International: Chicken into Fish?

In the shadow of the towering Council of Five (see above), the Executive Committee of the Preparatory Commission of the United Nations Organization buzzed along in London. Its 14 delegates had to decide when & where the first U.N.O.

Assembly would meet, and what it would do. Despite the hurry-up efforts of Edward R. Stettinius Jr., the committeemen sometimes haggled for hours over the inclusion, omission or interpretation of a single word.

Ed Stettinius wanted an organizational meeting of the Assembly in November or early December, at which special committees, as well as the permanent councils provided for in the charter, would be selected to draw up agenda for the first plenary session in the spring of 1946.

Russian Delegate Andrei Gromyko (Soviet Ambassador to Washington) objected. Apparently the Russians were afraid that the committees appointed at the first meeting would invade the agenda-planning prerogatives of the permanent councils. (Most of the small nations in the Assembly would like to do just that.) Gromyko insisted on a continuous session, the plenary meeting following immediately after the organizational.

No matter what you called the first Assembly, he said, it could not be other than organizational. “If we have a chicken and call it a fish, it doesn’t mean that the chicken has been converted into a fish.”

At one point Gromyko was in danger of being summarily voted down. Finally he was placated by laborious restrictions upon the committees to be appointed at the first Assembly, which was to meet in December.

Where? Subcommittee 10 of the Executive Committee had the task of picking a permanent headquarters for U.N.O. Dozens of cities all over the world have been mentioned, but last week the three leading candidates seemed to be Geneva, Copenhagen and San Francisco. Geneva has one enormous advantage: the $13,000,000 buildings and some of the existing machinery of the League of Nations.

The Russians favor Vienna or Prague, which almost no one else wants. They have uncomfortable memories of Geneva, where Maxim Litvinoff once pleaded in vain for total disarmament and where the Soviet Union was bounced out of the League in 1939. But since these are hardly logical objections as of 1945, the Russians have indicated that they might just possibly consider Geneva, after all.