Hammarskjold’s Career

Press, Volume C, Issue 29623, 20 September 1961, Page 15

Hammarskjold’s Career

Dag Hjalmar Agne Carl Hammarskjold (pronounced “hammershield”) became Secretary-General of the United Nations in 1953, succeeding Trygve Lie.

Although he was the son of a Conservative Prime Minister and for 16 years held important offices in Sweden’s Department of Finance and Foreign Ministry. he never belonged to a political party.

This detachment, perhaps as much as his skill in negotiation and administration. made him acceptable to both East and West. When l e was elected for his second five-year term in 1957 the General Assembly’s vote was 80-0. with no abstentions. He was an unemotional

man, who faced up to crisis after crisis with an outward air of detachment and imperturbability. He was a bachelor. His chief interests outside his work were modern painting and modern literature, particularly the writings of Joyce, Proust, Eliot, and Rilke. He spoke English, French, German and Swedish. As a disciple of Albert Schweitzer and Lord Keynes. Mr Hammarskjold became an ardent advocate of the welfare State, teaching this theory at a university and putting it into practice as a civil servant. But he once wrote that he had never joined the Social Democrat Party because his Schweitzerian thinking made him homeless among parties. His mission to Katanga was the latest of a series of peacemaking attempts which began in 1955 with a visit to Peking to discuss the release of 11 American airmen captured during the Korean war.

Soon afterwards he was faced with two major crises —the Soviet repression of the Hungarian revolt and the Suez crisis—and then became involved in the revolt in Iraq. It was in the autumn of 1959, during a visit to Laos, that Russia first accused him of using his office to advance the interests of the West. Russia returned to the attack soon after the outbreak of the Congo crisis last year. It charged him with complicity in the murder of Mr Patrice Lumumba. the Congo's first Prime Minister, and with siding with the “colonisers.” The Russians then demanded that he be replaced by a three-man executive <the “troika”*, and reinforced their campaign by ignoring him as Secretary-General. Born on July 29, 1905, at Jonkoning. Sweden, into an old family of the minor Swedish nobility, he studied law and economics at Uppsala University and first entered public life in 1930 when he beaded a Government committee on unemployment. After teaching economics at Stockholm University, he became secretary to the Bank of Sweden in 1934. and Under-Secretary of State to the Ministry of Finance in 1936." He was brought into the Government as a Minister of State in 1951. He first went to the United Nations in 1951 as viceehairman of the Swedish delegation, and was its chairman in 1952. In April the following year the General Assembly approved his appointment as Secretary-General.