Leaders In Profile Ralph Bunche, “The Man Everybody Likes”

Press, Volume XCV, Issue 28270, 7 May 1957, Page 11

Leaders In Profile Ralph Bunche, “The Man Everybody Likes”

[By

LES ARMOUR]

April 11, 1957. The impression most people have of Ralph Bunche is a blur. A glance down the list of his activities, succinctly recorded in half a column of Who’s Who, breeds mental indigestion. A look at the man himself in action serves as an explanation. He moves at a half-walk, halfrun, his shirt usually open at the neck, a cigarette perpetually - dangling from his mouth. He talks rapidly, but without waste of words. Often he sounds almost brusque. Impoliteness is far from his nature; but waste—even of words—is even farther. His grandfather was a slave, and he is acutely conscious of the problems of his race and of its trials both in the United States and abroad. But he spends no time pondering his own position or looking for insults. Bunche can hold his own anywhere in the world. And he knows it. There is no “race problem” for him. In part, he is fortunate. For he is primarily a scholar and in the academic world the race problem has never existed. But he is also a diplomat and in the diplomatic world it can be explosive. A stocky, compact man, with a complexion a little darker than a Florida tan and slightly crinkly hair, he looks like a precision machine. It is not hard to guess that he first made his name as an athlete. His parents both died when he was still in school and he went to live with an aunt in Los Angeles. After a spell as a carpet layer, he won an athletic scholarship to the University of California. He was welcomed not as a scholar but as a basketball star. Political science, however, proved more interesting than basketball and he was soon being i groomed for a scholarly career. Studies at Harvard i Another scholarship took him to Harvard where he took his Master’s Degree. At Harvard, he abandoned basketball completely—but not his other sportsman’s love, billiards. He still has a sharp eye and a steady hand. From Harvard he went to Washington’s Howard University as Assistant Professor and Chairman of the Department of Political Science. Howard has often been dubbed a hotbed of Negro communism and suspected of being a training ground for political agitators. Apart from the fact that the university has, indeed, turned out leaders whose courage has sometimes outrun their reason, none of 3 these allegations has ever been i proved. *•

In any case, Bunche was never impressed with communism as an answer to the Negro’s problem. What he demands for the Negro is simply the same rights, responsibilities, and opportunities as other Americans enjoy. After two years as Assistant to Howard’s President he returned to Harvard to take his Ph.D. His thesis was a comparison of the forms of government in two French West African territories —one a colony and the other a trusteeship territory. The thesis was never published but it won him his doctorate and a Harvard prize. “Three Jobs at Once” He left Harvard to take three jobs at once. One was his old job at Howard. The second was with the Carnegie Corporation which was engaged on a study of the Negro in America. The third was at Swarthmore College’s Institute of Race Relations.

War intervened and, after an unsuccessful attempt to join the army (they wouldn’t have him on acount of an old knee injury) he joined the Office of the Coordinator of information.

Later he was transferred to the State Department as top advisor on colonial territories.

After the war, he served for a year on the Anglo-American Caribbean Commission. Then he was loaned to the United Nations as Director of the Trusteeship Division. That led to his appointment as Acting Meditator in the Palestine dispute. It was in Palestine, after the assassination of Count Bernadotte, that his name became a household word.

In an atmosphere of hate and recrimination seldom equalled in modern history, he emerged as the one man everyone liked. Even now, he stands almost alone as a man who is persona grata td both Jew and Arab, a man to whom bbth sides turn for what they, know will be a fair and sympathetic- hearing.

The Palestine settlement was not his doing. The underlying problem was too deep for any one man to settle and Bunche recognized as well as anyone that the settlement that was reached could not be the end.

The significance of his work in Palestine was that he did manage, for a few moments at a time, to get both sides to recognize that neither’s aims were necessarily incompatible with the other’s. Even that tiny flicker of hope scarcely outlasted his presence in the conference rooms. Rut the personal goodwill that he engendered did survive. For his work he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize —and, for it, he became Under Secretary of the United Nations.

Now he is at work in the Middle East again. The situation has gone from bad to worse. But still there is one hope: In Cairo and in Tel Aviv, Ralph Bunche is still welcome.