United Nations: A History by Stanley Meisler

Engaging, balanced overview of the UN’s successes and failures

Stanley Meisler’s book United Nations: A History was first published in 1995. A revised edition was published in 2011 with additional material that continues the history of the UN through the first decade of the 21st century. Meisler was a foreign and diplomatic correspondent for the Los Angeles Times for thirty years, and he published a biography of UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan in 2007. Meisler’s historical narrative of the United Nations begins with the initial conception of the organization at the Dumbarton Oaks Conference of 1944. From there, Meisler chronicles all the major diplomatic crises and peacekeeping missions in which the UN became embroiled, including Israel, Korea, the Congo, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Somalia, the Gulf War, Rwanda, Bosnia, Kosovo, and more. In addition, Meisler’s institutional history reveals the interior power struggles and personality conflicts behind every secretary-general election, many policy debates, and the occasional accusation of corruption.

From his preface to the book, you can tell that Meisler believes in the mission of the United Nations. He is not a conservative or isolationist naysayer. Even so, his hopes for the organization don’t prevent him from providing a balanced assessment of the UN’s accomplishments and failures. In fact, the way Meisler tells the story, it would seem that the failures outnumber the successes. As Meisler puts it, in summation, “Throughout its history, the United Nations has never fulfilled the hopes of its founders, but it accomplished a good deal nevertheless.” Meisler’s telling of the UN story is heavy on the American perspective, both because he is an American journalist and also because the United States has played such a large role in the UN. Since so much of the UN’s work is carried out in what used to be called “the third world,” however, the coverage extends far beyond New York and Washington. One ends up getting more recent history on developing nations than you are likely to find in many world history textbooks.

Because of its often bureaucratic subject matter, Meisler’s book isn’t always exciting, but it delivers everything I expected and more. At least half of the events covered in this book took place before my adult memory, and Meisler provided me with a thorough education filled with interesting details. As for the more recent events, I was due for a refresher course, and this book gave me one. In the United States, UN happenings often get page-three treatment behind the doings of our president and Congress. In this book, crucial moments of world politics, policy, and diplomacy are placed front and center to give the reader a broader perspective and understanding of what was happening throughout the rest of the world.

I enjoyed reading Meisler’s mini-biographies of the UN secretary-generals and other major players in the organization—figures like Dag Hammerskjöld, Ralph Bunche, and Kofi Annan. Also, through Meisner’s behind-the-scenes insights into the workings of the UN, I gained a better understanding of what it is that diplomats actually do. Out of necessity, Meisler had to heavily condense a great deal of history to fit the UN story into one volume. The entire Vietnam War, for example, is dispatched in about half a chapter. Nevertheless, I feel like I got a comprehensive, engaging, and well-written history of the first 65 years of the UN.
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