184. Memorandum From the Under Secretary of State for Economic Affairs (Ball) to President Kennedy 1
SUBJECT
- The Problem of a Successor to Secretary-General Hammarskjold
The optimum solution to the situation created by the death of Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold would be the regular appointment, under Article 97 of the United Nations Charter, of a successor by the General Assembly upon the recommendation of the Security Council. This will not be possible since the USSR, which has a veto in the Council, has announced that it will agree to no one as Secretary-General, not even Mr. Arkadev, the principal Soviet official in the United Nations Secretariat.
At the other end of the spectrum of possibilities, it might develop that no affirmative action would be taken by either the Security Council or the General Assembly to provide for proper discharge of the Secretary-General’s functions. In this situation, the United Nations Secretariat and the United Nations operations in the Congo as well as the United Nations Emergency Force would be without an effective directing head. In practical terms, if this did not lead to disintegration of the United Nations, it would produce a de facto troika arrangement.
Between these extremes lie other possibilities with varying degrees of acceptability. Our delegation in New York has been instructed to seek adoption of a General Assembly resolution which would invest a single competent individual with the functions of Secretary-General provisionally until a new Secretary-General is regularly appointed by the Assembly upon recommendation of the Security Council. We are satisfied of the legal validity of this procedure within the United Nations constitutional structure. In this connection, it is reported that Ambassador Boland, of Ireland, and his neutral group have agreed on the following principles:
- (1)
- A single individual should be named;
- (2)
- He should be able to discharge on a provisional basis the functions of Secretary-General;
- (3)
- The designation of the individual should be made promptly and by the General Assembly alone; and
- (4)
- This should be done despite Soviet opposition.
Another and clearly less satisfactory possibility would be a General Assembly resolution inviting a named individual “to assume for the time being the direction of the Secretariat”. This formula has been advanced by [Page 392] Ambassador Boland as an alternative. Such a formula would appear to omit from the individual’s mandate the Charter functions of the Secretary-General other than his capacity as chief administrative officer and also the functions of the Secretary-General under a number of Security Council and General Assembly resolutions dealing with such important matters as the Congo. The formula would be improved to some extent by the addition, as proposed by our delegation in New York, of the words “with the functions set forth in Chapter XV of the Charter”. The obvious ambiguities remaining if this kind of language were to be adopted would be ameliorated if Ambassador Boland and other delegates were to state, in explanation of the proposed resolution before the General Assembly, that it was designed to give the named individuals all the functions of the Secretary-General on an interim basis.
We have asked the United States Mission in New York to make as firm a stand as possible, in the complex and difficult tactical situation that prevails there, in favor of language which would invest the person who is provisionally appointed with all the functions and powers he needs—which is to say the functions and powers that Dag Hammarskjold had. We are in hourly touch with the negotiations as they proceed and will check in with you when they reach the point when a final judgment about the United States position can be formulated.
- Source: Kennedy Library, National Security Files, Subjects Series, United Nations (General), 9/61, Box 310. Confidential. A handwritten notation on the memorandum reads: “Taken frm 9/23 week-end book.”↩