Keen On

How to bring peace to Gaza and Ukraine? Maybe the United Nations can help. Or, sadly, maybe not. But there really was a time, in the second half of the 20th century, when the United Nations could help bring peace to supposedly insoluble wars. The U.N.'s glory days were in the Sixties when it was run by a former Burmese school teacher called U Thant. His incredible story is told by his grandson, the Cambridge University historian Thant Myint-U, in a new book appropriately called Peacemaker. Thant Myint-U reminds us of a halcyon time when the UN Secretary-General could summon presidents at will, mediate between nuclear superpowers, and command respect from Castro to Kennedy. Today's forgotten history reveals how U Thant's intervention during the Cuban Missile Crisis helped prevent nuclear war—a role not-so-surprisingly airbrushed from most American and Soviet accounts. Yes, even in the glory years of the Sixties, the bureaucratized U.N. was far from perfect. But under a dedicated peacemaker like U-Thant it coul