On Oct. 16, 1962, U.S. President John F. Kennedy discovered that the Soviet Union was constructing missile bases in Cuba. Soviet ships have been on their approach to the island nation, 90 miles off the Florida coast, “loaded with atomic missiles and warheads.” Kennedy and his workforce determined that the best response—and one which didn’t danger beginning a nuclear conflict—can be a naval blockade of Cuba. In response, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev licensed using atomic weapons to forestall a U.S. invasion of Cuba.
As tensions constructed between Kennedy and Khrushchev, with every wanting the opposite to again down first, the United Nations’ Burmese secretary-general, U Thant, maneuvered himself into the function of negotiator. He had no mandate from the Safety Council. As an alternative, he turned to the African and Asian delegates for assist. With their backing, he approached each superpowers, searching for “to de-escalate tensions and create a window for diplomacy.” Racing to Havana from New York, fielding cellphone calls, and strategizing with representatives from the US and Soviet Union, Thant’s efforts paid off. International nuclear conflict was prevented.
On Oct. 16, 1962, U.S. President John F. Kennedy discovered that the Soviet Union was constructing missile bases in Cuba. Soviet ships have been on their approach to the island nation, 90 miles off the Florida coast, “loaded with atomic missiles and warheads.” Kennedy and his workforce determined that the best response—and one which didn’t danger beginning a nuclear conflict—can be a naval blockade of Cuba. In response, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev licensed using atomic weapons to forestall a U.S. invasion of Cuba.
Peacemaker: U Thant and the Forgotten Quest for a Simply World, Thant Myint-U, W.W. Norton & Co., 384 pp., $35, September 2025
As tensions constructed between Kennedy and Khrushchev, with every wanting the opposite to again down first, the United Nations’ Burmese secretary-general, U Thant, maneuvered himself into the function of negotiator. He had no mandate from the Safety Council. As an alternative, he turned to the African and Asian delegates for assist. With their backing, he approached each superpowers, searching for “to de-escalate tensions and create a window for diplomacy.” Racing to Havana from New York, fielding cellphone calls, and strategizing with representatives from the US and Soviet Union, Thant’s efforts paid off. International nuclear conflict was prevented.
The historian (and Thant’s grandson) Thant Myint-U has introduced collectively a compelling new narrative of U Thant’s tenure as the primary Asian U.N. secretary-general throughout a turbulent time in worldwide affairs. Peacemaker: U Thant and the Forgotten Quest for a Simply World is filled with nail-biting pressure, as with the vivid rendering of the Cuban missile disaster—a troublesome feat for an occasion with a identified consequence. The biography sparkles with wealthy, human particulars about Thant’s New York existence, his interior life, and his altering psychology throughout two phrases as U.N. secretary-general. His trajectory to management of the U.N. highlights the character traits that helped him—and, by extension, the quickly increasing U.N. itself—to flourish through the early Nineteen Sixties.
Thant talks with Empress Farah, alongside her husband, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran, at a state dinner at U.N. headquarters in New York on April 17, 1962.United Nations
Thant began his profession as a schoolteacher in Burma below British colonial rule. When the British left, Thant was in his 30s. He moved to Rangoon with aspirations to grow to be a civil servant. He ultimately turned chief advisor to Prime Minister U Nu, which allowed him to journey the world. In 1955, he helped to arrange the Bandung Convention in Indonesia which sought to protect a non-aligned place for newly unbiased nations amid the rising tensions of the Chilly Struggle. By 1961, he had been Burma’s consultant to the U.N. for 4 years, making a reputation for himself as a champion of Afro-Asian nations, however not as a radical. When the U.N.’s second secretary-general, Dag Hammarskjöld, disappeared in September 1961, presumed shot down by opponents of his peace efforts in what was then the newly unbiased Congo, the cool and pragmatic Thant was a favourite of each the Soviets and the Individuals.
Within the afterglow of his Cuban missile disaster victory, Thant made the U.N. cool, internet hosting dinner events and contributing to a rising New York social scene the place “professors, playwrights, and politicians” combined with U.N. diplomats. Thant Myint-U describes a cosmopolitan U.N. scene in New York, however one which wasn’t with out clashes. Earlier than Thant, “[m]ost of the top-ranking officers within the Secretariat had by no means earlier than served below somebody who was not white.” Thant and different U.N. diplomats from non-white nations struggled to search out lodging within the metropolis, with landlords blocking African and Asian dignitaries from renting their residences.
Regardless of these setbacks, Thant was at his finest when serving as a mediator between the 2 world powers. He might see what every wished, the way it match into their world technique in addition to each home political pressures and private management types. His dealing with of the Cuban missile disaster was past examine, and he was capable of place the U.N. as a selected kind of drive on the planet through the disaster, recognizing that “for each Khrushchev and Kennedy, it was far preferable to just accept an attraction emanating from the UN Secretary-Common than to just accept an ultimatum from the opposite.”
Thant oversees ceremonies as signed copies of the Restricted Take a look at Ban Treaty are exchanged in Russia on Aug. 5, 1963. Additionally current are Soviet politicians Leonid Brezhnev and Nikita Khrushchev; British Overseas Secretary Alec Douglas-Dwelling; and Adlai Stevenson, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Terry Fincher/Getty Photographs
However the identical qualities that served Thant so nicely through the Cuban missile disaster turned his undoing over the subsequent decade. Whereas being a scapegoat for Kennedy and Khrushchev allowed the 2 superpowers to make peace, by the later Nineteen Sixties, Thant’s potential to barter on behalf of the non-aligned and Afro-Asian nations whose voices in world politics he sought to champion was undermined. Because the crises of the last decade spilled throughout the planet—in Congo, Vietnam, Israel-Palestine, India-Pakistan, Biafra, Bangladesh—the U.N. struggled to function each an advocate for sovereignty for the newly decolonized nations and to symbolize these nations in pleas for intervention. In coping with the Nigerian Civil Struggle (1967-1970), as an example, Thant identified that the leaders of newly unbiased nations in Africa “resent most…the patronizing or paternalistic perspective from outdoors,” when hegemons and former colonial powers handled them “as youngsters who have no idea how you can run their affairs.” However not doing one thing was additionally a danger. Within the Bangladesh Liberation Struggle (1971), there was a “refrain of public requires the UN to ‘do one thing,’” however Thant didn’t have the authority to take action.
Thant Myint-U sees U Thant’s overseas coverage imaginative and prescient in opposition to Henry Kissinger’s supposed “realism”, calling Thant’s pragmatic “above all.” Kissinger was in opposition to Thant in additional than simply his method: Thant Myint-U writes that because the secretary-general’s repeated makes an attempt to barter peace in Vietnam had lastly practically succeeded in the summertime of 1968, Kissinger—realizing that peace would torpedo Nixon’s likelihood at victory that November—quietly squashed the talks. Within the ongoing Arab-Israeli conflicts within the Center East, Kissinger “noticed Israel as a invaluable chess piece that might examine any Soviet advance” into the area, whereas Thant felt that peace would imply that “the Arab states themselves would search to minimize their dependence on Moscow.” However Thant and the U.N. had little energy to compel the Nixon administration. Thant’s success as a peacemaker depended extra on the US and Soviet Union’s willingness to play alongside than it did on his abilities as a diplomat.
Thant lies in state at U.N. headquarters in New York on Nov. 27, 1974.
Thant envisaged a way forward for “peaceable co-existence” between completely different, various kinds of governments—democracies, but in addition any variety of different regimes—the place “governments might work collectively in concrete and sensible methods, most urgently to boost dwelling requirements world wide.” However whereas he might use his voice to boost consciousness, he couldn’t change the overseas coverage choices that the US made in Vietnam, Cambodia, or the Arab-Israeli conflicts that ramped up throughout his tenure. More and more, Thant discovered the U.N. sidelined to non-controversial humanitarian meals aid or humanitarian campaigning.
Thant served out his second full time period however had no illusions that the U.S. would assist his candidacy for a 3rd run. Though he left workplace in 1971 a celebrated determine, his loss of life shortly afterwards in 1974 highlighted the tensions between his globally oriented imaginative and prescient and the home politics he sought to beat. When his household returned to Burma along with his physique for burial, college students and Buddhist monks seized on his presence as a focus for a protest towards the navy dictatorship that had taken over the nation. The federal government killed protesters, seized Thant’s casket, buried it below six toes of concrete, and “days of bloody rioting adopted.”
The reminiscence of Thant was successfully buried with him. The Individuals and British, who, by the early Seventies, had been annoyed with Thant’s interference of their overseas coverage goals, have been joyful to rewrite his function as “a passive Third World bureaucrat.” Thant Myint-U writes that, in accounts of the Cuban missile disaster, “Thant was actually airbrushed from historical past,” as transcribers of Kennedy’s tapes within the Nineties, who by that time have been unfamiliar with Thant, misunderstood his identify when it got here up, writing “You [unclear].”
His dream of the U.N. as a spot to transcend superpower dominance succumbed to an analogous destiny. The U.N. aim of sovereign states coexisting as equals in a consultant world physique had at all times been Thant’s, and each peacemaker’s, aspiration. However civil wars, secession actions, and land grabs challenged the concept that a sovereign state was a secure and predictable unit with which to barter. There have been some spheres that Thant, and the U.N., might by no means attain—and never all governments have been equally invested in a way forward for peace.
