressed in black with white lace trimmings. The bodies of swifts he used to find in the castle’s deep windows, dead after flying into the cavernous, cold halls and finding themselves unable to get out. The ants fighting each other for territory among the white-star flowers of his favorite northern rock jasmine plants in the grounds.
The Hammarskjölds were an aristocratic family—the name is a version of the Swedish words for “hammer” and “shield”—granted a seat in the prestigious Nobel Academy (the body that awards the prizes).
Hjalmar, born in 1862, was the latest in a line of soldiers and government officials that extended back into Swedish antiquity. In pictures he appears positively Dickensian, wearing a top hat, a pince-nez, a long coat, and a gimlet-eyed stare that speaks of a stern intelligence held back from explosion by a thread of will.
He was trained as a lawyer and became the Swedish minister of justice in 1901. Later he served on the newly founded Court of Arbitration at the Hague. When Dag was born, he was negotiating the dissolution of a union between Sweden and its neighbor Norway. In 1914 in the midst of a governmental crisis, when Dag was eight, Hjalmar was asked by the Swedish king to form a government. World War I broke out shortly after he became prime minister.
It was Hjalmar that instituted a policy of wartime neutrality, which included declining a trade deal with Britain. He felt it a principled necessity. His people, suffering under rationing that they blamed on his isolationism, called him Hungerskjöld. The world saw it as the beginning of Sweden’s awkward appeasement of German forces. In 1917, he resigned his position and returned to the castle in Uppsala to be governor of the province.
Dag remembered his father watching out of his window and laughing as the crows outside fought, fluttered, and negotiated. Their disputes reminded him of human ones in their petty fury and pointlessness.
Hjalmar was frequently away. And Dag’s nearest brother was five years older. That meant he functionally grew up by himself. He became obsessed with cataloging the plants and insects around the castle. He modeled himself on an early hero, the botanist Carl Linnaeus, the father of modern genetics and the inventor of the taxonomical system, who had been a professor at Uppsala University.
The memories of his childhood that Dag put down in the essay were not of playing with other children, or of adventures, but a child’s careful observations of people and of life. That may have been of necessity. Sweden is a profoundly conservative society, for all of its progressive ideals. The lot of an aristocratic young man was to conform to the expectations of his parents.1 His life was expected to revolve around them.
His mother called him her little larva. To Dag she was everything his father was not—warmth, not light. She came from a long line of clergy, scholars, and poets, and embodied a child-like openness, a dislike of the rational, and a tendency toward startlingly quick intimacy with friends and strangers alike.
A friend, Sten Söderberg, told one of Hammarskjöld’s biographers that Dag had been Agnes’s “gentleman in waiting, her page, her faithful and considerate attendant.” Others expressed concern that he was spending too much time with her.
When Dag was seventeen, and on a trip with his brother and his wife, his mother sent him a letter: “Writing to you is the most fun I have. Dag is the only one I really own on earth, the only one who cares about me.”
He studied close to home, at Uppsala University, strolling out of the castle door, down one hill and slightly up another, to immerse himself in linguistics, literature, and history. It seems to have been the first moment he felt truly free. In a long-running correspondence with two friends, Rutger Moll and Jan Waldenström,2 the three discussed literature—Flaubert, Emerson, and Conrad—and life.
They spent a summer studying together in Cambridge, England, in 1927, when Hammarskjöld was twenty-two. After this, their letters to each other turned playful. They began addressing each other as “dear” and “darling”—perhaps an ironic Briticism.
On one occasion in August 1927—the matter of feverish debate for those who seek a binary definition of Hammarskjöld’s sexuality—he wrote to Rutger about Jan. “I regard him as ‘mine’—in a few years or perhaps sooner. It won’t be long.”
There is no evidence that he ever attained Waldenström, in whatever sense he meant it. Or anyone else, for that matter. Hammarskjöld never had a romantic relationship that he spoke openly of, or that was recorded by his friends and colleagues.
He continued his studies, in
law and economics, in Stockholm. His parents eventually moved, too. He lived with them well into his twenties as he commenced an ascent of the Swedish government—in the ministry of justice, in the foreign ministry, and in the finance ministry—that staggered his peers with its speed. He would return home for dinner every day, with a bouquet of flowers for his mother, before going back to the office to work on into the night.
In 1943, at the height of World War II, he traveled to Britain as part of a trade delegation. The policy of neutrality instituted by his father was still in place, though Sweden allowed Hitler’s Germany to move through its territory, and traded with it. The British officials he met treated him as a traitor.
His diaries reveal a split soul. A young man with a capacity for principled, logical, rigorous analysis, undertaken at a speed that astounded observers. But one who sought to push aside a sensitivity that read as shameful to him, and that found outlets in photography—which he said taught him to see—poetry, and long, solitary climbs up the mountains of the empty Swedish north, toward the Arctic Circle.
He discussed literature and life over dinners with Steinbeck—whom he pushed forward for the Nobel Prize for Literature that he won in 1962—the sculptor Barbara Hepworth, and the Swedish painter Bo Beskow, among others.
The trouble with Hammarskjöld, his friend Auden wrote, was that he was endowed with many brilliant gifts, but was “not, I think, a genius, not, that is to say, a person with a single overwhelming talent and passion for some particular activity—be it poetry or physics or bird-watching—which determines, usually early in life, exactly what his function on earth is to be…
“To be gifted but not to know how best to make use of one’s gifts, to be highly ambitious but at the same time to feel unworthy, is a dangerous combination which can often end in mental breakdown or suicide,” Auden concluded.
Hammarskjöld’s journal, found after his death, never mentions his work. It is, instead, a collection of thoughts and images, between Marcus Aurelius and a dream diary, unlike anything written by a working world leader in the modern era.
It reveals a deep religious faith—he was a Bible scholar of some achievement—that broadened through his life to become a precursor to modern pantheistic spirituality. And a series of obsessions that few of those who met him sensed.
How to be good in the face of evil:
Only he deserves power who every day justifies it.
How to evade the temptations of victimhood:
In spite of everything, your bitterness because others are enjoying what you are denied is always ready to flare up.
A solitude that he felt could never be assuaged. And a fixation with mortality:
Loneliness is not the sickness unto death. No, but can it be cured except by death? And does it not become the harder to bear the closer one comes to death?
In April 1953, his quiet daily life—a pleasant walk along the bucolic waterfront in Stockholm to work, days at a beautiful antique desk in a grand government building that felt more like a cathedral, summers off—was interrupted by a telegram informing him that the key nations had recommended him to run the United Nations.
“I was simply picked out of the hat,” he said later, coyly setting aside the incandescent ambition that had driven him to greater and greater heights. It was partly true, anyway. America, Britain, and Russia had sought a mild, bureaucratic figure. They wanted a civil servant. And to all appearances, Hammarskjöld fit the bill. One Dutch diplomat described him, in 1953, as “an office-man without color and with a lot of care.”
With a typical fervor for the driest possible expression of a glorious mandate, the UN describes the secretary-general as its “chief administrative officer.” The role has been described, more grandly, as a secular version of the pope.
He—and it has, so far, always been a he—is in reality a mediator, a manager of international crises, and a cajoler of 193 member nations toward their better selves. He also sets the agenda for the UN—to focus the world on one difficulty instead of another.
When Hammarskjöld took the job, he was forty-seven. He formalized his loneliness with a declaration that he would devote himself only to his work. “In my situation in life,” he wrote to a friend once, “I suppose this is part of the price of the stakes, that you are able to give yourself wholly and without reservation only if you don’t steal, even in the smallest degree, from someone else.”
In France, the newspapers, dripping with a haughty loathing, ran stories that he was secretly gay, at a time when homosexuality was still illegal in the United States.
He landed in New York on April 9, 1953. His predecessor, Trygve Lie, bitterly welcomed him “to the most impossible job on this earth.” Hammarskjöld had, indeed, taken power over nothing and responsibility over everything. Every global crisis was his. Every powerful nation would seek to make him their scapegoat as they attempted to remake the world to their advantage. And yet it was enough to allow Hammarskjöld to put his idealistic theories into practice.
He began by meeting every delegate from every nation. He said little. But beneath his mask lay a radical idealism. “There is a simple basic morality that motivates most people,” he told the New York Times shortly after taking office. “The great moment is the moment of realization that their desire for decency exists not only in their own groups but in others.”
The Times story continued, “I happen to be the man selected. I happen to be the man who got the unanimous vote. I happen to have come in at the right time.” Hammarskjöld added an aside, more quietly, almost to himself: “The time when there seems to be a chance.”
When he took office, the Korean War had recently ended. Joseph Stalin had died, setting in motion a power struggle in Russia. President Dwight Eisenhower had refused clemency for Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, convicted of spying for the Soviet Union. Joseph McCarthy was preparing to embark on a hunt for Communists in America that would launch the country into one of its periodic paroxysms of division and hatred.
“We live in a time of peace which is no peace,” Hammarskjöld said in a speech to students at Cambridge University, “in a time of technical achievement which threatens its own masters with destruction.
“There are fires burning everywhere on the horizon,” he continued. “This may explain why many now show reactions which seem to reflect a kind of despair of Western civilization. But, where is the reason for such defeatism?”
In 1955, he scored a major success—he secured the release of fifteen American airmen being held in China. In 1956, he had been out walking on Mount Kebnekaise, the highest mountain in Sweden, when news broke. Egypt’s president Gamal Abdel Nasser, who had already begun to accept Soviet aid—an act that was a virtual declaration of war against the West—had seized the vital Suez Canal.
The UN sent planes and local trackers out to search for Hammarskjöld. He was found thirty-six hours later, with a map in his hand, walking contentedly. The Western powers, in concert with Israel, had sent in troops. They expected Hammarskjöld’s support. He condemned their decision and demanded neutral oversight instead. In 1957, he was unanimously reappointed for a second four-year term as secretary-general.
Hjalmar had died six months after his son had first taken office. And in his father’s absence, Dag had started to reconsider his legacy. Hjalmar’s service, he said in a radio lecture, “required a sacrifice of all personal interests, but likewise the courage to stand up unflinchingly for your convictions concerning what was right and good for the community, whatever were the views in fashion.”
He wrote to Moll that he realized he had long been mediating a war inside himself, one between the stern principle of his father—“an admiration for the drawn sword that disregards the value of negotiated results and will only accept victories won in open battle”—and the “streaming, explosive power” that came from his mother.
“Where the one was light,” he wrote, “the other is warmth. And who wouldn’t want to integrate light and warmth?”
In October 1960, Khrushchev stood up once more to address the UN, this time specifically about the Congo and Hammarskjöld. “There are no saints on earth and there never have been. Let those who believe in saints keep their belief… Everyone has seen how vigorously the imperialist countries have been defending the position of Mr. Hammarskjöld. Is it not clear whose interests he interprets and executes, whose ‘saint’ he is?”
Sweden is a nation built firmly around the principle that no man should place himself above another. The concept derives, apocryphally, from Vikings passing a horn filled with mead. Each man had to sip neither too little nor too much. The principle has a word: lagom. And Sweden’s aristocrats were willing extremists in the service of this moderation.
During World War II, Count Folke Bernadotte, the grandson of King Oscar II, the last king to rule over both Sweden and Norway, had quietly engineered the release of twenty-one thousand Jews from the concentration camps. He greeted them personally as they arrived on white buses, starved and afraid.3
Raoul Wallenberg, one of Sweden’s richest men, had been appointed an envoy to Hungary in 1944. He had told senior Nazis that the war would soon end, and that when it did he would use every one of his considerable resources to pursue and destroy them unless they helped him save the Jews of Budapest. By the time the war ended, he had 350 people working for him, forging documents and smuggling people. He saved about one hundred thousand lives.4
Though on the surface Hammarskjöld was quiet and implacable, he burned with a similar righteous determination. For him it took the form of a near-mystical stoicism that drove him to neither obey nor defy, but to rise above through the rigorous application of a principle. He hated speechifying. He thought that rhetoric was cheap. But he felt he had no choice but to respond.
“It is not the Soviet Union or indeed any other big powers that need the United Nations for their protection. It is all the others.” The hall stood and applauded him. “The representative of the Soviet Union spoke of courage. It is very easy to resign. It is not so easy to stay on. It is very easy to bow to the wish of a big power. It is another matter to resist.”