Nordlinger - Peace, they say: a history of the Nobel Peace Prize, the most famous and controversial prize in the world

Alfred Nobel, an extraordinary mind and spirit, author of an extraordinary will. Library of Congress, Bain Collection, LC-DIG-ggbain-17492

Henry Dunant, the father of the Red Cross, co-recipient of the first Nobel Peace Prize, in 1901. Library of Congress, Farm Security Administration/ Office of War Information Black-and-White Negatives, LC-USW33-042485

Theodore Roosevelt, the 1906 laureate, a man whose win excites controversy even today. Library of Congress, Harris & Ewing Collection, LC-DIG-hec-15043

Fridtjof Nansen, a reallife Indiana Jones, and the 1922 laureate. Library of Congress, Bain Collection, LC-DIG-ggbain-25031

Ralph Bunche, the American U.N. diplomat who won in 1950. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Carl Van Vechten Collection, LC-USZ62-109113

Sen MacBride, a Nobel peace laureate for 1974 (and soon thereafter a Lenin peace laureate). UN Photo/Saw Lwin

Mother Teresa, the 1979 winner, and almost surely the saintliest of them all. Wikimedia-Commons User Trelio, Creative Commons BY-SA 2.0-de

Rigoberta Mench Tum, the Guatemalan peasant-memoirist who won in the Columbus year of 1992. Micheline Pelletier/Sygma/Corbis

Yasser Arafat, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, who won in 1994 with two Israeli statesmen. World Economic Forum (www.weforum.org) www.swiss-image.ch/ Photo by Remy Steinegger

Wangari Maathai, the 2004 laureate, with King Harald and Queen Sonja (of Norway). Ricardo Medina

Mohamed ElBaradei, co-winner in 2005 with the outfit he directed, the International Atomic Energy Agency. D. Calma/IAEA

To Martha Apgar and Roger Kimball
(in alphabetical order, as the Norwegian Nobel
Committee often, but not always, does)

INTRODUCTION

I s there a higher earthly honor than the Nobel Peace Prize? Its hard to think of one. It represents a summit of human achievement, and goodness. Mamas, dont let your babies grow up to be cowboys, went an old song. They would certainly want their babies to grow up to be Nobel Peace Prize winners. And if they did not, they would be a very special kind of parent indeed.

When you receive the Nobel Peace Prize, you are crowned a champion of peace. A former chairman of the relevant Nobel committee, Francis Sejersted, wrote that the Laureate will symbolise good will and purity of heart all over the world . If you win the prize, people will recite a Beatitude to you, and about you: Blessed are the peacemakers. (They dont so often recite the second part of that Beatitude: for they shall be called the children of God. Perhaps those words seem unfit for secular society.)

A Nobel peace laureate is considered a sage in the world, a moral guide, and an example to all. Desmond Tutuwinner of the prize for 1984has said, No sooner had I got the Nobel Peace Prize than I became an instant oracle. Virtually everything I had said before was now received with something like awe. Its true, too, for better or worse.

The title of this book says that the Nobel Peace Prize is the most famous award in the world. That is maybe not strictly true. The Academy Award, a.k.a. the Oscar, is probably equally famous, if not more so. But, Hollywood to one side, the Nobel Peace Prize is almost certainly No. 1. Winners of the award are listed in the dictionarynot just encyclopedias, but dictionaries. Open one, and you will find Mench, Rigoberta (who won in 1992). And consider this tidbit: In 2010, Jimmy Carter came out with his White House Diary. On the jacket flap, his bio read, Jimmy Carter, our thirty-ninth president, received the Nobel Peace Prize for 2002. The presidency is mentioned first, but the weight of the sentence, there at the end, is on the Nobel prize.

Of this prize, Henry Kissinger, a 1973 laureate, wrote in his memoirs, There is no other comparable honor. Accepting the award in 1949, John Boyd Orr confessed grave doubts about his worthiness to receive the greatest honor any man can get. Later, delivering his Nobel lecture, he said, The award of the Nobel Peace Prize is an international event of the first importance. It arouses the interest of the people of all countries . Ten years later, Philip Noel-Baker received the award: given, as it always is, in Oslo, Norway, during the month of December. He said,

There has come to me what I have always counted as the greatest of the honors which men bestow; it has come to me in the lovely capital of a beloved country, mantled now in Christmas snow; it has come by the decision of your Nobel Committee of wise and most distinguished men. What more could any man or woman ask of Fate?

You might expect winners of this prize to talk this way: After all, they have won. And they are grateful, possibly overwhelmed. But others also acknowledge the supremacy of this prize. Presenting the award in 2007, the Nobel chairman cited the Oxford Dictionary of Contemporary World Historywhich describes the award he was presenting as the worlds most prestigious prize.

It was first handed out in 1901, and of course continues to be handed out today. A history of the Nobel Peace Prize gives us a survey of the 20th centuryand, at this point, about a decades taste of the 21st. We will make our history a chronological one, beginning with the beginning, marching on through the decades, and eras, till we get to President Obama, the 2009 winner. (I will touch on the 2010 and 2011 prizes in an afterword.) Each prize relates to another, really. Along the way, however, there will be excursions and pausessome jumpings ahead, some looks back. I will explore such questions as, What is peace, anyway? and, Who did not win the prize who should have, or might have?