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22 January 1909—25 November 1974

Searching for Peaceful Coexistence

On a September night in 1961, Dag Hammarskjöld, Secretary-General of the United Nations, died in a plane crash while on his way to negotiate a ceasefire between warring factions in what was then called Northern Rhodesia. Hammarskjöld had an international reputation. His successor, a soft-spoken Buddhist from Burma (now Myanmar) named U Thant, was unknown. But he would lead the United Nations with grace and skill during a decade of worldwide strife.

The son of a wealthy landowner and merchant, Thant was educated at the prestigious National High School in his native land and went on to study at University College in Rangoon. Upon graduation, he returned to teach at his alma mater and was appointed headmaster when he was only twenty-five. During his years as a school administrator, he became actively involved in Burma’s struggle for independence from Great Britain. He struck up a working acquaintance and then friendship with U Nu, who became the first prime minister of independent Burma in 1947. Once in office, Nu assigned Thant to several government posts before appointing him Burma’s permanent delegate to the United Nations in 1957.

Thant once said that as a Buddhist, he was “trained to be tolerant of everything except intolerance.” His quiet manner and unassailable integrity gave him the authority to navigate tangled political crises during his tenure as UN Secretary-General. He was instrumental in defusing the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis and in ending the first civil war in the Congo (1960–1966). He opposed the apartheid policy of South Africa and, frustrated by the hawkish posture of President Lyndon Johnson’s administration toward Vietnam, unsuccessfully tried to engage Washington and Hanoi in peace talks. He was also a guiding force in helping establish UN environmental and development programs.

One of the convictions that guided U Thant’s leadership of the UN was his belief that a different kind of war needed to be fought, one that was waged nonviolently for secure and peaceful coexistence rather than conquest. “Two world wars were fought to make the world safe for democracy,” he told the General Assembly in 1964. “Today we have to wage a war on all fronts. This war has to be waged in peace time, but it has to be waged as energetically and with as much total national effort as in times of war. The war we have to wage today has only one goal, and that is to make the world safe for diversity. The concept of peaceful coexistence has been criticized by many who do not see the need to make the world safe for diversity. I wonder if they have ever paused to ask themselves the question: What is the alternative to coexistence?” In many ways, the search for peaceful coexistence was the ruling principle of U Thant’s public life.