Changing United Nations - 27 December 1974

I have something I ought to talk about, and something I must tell you about.

What I ought to talk about is the 1974 general assembly of the United Nations. What I must tell you about, is an encounter I recently had with the Russians which is insignificant, cockeyed and hilarious. We’ll leave that as the icing and get down to the cake.

It’s been teatime talk for ten years or more that the United Nations has been going downhill as a world organisation able to keep the peace, though if you challenge people to say why, you get only a confusion of vague replies. So, I think I ought to say, as clearly and briefly as I can, why I think it’s gone. The overriding aim of the United Nations was firmly stated on the day of its birth, in San Francisco 29 years ago in the first sentence of its charter "to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war". And the way to do that, everybody present agreed, was to give the United Nations a force, a physical force stronger than that of its strongest members, or of any coalition of them.

They said it all in one article of the charter, article 43. It binds all the member nations "to make available to the security council on its call, and in accordance with the special agreements, or agreements, armed forces, assistance and facilities including rights of passage necessary for the purpose of maintaining national peace and security". These agreements were to be, "negotiated as soon as possible".

Well the simple disastrous truth is that they have never been negotiated, no nation feels obliged to make available to the security council a bow and arrow, let alone the bulk of its armed forces. So the United Nations have never had the force to assert the authority it claims, because none of us is willing to accept an international verdict against our own national interests. I believe it’s as unavoidably simple as that.

So now to the session of the general assembly that just ended with such a menacing bang for the western world. To put it as forcefully and fairly as possible, let's recall the annual assemblies of the 1940s, '50s and '60s. For four years, we had rousing meetings, much promise of much good to poor countries, and many expressions of peaceful intent, among the powerful. But the Russians were a nuisance at best, at worst a constant threat to the independence of countries in the Middle East. They kept on using their charter right to veto every security council resolution that called for force or international action in any place that interested them. So in 1950 the Americans and the Britain’s got together, and pushed through an assembly resolution, given the right to "call for arms" to the assembly, where the Russians veto couldn’t be used.

Why were the Americans and the British able to do this? Because, they were absolutely top dog at the time and they could always count on the supporting vote of an actual majority which was made up of what the Russians called, our "satellites", and what we called, "all good men and true" – namely, western Europe, and the Latin American nations.

Today the UN, which started with 50 member nations, has a 138 and the majority is made up neither of our satellites nor the Russian satellites. It's sometimes known as the Third World. It is, in the main, the poor countries of Asia and Africa. In this assembly the Russians voted with them automatically, just to be sure the Chinese didn’t monopolise the role of the poor man’s friend. This year, for the first time, the new majority flexed its muscles because it was backed by the Arab countries, whose citizens may be poor, but whose leaders are rich enough to threaten our own wealth, if not to annex it.

So the Arabs were the biceps of this muscle-man show, and Algeria was the brains – or ideological guide – together, they managed to get South Africa actually barred from the assembly. They got UNESCO to deny money and cultural help to Israel, the first time a nation has been so blackballed. The Israelis indeed were battered and besieged, and profoundly humiliated when the assembly president, an Algerian, ordered the chair on which Pope Paul had sat in 1965 to be taken from the storeroom, and placed on the podium, to honour the special invited guest – the guerilla leader, Mr Arafat.

All in all, it was a humbling session for the white man, for western Europe, for the United States and for the Latin Americans, for all the old reliable western majority. The majority has swung to the black men and the brown men and the yellow men, and it looks as if the future of the UN were theirs to dictate.

Well, that's the rather indigestible piece of Christmas cake, now for the icing. A few weeks ago, when I was in San Francisco, I had a call one morning inviting me to lunch with the Russian consul general and his deputy. The invitation came from an unlikely host, a friend of mine who is a lawyer, an affable gent, a Republican and a first-rate golfer; he is, indeed, the chairman of the championship committee of the United States Golf association.

And he was throwing a little lunch for the consul general at the golf club, not simply by way of convenience, golf, he said, was to be the main reason for the lunch. Now this was like being invited by a rabbi to lunch with the pope to discuss stud poker. I accepted, instantly. The co-host was a young American – a boyish type out of Disney – who’s associated with his famous father in the most successful golf architects firm on earth. Golf architecture is the art of designing and building golf courses and involves much knowledge of landscape grasses, water drainage, engineering, meteorology, and sometimes, I feel, black magic.

Let’s call the young man Mr Jones. For that is his name. He had recently returned from Moscow, where he and his father had responded to what must have at first sounded like an incredible call, from the mayor of Moscow, to build the first Russian golf course.

The impulse, apparently, had come from a Soviet diplomat, who had been exposed to tee west, and become one mad golfer – the only Russian golfer of whom we have any knowledge, and curiously he was not bundled off to Siberia to play golf with a little red ball and a snow sledge. Somehow, he sold the mayor of Moscow on the idea. I don't imagine things are allowed to rest there, the matter went up to the Kremlin, and from all I could gather, Mr Brezhnev gave the nod. Well, the consul general turned out to be a rumpy, wry- faced man with a puckish humour – when we asked him if the Russians would take to golf he said, "You see the Russian people like quick games", and somebody said, "Like chess?", he came back on the hop, "We like a quick win".

He plainly and admittedly knew nothing but he asked everything and to help him with the rudiments young Mr Jones put on a lantern lecture with colour slides showing rice paddies in Bangkok being transformed – slide by slide – into bulldozed open ground, ground laid with gravel and seed and soil, planted and eventually appearing as a pastoral golf course. And we went, so to speak, to Hawaii and Florida and Scandinavia, and in the end, to the fair sites around Moscow from which they will choose the one on which to build the course.

After that, the consul general had to have a lesson in weaponry. Golf, Winston Churchill said, "is a game, who’s aim is to hit a very small ball, into an even smaller hole, with weapons singularly ill-designed for the purpose". We went off in electric carts like a little motorised battalion to the eleventh tee on this noble San Francisco golf club course, a swaying, rolling landscape of brilliant green meadows and hills towering with cypress and pine and eucalyptus. The eleventh hole is a par three – that's to say you are required to hit the green with your first shot and sink the ball with two putts. Our lawyer took off his coat, straightened his waistcoat, took a four iron, set up the ball, and stood to the ball.

Offhand I would bet, 99 to 1 any time, that he would hit the green. Well he hit about six inches behind the ball which rose in an unsteady arch and landed about 120 yards away in front of a deep bunker. "Dear me", he said with admirable restraint. "So," said the deputy consul "the first pancake is never any good".

Ignoring this gem of Russian folk wisdom the lawyer set up another ball and this time he was well up on the green. Now the consul general was motioned to play, he too took off his coat, and looked down at the ball, seized the club with a baseball grip, his two hands far apart, missed the ball at the first swipe, at the second fell just a little short of the lawyer's first ball, there was general applause – "A natural talent", purred our lawyer, "Please..." said the consul general, and then the deputy had a go and he slithered the ball about thirty yards along the ground. "That deputy," one man whispered to me, "he sure knows what he’s doing".

We then all departed for the clubhouse, had our pictures taken, and the consul general was given, by young Mr Jones, a copy of an article that I’d once written on the origins of golf. Mysterious this – why, I asked young Jones? He looked over his shoulder to see if there was a CIA man behind a tree, "Because" he said, "don’t you see it reinforces the main argument". And what would that be? I realised then that the argument had come up in Moscow and that we had kicked it around at lunch, it really touched on our main curiosity – why should the Russian leaders, the gods of the proletariat, want to embrace such a capitalist amusement, as golf?

The consul general had dropped more than a knowing hint that he knew it was a rich man’s hobby. All unaware of why I had been seated next to the consul general at lunch, I hastened to disabuse him with – young Mr Jones later assured me – deeply moving eloquence. "No, no," I said, "that used to be so, no more. Even then, only in England and America, never in Scotland". "Why Scotland?"

I painted a poignant picture, all the more effective because it was true, of little poor boys, barely able to walk, going off with their sticks and paying a few pennies to play the most hallowed courses on earth. In Scotland, I said, the people learn to play golf as simply as they learn to drink tea. And St Andrew’s – the Vatican of golf, pardon, the Kremlin – is a public course. On Sundays they close it so that little old ladies and dogs and babies can frolic around, for it is a public park absolutely for the people. "No..." said the consul general. "Yes," I said. "What," he asked, warming to the people's sport, "will our people do, will they succeed this sport?"

I was warmed too, by this time, I can tell you. "Ten years from now," I declared – there had been a couple of stimulants before lunch – "the British or American Open champion will be a Russian. Five years from now, there will be a match between the best player in the world Jack Nicklaus and Nicholas III".

"There was never any Nicholas III," said the deputy. "There will be," I cried, "And he will win".

So, I like to think that a year, two years, from now, when Mr Brezhnev stands on the first tee and declares the first golf course in Russian open, he will carry a note or two compiled from our San Francisco lunch, and he will proclaim to a vast assembly of the peoples of all the Russias "So .. let us begin to play golf. The people's sport.". Happy New Year.

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.

Letter from America audio recordings of broadcasts ©BBC

Letter from America scripts © Cooke Americas, RLLP. All rights reserved.