Zachariah Mampilly
In September 1948, Folke Bernadotte, the Swedish count serving as the UN mediator for Palestine, was shot dead on the streets of Jerusalem by the Stern Gang, a Zionist terror outfit. His American deputy, Ralph Bunche, was quickly named as his replacement. Over the next 11 months, Bunche, who had planned to be in Bernadotte’s motorcade that fateful day but was absent because of a delayed flight, painstakingly negotiated an armistice between the belligerents. It was a brilliant achievement. He returned to a ticker-tape parade in New York City, and the mayor of Los Angeles declared July 17 “Ralph Bunche Day.” In 1950, Bunche won the Nobel Peace Prize, the first Black person in any field to be so honored, and that same year, Ebony featured him on its cover with the headline “America’s Most Honored Negro.” In 1963, President Lyndon Johnson awarded Bunche the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Politically, Bunche was a key figure in establishing the UN and a celebrated leader of the civil rights movement. Socially, he counted white liberals such as Eleanor Roosevelt and Black Marxists such as Paul Robeson among his wide network of influential friends. Culturally, he was feted for his accomplishments with fawning comic-book portrayals, and he appeared at the Academy Awards, where he was introduced by Fred Astaire, and announced the prize for best picture. Intellectually, he made seminal contributions to the study of African politics and went on to become the first Black president of the American Political Science Association. In his lifetime, perhaps only Martin Luther King, Jr., and W. E. B. Du Bois could be considered his peers. Despite his accomplishments, he is scarcely remembered today, as a new, deeply researched biography by the legal scholar Kal Raustiala makes clear. His academic contributions are rarely taught. His name is almost never included in the pantheon of American civil rights leaders. Nor is his name celebrated in the former European colonies of Africa and Asia, many of whose founding fathers once relied on him to champion their causes. Even his signature accomplishments—the Arab-Israeli armistice agreement and the founding of the UN peacekeeping force—are seldom acknowledged.
How did Bunche go from being “absolutely indispensable”—as Arthur Goldberg, the U.S. ambassador to the UN, described him in 1966—to largely unknown? Part of the answer is that his achievements have aged badly. The Israelis and the Palestinians are even further from peace than they were in the 1940s. Today’s racial justice advocates more commonly cite revolutionary figures such as Malcolm X and Angela Davis rather than perceived compromisers such as Bunche. Within academia, where Bunche’s name remains most prominent—at least in terms of buildings and centers named for him—social scientists have moved away from the ethnographic methods he pioneered toward detached analyses built on data sets. Even the UN, the institution Bunche identified with most as he worked to build the architecture of global governance, is much diminished, barely registering as a player in conflicts from Afghanistan to Ukraine. Its peacekeeping force is marred by ineffectiveness and accusations of corruption.
Attributing Bunche’s erasure to the unforgiving march of history, however, is unsatisfying. As The Absolutely Indispensable Man notes, Bunche remains an awkward historical figure. As comfortable on the streets of Harlem as he was in the corridors of power in Geneva and Washington, Bunche carved his own path through the mid-twentieth century.
Charged with navigating some of the thorniest crises of the time, Bunche, in Raustiala’s favorable assessment, combined “optimism and realism” to achieve considerable success. Bunche’s diplomatic accomplishments alone are impressive enough to justify studying him today. But his enduring relevance lies in his role in the creation and operation of the liberal international order. Like so many U.S. strategists in the postwar era, Bunche strove to reconcile his country’s interests with his liberal internationalist values. Although he did not always succeed, these dueling impulses defined his career—just as they have continued to define U.S. foreign policy in the decades after he left his mark.
RADICAL YOUTH
Bunche was born in Detroit in 1903. He had a peripatetic childhood, moving around the Midwest before the family eventually settled in Albuquerque. Following his father’s departure from the family, in 1916, and his mother’s death from tuberculosis, in 1917, Bunche moved to Los Angeles with his grandmother and younger sister.
His success began early, at UCLA, where he studied political science. Inspired by Du Bois, that great Black American polymath, Bunche became identified with the “talented tenth,” the segment of the African American population Du Bois thought had leadership potential. Bunche graduated as valedictorian of his class in 1927. Even then, his preternatural confidence in his own abilities was clear. Writing to Du Bois that same year, he proclaimed his readiness to lead: “I have set as the goal of my ambition service to my group. To some extent I am even now fulfilling that ambition.”
Bunche next headed to Harvard for graduate school, with funds raised by the local Black community. In 1928, 25 years old and having received his master’s degree, he began his doctoral studies in political science at Harvard while serving as a professor and founding head of Howard University’s department of political science.
Bunche’s dissertation examined the performance of the mandate system of the League of Nations. The mandate system, which, after World War I, assigned colonies from the defeated powers to the Western victors for administration, was devised amid a surge of global anticolonial nationalism. Bunche compared lands the French had long ruled with those it had recently acquired under the League of Nations’ auspices, arguing that the mandate system, from the perspective of its subjects, was indistinguishable from formal empire. His dissertation went on to win multiple prizes at Harvard and foreshadowed Bunche’s later role in developing the UN Trusteeship Council as a vehicle for shepherding African colonies toward independence.
Bunche at a UN Security Council meeting, Lake Success, New York, October 1946Bettmann Archive / Getty Images
Bunche sought to situate the study of Africa within world history and global change rather than treating it as separate. In contrast to the prevailing arguments that attributed the continent’s woes to some internal, civilizational deficiency, Bunche argued in favor of Africans’ readiness for independence and against the idea that European empires were “developing” immature Africans for self-rule.
During this period, Bunche was influenced by radical Black thinkers, including Du Bois and Robeson. In 1936, Bunche published his first book, A World History of Race, in which he compared racism in the United States to European colonialism. He found common cause with African intellectuals who would go on to lead their countries’ anticolonial struggles, including Jomo Kenyatta, who was Bunche’s Swahili instructor during his stay in London in 1937 and later Kenya’s prime minister. As the historian John Kirby noted in Phylon (a journal founded by Du Bois) in 1974, Bunche in the 1930s was “widely regarded as a militant black political theorist and social critic.”
Bunche left academia in 1941. He joined what eventually became the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the CIA, and later left the employ of the U.S. government for the UN. In the process, he moved from the Marxist views championed by many of his Black contemporaries to Cold War liberalism. Raustiala argues that Bunche disavowed his early work on race and imperialism because of the threat of Nazism, preferring the flawed democracy of the United States to the racial totalitarianism of Hitler’s Germany. Although Bunche was never blind to the flaws of the United States, he believed that, unlike its totalitarian rivals, it could be transformed through the contributions of its diverse population. His life, in many ways, served as proof of his thesis.
When World War II ended, the United States stood as the guarantor of the international order that had been formulated in response to the fascists’ vision. Bunche emerged as one of the defenders of the liberal international order. Understanding that his academic writing impinged on his ambitions in U.S. foreign policy circles, he set about to prove his patriotic bona fides. As McCarthyism targeted left-wing Black critics of the U.S. government, including Du Bois and Robeson, Bunche worked to escape the perceived taint of his earlier radicalism. It was a strategic calculation. “His radical past,” Raustiala notes, had become “an albatross to this new Bunche, one he tried to distance himself from as much as possible.” In time, he would denounce his own book on race, damning it as hastily written. “I am not at all proud of it,” he wrote decades later.
NECESSARY COMPROMISES?
Pitched as a political biography, the book comes to life when Raustiala analyzes Bunche’s diplomatic contributions. The reader follows decades of negotiations, illuminated by Raustiala’s considerable knowledge of international law. In the course of his career, Bunche navigated between the demands of anxious anticolonial leaders attuned to the shifting winds of the emerging postwar order, recalcitrant European leaders mourning the collapse of their imperial fantasies, and the interests of the new superpower, which busily sought to shape this new world in line with its needs and beliefs.
Raustiala is particularly strong on Bunche’s work to resolve crises on behalf of the UN. The armistice agreement that Bunche negotiated between Egypt and Israel in 1949 is discussed in detail. So, too, is his later work in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where Bunche served as the commander of the UN operation in the newly independent country, one of the organization’s first efforts at peacekeeping.
Congo had been brutally misruled by Belgium for over 70 years when the winds of change blew through in the late 1950s. Belgium had little choice but to concede. After Congo’s independence in 1960, however, the Belgian government fomented the secession of the mineral-rich Katanga Province to ensure its continued control over Congo’s vast resources. This was a blatant violation of the new nation’s sovereignty. The government of Patrice Lumumba, the prime minister of Congo, appealed to both the UN and the Eisenhower administration for help.
Neither party responded in the way Lumumba imagined. The UN set up a massive peacekeeping operation, which Bunche led. But despite the Belgian government’s support for the secessionists, Bunche and his boss, Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold, regarded the conflict as a purely domestic dispute and refused to use the UN force to bring Katanga back into the fold. The United States, for its part, so feared Soviet encroachment in Africa that after Lumumba appealed to Moscow for help in uniting his country, the CIA sought to assassinate him. Nor did the UN get involved as Lumumba was arrested and killed with Belgian and U.S. complicity. His body was dissolved in sulfuric acid, and the remains—teeth and finger bones—were taken by a Belgian police officer charged with disposing of the corpse. The remains would not be returned to Congo until May 2022. Lumumba’s army chief, Joseph Mobutu (later Mobutu Sese Seko), orchestrated a coup and proceeded to misgovern the country until his overthrow in 1997, all while remaining a close ally of the United States.
The great risk for those who aim to be champions of compromise is that they may, in the end, become compromised themselves.
Although Bunche had spent his career as an academic championing African independence, his attitude toward the continent changed after he became a diplomat. As with his assessment of Palestinian leaders, whom he compared in his diary to “children,” he tended to regard Africa’s independence leaders with suspicion bordering on contempt. In 1960, for example, he privately denounced Ghanaian President Kwame Nkrumah as an “unprincipled demagogue.” Bunche regarded Lumumba as “a madman,” a “Congolese ogre,” a “jungle demagogue,” and an “utterly maniacal child.” For Raustiala, Bunche’s handling of the Congo crisis is evidence of his pragmatism when negotiating between the United States and the Soviet Union: “It was his skill at finding agreement,” Raustiala writes, “that ultimately turned Ralph Bunche from a successful but largely anonymous diplomat into a national and even global star.” But the episode also reveals why Bunche was criticized as a lackey of the United States by many of the same people he hoped would view him as a fair, if critical, ally. Rather than serving as evidence of his evenhandedness, Bunche’s assessment of Lumumba echoed that of U.S. Undersecretary of State Douglas Dillon, who, after meeting Lumumba, dismissed him as “irrational” and “almost psychotic.”
Throughout these discussions of the detailed work of international diplomacy, Raustiala presents a nuanced picture of a loyal diplomat committed to the promise of global governance, wrestling with the compromises that international diplomacy requires. Letters to his long-suffering wife, Ruth, provide a sense of the isolation that Bunche felt while away. From these letters, readers get a sense of his homesickness and the toll his work took. While in Cairo to negotiate the Arab-Israeli armistice, he wrote to Ruth that “we keep hopping from one [country] to another like mad in our plane and often on just a few moments’ notice. As soon as we land anywhere we begin to confer and leave for someplace else immediately. . . . I get practically no sleep and miss many meals.” Writing from Congo in the midst of the crisis, Bunche told Ruth, “I am dreadfully tired . . . as I got less than three hours sleep last night and even that was more than the night before.”
Bunche interacted with a who’s who of twentieth-century political and intellectual leaders over his three-decade career as a diplomat and scholar. But outside of the galas and formal events, much of his time was spent alone in hotel rooms. Although readers learn much about his interior life, the biography does not delve much into the psyches of his family members. Readers interested in learning more about Ruth, who balanced raising the three Bunche children with her own career as a teacher and activist, must look elsewhere.
ON A PEDESTAL
As the highest-ranking American—not simply Black American—in the UN, Bunche was acutely aware of his role as an embodiment of the American Dream even as he remained wary of nationalism’s inherent divisiveness. The tension between Bunche’s unabashed patriotism and his universalist dreams—“how to balance national interest with multilateral cooperation,” as Raustiala puts it—defined his life.
What emerges from this book is a portrait of a man struggling to reconcile idealism with reality. Bunche was, on the one hand, a committed internationalist and, on the other, a patriotic American seeking to prove that Black Americans were integral to the country’s success. In Congo and elsewhere, reflecting the United States’ common tendency to operate against its stated values, Bunche too often appeared to sacrifice his own beliefs and those of the UN in the interest of his home country.
The great risk for those who aim to be champions of compromise is that they may, in the end, become compromised themselves. For Bunche, and many others who have followed in his footsteps, the soaring rhetoric and ambition that characterizes liberal global institutions could never be squared with the stark reality of power politics driven by the national interests that shape their actual behavior.
These challenges may explain Bunche’s relative absence from our collective memory. Although Bunche did more than almost any other figure to demonstrate the promise of liberal internationalism, he was not immune to its blind spots, nor could he resolve the fundamental tension between nationalism and internationalism. Perhaps his closest analog is former U.S. President Barack Obama, whose soaring rhetoric about promoting democracy was often at odds with his continued support for Middle Eastern and African autocrats. Like Obama, Bunche aspired to be an exemplar of Black excellence in the United States, but the contradictions that that desire produced could never be synthesized with his dream of an equitable and just world order. Although Bunche failed to overcome these challenges, his contributions to a different and more inclusive global community cannot be denied. Today, as the promise of global cooperation recedes amid the rise of nationalism, Bunche’s life still has much to teach everyone.
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