Peacekeeping Forever
By Bill Kauffman

To hear Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Tom Connally tell it, the only Americans opposed to ratification of the Charter of the United Nations in the summer of 1945 were a few shrill harridans whose preposterous belief was that "the charter would bring into being a world government" of which "the duke of Windsor was to be the world king."

Connally permitted the cranks a brief opportunity to testify before his committee, but treated them with ill-disguised contempt. The ladies were a spirited lot, given to fantastic predictions: they imagined that someday a president, without the consent of Congress, might send American soldiers on a U.N. "peacekeeping" mission halfway around the globe. The hysterical fear-mongers!

Mrs. Cecil Norton Broy, representing a 25-member study club of Arlington, Virginia, cautioned the senators against "the further disruption of normal American family life .... We would be working on the principle of scattering the most virile of our men over the face of the globe." Mrs. Elise French Johnston announced that she represented no group but was speaking "as a free-born American citizen exercising my right of appeal and protest." Connally snickered-the kooky old broad--until La Johnston riposted, "This room with its marble walls-has it also marble ears?"

Mrs. Grace Keefe of the Women's League for Political Education in Chicago insisted: "The easy comparison of a world army with a local police force is sheer nonsense. A local policeman is called upon to act where an individual breaks existing law and the individual is held responsible for his crime. An international army or air force which moves in with bombers against helpless populations and indiscriminately burns, maims, and destroys is not an instrument of justice or law and order."

Pro-U.N. witnesses either ignored or patronized the dowdy antis. Livingston Hartley, director of the American Association for the United Nations, assured Senator Hiram Johnson, the California warhorse who had been Teddy Roosevelt's Bull Moose running mate in 1912, that the United States' contribution to U.N. occupation forces would be "very small," at most "a few thousand."

"If that did not suffice to put down the trouble, would you send a few thousand more?" Johnson asked.

Oh no, Hartley replied; recalcitrants would be cowed merely by the show of blue helmets, and if any were crazy enough to actually defy U.N. authority, well, it then became a simple matter of "mobilizing the machinery of war, the bombing planes, and the mechanized weapons." (Mr. Hartley was not, evidently, of Serbian ancestry.)

The committee reported the measure, and the ensuing floor "debate" was a dreamy lovefest of global harmony, disrupted only by a few spoilsports who kept adverting to the Constitution.

Senator Burton K. Wheeler (D-Mont.) predicted, "We are not going to send a police force to stop aggression by Russia. . . because Russia is not going to permit it to be done. We are only going to use such powers against the small and the weak nations who have not any friends and who are not satellites of some powerful nation."

One of the last of the classical liberals, Senator Robert Taft (R-Ohio), mused, "I cannot imagine anything more likely to bring about war than the attempt to intervene in the domestic affairs of other nations."

Enlightened opinion scoffed. So what if we "send a few tanks or a few ships or even men," asked Senator Claude Pepper (D- "I am not one of those frightened by what some call a superstate." The patrician Leverett Salstonstall (R-Mass.) lectured his benighted cow-state colleagues that "one result of this smaller world is greater centralization of governmental authority"; the U.N., sighed the Brahmin, was just "another step" on the path to One World.

The charter was ratified by a vote of 89-2, the dissenting duad made up of "Wild Bill" Langer of North Dakota and Henrik Shipstead of Minnesota. "The control of the war power, as provided in the Constitution, must remain in the Congress if the United States is going to remain a republic," Shipstead bellowed to his chamber's marble ears.

Thus did these United States enter the United Nations, to the distress of a few old ladies who feared that someday a president and the U.N. Security Council would send American boys to exotic deathtraps with names like Mogadishu.