The United Nations as Viewed From Geneva

The United Nations Organization is an essentially American product, as the jeep or the atomic bomb. Conceived at Dumbarton Oaks near the American Capitol, inspired by American ideas, born under American chairmanship on the American West Coast, having decided on a permanent site in America, it is even endowed with an American surname. In fact as in word, there would be no United Nations were there not a United States.It is therefore very generous of an American body to ask me, as a foreign visitor to your shores, what I think of this American product. But it is correspondingly embarrassing for me to attempt to tell you. When one is invited out to dinner, it hardly does to comment, except in terms of the highest enthusiasm, on the cuisine of your host or on the beauty of his daughter.Your invitation to this intellectual feast therefore obliges me to choose between politeness and sincerity. As I am speaking here at your request, not in any diplomatic capacity whatever, but solely as a friend among friends and as one man of science to a host of academic colleagues, known and unknown, I unhesitatingly opt in favor of complete frankness. I venture to trust that our common ideals of scientific freedom will assure my impunity from any reproach of indiscretion or of impertinence.