Jan Kjaerstad - The Seducer

In Trygve Lie’s case there was no shortage of material. The whisperers began by having some fun with the harmless fact that Trygve Lie’s English pronunciation was little short of comedy-hour standard — their imitations of this were actually very funny. Then they turned to whispering, far more maliciously, about how Trygve Lie gave in to McCarthy’s paranoid ‘reds under the bed’ hysteria and granted the FBI access to UN headquarters, to investigate the people who worked there, before rounding off with an even softer, poisonous sequence on the blackening of Dag Hammerskjöld’s name, all presented in the form of vague rumours, interspersed with little hints and insinuations — just as in real life — where the viewers were left to fill in the gaps for themselves: ‘Didn’t he make a lot of not exactly pleasant remarks about Dag Hammerskjöld?’ — ‘Bad-mouthed him something rotten, you mean.’ — ‘The way I heard it, he called him both one thing and the other’ — ‘Oh, yes, especially the other’ — ‘And wasn’t there even some crude reference to Hammerskjöld’s sexual proclivities?’ — ‘Just because he was a bachelor’ — ‘Somebody said that Hammerskjöld had to put Lie on the carpet’ — ‘Uh-huh, and ask him to curb his imagination’ — and so on and so forth, blithely, whisperingly anonymous.

The programme’s central scene was shot in NRK’s biggest studio. Jonas Wergeland wished to concentrate on the very heart of Trygve Lie’s work: his tireless struggle to safeguard the fragile peace. At no other time in Lie’s life did this manifest itself more clearly than during a heroic 32-day tour made in April and May of 1950, during which Lie journeyed halfway around the world, to Washington, London, Paris and Moscow in order to hand over in person a document which he had written, rather grandly entitled ‘Memorandum on principles for consideration in the preparation of a twenty-year program to achieve peace through the United Nations’. In actual fact this tour more or less amounted to a personal attempt to save the UN from dying the death — the Soviet Union had already boycotted the Security Council in protest at the exclusion of communist China. Trygve Lie tried, in other words, to prevent a rift between two irreconcilable blocs, to put an end to the Cold War. A fitting task for a Norwegian, really: the battle against the cold. On the huge film set Jonas Wergeland had arranged four groups of tables and chairs, to represent the four capitals and the summit meetings held there. Lie was then trundled round the floor in a circle, sitting in a miniature aeroplane, from one group — i.e. city — to the next, and at each stop he presented his memorandum and spoke to the heads of state and their foreign ministers. The floor of the set showed the UN’s blue and white map of the world with the North Pole and, hence, Norway too, at its centre, encircled if not with a laurel wreath, then certainly with olive branches as if this were another race in which a Norwegian would win his laurels.

Trygve Lie went round and round, a wheel with a desire for peace at its hub, presenting his utopian document, ten points for achieving peace. Viewers saw how he struggled, plodding round in a circle, a sort of outsize budgie wheel, shaking hands here, shaking hands there, with President Truman, Prime Minister Atlee, Prime Minister Bidault, Generalissimo Stalin and their staff. Making the same opening remarks every time. They all listened to him, they were all most polite, they all said the same thing, they all promised to study his memorandum carefully and with the greatest interest, they all appreciated his efforts, they were all truly grateful for this initiative, they all found his observations both enlightening and useful, but even while they were smiling and nodding approvingly, they were picking holes in his suggestions: in all honesty we doubt whether these points are of any relevance vis-à-vis the current situation, no, we cannot limit the use of the Security Council’s right of veto. Trygve Lie makes amendments, adds appendices, travels on, people smile and nod approvingly, but no, a meeting of the heads of state is not, in our opinion, the most burning issue at this time, and furthermore, we do not want to have anything to do with communist China. Trygve Lie puts up with all the quibbling, the insistence upon different wording, travels on, people smile and nod approvingly, but no, such a suggestion conflicts with our interests, we must be careful not to create false illusions, Twinkle, twinkle little bat and all that, accompanied by a hail of ‘at this moment in time’ and ‘the way we see it’ and ‘the time has come’. Trygve Lie travels on, people smile and nod approvingly, but no we are afraid that we cannot go along with the idea of regular meetings of the Security Council, nor do we have any faith in the notion of having a consultative assembly to discuss the problems associated with atomic energy, we are also extremely unhappy about the way in which the UN has handled the question of colonialism. Trygve Lie travels on, circling the room, traversing a light-blue and white flag of the world, on a utopian journey in the cause of peace on which the Soviet troika of Stalin, Molotov and Visjinski make a notably large number of objections, but Lie makes change after change, deletes and appends, refuses to give in. Trygve Lie travels in a circle from one capital to the next, following the curve of the olive branches, with Jonas Wergeland inserting intermittent clips of what was being said behind Lie’s back while he was busy at another table. The Russians called him an ‘American lackey’, while the Americans believed him to be a ‘Stalinist agent’, far too ready to make concessions to the Russians. To the British he was a simple man, little better than a peasant, and they were shocked by his lack of discretion in the playing of his political role, so far removed from the understated English style of diplomacy learned on the playing fields of Eton. The cynical Frenchmen laughed outright at the whole rash initiative, this attempt to raise earnest Norwegian morality onto a global plane — and all this while the viewers were watching Trygve Lie eventually pulling off his jacket, sitting there in shirtsleeves and braces, chain-smoking, a secretary for peace, a Sisyphus from Norway, undertaking the most impossible task in the world, trying to prevent another major conflict. Trygve Lie puts his shoulder to the wheel, keeps going, looks on the bright side, calls this tour of his a voyage of discovery; Trygve Lie in his shirtsleeves and braces, the personification of the Norwegian Labour Party, sitting at the helm of the world in a plucky endeavour to turn the entire globe into one good solid social democracy.

And all the while newsreel clips were flashing across a studio wall in the background, showing how the major powers and particularly the United States and the Soviet Union were arming themselves, building warships, tanks, rockets. And more particularly how stocks of nuclear weapons were building up month by month. And when Trygve Lie returned home from his one-man peace mission, suffering from a sore throat — brought on, one might almost think, by all that talking — but feeling almost certain that he had succeeded in arriving at some sort of consensus and possibly even managed to achieve his prime aim: a meeting in the very near future of all the government leaders, he was shown standing facing this newsreel backdrop, in his shirtsleeves and braces, chain-smoking, and watching as the images suddenly exploded; in June, scarcely a month after he completed his journey for peace, the Korean War broke out. Jonas Wergeland had unearthed some pretty harrowing scenes from the war which made a fitting contrast to Trygve Lie’s dogged, but hopeless and naïve struggle for peace.

Personally, I have a bit of a soft spot for this programme, perhaps simply because so many Norwegians underestimate, or have quite simply forgotten, Trygve Lie. To me — who can take an objective view of all this — Trygve Lie is Norway in a nutshell: not some brilliant intellectual figure but an idealistic and hardworking secretary. As far as I can gather, Lie must surely have earned himself the right to be called ‘the master-builder of the UN’ — after all, who can say how the United Nations would have turned out without him and the devotion he showed to the organization as an ideal, whatever standpoints might be taken or resolutions passed. Through his efforts during the delicate construction phase, Trygve Lie had a quite crucial influence on the greatest experiment in international collaboration the world has ever known. For that alone I take my hat off to him.