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<\/a>Two days after the attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt delivered a radio address saying, \u201cThere is no such thing as security for any nation \u2014 or any individual \u2014 in a world ruled by the principles of gangsterism. There is no such thing as impregnable defense against powerful aggressors who sneak up in the dark and strike without warning…. We are going to win the war and we are going to win the peace that follows. And in the dark hours of this day \u2014 and through dark days that may be yet to come \u2014 we will know that the vast majority of the members of the human race are on our side.\u201d The next day, FDR\u2019s personal secretary received a letter from Clark Eichelberger, the Director of the League of Nations Association, offering the services of his organization and related groups to help the President construct \u201cthe organization of the world for peace and justice.\u201d<\/p>\nThis was not a spontaneous idea born from shock of the attack. It was the exact opposite. For more than 20 years, Eichelberger, the LNA, and others had carried the banner for \u201cWorld Organization\u201d as declared by the League of Nations. While the League itself continued to slip into irrelevance, the LNA continued to promote the ideals of the League, calling for revisions of the League of Nations Covenant to make the world body both more effective and more acceptable to the United States. By the time World War II was at its bloodiest in the early 1940s, there was finally a consensus among the allies that a new organization for international security \u2013 not simply a victor\u2019s peace \u2013 was necessary well before the shooting stopped so when peace finally came, the world would have a new foundation to build upon.<\/p>\n
The LNA was founded in 1919 immediately after the Paris Peace Treaty that set down the terms of victory, including the creation of the League of Nations. Despite congressional and popular rejection of the League, the LNA continued to campaign for international engagement. The LNA was the founding organization that became the American Association for the United Nations (AAUN) in 1945 and finally the United Nations Association of the United States (UNA-USA) in 1964\u2026<\/p>\n
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\u2026 The single overarching obsession of the internationalists \u2014 starting with FDR himself \u2014 was to ensure the multiple failures of the League of Nations would not be repeated. In global terms, this meant creating an international organization that had real authority and was not created as a victors\u2019 peace. In US domestic terms, this meant engaging as broad a spectrum of political (especially Congressional) and popular opinion. It had been less than twenty years between the Paris Peace Accords of 1919 and Hitler\u2019s annexation of the Sudetenland in 1938, meaning that for most political and military leaders in the late 1930s, the Great War was living memory. Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, and Eichelberger were soldiers in the Great War; FDR was a junior government official at the time. In her memoirs, This I Remember, Eleanor Roosevelt recalled the United Nations Assembly in London in 1946 that brought up the ghosts of previous failures. \u201cSo many of the Europeans were older men who had made the effort with the League of Nations and were a little doubtful about a second international effort to keep the world at peace,\u201d she wrote, \u201cThe loss of a generation makes itself felt acutely twenty to twenty-five years later, when many men who would have been leaders are just not there to lead.\u201d<\/p>\n
Among the internationalists, there was no debate that the failure of 1919 led directly to the next world war. And it certainly was not a question of hindsight. Paul Kennedy, in The Parliament of Man, reproduced a chilling political cartoon from 1919 entitled \u201cPeace and the Cannon Fodder\u201d from the [New York] Daily Herald. It depicts the Great War victors strolling out of the Paris Conference while cowering behind a column is a small, naked boy labeled \u201cthe soldier of 1940.\u201d \u2026<\/p>\n
Chapter Eight: The UNA-USA Parallel Studies Program & Track II Talks 1968-1992<\/h3>\n
\u2026 The Policy Studies Committee of the UNA Board decided in the late 1960s that the most urgent foreign policy issue was the tension between East and West. A Policy Studies program brought together US experts to discuss important security issues in the US-Soviet relationship and, later, a Parallel Studies program brought together American and Soviet experts to discuss a range of issues. The first was undertaken with partners in the USSR; subsequent programs involved Japan and the People\u2019s Republic of China. The initiative with the Soviet Union started during a relatively calm period in US\/Soviet relations, in the late 1960s, when the two superpowers were cooperating on several arms-control ventures, including the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty and the first agreement limiting the stock of strategic ballistic missiles \u2014 the SALT I Treaty. Under President Nixon, arms control was high on the priority list of both Washington and Moscow as a means of reducing tensions between the two countries.<\/p>\n
UNA began its policy studies program in the mid-1960s under Elmore Jackson, the vice president, whom Porter McKeever, then UNA\u2019s president, recruited from the State Department in 1966\u2026<\/p>\n
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\u2026 One of Lenefsky\u2019s last acts before leaving UNA in 1972 was to hire [Toby] Gati, who had just earned her master’s degree in international affairs degree from Columbia University. While still at Columbia, Gati asked a former UN ambassador, Charles Yost, who was teaching at the university, for career advice, and he directed her to UNA. She was hired as a researcher and became the Parallel Studies project director in 1974. [Ed] Luck, her classmate, was hired in 1974, first as a researcher and eventually as a project director. As project directors, \u201cWe wrote articles together and worked extremely well together,\u201d Gati said. She and Luck would divide up an article, each of them writing different parts that would come seamlessly together. In addition, \u201cWe had to do fund-raising because every one of these projects had to be self-supporting. It was more than that. Our programs became a net contributor to the UNA budget.\u201d \u2026<\/p>\n
Besides influencing Soviet thinking on these issues, \u201cwe brought ideas back to the State Department and the White House,\u201d Gati said. Like many US embassies around the world, those in the Eastern bloc were isolated; the US embassy in Moscow, for example, \u201cdidn\u2019t have many of the contacts we had.\u201d In fact, \u201cthe embassy rarely saw people from the Politburo, but we often did.\u201d As a result, \u201cthere was not that much information on the Soviet Union at that time and what it was thinking,\u201d she said. So, after returning home from meetings in the Soviet Union, UNA-USA members would find themselves cited in The New York Times about the policy implications of what they had learned in their discussions abroad\u2026<\/p>\n
These were insights that UNA could relay to the UN itself. \u201cWe had a unique understanding of those issues. We had very close relationships with every Secretary-General. We could go in and talk about any subject, nonproliferation, any subject on our agenda,\u201d Gati said. \u201cWe had our reports on UN reform, or on nonproliferation, or on economics \u2013 whatever issue, we had entr\u00e9e into the highest level of the UN to discuss. I remember holding sessions on different topics and inviting ambassadors from all over based on work that UNA-USA had done.\u201d<\/p>\n