KURT WALDHEIM AND THE UN'S LOW ESTATE - The Boston Globe (Boston, MA)

COUNTENANCE OF TRUTH

The United Nations and the Waldheim Case.

By Shirley Hazzard. Viking. 179 pp. $17.95. The far right has always seen the United Nations in a sinisterlight, as a threat to national sovereignty. For that same reason,the utopian left has always supported it, seeing in it the firsthalting steps toward world government. Most everyone else -- forthe last couple of decades, anyway -- has pretty much ignored it.The work of such affiliates as the United Nations Children's Fundand the World Health Organization inspires universal admiration.Yet 45 years after the United Nation's founding, the SecurityCouncil, General Assembly and Secretariat seem more and more like arelic from the past: a nice idea, whose time never having come, nowseems utterly superfluous.

Perhaps no event did more to discredit the United Nations thanthe disclosure of Secretary General Kurt Waldheim's Nazi backgroundand its subsequent cover-up. It's hard to imagine a greater mockeryof an organization devoted to world peace than its leader turningout to have been a war criminal who based his career on a falsifiedpast.

In 1980, Shirley Hazzard wrote an article for The New Republicthat first raised public doubts about Waldheim's background. Both agifted novelist (her 'Transit of Venus' won the 1981 National BookCritics Circle Award) and a former employee of the UN Secretariat,where she served for 10 years in the '50s and early '60s, Hazzardseemed ideally suited to dissect the moral murk and grim burlesquethat define the career of Kurt Waldheim. It had been known for someyears that she was writing a book on the subject, and anticipationhas run high. Indeed, Brian Urquhart, the UN's former seniorunder-secretary general, had an article last month in The New YorkReview of Books that amounted to a preemptive defense againstHazzard's book.

Need he have troubled? At once too much and not enough,'Countenance of Truth' alternately has the aspect of an unwieldyessay that is three times too long, and of a precis for a volumethat seems as yet a third its proper length. It's as if Hazzardfelt the issues too deeply, had held on to the project too long. Inher scathing (and all too justified) condemnation, anger too oftengets the better of argumentation.

'Countenance of Truth' is less about Waldheim than the UnitedNations as a whole. In a sense, he was the logical outcome of itsunimpressive history. Hazzard sees the organization as fatallyhandicapped from the outset. Rather than setting itself above thecountries represented there, the United Nations based itself onthem. 'In offering itself as the mere creature of its membergovernments,' Hazzard writes, 'the United Nations system entered astate of arrested moral development, marked by the habitual emblemsof immaturity: demands for approval, hostility to truth, and anincapacity for individual or collective self-questioning.'

The quality of leadership it received exacerbated the UN'sproblems. Its first secretary general, the Norwegian diplomatTrygve Lie, was a compromise candidate. Hazzard's dismissal of himindicates her view of the organization he led. 'Crude withoutforthrightness, devious without astuteness, Lie was above alldeficient in ethical perception. The choice of such a figure toinaugurate the office of United Nations Secretary-General in itselfexpressed the shallow intentions of the great powers in regard tothe new organization.'

His support of loyalty purges did nothing for the UN's moralstanding. In 1953, the FBI went so far as to set up a branch officeat UN headquarters 'for purposes of surveillance, interrogation,and fingerprinting of all Americans on the internationl staff';this had the approval of both Lie and US Ambassador Henry CabotLodge Jr. Such actions gave the United States no occasion todisapprove when East Bloc nations put forth citizens answerablefirst to their own governments as secretariat employees; not a fewengaged in espionage. Worst of all may have been the secretarygeneral's increasing emphasis on loyalty to his office rather thanto the organization as a whole or its supposed principles. Theworst offender in this regard was Lie's successor, DagHammarskjold, who as Hazzard limns him was less diplomatic herothan diplomatic autocrat.

Hazzard passes over the secretary generalship of U Thant,Hammarskjold's successor, other than to note the grotesque swellingof the UN bureaucracy. The ineffectuality of U Thant's leadership,especially when juxtaposed with Hammarskjold's forcefulness, setthe stage for an occupant who could exploit occasions forgreatness, and so retrieve for the organization a measure of theauthority it had had under Hammarskjold.

It got Waldheim. 'Uninspired, officious, and essentiallytrivial, Waldheim was proof against every occasion of a largerkind. A lack of imagination, which indubitably sustained him in hislong deception, precluded any sense of self-absurdity.'

Hazzard's scorn for him is manifest -- and surely merited --yet that very scorn keeps her from addressing Waldheim and hismendacity with the thoroughness they deserve. Perhaps she feelsthe story has been so frequently told elsewhere her indictment (forthat is what this book amounts to) can leapfrog over narrative to ahigher realm of discourse. Instead, the sketchiness of her accountleaves one feeling nearly as disappointed in 'Countenance of Truth'as in the United Nations and its moral bankruptcy. She has writtenof that organization's sorriest leader with real passion andoccasional brilliance. With more focus and elaboration, she mighthave written of him with more effect, too. MFEENE;03/30 NKELLY;04/09,12:50 UN08 Caption: PHOTO Shirley Hazzard / FRAN COLLIN PHOTO