User:John Z/drafts/Leo Pasvolsky

Leo Pasvolsky (August 22, 1893 - May 5, 1953 ) was a journalist, economist, state department official and personal assistant to Secretary of State Cordell Hull. He was one of the United States government's main planners for the post World War II world and "probably the foremost author of the UN Charter." Thomas Connally said in his memoirs "Certainly he had more to do with writing the framework of the charter than anyone else." His New York Times obituary is subtitled "Wrote Charter of World Organization."

A short, rotund, mustachioed pipe smoker with a very large and round head, he joked that he might find it easier to roll than to walk. An aide compared him to the third little pig in the Three Little Pigs, Hull called him "Friar Tuck." A hardworking "one-man think tank" for Hull, he preferred to stay invisible, in the background. In the words of Richard Holbrooke, he " was one of those figures peculiar to Washington -- a tenacious bureaucrat who, fixed on a single goal, left behind a huge legacy while virtually disappearing from history."

Early life
Pasvolsky was born in Pavlograd in the Russian Empire in 1893. His parents were anti-czarists and the family fled to the United States in 1905. After graduating from the City College of New York in 1916 he studied political science at Columbia University and also attended the University of Geneva. He then edited periodicals, the monthly The Russian Review and Amerikansky Viestnik, and the daily newspaper Russkoye Slovo. Engaged in the tempestuous political climate of the emigres in New York, he debated Leon Trotsky during his visit to New York in 1916. He was at first optimistic about the Russian Revolution, and worked as the secretary of Boris Bakhmeteff, the last Ambassador to the US of the Kerensky government, but became embittered and anti-communist after Lenin's October Revolution.

In 1919 he covered the Paris Peace Conference for the New York Tribune, the Brooklyn Eagle and other newspapers, and in 1921 he covered the Washington Arms Conference for the Baltimore Sun. During this period he became a Wilsonian internationalist and softened his stance toward the Soviet Union, arguing for its recognition by the US and its admission into the League of Nations.

Brookings
In 1922 he became an economist on the staff of the Brookings Institution, from which he received a Ph. D. in 1936, and which was his institutional base until his death in 1953. In November 1926, he married Clara Christine McCormick of Pittsburgh.

In his writings in the 20s, he argued that the Soviet Union's 1918-1921 war communism was an ideologically based attempt to realize Marx's vision of socialism or communism, rather than a short-term wartime expedient with no lasting significance. Pasvolsky's book on Bulgaria and others from this period are still regarded as useful surveys by specialists.

Bureaucrat
Early in the first Roosevelt administration, he was hired by Cordell Hull as his personal assistant but returned to Brookings after two years. Later he worked in the Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce of the Department of Commerce (1934-35) and in the Division of Trade Agreements 1935-36 and later in various capacities in the State Department from 1935 to 1946. During the 30s and 40s, frequently with Harold G. Moulton,. his closest ally and collaborator since the 1920's at Brookings, he envisioned a stable, open world economy based on international political cooperation involving a successor to the League of Nations, wider than an alliance of democracies, and with international police powers. Earlier Brookings studies of the 20s and 30s focused on the importance of worldwide demand to the American economy, but by 1941 Paslovsky and Moulton underscored the ever growing dependence of the American economy on foreign raw materials binding the US more tightly to the world economy. "Even before America entered the war, Pasvolsky was thinking about the postwar world. He joined the Council on Foreign Relations in 1938. Along with Norman Davis, Pasvolsky, nicknamed "Pazzy" by some council members, became the main liaison between the Council and the State Department, and regularly attended the Council's Economic and Financial Group meetings in New York.

As Hull's assistant, he was on the same level as the six assistant secretaries of state.

In September 1939, Hull assigned Pasvolsky to planning for the postwar peace, and at Pasvolsky's suggestion, set up the Advisory Committee on Problems of Foreign Relations. After this became moribund, Hull appointed Pasvolsky the first director of the State Department's new Division of Special Research in February, 1941. During 1942 diplomat Charles Woodruff Yost served as Assistant Chief. The two would work together at the Dumbarton Oaks conference, drafting the UN Charter. When the division was split in January 1943 into a Division of Political Studies and a Division of Economic Studies, Pasvolsky continued to supervise them. He was executive officer of the secretive Advisory Committee on Postwar Foreign Policy, which superseded the Division, returning to the broadly based Advisory Committee concept.

UN planning
The work of the Advisory Committeeled to the drafting of an outline for a "preliminary UN" by Undersecretary Sumner Welles, based on the design of the League of Nations. Pasvolsky and Hull eventually opposed Welles' draft as being too hastily written. The major split was over whether the organization would have a "regional" nature, perhaps with local councils, in which each great power would have most of the responsiblity for its region, or would have more centralized structure. Welles, as well as Winston Churchill (and later, Nelson Rockefeller) favored "regionalism," while Pasvolsky and Hull favored a unitary global body. Roosevelt wavered between the two sides.

Throughout 1942, Welles took the lead on planning for the UN and in January 1943 discussed a new and full draft charter with Roosevelt. It incorporated Roosevelt's four power "global policemen" but gave them less than absolute veto powers on an Executive Council with "regional" members too. Welles continued to work on the draft, but after a period of political infighting with Hull, he was forced to resign in August 1943. Subsequently Hull took charge of UN planning, and appointed Pasvolsky to put together a draft charter, which he produced in August. It retained the Security Council, General Assembly and Secretariat, which Welles and Pasvolsky had agreed on, but downplayed regionalism. With the absence of Welles or any other figure with comparable influence, interest and expertise Pasvolsky's ideas and phrasing dominated the drafting henceforward. Before Hull departed for the Moscow Conference (1943), Pasvolsky advised him that economic reconstruction, especially in the USSR, should be a prioritized, while Bowman insisted on territorial agreements restricting Soviet expansion. By February 3, 1944, Roosevelt had approved Pasvolsky's latest draft. It incorporated two major departures "that modulated at least the naked appearance of Big Four dominance". Unlike the League of Nations, it entrusted security matters exclusively to the Security Council. However, it widened the Security Council into an 11 member entity, reducing the dominance of the four big powers that Roosevelt had long envisioned.

In 1943 Pasvolsky was placed in charge of International Organization and Security Affairs in the State Department with responsibility for drafting the United Nations Charter; he was present at Bretton Woods and Dumbarton Oaks. He became chairman of the Coordination Committee at the San Francisco United Nations Conference on International Organization, where the charter was negotiated and signed. Secretary Hull depended heavily on Pasvolsky to explain the plans and proposals for the UN to President Roosevelt. Craufurd Goodwin writes "It is striking how close a resemblance Pasvolsky's statement of objectives for the new international organization bears to the positions he had taken with Moulton throughout the previous decade."

Another important innovation at Dumbarton Oaks was the Economic and Social Council. Pasvolsky and Stettinius managed to persuade Roosevelt to drop his idea of adding Brazil as a sixth member of the Security Council. Pasvolsky opposed an absolute veto by permanent members on all Security Council discussions and resolutions as giving these big states too much power, while Hull and the Soviets supported it. His persistence on this issue persuaded Hull and eventually the Soviets to limit the veto to substantive matters only - not allowing it on procedural ones including discussions.

Other postwar planning
The British Foreign Research and Press Service, directed by Arnold J. Toynbee, also worked on plans for postwar reconstruction and political and economic arrangements and collaborated closely with the Advisory Committee. Toynbee and Pasvolsky "met on many occasions to discuss in detail ideas about the shape of a world order under Anglo-Saxon leadership."

Pasvolsky, reflecting the thought of the State Department, the British, led by Lord Keynes and even the Soviets, envisioned the "eventual integration of Germany into the world economy." This lenience towards Germany in a 1944 State department memorandum by Pasvolsky inspired Treasury Secretary Morgenthau's opposed Morgenthau plan, but while the Morgenthau plan won tentative approval, the more lenient policies were eventually carried out. Similarly, Pasvolsky, concerned about the strain on occupation forces, favored not insisting on the removal of the Japanese emperor, opposing Dean Acheson  and Archibald MacLeish

Return to Brookings and death
He resigned from the State Department in March 1946. In 1946–53 he was director of international studies at the Brookings Institution, and a the time of his death, he was working on a study of the origin and history of the United Nations. He died of a heart attack on May 5, 1953 in Washington, DC, survived by his wife Christine McCormick Pasvolsky, two sisters and two brothers. His incomplete manuscript on the history of the UN was the basis of his assistant Ruth Russell's 1961 History of the United Nations Charter, the standard work on the subject.

Critics
Pasvolsky had his share of enemies at the State Department. Isaiah Bowman, one of the leading advisers of the State Department, took an instant dislike to Pasvolsky. Bowman, Welles and Pasvolsky engaged in a power struggle over the direction of the Advisory Committee in late 1942. Bowman's differences with Pasvolsky erupted at San Francisco, where he wrote that he was "dangerous to American interests" and that it was "a mistake to put one man with his background into a key position." Pasvolsky resented Bowman equally, and wrote him out of subsequent histories of the UN's founding.

Some considered Pasvolsky's Brookings ideas for the world's economic problems simple-minded. Dean Acheson referred disparagingly to the "Hull-Pasvolsky establishment" and wrote that "Leo Pasvolsky was Mr. Hull's principal speech writer.  Or one might say, he wrote Mr. Hull's principal speech: for whatever the occasion or title, the speech was apt to turn into a dissertation on the benefits of unhampered international trade and the true road to it through agreements reducing tarriffs." Acheson belittled Pasvolsky's postwar planning: The whole effort, except for two results, seems to have been a singularly sterile one, uninspired by gifts either of insight or prophecy. One of these results was the foundation work for the United Nations Charter, the other, which laid an even broader foundation, the education of Senator Arthur Vandenberg to understand that beyond the borders of the United States existed a "vast external realm" which could and would affect profoundly our interests and our destiny.

In a 1967 letter, Acheson criticized American moralism in international affairs, which he saw as culminating in "that little rat Leo Pasvolsky's United Nations."

add
Atop the heap article!

+++++++++ Hoopes & Brinkley 114-115 say LP is "generally credited with two proposals that modulated at least the appearance of naked Big Four dominance. One was to merge the 4p (which under FDR's conception were to form a separate entity) with the larger (ultimately 11-nation) Security Council.  The other was to assign exclusive jurisdiction for security matters to that council, while assigning the initiative nfor all non-security matters to the General Assembly, in which all UN members would have a vote.  The League Covenant had generated confusion by giving jurisdiction in security matters to both the League Council and the League Assembly."

137, at Dumbarton, Stettinius headed delegation, exerted principal influence thru steering committe LP, Green Hackworth, and James Dunn, director of the office of European affairs

Pasv's influence, memo on trade liberalization p65-66

++++++++ LP ideas on place of UN: "[U]niversal membership was based on the principle that the organization was an association of nations with common ideals and common standards of behavior. They must, he said, be agreed to undertake certain actions as obligations. He stated that States by accepting certain common principles would be thereby eligible to membership in the organization and that therefore membership had not been made to rest on the fact that a nation exists, but rather that a nation lived by certain principles. He stressed that it was clear that if peace and security were to be maintained, all nations must act in accordance with these principles. He said that when, however, a nation did not wish to accept these obligations once it had entered the organization, when it habitually violated obligations, it was no longer a part of the community of nations, but it was not thereby absolved from its obligations. He mentioned that all nations had certain obligations, whether they were members of the organization or not." 

stuff
"SCHLESINGER: Leo Pasvolsky was a colorless bureaucrat in the State Department who nobody had ever heard of until this book was written, and yet he was probably the foremost author of the U.N. charter.

International Law, Organization and Politics bk review

He was the one given an assignment by Roosevelt and Cordell Hull, who was then secretary of state, in 1939, and he spent six years actually drafting that charter, the charter which we now basically have today before us in the United Nations."

Pasvolsky, Leo The Economics of Communism: With Special Reference to Russia's Experiment Macmillan, 1921 http://www.questia.com/read/676576

http://www.newleftreview.org/A2478 review of Act of Creation

An obscure but determined State Department official named Leo Pasvolsky had been working in secret on a postwar world organization since the end of 1939, under the direct guidance of Secretary of State Cordell Hull. Pasvolsky, a Russian-born journalist and economist who had covered the failure of the League of Nations first-hand, was one of those figures peculiar to Washington -- a tenacious bureaucrat who, fixed on a single goal, left behind a huge legacy while virtually disappearing from history.

By 1944 most key elements of the new organization were in place in Pasvolsky's draft, especially an idea that evolved into the United Nations Security Council -- a small group of nations that would be empowered to authorize the use of force, in the words of Article 39 of the Charter, to maintain or restore international peace and security.

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E04E4DE123AF93BA1575AC0A9659C8B63 review of act of creation NYT By RICHARD HOLBROOKE Published: September 28, 2003

Died. Leo Pasvolsky, 59, Russian-born architect of the United Nations charter and economics expert at Brookings Institution; after a heart attack; in Washington, D.C. A late '30s protege of Secretary of State Cordell Hull, Economist Pasvolsky served as Hull's principal behind-the-scenes strategist at the Dumbarton Oaks and San Francisco conferences, broke a Big Five deadlock at San Francisco by "reinterpreting" the veto question and rewriting the U.N. charter.

Monday, May. 18, 1953

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,818511,00.html?promoid=googlep

lots more at google, amazon



Chapter 7: Harold Moulton and Leo Paslovsky of the Brookings Institution as champions of a new world order Craufurd D. Goodwin

section : "The Missionary Committment of Leo Pasvolsky"



p.89

http://books.google.com/books?id=jfqv5MwzdTEC&pg=RA2-PA89&lpg=RA2-PA89&dq=leo+pasvolsky&source=web&ots=4_v4goo3ZM&sig=5_ryS39GPfocdwFG1JEiL1EUurY&hl=en

p.90 http://books.google.com/books?id=jfqv5MwzdTEC&pg=PA90&vq=pasvolsky&dq=leo+pasvolsky&output=html&source=gbs_search_s&cad=4&sig=V8rd2PSUtx1UzGQtIY9vKZwA0JE

p 91

http://books.google.com/books?id=jfqv5MwzdTEC&pg=PA91&vq=pasvolsky&dq=leo+pasvolsky&output=html&source=gbs_search_s&cad=4&sig=NuHE0T3fb0wB0Cd09TGEZPS7REM

p. 92

http://books.google.com/books?id=jfqv5MwzdTEC&pg=RA2-PA92&lpg=RA2-PA89&ots=4_v4goo3ZM&dq=leo+pasvolsky&output=html&sig=F2Jv9u-ELdGp94noRzU2MbQ5cCM

p 93

http://books.google.com/books?id=jfqv5MwzdTEC&pg=PA93&vq=pasvolsky&dq=leo+pasvolsky&output=html&source=gbs_search_s&cad=4&sig=jQBO7UUzz0rqH233ARgBqOOoVq0

p 94 (acheson's critique)

http://books.google.com/books?id=jfqv5MwzdTEC&pg=PA94&vq=pasvolsky&dq=leo+pasvolsky&output=html&source=gbs_search_s&cad=4&sig=l-zatRik3r9L1EYF8eLsharSZak

p 95

http://books.google.com/books?id=jfqv5MwzdTEC&pg=PA95&vq=pasvolsky&dq=leo+pasvolsky&output=html&source=gbs_search_s&cad=4&sig=eJIj4jV-Fjro2CfNNpN9NlMKUrs

NYT Obit May 7, 1953, Thursday

DR. LEO PASVOLSKY OF U. N. FAME; Economist, Ex-Aide at State Department Wrote Charter of World Organization

Page 31, 542 words

http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F40714F73C5B157A93C5A9178ED85F478585F9&scp=1&sq=pasvolsky&st=p

http://www.america.gov/st/washfile-english/2005/September/20050906111550dmslahrellek0.4635736.html

book on isaiah bowman, critical of lp http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/9390/9390.ch14.php

time mag, crashes

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,801644,00.html

stuff2
10 The UN's origins, long ignored by historians as unimportant, have become the focus of more geographically prescient analyses appearing recently. See Thomas M. Campbell, Masquerade Peace: American UN Policy, 1944-45 (Talahassee: Florida State University Press, 1973); Robert C. Hilderbrand, Dumbarton Oaks: The Origins of the United Nations and the Search for Postwar Security (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990); and Georg Schild, Bretton Woods and Dumbartion Oaks (Houndmills, England: Macmillan, 1995). See also Gardner, Spheres of Influence.





377 Pasvolsky worked for the Brookings Institution from 1923 to 1935 and received a Ph.D. in international economics there in 1936. He started as a special assistant to Hull in 1936 and became a council member in 1938 (Domhoff 1990:119-20). He headed the original State Department Division of Special research in 1941, which “was organized along the same structural lines as the Council groups, and the latter’s research secretaries were integrated into the work of the Division of Special Research” (Wala 1994:34). 378 AQI Kraft 1958:67. The full quote is, “Whenever we needed a man we thumbed through the roll of Council members and put through a call to New York.” 379 9 November 1943, quoted in Wala 1994:37 p 126

A small group of CFR members convened in January 1943 by Hull drafted the original blueprint for the United Nations. Dubbed the Informal Agenda Group, Leo Pasvolsky, Isaiah Bowman, Sumner Welles, Norman Davis and Myron Taylor submitted the plan to FDR on June 15, 1944, after consulting with CFR-affiliated attorneys on its constitutionality. The President publicly announced his approval that same day. WPS members filled the U.S. delegation to both the preparatory conference at Dumbarton Oaks and the 1945 UN founding conference in San Francisco, including the Secretary-General of the conference and secret Soviet agent Alger Hiss.441

438 CFR 1946: 6-7 439 Eichelberger 1977: 202 440 Divine 1967 441 Shoup and Minter 1977:169-71

p. 146

Domhoff, G. William (1990) The Power Elite and the State: How Policy is Made in America (New York: Aldine de Gruyter).

Shoup, Lawrence and Minter, William (1977) Imperial Brain Trust (New York: Monthly Review).

Wala, Michael (ed.) (1993) The Marshall Plan, by Allen W. Dulles (Oxford/Providence)

Wala, Michael (1994) The Council on Foreign Relations and American Foreign Policy in the Early Cold War (Providence, R.I.: Berghann Books). 157181003X

Marshall, Jonathan. To Have and Have Not: Southeast Asian Raw Materials and the Origins of the Pacific War. Berkeley: University of California Press,  1995. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft4489n8wm/

http://etd.library.pitt.edu/ETD/available/etd-08192005-162045/unrestricted/FinalTevelowETD.pdf

article in The Red Cross Magazine 1916

stuff3
After serving close to ten years in the State Department, Leo Pasvolsky returned to the Brookings Institution in 1946, along with six other members of the State Department. With the financial backing of the Rockefeller Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation, and the Mellon Trust, Pasvolsky initiated an International Studies Group, which developed the basis for the Marshall Plan, to aid the European war recovery efforts.

from, nutty?

---> "Indeed, if we had to pick the single most influential individual with reference to UN planning, it would have to be Pasvolsky."

"Based on the documents pertaining to the last phase in the planning process, it is possible to find out argue that nobody besides Leo Pasvolsky had the readiness to answer the main questions about the nature and key character characteristics of new world organizational entity. Not even the so-called “father of the United Nations”, the 1946 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Senator, and long-term Secretary of State Cordell Hull was ready to answer those complicated questions."

"Due to the differences in their respective roles, the planning rhetoric of Pasvolsky’s group was very different from that of President Roosevelt. The role of Pasvolsky in the preparations was that of a pragmatic, technical planner, who transformed the presentations pronouncements of Roosevelt’s pompous humanistic globalism, and the broad development- historical perspectives of other politicians, into conceptual material UN planners could use in their work.

The key idea of Pasvolsky’s project was to introduce the notion of a ”world community” on which to base all other reformative structures, which were to constitute the tools, and characteristics of the new WO. It followed logically from that starting point that much of the old diplomatic system would have to be either discarded or replaced."

compare

stuff4
“Leo Pasvolsky: Architect of the Postwar World?”, paper presented to the Transatlantic Studies Conference, University of Dundee, Scotland, July 2006

Dr. David Woolner Marist College