The Foreign Service Journal, September 2020

58 SEPTEMBER 2020 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL this issue from his early academic pursuits through his work at, successively, the Office of Strategic Services (1941-1944) as head of the Africa Section of the Research and Analysis Branch, the Department of State (1944-1946) as an adviser on colonial matters and the United Nations (1946-1954) as director of the Trusteeship Division. While transitioning from the OSS through State to the United Nations, Bunche was also a tenured political science professor at Howard University (a position he relinquished in 1950). I was a freshman at Howard University in 1949. With our class, Bunche presided over the establishment of the first chapter of Phi Beta Kappa at Howard University, and we proudly strutted across the campus sharing the success of our professor’s accomplishments. As a Bunche “junkie,” I have also been fortunate to have known many of those who worked closely with Bunche at vari- ous stages: Benjamin Rivlin, Bunche’s Office of Strategic Services assistant; Lawrence Finkelstein, Bunche’s assistant at State, who accompanied him to the 1945 San Francisco Conference to draft the U.N. Charter and served as his assistant when Bunche assumed directorship of the U.N. Trusteeship Division in 1946; and Sir Brian Urquhart, Bunche’s U.N. colleague, friend and suc- cessor U.N. Under-Secretary-General. With their help, a review of this earlier 1941-1946 period in his career illuminates the unique contributions Ralph Bunche made to the United Nations long before the peacekeeping achieve- ments for which he is better known. These contributions center on Bunche’s deep familiarity with the colonial aspects of the post–World War I peace agreements and his development of the basic principle of self-determination as the standard by which to judge a system of government. Academic Underpinnings and Historical Context One has only to reflect on Bunche’s early academic prowess at every level to see how later principles of humanism, freedom and conflict resolution took strong hold in his thinking. Born in 1904 in Detroit, he was raised by his maternal grandmother, Lucy Taylor Johnson, who moved the family to Los Angeles in 1919. He graduated with honors from 30th Street Intermediate School, where his grandmother insisted that he be given academic courses to prepare him for college. He then graduated first in his class and valedictorian from Jefferson High School, but he was not accorded a listing in recognized honor societies because of his race. Bunche entered the southern branch of the University of Cali- fornia (later to become UCLA) and graduated summa cum laude as class valedictorian in 1927. In his commencement address, Bunche referenced the Great War (as World War I was then known), that “supreme catastrophe” that “seared deeply into the heart of humanity the burning realization that the world is in distress.” And he implored fellow students to become “socially valuable individuals” by developing their personalities—reason, self-consciousness and self-activity—to the fullest and adding a fourth dimension: “bigness,” which he defined as the soulfulness, spirituality, imagination, altruism and vision enabling one to understand and love one’s fellow man. Ralph Bunche’s views were shaped by international events as he was growing up. World War I began in 1914 when he was 10 years old. The Great War pitted Germany, Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire against Britain, France, Russia and, ultimately, the United States, Italy and Japan. The war lasted for four years, 1914 to 1918, and the peace settlement took another five years—from the 1918 Treaty of Versailles through to the 1923 Treaty at Lausanne, where peace was finally reestablished. During the subsequent 1924-1930 period, the League of Nations, established in 1919 under Part I of the Treaty of Versailles and based in part on President WoodrowWilson’s “Fourteen Points,” became operational, and programs and practices emerged to govern international conduct. Besides calling for establishment of an international orga- nization to enforce the peace, Wilson’s “Fourteen Points” dealt with the disposition of colonial claims, a large and critical aspect of the war. Point V, which went some way toward establishing the principle of self-determination, called for: “A free, open-minded, and absolutely impartial adjustment of all colonial claims, based upon a strict observance of the principle that in determining all such questions of sovereignty the interests of the populations concerned must have equal weight with the equitable claims of the government whose title is to be determined.” (This was a most interesting position taken by a president who resegregated the federal capital city, but that is another matter.) In the charter of the League of Nations, Wilson’s Point V was One has only to reflect on Bunche’s early academic prowess at every level to see how later principles of humanism, freedom and conflict resolution took strong hold in his thinking.