A Man Without Color

Ralph J. Bunche was by his own admission a man of many predispositions. "I have a deep-seated bias against hate and intolerance," he once said. "I have a bias against racial and religious bigotry. I have a bias against war, a bias for peace. I have a bias which leads me to believe that no problem of human relations is ever insoluble."

From hard personal experience, Bunche knew other, less commendable prejudices. He was a black in a country biased against his race, and he was an

American in a world persuaded that no U.S. citizen could approach international relations with impartiality. Yet when he died last week at 67, six months after his health had forced him to resign as the United Nations Under Secretary-General, Bunche had achieved a unique status: a black without color and an American who belonged to all the nations.

His most spectacular success at the U.N. was undoubtedly the negotiation of the 1949 armistice between the newly born state of Israel and its Arab neighbors. For that achievement, he won the Nobel Peace Prize the following year. But Bunche was proudest of his 1956 role in organizing the 6,000-man U.N. peace-keeping force in the Sinai and Gaza, which maintained the peace for eleven years. "For the first time," he said then, "we have found a way to use military men for peace instead of war." It was Bunche, however, who advised Secretary-General U Thant in May 1967 that the Secretary-General had no legal alternative but to accede to Egypt's demand that the force be withdrawn. Many critics maintain that if Bunche and Thant had stalled the Egyptians and fought harder to keep the blue-helmeted troops on hand, the Six-Day War might have been averted.

Alabama Chase. Born in Detroit, the son of a barber, Bunche was orphaned at 13. He starred in football, baseball and basketball at the University of California at Los Angeles, but suffered a knee injury that was to trouble him the rest of his life. He graduated with Phi Beta Kappa honors from U.C.L.A., took his doctorate at Harvard, later did advanced work in anthropology and colonial policy at Northwestern University, the London School of Economics and the University of Cape Town.

From 1938 to 1940, he did research for Swedish Sociologist Gunnar Myrdal's monumental study of U.S. race relations, An American Dilemma. The work took Bunche and Myrdal into the Deep South, where one night a mob of whites, angered by their questions about interracial sex, chased them across Alabama.

Leaving the Office of Strategic Services, where he had risen to chief of the Africa section, Bunche joined the State Department and became one of the authors of the United Nations Charter. In 1946, at the request of Secretary-General Trygve Lie, he went on loan to the U.N.; he joined the permanent secretariat the following year and quickly became the Secretary-General's right-hand man, a role he filled until his retirement. When the mediator of the Palestine dispute, Count Folke Bernadotte of Sweden, was assassinated by Israeli terrorists in late 1948, Bunche took over. It required painstaking, brilliant diplomacy to bring the Arabs and Israelis together on the island of Rhodes; Bunche's forceful personality, plus occasional billiard games, helped to keep them there. When the armistice agreement was reached 81 days later, Bunche gave the negotiators special pieces of Rhodes pottery, made before the negotiations opened. To an Israeli delegate who asked what he would have done with the pottery had the talks failed, Bunche smiled and said: "I would have broken them over your heads."

Double Problem. The remark illustrated the irreverent side of Bunche's personality. He was an avid football and baseball fan, and most of the participants at high-level U.N. meetings probably never suspected that the scraps of paper delivered to him during their sessions sometimes contained nothing more momentous than the scores of games. A very private man, he lived quietly with his family in the Kew Gardens section of New York City.

Bunche was sometimes criticized by other blacks for not taking a more militant role in their struggle, but there was never any doubt where he stood or how he felt. Bunche walked his first picket line for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1937. He joined the march from Selma to Montgomery, Ala., six years ago. At high school in Los Angeles, Bunche was valedictorian of his graduating class, but had been refused admission to the school's honor society because of his race. Years later he turned down Harry Truman's offer of appointment as Assistant Secretary of State, at that time the highest U.S. post ever offered a black. Said he: "It is well known that there is Jim Crow in Washington. It is equally well known that no Negro finds Jim Crow congenial. I am a Negro."

In recent months, Bunche's 200-lb. frame was racked by a succession of debilitating illnesses. Nearly blind, he suffered from heart disease, kidney malfunction and diabetes. Last week President Nixon eulogized Bunche as a man who "never relented in his persistence to advance the cause of brotherhood and cooperation among men and nations." Now the U.N., which has seldom seemed so ineffective, has a double problem: to find a replacement for the retiring Thant and to fill the void left by the man whom the Secretary-General called "the most effective and best-known of international civil servants."

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