If any secretary-general of the United Nations has attracted considerable historiographical attention, it is Dag Hammarskjöld of Sweden. More than likely, this is due to Hammarskjöld's death in a mysterious plane crash in 1961. Even though his immediate successor would die nonviolently in a hospital, his service at the UN merits just as much study. U Thant of Burma led the multinational organization for ten years, and his grandson, the historian and diplomat Thant Myint-U, has taken on this tumultuous period. Remarkably, I detected no familial bias within the text. Reading the biography, I even forgot for long stretches that the subject was the author's grandfather. U Thant died when Thant Myint-U was still a young child. Peacemaker includes a few childhood memories, plus a charming 1970 photograph of the secretary-general, who is holding his grandson while posing with astronaut Neil Armstrong and the rest of the Apollo 11 crew. Nevertheless, the biography relies more on archival sources, such as the UN Archives, in addition to the presidential libraries of John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Richard M. Nixon. Thant Myint-U also makes use of Henry A. Kissinger's papers, which are now kept at Yale University, and official documents from the published State Department collection, familiarly known as FRUS, or Foreign Relations of the United States. After all, U Thant's grandson is a fully qualified historian, trained at Cambridge University, and the author of previous works such as The Hidden History of Burma: Race, Capitalism, and the Crisis of Democracy in the 21st Century (W.W. Norton, 2019) and Where China Meets India: Burma and the New Crossroads of Asia (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011). It is understandable that Thant Myint-U has composed a sympathetic portrait of his grandfather. Yet, the 1988 memoir by U Thant's press officer, Ramses Nassif, and a 2009 article by scholars A. Walter Dorn and Robert Pauk largely confirm the positive claims made by the grandson (see, respectively, U Thant in New York 1961–1971: A Portrait of the Third UN Secretary-General St. Martin's Press, and “Unsung Mediator: U Thant and the Cuban Missile Crisis,” Diplomatic History). The important difference between Peacemaker and the older works is the depth that Thant Myint-U devotes to his subject. The title of the new biography is fitting, for U Thant was a peacemaker in the truest sense of the word. At times, the secretary-general met with success, and even when he failed, he deserves credit for daring to make the attempt, just the same. U Thant's substantial contributions to peace were made at a time when the nations of the world took the UN seriously. Unlike today, as Thant Myint-U regrets in a recent essay that “political leaders from around the world have come to think of the U.N. as an obsolete talking shop of empty words.” (“Trump's Board of Peace is Anything But,” New York Times, 30 January 2026). The popular conception of the Cuban Missile Crisis incorporates only one UN personage, US Ambassador Adlai Stevenson. At a meeting of the UN Security Council, Stevenson confronted his Soviet counterpart, Valerian Zorin: “Do you, Ambassador Zorin, deny that the USSR has placed and is placing medium-range and intermediate-range missiles and sites in Cuba. Yes or no? Don't wait for the translation: yes or no?” The Soviet ambassador replied: “I am not in an American courtroom, sir, and therefore I do not wish to answer a question that is put to me in the fashion in which a prosecutor does. In due course, sir, you will have your reply. Do not worry.” Dispensing with standard diplomatic tact, the US ambassador retorted: “I am prepared to wait until hell freezes over” (57). Viewed on film today, Stevenson's behavior appears unstatesmanlike and immature. During those dangerous thirteen days in October 1962, the US ambassador's hostile manner could only have aggravated tensions. The secretary-general, by contrast, helped ease them. Indeed, before President Kennedy appeared on television to inform the public of the Soviet missiles in Cuba, he extended U Thant the courtesy and respect of informing him in advance. The secretary-general's military advisor received a briefing at the Pentagon, as well as U-2 photographs of the damning evidence. As much as U Thant enjoyed the confidence of the White House, he still acted independently of it. On his own initiative, the secretary-general appealed to Kennedy to end the so-called quarantine, or naval blockade, of Cuba. Turning to Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, he called for the cessation of arms shipments there. Both the American president and his representative at the UN, Stevenson, had wanted the secretary-general to also call for the removal of the Soviet missiles from Cuba. “Thant would not budge,” his grandson explains. “He knew if he opened his messages up for negotiations with either side, his initiative would be doomed from the start” (50). Addressing the UN Security Council on October 24th, U Thant insisted that “what is at stake is not just the interests of the parties directly involved, nor just the interests of all Member States, but the very fate of mankind. If today the United Nations should prove itself ineffective, it may have proved itself so for all time.” The superpowers dominated the Security Council, but as a Burmese, he was aware that “all conflicts have more than two sides, those of the two antagonists and that of the rest of the world” (51). As the crisis intensified, U Thant provided invaluable services as an intermediary, at Kennedy's request. The secretary-general asked Khrushchev to distance all ships from the blockade line, allowing negotiations to commence. The Soviet leader responded promptly to U Thant: “I understand your concern over the situation which has arisen in the Caribbean, for the Soviet Government too regards it as highly dangerous and as requiring immediate intervention by the United Nations. I wish to inform you that I agree to your proposal, which is in the interests of peace” (56). Making concessions to the secretary-general, rather than to the president, allowed the Soviet premier to save face. Once Kennedy and Khrushchev had reached an agreement, Cuban Prime Minister Fidel Castro was the one who lost face. In fact, Castro was so angry that he broke a mirror. Thant Myint-U observes: “He had been sidelined; he was unable to use the crisis to leverage his position and gain the iron-clad guarantees he wanted against future American interference. He demanded the US end reconnaissance flights over his territory and withdraw from the base at Guantánamo Bay, a legacy of pre-revolutionary days” (63). Visiting Cuba, U Thant tried to empathize with Castro's resentment that Khrushchev had not consulted him about the removal of the Soviet missiles. The secretary-general then took advantage of the meeting to make a special request. On October 27, 1962, the U-2 of Air Force Major Rudolf Anderson had been shot down over Cuba. Castro permitted the return of Anderson's body to the United States. Looking back on U Thant's services during the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy acknowledged: “U Thant has put the world deeply in his debt” (75). When the president, suffering from a bad back, visited the UN in September of 1963, he felt comfortable enough with U Thant to lie down in his host's private quarters. Kennedy also drank a Bloody Mary. Two months later, the president's assassination crushed the secretary-general. Nevertheless, he hoped to have an equally constructive relationship with the new president, Lyndon Johnson, for he was eager “to press ahead with two of the agendas that preoccupied him and others from the ex-colonial world: economic development and the fight against racism. These were not separate agendas; they were linked in a single vision of global equality” (100). U Thant himself regarded the “widening gap between the industrialized nations and the developing countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America” as “more dangerous, more explosive” than the “ideological differences” between NATO and the Warsaw Pact (100). Such was the secretary-general's commitment to the development of the Third World that he selected the Argentine economist Raúl Prebisch to lead the newly created United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). Prebisch was the father of dependency theory, the concept that wealthy countries inhibit the development of the Third World through their exploitation of its raw materials. In 1945, when atomic weapons were dropped over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there was a widespread feeling in many parts of Asia that these deadly weapons were dropped on Japanese cities because the Japanese were non-whites and that they would never have been dropped over cities in Nazi Germany. So, there is a racial element which I could commend to the attention of those who are thinking of launching such atomic blasts (111). U Thant challenged not only Goldwater, but the Democratic candidate, President Johnson, with his comments. He repeatedly emphasized that the matter of Vietnam was “not essentially military; it is political, and therefore political and diplomatic means alone, in my view, can solve it” (113). The secretary-general endorsed a coalition government in South Vietnam. No matter that it was the coalition idea that would ultimately end the Vietnam War, the Johnson administration opposed it, turning down U Thant's several offers of mediation. By 1968, another presidential election year, the lame duck Johnson was open to serious negotiations with North Vietnam. The Republican nominee, Richard Nixon, sabotaged the official Paris talks by secretly offering the South Vietnamese regime a better deal in the event of his election. Such scheming won Nixon the presidency. His fellow schemer, Harvard Professor Henry Kissinger, was the new national security advisor, and far from the ideal appointment. “The baritone, German-accented Kissinger was a specialist in European history but knew next to nothing about Southeast Asia,” Thant Myint-U points out (255). The Nixon-Kissinger team escalated the war in Southeast Asia, expanding the conflict in Vietnam to neighboring Laos and Cambodia. Obviously, U Thant had no friends at the White House. To celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the United Nations in 1970, the secretary general had arranged a performance by cellist Pablo Casals and dinner in New York. The president sought to ruin U Thant's plans by hosting heads of government at a White House dinner that very evening. There was one party that Nixon could not ruin, however. U Thant's retirement party the following year was a smashing success. John Lennon and his wife, Yoko Ono, turned up. “U Thant works for peace and so do we,” Lennon told a Washington Post reporter. “Besides, if we want to take over the establishment, we have to find out how it works.” Upon meeting the retiring secretary-general, the former Beatle said: “I've been following your activities. You've got a hard job.” U Thant, who had watched the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show, replied: “I've been following your activities too” (2). Toward the end of the party, according to Thant Myint-U, “Lennon sang a song he had recently written about peace and which, he said, he had never performed before in America” (4). It was “Imagine.” In conclusion, I would recommend this biography for graduate students and undergraduates alike, supplemented by other monographs covering the historical period that U Thant was in office. The author declares no conflicts of interest.
Lubna Qureshi (Thu,) studied this question.