Book review: A leader we could do with now

This frighteningly perceptive and well-written biography of UN secretary general, Burmese Buddhist U Thant, details his efforts at resolving one 1960s crisis after another

Author Thant Myint-U is a historian and the grandson of former United Nations secretary general U Thant. Picture: Thurein Aung

• Peacemaker: U Thant, The United Nations and the Untold Story of the 1960s
• Thant Myint-U 
• Atlantic Books, €20.00 

There is a sad but almost inevitable irony that a eulogy written to remind us of the relentless nobility and optimism of 1960s UN secretary general, Burmese Buddhist U Thant should also remind us of the raw brutality of power, especially superpowers’ capacity to align themselves with those who control the oil, the diamonds, or whatever natural resource might bank roll a young nation shaking off the chains of colonialism.

Those often anti-democratic appetites are best represented in two dark American figures — the immoral Henry Kissinger and the bellicose Dean Rusk.

Kissinger consciously undermined U Thant’s peace efforts during the 1968 Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia lest a successful process disadvantaged Richard Nixon in a looming presidential election. 

He also directed bombing Vietnam and Cambodia long after the possibility of achieving anything worthwhile had passed.

Nevertheless, it seems almost unkind to remind the world of that pair’s toxicity in the context of their bully-boy relationship with calm, wise, dignified, and spectacularly prescient teacher from rural Burma. 

More than 50 years ago, U Thant predicted that if peace talks after the 1967 war in Israel/Palestine failed “that the Middle East was in something like the early stages of a new Hundred Year War”. 

How tragically accurate he was as even then Israel, emboldened by America’s support, refused to engage with the compromise that might have averted today’s genocide.

U Thant’s grandson, author Thant Myint-U, tells us, possibly tongue-in-cheek, that he once told a journalist that UFOs represented one of the greatest threats facing mankind. 

However, in 1970 — all of 55 years ago — he warned about the “inherent risk of obliterating all life on earth … and that our small planet is perishable.”

Is it any wonder that he was relentlessly undermined and slandered by American and British figures who presented themselves as politicians but were just errand boys for conglomerates determined to exploit the world’s natural resources? 

That two of his predictions have been realised with such force underlines the global scale of his thought and perception.

This frighteningly perceptive and well-written biography details U Thant’s efforts at resolving one 1960s crisis after another. 

We should all celebrate the calming influence he had on US president John F Kennedy during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. 

Kennedy was surrounded by a cabinet indifferent to the consequences of confrontation with the Soviet Union but U Thant assured him, and thankfully he took the advice, that negotiations would resolve the stand-off. 

Catastrophe was averted, albeit at the 11th hour. U Thant’s efforts often involved Irish troops wearing the UN’s blue berets. 

At a moment when today’s Kissingers and Rusks hold the whip hand, and as climate collapse becomes all too real, it is almost cruel to remind the world that diplomacy can resolve our greatest difficulties — especially as we cannot identify a U Thant for our time.