THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | SEPTEMBER 2023 81 the first peace treaty between Israel and its four Arab neighbors. But the 1956 Suez Canal crisis ended with deployment of the United Nations Emergency Forces (UNEF) at Gaza in 1957—it was a pioneering Bunche solution. Raustiala also shows Bunche’s careful, cautious, yet deliberate approach to his Africa research project. Bunche applied the lessons he learned about the post–World War I mandate system under the League of Nations as head of the post–World War II U.N. Trusteeship Division. His work resulted in the decolonization of almost half of the world’s population, who happen to have been people of color. Ralph Bunche was an outstanding and effective individual. As Brian Urquhart put it during our 2001 symposium: “Bunche was a very unusual public figure. He liked getting things done, but deeply despised and disliked taking credit for them. So, the efforts that he pioneered are still well known to us—civil rights, peacekeeping, decolonization— while he has virtually disappeared, which is exactly what he wanted.” Speaking in support of a resolution acknowledging Bunche’s accomplishments in October 2003, then–Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Joe Biden capped it: “Bunche did not want to be remembered as the first African American to graduate from UCLA as valedictorian, or the first to graduate from Harvard with a Ph.D. in government and international relations, or the first to become Chief U.N. Mediator. Least of all, the first to win the Nobel Peace Prize. He wished to be remembered simply as an American who answered his country’s call to duty.” Returning to the 2001 Ralph Bunche event at the Library of Congress, I can’t help but think of the irony of our assignment adjacent to the Woodrow Wilson Room. Wilson was, of course, a proponent of the colonial mandate system that in the Treaty of Versailles divided the spoils of World War I—colonized peoples—among the victors and was a central part of the newly established League of Nations Wilson fiercely championed. I like to think of the poetic justice that might be realized at the Library of Congress by renaming Room L11, where we rejuvenated Bunche’s unique and farreaching contributions to humanity, the Ralph J. Bunche Room. In the meantime, read this book! It is full of excellent insights and refreshing revelations. It is meticulously researched. The book should be required reading in every political science class, at all academic levels, and used as a fountain of information in all fields. It is political science, history, sociology, psychology, anthropology, and, of course, a biography of an indispensable man. A retired Senior Foreign Service officer and U.S. Army pioneer special operations officer, James T.L. Dandridge II is vice chairman of the board of directors of the Diplomacy Center Foundation for the establishment of the National Museum of American Diplomacy and immediate past president of the DACOR Foundation and DACOR Bacon House board of governors and trustees. He served as chair of the board of directors for the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training at the Foreign Service Institute from 2005 to 2015. II: A Great American A Review by Alexis Ludwig It’s a rare thing to pick a new book from the library shelf with casual curiosity, become quickly engrossed, and never once consider stopping until you’re finished, especially if it goes for 557 pages. But Kal Raustiala’s biography of Ralph Bunche—The Absolutely Indispensable Man—is that kind of book. Even the footnotes never fail to entertain and nicely complement the narrative’s smooth, limpid flow. This is an impressive work— scholarly, entertaining, and accessible. One comes away from its reading convinced that Ralph Bunche, a star in his day—the first Black man to win a Nobel Prize (1950), a confidant of presidents, chief consigliere to the first three U.N. Secretaries General, and mentor to illustrious contemporaries including Martin Luther King—should be much better known in our own. Bunche was a great American, a superb global diplomat, and a quietly towering figure—with no further qualifying adjectives required. The issues facing Bunche remain germane today: the competition between superpowers blocking multilateral cooperation on big issues; the acute governance challenges of fragile states; and, not least, the intertwining of American foreign policy interests with thorny domestic problems in which the U.S. role as leading democracy of the “free world” is tainted and hampered by the shortcomings of our democracy at home. The backdrop to Bunche’s diplomatic work birthing new states and mediating conflicts in faraway places—from IsraelPalestine and Cyprus to Kashmir and Congo—was the rising pitch of the civil rights struggle inside the United States. In both arenas, Bunche favored pragmatic approaches within existing institutions based on the idea of peaceful
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