Trygve Lie: the Norwegian who built the United Nations

‘Welcome to the most impossible job in the world!’

Thus Trygve Lie, the outgoing United Nations secretary general, greeted Dag Hammarskjöld, his successor, when the Swedish diplomat arrived at New York’s Idlewild Airport on 9 April 1953 to take up his duties as newly elected head of the seven-year-old international peacekeeping organisation.

The cerebral, charismatic Swede would go on to become the UN’s most celebrated secretary-general before his tragic death in 1961, while the achievements of his embattled, less glamorous, Norwegian predecessor, have fallen between the cracks of history.

Who, after all, remembers Trygve Lie?

Perhaps we ought to.

For one thing, the idea that the newfangled body should wield its own peacekeeping force originated with him. For another, it is questionable whether the UN complex, including its centrepiece Secretariat building, the architectural analogue of its soaring remit, would have been erected in the first place without Lie’s passionate involvement.

The hard-working Norseman also notched up several other important achievements during his first term, while he still had the backing of all the founding Allies, before he was cast aside as a result of the fractious politics of the Cold War.

The fact that Lie was in the position in the first place was a surprise to the Oslo native, who neither wished nor aspired to be the UN’s first secretary general. And yet there he was, the unassuming former lawyer, in London on 2 February 1946, six months after VJ Day, at the inaugural General Assembly, standing before the delegates from the 51 nations in attendance at Central Hall Westminster, pledging to be ‘the servant of you all’ and ‘a true international officer inspired by the lofty idea of international cooperation which prompted the great leaders of the war to create the United Nations’.

There was an elephant in the room when the unassuming Lie made his pledge: the haunting memory of the UN’s failed predecessor, the League of Nations. Like the ill-fated League, the UN emerged from the rubble of a fratricidal global conflict, in the former case, the 1914-18 Great War, and the victorious Allies’ desire to prevent another. The League was crippled from the start by the absence of the United States, whose idealistic president, Woodrow Wilson, had godfathered it, after the Republican-controlled, isolationist US Senate refused to ratify the Treaty of Versailles.

That was not a problem this time around. Despite disagreements between the two most powerful Allies, the United States and the Soviet Union, both victors were fully behind the fledgling organisation. The two were deadlocked, however, on their preferred choice for secretary general.

Consequently Andrei Gromyko, Moscow’s first representative to the UN, proposed Lie as a compromise choice. For one, the Soviets felt that as a long-time member of the Norwegian Labour Party the burly Lie would be more amenable to the Soviet point of view. Also, as foreign minister, he had strongly supported the joint Norwegian-Soviet liberation of Finnmark, the northernmost region of Nazi-occupied Norway.

Most importantly to the touchy Soviets, who already had mixed feelings about siting the UN in New York, Lie was not North American.

Edward Stettinius Jr., the US Secretary of State, who headed the US delegation to the inaugural 1946 London General Assembly, had no objections to the dark horse candidate. However, first he had to be reminded what he looked like, as Brian Urquhart, the veteran diplomat, who was a member of the British delegation, recalled.

‘During the process of Assembly approval Stettinius rushed to my table and asked me to identify Lie, whose name he mispronounced,’ he wrote.

‘I then pointed out the substantial figure of the Norwegian Foreign Minister and then Stettinius mounted the podium to acclaim Lie as a celebrated wartime leader, household name, etc.’

In fact, Lie’s selection to occupy the prestigious post wasn’t as odd as it seemed to many at the time. Lie was one of the first Allied diplomats to publicly advocate reviving the idea of a world government, or ‘a Community of Nations’, as he called it. Witness a prophetic op-ed piece that Lie, who fled to London with King Haakon after the German invasion of Norway in April 1940, wrote for The Times in November 1941 under that hopeful title, when the Allies’ victory was far from certain.

‘We have all discussed the reasons why the League did not succeed,’ Lie wrote. ‘It would have been possible to use the League machinery against Italian and German aggression if the leading Powers had seriously wanted to do so.’ Instead, he wrote, ‘countries adopted a short-sighted policy of self-interest, and in an atmosphere of pacific public opinion nobody was willing to run any risks. This produced a critical attitude towards the idea of a  community of nations’.

It is worth noting that Lie’s essay, in which he presaged then-neutral America’s entry into the war, as well as the Allies’ ultimate victory, was published on 14 November 1941, three weeks before Pearl Harbor. Who says that Lie lacked vision?

Not that he possibly could have envisioned heading the ‘new’ League he sketched out five years before. Nevertheless, the unpredictable winds of war and peace had brought him there and Lie was determined to make good on his difficult charge. ‘Those who gave their lives in order that we may be here’, he vowed at his inaugural, ‘have given us a mandate to build a firm foundation for the peace of the world. We may find difficulties and obstacles ahead of us. But the harder the task, the higher the prize. It is the future of the world which is at stake.’

Ultimately, Lie found it more difficult to put those high-minded words into practice than he possibly could have imagined. He did not have any illusions about the road ahead, including the difficulties presaged by already simmering East-West tensions. Yet, if worse came to worst, there was always a ‘Middle Way’, as American journalist Marquis Childs dubbed the Swedish art of finding a compromise between two systems or ideologies in his 1936 book of the same name. Here was a faith in which Lie, who also served four years as Norwegian Minister of Justice before the war, was a fervent believer.

Lie’s faith in the Middle Way, plus his passionate belief in the United Nations, along with his admittedly limited political skills, served him well enough as he navigated the array of various obstacles and crises thrown at him during his first term. Indeed, he resolved his first major international crisis shortly after he took office when he leveraged his still good relations with the Soviet Union and persuaded the Kremlin to withdraw its troops from northern Iran, setting a precedent for an active vision for the secretary-generalship.

Thus emboldened, Lie would go on to mediate a succession of foreign crises with the blessing of the Security Council, including the partition of Palestine and the establishment of Israel in 1948, in which he was a passionate believer, and the 1948 Kashmir Crisis, in which he played a central role in mediating a ceasefire between India and Pakistan.

The Palestine War saw the first deaths on Lie’s watch, including the assassination of Count Folke Bernadotte, the first official UN mediator, and his aide by members of the Jewish Stern Gang. Bernadotte’s death spurred Lie to transform the UN’s hitherto improvised observer mission into the United Nations Guard Force, the embryo of the United Nations Peacekeeping Force, the multinational army that has since been dispatched to seventy-odd conflicts around the world. That is also part of his legacy.

Nevertheless, it was his success in finding the six-block site on New York’s East River and persuading the responsible city officials to approve it, and John D. Rockefeller, the millionaire philanthropist, to purchase it, that stands as Lie’s greatest accomplishment. As Urquhart wrote:

It was due to Lie and his good relations with New York mayor William O’Dwyer and the Rockefeller family that after wandering the wilderness and being threatened with a number of totally unsuitable sites in the US that the UN was settled in its magnificent current location. This was a major achievement and Lie deserves full credit for it.

Perhaps the best known photo of Lie is the one of him taken on 25 March 1947 holding Rockefeller’s signed check for $8,500,000 which Rockefeller’s son, John D. Rockefeller III had just gifted him, flashing a broad smile.

Soon Lie’s smile began to thin as the crosswinds of the Cold War became headwinds and East and West clashed over various issues, including ones regarding the UN.

Lie was still feeling hopeful on 29 October 1949, when the cornerstone for the towering 39-story glass and marble Secretariat Building was laid in an august ceremony, as President Harry Truman gave the dedication speech as Lie proudly watched on.

The following month Washington and Moscow stalemated over the question of whether the newly proclaimed People’s Republic of China should take over Nationalist China’s seat on the Security Council, as Premier Chou en-Lai demanded, which Moscow backed, as did Lie, and Washington vehemently opposed. The result was a Soviet walkout.

Determined to resolve the imbroglio, in May 1950 the stout-hearted secretary general undertook a whirlwind tour of the major European capitals in an effort to ‘resell’ his troubled confederation.

Joseph Stalin, who had met the young Lie 30 years before when the latter visited the Kremlin as a delegate of the Norwegian Labor Party, was kindly disposed enough to grant him an audience.

The next month, June, 1950, North Korea invaded South Korea and all hell broke loose, including at the UN, when the Security Council, which Moscow was still boycotting, issued its historic directive authorising its member states to provide military assistance to South Korea. This the US and 15 other member nations with their armies proceeded to do under the newly established United Nations Command, and the world had another war on its hands.

Now Lie, who strongly backed the directive, became persona non grata for Moscow, which refused to recognise him as secretary general or have anything to do with him. The Soviets also refused to accept the General Assembly’s action that November when it voted to extend his appointment for another term.

In the meantime, the beleaguered Norwegian also became ensnared in the Red Scare as Senator Joe McCarthy and his allies accused him of employing American citizens who were disloyal to the US. Lie further added to the controversy when he allowed the Federal Bureau of Investigation to interview some of his aides. Under attack from both left and right, his position had become untenable.

Still, there was shocked silence when an emotional Lie announced his resignation to the General Assembly ‘in the hopes of saving peace’ on 10 November 1952, as The Times reported: ‘He is held in esteem and affection by most delegations to the United Nations, who would agree that in the worsening international situation he had made the most of an often thankless task.’

Brian Urquhart, who would go on to work for Lie’s famed successor, Dag Hammarskjöld, concurs. ‘Lie had political courage and conviction and he cared passionately about the United Nations,’ he observes. ‘He did his best when the incipient pressures of the Cold War put him in an historic position.’

Lie returned to Norway and public life, albeit on a smaller stage, after he resigned, taking on a number of municipal and ministerial positions of the kind he had before the war, including Minister of Industry and Minister of Trade and Shipping, before fading away. He died in 1968 at the age of 72.

His outstanding contribution to the United Nations, the soaring 550-foot-tall Secretariat, which still dominates the Manhattan skyline, certainly hasn’t faded away. As for the sprawling, idealistic organisation that the landmark building hosts, and for which Trygve Lie laid the cornerstone, the UN itself remains a work in progress.