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A Time of Hope
Conversations with Early Staffers of the UN

The Mohicans enjoy bragging about each other. Every interview with this group of veteran UN staff members (to qualify for membership, one must have worked at the UN prior to August 1946) seems to end with, "Oh, you'll be meeting with so-and-so. Much more interesting than I'm sure I've been, you'll get much more from them. . . ." Presently, there are some 100 members, some of whom gather yearly for a luncheon of camaraderie and reminiscence.

Planning for a postwar international organization was initiated by the Allied powers in 1943 with United States President Franklin Delano Roosevelt an especially strong advocate of the need for such an organization. The predecessor body, the League of Nations, had been undermined by failure of the United States to join and by dissension among the major powers; planning for the new organization was informed by the determination to avoid the errors of the past. 

Despite this relatively lengthy planning, once things moved to the actual implementation stage, the search for a talented staff was rather ad hoc. The Mohicans interviewed all describe a sense of suddenly finding themselves involved in a new project whose contours were still vague but which seemed to prefigure a very different way of conducting the world's affairs. They each came alive with a particular energy when the subject turned to the early days of the UN, a time of hope that overlapped and dovetailed with the idealism and energy of youth. 

A Chance Encounter 

Betty Teslenko's 52-year career at the UN began in the night skies of April 1945. As a Depression-era economic survival strategy, she had learned stenography and had worked briefly as a court reporter. During her years as a student at the University of California, Berkeley, she studied French and many of her professors had been refugees from Europe who had fled the oppression of Fascism. During the long, propeller-driven flight between New York and Chicago, she struck up a conversation with a passenger who was unable to sleep and who was fascinated by her rare combination of skills: stenographic note-taking and foreign languages (including the ability to decipher heavily accented English).

The passenger turned out to be a senior officer of the United States State Department. He urged her to quit her job as a flight attendant and return to her native San Francisco, where an important conference requiring her skills was under way. She gave notice and soon found herself at the United Nations Conference on International Organization that culminated in the signing of the UN Charter on June 26, 1945. Reporting for her first day of work, Betty, who had expected a period of orientation or training, found herself in a roomful of foreign ministers from the Allied powers, including Anthony Eden, Vyacheslav Molotov and Edward Stettinius. "I actually thought I had died and gone to heaven. We had no sound equipment and we worked night and day. But I never had a period of my life that meant so much to me. The people attending the conference were coming out of the war, people who had been in prison camps, people who had been in the Resistance [to the Nazis]. For many participants, taking shelter from air raids had long been a part of daily life, and when the lights would stay on at night they would just stand and look. San Francisco opened its arms to us. There was a lot of hope. It was just a terrific place to be. And I've never looked back."

Making a Difference

Looking back at a long and eventful career, Betty Teslenko recalls the consistent sense of being at the heart of the action in meetings of the Security Council and elsewhere. She continued working until the mandatory retirement age of 60 and returned on a contract basis, putting in a total of 52 years at the United Nations. She describes her response to a goddaughter who could not believe this extraordinary length of service: "I told her you had to have been there, to be at the heart of the action and have a sense of doing something that really does matter. . . . People only know the political end of the UN. The UN has done so much in other fields. The WHO [World Health Organization] eradicated smallpox. The Berlin Airlift Crisis [of 1948-49] was really settled in the delegates' lounge of the UN when the Russian and American delegates met there and found a way to settle it without losing face."

Asked about her most exhilarating moment at the UN, she answers without hesitation: "When Nelson Mandela spoke at the UN. For every year since 1947, we had had the South African question before the UN. To have spent 27 years in prison on Robben Island and not be vindictive! The idea that this gentle man could become president of the country that had tried to kill him!" Asked to sum up her feelings about the UN, she is equally clear: "I don't think I am naive about the shortcomings of the UN, but it is vital that countries have a place where they can come together and talk, and try to work out their differences peacefully. The people of the generation who created the UN experienced so much war and destruction. I sincerely believe that without the UN, there might already have been nuclear war. And I hope that the present generation will work to ensure that that continues to be the case."

Spirit of Internationalism

Mel Silverman had just been discharged from three years of service in the U.S. military and was "at wit's end" as to what to do with his life when he heard about the United Nations from a friend. The friend told him that the new organization, then headquartered in the Bronx section of New York City, was in need of a wide range of talents. He was hired, but he was a U.S. citizen and the imperative to develop a genuinely international staff meant that it was only a matter of time before he was replaced. "For the first year, about every week there were people coming in as replacements and there was a list of people who would not be invited to return next week. It was very clear that this was a temporary situation." Contrary to his expectations, however, he was given a permanent position in November 1947.

Silverman also remembers the spirit that animated the early days of the United Nations. "We still talk about the feeling we had when we first set foot in those jobs, no matter how menial they were. After having gone through the war, it was so thrilling to suddenly be in an atmosphere where here was an Iranian and here was a Canadian, and here was this and here was that nationality, all working to do the same thing together. There was a spirit that still prevails among the Mohicans who come to our little luncheons."

Soon, however, Silverman found himself caught up in the anticommunist campaign waged by U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy who demanded the investigation of all U.S. employees at the UN. The Secretary-General at the time, Trygve Lie, acceded to the pressure and agreed that every U.S. employee of the UN should be required to sign a loyalty oath--"which was contrary to the Charter and contrary to every understanding about what an international civil servant should be and should do." The impact on staff morale, Silverman recalls, "was devastating."

In 1953, Dag Hammarskjöld became Secretary-General. "He systematically went from office to office, floor to floor, meeting every staff member." Silverman still thinks of Hammarskjöld's handshake as an especially inspiring moment in his long career. In various staff positions over the years, Silverman found himself on the edges of crisis, one of the most memorable being the aftermath of the invasion of Egypt by Britain, France and Israel in 1956. "I was on duty as a document coordinator on the night when Lester Pearson, the Canadian Foreign Minister, was meeting with representatives of the Secretary-General to draft a document proposing the establishment of a UN peacekeeping force for presentation to the Security Council the next morning. We were told that translators and reproduction staff had to remain available until that document was ready because it had to be translated into the five official languages and printed by morning.

"There was great emphasis on urgency because Russia had just invaded Hungary and a high-level Russian diplomat was reportedly en route to attend the Council meeting. The fear was that Russia might also become involved in the Middle East if the plan for creation of the peace-keeping force was not on the table at the morning meeting. There was a sense of anxiety as we waited for this crucial document to be completed. Happily, it got done on time and the first-ever UN Emergency Force was created soon thereafter."

Women's Input

Margaret "Molly" Bruce is generous in sharing her many treasures. The first is a letter from Ren‚ Cassin, vice-chair of the UN Commission on Human Rights during the years 1946-55 and a key figure in the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In his letter, Cassin first regrets Molly's absence on the committee, then expresses his joy that its cause was the recent birth of her child, and closes by wishing Bruce, whom he had nicknamed "jewel of the commission," a speedy return to work. There is similarly a photograph of Eleanor Roosevelt at the first meeting of the UN General Assembly in January 1946, when she gathered together the women representatives in attendance. They drafted and issued a message to the women of the world. This was particularly important, she notes, "if you remember that at the time of the San Francisco conference, women in two-thirds of the 51 countries participating in that meeting did not have the right to vote."

Molly Bruce graduated from Cambridge University in the early years of World War II. She was working for the Royal Institute of International Affairs, headed by Arnold Toynbee, when she was recruited to support the UN meetings being held in London.

Her interest in human rights had been shaped by experiences in continental Europe during the 1930s, as the forces of militarism and Fascism were gaining momentum. She was in Munich when Hitler met the Italian Fascist leader Mussolini; she watched them drive past where she was staying. "We would go out at night with a pot of black paint and paint over anti-Jewish propaganda that was displayed in every square in every German city. We were never caught. We were just completely crazy, but you do things like that when you are young. . . . Witnessing the human rights abuses of that era is what gave me the desire to join something that would build another world where you wouldn't see this kind of thing."

As staff for the UN Human Rights Commission, Bruce worked with former U.S. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, attending many of the meetings at which the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was drafted. According to Bruce, Roosevelt had a great gift for bringing people together; she would often invite delegates to her home to discuss differences in a private setting. The delegates, in turn, respected her, even when they disagreed violently with her. "She was always on time, by the way, while almost everybody else was almost always late. One time there was an elderly man in the audience, and he asked me if he could possibly say hello to Mrs. Roosevelt. I told her and she said, 'Well, where is he? I'll go and say hello to him.' That's the kind of person she was. She preferred to eat in the staff cafeteria. Of course people would always want to give her their place in line, and she would never take it. These are small things, but they mean a lot."

Especially in the early years, the UN's involvement in human rights concentrated mainly on establishing legal standards to define them, and on educating and promoting respect for human rights. The governments that comprised the organization were vigilant in guarding the prerogatives of sovereignty, and the Commission on Human Rights went so far as to declare that it "recognizes that it has no power to take action with regard to violations of human rights." Yet as a UN staff member, Molly Bruce was exposed to a stream of letters and reports from individuals whose rights had been violated and who were seeking redress. She fought her frustration and did what she could.

"I was close to one of Dag Hammarskjöld's advisers, and I told him how distressed I was about all these complaints that we were doing nothing about. He told me to let him know when Hammarskjöld was going somewhere if I had information that related to the situation in that country. If he could do something, he would. Well, that was very, very 'under the counter.' But I wasn't unique in this regard at all. There were things you could do as staff behind the scenes. And I think a lot of what goes on, and a lot of the effectiveness of the UN secretariat is what they are able to do behind the scenes, and that of course never comes out in any form."

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