The United Nations: San Francisco in 1945 and Fifty Years Later

By Dr. Alfred M. Lilienthal

I was there both times. In April 1945 I was designated by the American Veterans Committee to represent soldiers and veterans at the San Francisco International Conference, which was convened to set up a successor organization to the ill-fated League of Nations. At the time I was recuperating at Camp Pickett, Virginia, from an acute case of hepatitis which I had contracted in Cairo during military service there.

"Your ticket will be awaiting you at the San Francisco Opera House," I was told. How to get there was left to my ingenuity. I went to Andrews Air Force Base just outside the national capital, and inquired if any plane was leaving for California. "You're in luck," a dispatcher told me. "Hurry! There's a plane out there warming up for the West Coast."

I dashed out to the open door of a large plane sitting on the tarmac and asked a tough-looking sergeant: "Any room for a soldier needing a lift?" His response: "Probably in the rear of the plane. There are a lot of VIPs aboard. Hop on!"

I had luckily hitched a ride on "The Sacred Cow," President Harry Truman's plane (later to be given to the United Nations and to crash in the Congo with Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold aboard). When I got aboard it was carrying the U.S. delegation to the San Francisco conference—Secretary of State Edward Stettinius, Commander Harold Stassen, Dean Virginia Gildersleeve, Senators Arthur Vandenburg and Tom Connolly, and Representatives Sol Bloom and Charles Eaton.

When the plane stopped to refuel at Love Field in Dallas, the distinguished officials were greeted by a military guard of honor who, I am sure, were puzzled by the private first class who was walking behind the seven statesmen and who returned their salute with a snappy salute of his own.

An Associated Press reporter who interviewed the party quoted me on April 24 as saying: "We need an international organization with muscles," a call I repeated five months later in testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in Washington. The result of the interview was that my photo in uniform appeared in a syndicated article, along with pictures of Truman, Churchill, Stalin and Chiang Kai-shek.

All doors were open to me. It was a magical three weeks in San Francisco before I returned to camp to obtain my discharge. Gracie Allen and Hedda Hopper had me on their radio programs. (It was before the age of television.) Jimmy Cagney took me to lunch.

Of course I had not yet become a controversial Middle East writer, but I did talk to several of the delegates, including the Dominican Republic's Minerva Bernardino, a strong supporter of women's and Palestinian rights, and to consultant Judge Joseph Proskauer, president of the American Jewish Committee. He, like me, then was cool to the idea of Zionist statehood in Palestine, which was being bandied about in the corridors. But the judge later was persuaded to join the big parade behind the Israeli state.

San Francisco 1995 was a far different story. Invited to attend by U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, I flew out on my own on United Airlines and stayed with a dear friend in nearby beautiful Marin County. I took the delightful ferry into the city to pick up the tickets for the big events—Mayor Frank Jordan's Saturday reception, the Clinton address at the Opera House, and the official luncheon which was to follow.

I was told at the headquarters of U.N.-50, the big money for which had been put up by multimillionaire Walter Shorenstein, who happened also to be a top contributor to the United Jewish Appeal as well as to the Democratic Party, that the tickets would be delivered to me by messenger the next day (Tuesday). When they were not received, a return trip that Thursday yielded the explanation that "tickets are not ready yet." I had to go back a third time, Friday, and was given tickets for two of the events, but not for Mayor Jordan's reception. Getting these required visits and phone calls to the Shorenstein headquarters and even to Gillian Sorensen, Boutros-Ghali's deputy, at her hotel. We were forced to pick up the tickets at the home of one of the secretaries en route to the DeYoung Museum, where the lavish event was taking place.

The reception, addressed both by U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Madeleine R. Albright and Secretary-General Boutros-Ghali, brought out television reporters—one good reason not to have Lilienthal there. Adroitly, I managed to make my presence and my 1945 connection known to one television reporter who was covering the two network stations. I was interviewed at length on the spot and appeared on channels 2 and 4 and CNN. I once again called attention to the crying need for a permanent standing U.N. military force, needed now more than ever to help empower the implementation of U.N. resolutions, whether on Bosnia or Palestine.

The following evening, Yehudi Menuhin conducted the Royal Philharmonic in a stirring concert at Davies Symphony Hall. I knew the virtuoso through his late father, the intrepid anti-Zionist Moshe Menuhin, and his 99-year-old mother, Marutha, whom I invariably visit in Los Gatos during my California stays. Moshe, with a little help from me, had put Yehudi on the right track on the Middle East despite tremendous pressures from some other musicians, who were particularly inflamed over his leadership of the Music Committee of UNESCO, given UNESCO's alleged antagonism toward Israel.

In corresponding with Boutros-Ghali's office, out of sentiment I had asked to be seated for the speech by President Bill Clinton as close as possible to seat CC-124 where I had sat 50 years earlier, adjacent to the U.S. delegation. What an optimist I was! Our seats were in the gallery tier high above guest of honor Princess Margaret and the assembled delegates. Later, I found out that my 1945 seat was occupied by the Belgian ambassador to Washington. It was, therefore, from a considerably elevated plane that I heard the Boutros-Ghali and Clinton addresses and the stirring poetry recited by former U.S. poet laureate Maya Angelou. Her performance alone made my frustrating efforts worthwhile. My experience could not help but bring to mind Woody Allen's pithy expression: "I may be paranoid, but that doesn't mean they're not out to get me."

A few weeks later, while ruminating over my California stay and enjoying the beauty of Nantucket island, where I had written my five Middle East books, once more I was rudely brought back to reality. July 23rd's Sunday New York Times, obtained at the Hub on Main Street at a cost of $3.50, carried on its front page the latest details of the Bosnian tragedy, a veritable holocaust, but never referred to with that sacrosanct word reserved solely for the "chosen people."

Dominating the full page 14 report on the meeting in Hayden Lake, Idaho of the Aryan World Congress, an annual celebration of "the white race and anti-Semitism," was a 4-column, 61Ž4-inch-deep photo of members receiving the outstretched-right-arm Nazi salute from one of the conference guards.

In escorting reporters to a news conference, another guard was quoted: "I wish we were marching you into the showers," an obvious reference to the concentration camp gas chambers. Page 4 of the same first section carried an article headlined: "Man Tied to Nazism Loses His Citizenship."

The Book Review section, prominently noted with a cartoon on its index page, ran a lengthy review of Tova Reich's The Jewish War, which was cited for skewering religious fanaticism and for "showing sympathy for those burning with a holy vision of their land." Sharing one of the pages of this review was Jacob Heilbrunn's review of Marc Fischer's After the Wall which, in bold type, berated the reunited Germans for not "adequately dealing with their Nazi past."

Sharing the book section's listing of best sellers was a full-column Random House ad for Neil Gordon's novel Sacrifice of Isaac depicting "The Death of a Great Israeli Statesman...the hunt across Europe for his exiled son...a web of deception and misunderstanding from Nazi Germany to present-day Jerusalem."

Page 16 of the Times' Travel Section contained a letter to the editor on "Auschwitz Photos," noting where and when these might be seen around the U.S. and Europe. And climaxing this unbelievable but not necessarily atypical serving of Holocaustomania, a Times Magazine note on the 20th anniversary of the disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa included this: "Hoffa helped found an orphanage in Jerusalem because Israel's plight reminded him of union struggles."

Nor can one escape from Hitler even in the local media of my unique island in the sea. Nantucket's Inquirer and Mirror of July 13 carried a two-page story on a summer resident's translation of the book Auschwitz and After by French writer Charlotte Delbo, who had been imprisoned in that concentration camp. A prominent ad contained details of a lecture at which selections by the translator, Rosette Lamont, were to be read. This was to take place in the very same Unitarian church where twenty-three years earlier former U.S. Ambassador to Egypt David Nes and I had lectured on the Palestine question before a large and highly emotional audience, many of whom it almost seemed had been flown in from Boston to make it a most troublesome evening for the speakers.

It seems that, from San Francisco to Nantucket, the specter of Hitler, like Banquo's, is never to be banished.

Dr. Alfred M. Lilienthal is the author of What Price Israel?, The Other Side of the Coin, There Goes the Middle East and The Zionist Connection.