UN unanimous on Iran-Iraq

There used to be a job in journalism which, at one time, I think most good serious reporters around the world would have been proud to be appointed to. They were assured from the start that they could have as much space in the paper and almost as much time on the radio as they felt they needed. Forty years later, the vast majority of newspapers around the world have abolished the job.

The New York Times, which has more resident foreign correspondents in more countries than any other paper I know, used to have not one person in this enviable job, but at one time a dozen. Today, I believe they're probably unique in having two people do the job. It's the job of United Nations' correspondent for a paper, a radio station, a television network.

I started with the old Guardian in 1945 covering the organising conference of the UN in San Francisco and, for nine weeks, wrote and saw in print on an average two or three thousand words a day, sometimes five thousand. Once the thing was set up, the problem was where it was going to live. Where would the new world organisation set up its headquarters? And this, of course, was to be decided by the organisation, itself, by its, as I recall, permanent site committee – that sounds straightforward. Far from it.

The moment it was announced that the United Nations was looking for a home, we correspondents were brought up short with a very brisk example of practical politics. We'd been dealing with and writing about such noble things as how to organise a common force to stop wars, what to do with former colonies, how to encourage agriculture in every poor country on earth, what sort of body should be created to monitor, to watch and advise on the health of the world?

And here, I'd like to say as forcefully as possible, that of all the many bodies the United Nations created, that one, the present World Health Organisation is incomparable, irreplaceable, literally vital and the best thing that ever came out of the second attempt at a League of Nations. By keeping tabs on health statistics of nearly 200 nations, watching the actual movement of airline passengers from countries with known epidemics and maintaining a continuous 24-hour watch on these and many other health matters from its headquarters in Geneva, the World Health Organisation has probably saved more hundreds of thousands of lives by prevention than any other organisation on earth.

Well, as I was saying, we lofty reporters who had spent our days listening to how the world was going to be reorganised and spent our nights writing about it, were suddenly brought down to earth by the healthy reminder that when these 51 nations agreed to live in perpetual peace and friendship, they had not abolished nationalism or national pride.

The early meetings of the site committee were not held in public but, from delegates who'd attended them, it was possible to get a picture of a bunch of diplomats who, while remaining high-minded, weren't averse to practising the arts of an advertising salesman. After all, it was like putting out bids on the site for the next or next-but-one Olympic games.

The delegates, even though they were professional, austere diplomats, pictured their own fair city as ideal and were quick to see the wonderful revenues that would flow continuously in from tourism, from building new hotels, renting expensive homes for 51 delegations, not to mention a stampede of top chefs and new restaurants and prosperous days and nights for limousine services and chauffeurs and armies of secretaries.

There was a moment there, I don't believe ever reported, when one or two of the doctors who would eventually form the nucleus of the World Health Organisation began to wonder, as all organisers of festivals, political conventions, conferences, big sports events, must wonder, what to do about the probably influx of gamblers, con men, call girls and prostitutes.

I believe the site committee, having listened to promotional speeches about the beauties and peculiar fitness of Scandinavia or a town in the Alps, Paris – why not go back and settle in San Francisco which had enchanted most of the original 50 nations? Geneva was suggested and rejected at once. Geneva carried a shroud. It was the graveyard of the first attempt at an international league and I think everybody agreed that the new organisation should not dampen its optimism by starting with a resurrection job.

The original list was paired down to 16 possible sites, which included such exotic new homelands as Blackpool, England and a new town to be created in the Black Hills of South Dakota. That really sounded bizarre and was much derided by Europeans and reporters from the tonier cities of the eastern United States. Yet to some Westerners and some foreign fans of the old West, the idea was not without its fascination. The Black Hills is an area of about 6,000 miles, straddling the western border of South Dakota and the eastern border of Wyoming.

By the way, the hills are not black and nowhere else would they be called hills. They rise between five and seven thousand feet, and when they were discovered were very heavily forested with a species of yellow pine which, from the distance of the Indian discoverers, looked black.

The Indians lost their hold on the lands when, as usual, some mineral – in this case, gold – was discovered. Whites moved in and built such mining towns as Custer, Lead, Rapid City, Spearfish and the legendary Deadwood where, you'll remember, Jack McCall shot Wild Bill Hickok in the back while he was holding a hand of aces and eights, every afterwards to be known as 'the dead man's hand'.

This location had its appeal for Western nuts which include some unlikely people. I remember later over drinks in the delegates' lounge at what was to become the UN's permanent home, I remember a fanatical Frenchman, a Dutchman, a Korean and, as always, an Englishman, who gathered to swap tales true and fantastic about the 1870s in the Black Hills. It was, need I say, an Englishman who regretted to point out, when someone was in full flight about Gary Cooper's splendid performance as Wild Bill Hickok, that in the subsequent trial, Jack McCall was acquitted. Who then shot young Bill? History is dumb.

Well, the point of putting up the Black Hills – it was done by the Chamber of Commerce of South Dakota – was that the hills were just a little more than halfway across the United States, would give more or less equal access to Europeans and Orientals, but – the big point – were in a remote place, sparsely settled and not worth bombing when and if the Russians ever got the atom bomb. The Black Hills were turned down. So, I'm afraid was Blackpool.

Moscow or Yalta, the Crimea, nowhere in Russia was ever suggested. The Russians shuddered at having the delegates and families and professional hangers-on of 50 nations. All those spies at large anywhere in the Soviet Union!

It came down to Europe or the United States and Europe in 1945/6 was battered and poor. In the end, the 16 suggestions were reduced to two – a bosky section of hills and valleys about 30 miles outside New York City called Harrison, New York and San Francisco. From my own posse of spies, I learned that the site committee had travelled up to Harrison – it's still charming country – but was nagged by a yearning for San Francisco. It came close enough for me to check with my editor and announce that I was prepared, as now the paper's regular and only UN correspondent, to move the family, gladly, to San Francisco.

The site committee was still weighing the comparative charms of Harrison and San Francisco when the Rockefeller brothers announced that they owned a stretch of real estate hard by the East River in Manhattan and were willing to raze the properties there and present a great gaping patch of land for the building of the United Nations headquarters. The offer was grand. It was done. And the mayor of New York City, who'd done less lobbying than the South Dakota boys, chuckled with delight. And there it is.

And, after a couple of years of moving the temporary headquarters from a college outside New York City to a disused bomb site on Long Island, the United Nations made its home where it is today. And when it opened, after another fierce round of lobbying between the nations as to who would get the contract for this and that, the marble for the assembly building (Vermont), the panelling for the security council's chamber, the office desks with the folding, built-in typewriters – America, of course? No, it was Great Britain. At last we all poured into there and were assigned our offices and cubicles and telephones and telegraphic services.

The organising conference in San Francisco was covered by about 650 correspondents. By 1948, the UN headquarters in New York housed something like 300, 350 full time correspondents. I can't guess how many – how few – are left. They're like exiles from many invaded countries. Real life, real politics goes on outside them and their world.

So, it was an immense shock to see, last Tuesday, a two-column headline from the United Nations. The security council had passed a unanimous vote and for the first time, I believe, in 42 years, the permanent members – the USA, the UK, France, China and the Soviet Union – had voted together. It was to order a ceasefire in the war between Iran and Iraq. And, we were told, this was only the preliminary move for a resolution to be voted or considered within two months to impose a worldwide arms embargo against either of the two nations that does not agree or accede to the ceasefire. The UN had suddenly sprung to useful life.

But wait! A day later, a Soviet official said that his country's vote for the first resolution should not be taken to imply its agreement to embargo arms shipments to its good friend Iran. Back to square one. Back to normal.

Those few United Nations' correspondents can go back to their doodling or letter writing or poker or the batting out of little dispatches that will never be printed.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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