Stephen Schlesinger - Act Of Creation: The Founding Of The United Nations

A Story of Superpowers, Secret Agents, Wartime Allies and Enemies, and Their Quest for a Peaceful World

This book had a lengthy gestation period. I first began to contemplate it when I read a New York Times story dated August 11, 1993, revealing that the United States had undertaken spying at the founding conference of the United Nations in San Francisco in the spring of 1945. The disclosure had come about almost incidentally to a Freedom of Information request by the historian Gar Alperovitz seeking information from the National Security Agency about Americas decision to drop the atomic bomb. Although Mr. Alperovitz did not pursue the U.N. angle, I had had a long-standing regard for the United Nationsespecially its origins. So this new information especially piqued my curiosity. I divined that, as far as the creation of the U.N. was concerned, surely there had to be more to the tale than just the U.S. surveillance activities.

I made my decision to write this book based on the Times piece. My first step was to get hold of the recently released Alperovitz documents. I wrote to the National Security Agency in early fall 1993, and promptly received about 627 pages of information detailing the operations of our nations army agents in surreptitiously following the preparations of other nations for the San Francisco Conference. Much of the information was blacked out for security considerations, but enough of it was still readable to allow me to gain a broad understanding of how extensive and meticulous was the gumshoe work that went on in that California city.

Concomitantly, I began to spend my lunch hours when I worked for Governor Mario Cuomo in offices in Times Square at the nearby New York Public Library. I commenced to search the computerized files for all the books that had ever been written about the San Francisco Conference. I discovered that there was not one full-length account of that historic event anywhere in the collection. This redoubled my fascination with the topic. Soon, I compiled a list of works that at least touched on the meeting or devoted some portion of their text to evaluating the proceedings. Meanwhile, I began Xeroxing all the New York Times articles about the two-month conference running from April 25, 1945, to June 26, 1945. I was especially respectful of the Times coverage since the principals at the conclave talked at their daily gatherings almost exclusively about what the Times was saying.

The copying assignment at the New York Public Library turned out to be a mammoth one. I became an expert in how to handle microfilmskillfully inserting the round cartridges in cranky old machines and threading the spools, arranging the film so that it unwound in the right chronological direction, peering at page after page to assay the San Franciscorelated articles, and carefully photographing the appropriate pieces. It was a laborious taskbut over the period of about six months, I managed to accumulate the entire public story of the conference; this gave me a real sense for the first time of how crises erupted and died away at San Francisco, of the constant flow of commentary and analysis that influenced events, of who was or wasnt a key figure at various public sessions.

In due course, I also supplemented my research with the private notes of the participants at two libraries, the Truman Presidential Library and the Stettinius Archives at the University of Virginia. Although I was not able to visit either personally, through the genius of our technological age, I made use of these repositories though Xeroxes, faxes, Fed-Ex, e-mails, and phone calls. At the first institution, the Truman Presidential Library in Independence, Missouri, Archivist Dennis Bilger was of particular help to me in arranging for me to receive documents relating to Trumans involvement in the San Francisco event. Later at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Virginia, Mr. Gregory Johnson, who works in the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, was of estimable assistance in gaining me access to hundreds of reports, memoranda, and telephone summaries generated by Stettinius and his staff. Ms. Vesta Lee Gordon undertook the actual research into the Special Collections Library to harvest these documents for mea wonderful achievement and an important contribution.