Urquhart, Brian

Biography

Sir Brian Urquhart was born on February 28, 1919; educated at Westminster School and Christ Church, Oxford University; served in the Dorset Regiment and Airborne Forces during World War II; personal assistant to Gladwyn Jebb, Executive Secretary of the Preparatory Commission of the United Nations, London, 1945-46; personal assistant to Trygve Lie, 1st secretary general of the United Nations, 1946-49; member, Office of Undersecretary General For Special Political Affairs, 1954-71; active in organization and direction of UN Emergency Force in Middle East, 1956; assistant to the secretary general's special representative in the Congo, 1960, and UN Representative in Katanga, Congo, 1961-62; responsible for organization and direction of UN peace-keeping operations and special political assignments; Assistant. Secretary General of the UN, 1972-74; publications include Hammarskjold (1972) and Ralph Bunche: an American Life (1993); Bunche was born in Detroit, Michigan, on August 7, 1904; AB, UCLA, 1927; AM, 1928, and Ph.D., 1934, Harvard University; professor at Howard University from 1929-1950, and at Harvard, 1950-1952; in 1948 joined Permanent Secretariat of UN; Undersecretary for special political affairs, UN, 1958-67; became Undersecretary general in 1968; awarded Nobel Peace Prize in 1950; died in New York, on December 9, 1971.

Biographical Narrative

Sir Brian Urquhart has led an extraordinary life, much of which has been spent in and around the United Nations system --experience which accounts for his international stature and visibility in current debates over the future of the United Nations and the role of UN security forces in the post-Cold War era. It is fair to say that he has become the central figure in the dialogue over renewing the United Nations system.

Born in England in 1919, Brian Urquhart was educated at Westminster School and Christ Church, Oxford. After serving in the British army and military intelligence during World War II in North Africa and Europe, he served as a personal assistant to Gladwyn Jebb, who established the preparatory commission of the United Nations in London. Since 1946, Sir Brian's professional life has been, in many respects, a history of the UN itself. He was personal assistant to the first Secretary-General (Trygve Lie) and subsequently served in various capacities under Ralph Bunche between 1954 and 1971. Over this period, Sir Brian was centrally involved in the conferences on peaceful uses of atomic energy, the Congo crisis in the early 1960s, and peacekeeping in Cyprus, Kashmir, and the Middle East. In the period after 1972, Brian Urquhart was one of the principal political advisors of the Secretary-General, and served as the Under-Secretary-General for Special Political Affairs, working on Lebanon, Israel and Palestine, and Namibia, among others. He retired from the United Nations Secretariat in 1986.

Across this extraordinary career, Sir Brian has written several books, including brilliant biographies of Dag Hammarskjöld and Ralph Bunche. He has also written an autobiography, A Life in Peace and War, published by Harper & Row. His books on decolonization, and more recently on reforming the United Nations system, have projected him into the international limelight of transnational politics. A tireless speaker and activist, Sir Brian is deeply involved in the events surrounding the fiftieth UN anniversary. His pieces on the UN volunteer force and the responsibilities of the UN system published in The New York Review of Books in 1993 and 1994 have set the terms of the debate for all future discussions of rethinking the UN system.

Conversations with History: Sir Brian Urquhart . 1998. Online. Berkeley Multimedia Research Center. Internet. 9 April 1998. http://bmrc.berkeley.edu/cwh/urquhart/.