in it must be purer or more reasonable, or less subject to pride and prejudice, than those in politics elsewhere. But the more you study the politics of the United Nations, the more clearly you see how similar it is to our homegrown American brand.

In both kinds of politics, domestic and international, political leaders sometimes talk primarily for home consumption. If an African political leader speaks in the United Nations General Assembly in a way designed to make him a hero at home in Africa, is that really so surprising or so different from American practice?

In both kinds of politics, domestic and international, the irresistible force of executive logic meets the very resistant body of legislative process. If no country gets precisely the results it seeks every time at a United Nations conference, consider whether your Congressman ever gets through Congress precisely the ideal bill he starts by sponsoring. In both kinds of politics we see the collision of too many principles elbowing each other in the crowded corridors of policy.

In both kinds of politics, domestic and international, there are problems of apportionment. I occasionally encounter an American who is quite relaxed about the presence in the Senate of two Senators from each State, regardless of size, yet is appalled to find that the United Nations Charter gives each country, regardless of size, one vote in the General Assembly. Today's complaints about the apportionment of votes in the General Assembly can be matched by the early complaints about the Great Compromise in the Philadelphia Convention of 1787. But what looked grotesque to the contemporaries of Madison and Jay looks pretty good after 174 years. And the apparent grotesquerie

of "one country, one vote" doesn't look bad after 17 years in the United Nations.

There is a temptation, which many commentators do not resist, to recommend that the United Nations operate according to some system of weighted voting. When it comes to financial decisions, there must eventually be some way to take formally into account the fact that 16 free countries put up 61 percent of the resources which convert the United Nations from a debating society to an important operating system that spends more than half a billion dollars a year. But there has been so much talk about weighted voting in the General Assembly that we decided several months ago to take a look at the facts.

We developed 15 different systems of weighted voting, factoring in the scale of U.N. assessment, population, and national income, singly and in combination. Then, with the help of a computer, we applied those 15 systems of weighted voting to the 178 key votes taken in the General Assembly from 1954 to 1961. We found some sobering facts. Almost without exception, those key votes would not have gone as well under the weighted voting formula, from the point of view of the United States' national interests, as they did in fact go under the "one country, one vote" system.

The reason, of course, is clear. Almost any system of weighted voting you want to select will lift the voting power of the Communist bloc in the General Assembly from 10 to 20 percent or more. Almost any system of weighted voting you want to select will downgrade the voting power of a great many countries which are indeed quite small but whose voting behavior strikingly coincides with our own-because both they and we are willing to base our foreign policy on the same United Nations Charter. The next time you hear

someone complain about the "one country, one vote" principle, ask him to let me show him some computer tabulations in my office in Washington.

In both kinds of politics in which you and I are deeply engaged-the domestic kind and the international kind-we have to apply the elementary things we know about political life, from instinct and from personal experience. We know that politics is the art of the possible; we know that it involves the hardest kind of homework. We know that success attends the efforts of those who are not afraid to repeat themselves until they are sure they are understood and those who will listen to the views of others beyond the point of screaming boredom. We know that the political leader, like Dr. Conant's turtle, makes progress only when he sticks his neck out.

And thus we know that the responsible executive in international politics, as in community or State or national politics, must try as best he can to take everything and everybody into account, must constantly be asking those four classic questions that Paul Appleby terms the precondition to any political act: "Who is going to be glad?" "How glad?" "Who is going to be mad?" "How mad?"

U.N. Actions in Critical Areas

The United Nations, then, is an arena of practical politics, a tool of growing sharpness for economic and social development, for peaceful settlement of incipient disputes, and for restoring the peace after it has been breached. As such, from our point of view, it is an instrument of American foreign policy, made complicated by the efforts of every other member country in the United Nations to use it as an instrument of its foreign policy too.

But if the United Nations is a political organization, working partly for us, we have a right to ask the ultimate political question-to paraphrase Alben Barkley: "What has it done for us lately?"

Well, two of the crises that have lately stirred our souls and enlivened our politics have been Cuba and the Congo. What did the United Nations do in those crises that was important to us?

In the case of the Cuban crisis the United Nations first provided a forum in which we could demonstrate the credibility of our facts about the Soviet missiles and explain to the world why we and our Latin American allies had to act on those facts.2

Then the United Nations, through its Secretary-General, served as a middleman in parts of the dialog between President Kennedy and Chairman Khrushchev which led to a peaceful solution. It was an appeal from U Thant which Chairman Khrushchev was answering when he said that his ships would not challenge the quarantine line.

The United Nations also was ready, at our suggestion, to provide inspectors to examine missile sites in Cuba to make sure the missiles were gone. Castro would not allow U.N. inspectors into his island fief. But by refusing to cooperate with the United Nations, Castro branded himself an outlaw and convinced practically all the vocal bystanders that this was no case of little Cuba versus the big United States; this was a case of an intransigent Cuba thumbing its nose at the world community.

In the case of the Congo, the United Nations was dispatched to keep a chaotic country with

'For background, see BULLETIN of Nov. 12, 1962, pp. 715-746.

a mutinous army from sucking in the great powers to confront each other in the middle of Africa. The United Nations mission there can be expressed in words straight out of the United Nations Charter: to protect the territorial integrity and political independence of that large and strategic country, a new nation with nine international frontiers, whose destiny will deeply influence the destiny of a continent.

The objective of the United Nations was to sit on the lid and conciliate the contending forces. A few of the contending forces, however, preferred to contend rather than talk: so the United Nations force helped the Central Government deal with a Communist-supported secession in Orientale Province in the north, another secession in the diamond-smuggling area of South Kasai, and a third secession based on copper revenues in South Katanga. Now, hopefully, the contending factions can find some way of operating together, and the United Nations can revert to the more normal function of coordinating economic aid and providing technical people to help the Congolese administer their large, rich, but still disorganized economy.

United States policy in the Congo was to help restore peace and order in the heart of Africa. By supporting the United Nations we did just that.

So these are two things-two supremely important things in Central Africa and the Caribbean-which the United Nations has done for us lately. There have been others in the year just past.

In the Middle East, truce supervisors policed for the 15th year the armistice by which the State of Israel was created; and the United Nations Emergency Force, the first truly international peace force, operated for the 6th year