Dag Hammarskjöld thought his UN nomination was an April Fool's joke
Just after midnight on 1 April 1953, a journalist phoned Dag Hammarskjöld to say the Security Council had picked him to lead the United Nations. Nobody had told him he was a candidate, so he dismissed it as an April Fool's prank. Only after a third call did he believe it. He was 47, still the youngest person ever to hold the job.
The superpowers wanted a quiet administrator after months of deadlock, including a Soviet veto of Canada's Lester Pearson. Hammarskjöld, a Swedish economist and civil servant, seemed to fit. The Soviet envoy judged him harmless, and at the US State Department the nomination caught officials so off guard that they scrambled to find out who he was, concluding he might be as good as they could get. The Security Council backed him 10 votes to none with one abstention.
He was the youngest of four sons of Hjalmar Hammarskjöld, Sweden's prime minister from 1914 to 1917, and grew up in Uppsala Castle. He earned a doctorate with a thesis on how business cycles spread, chaired the Swedish central bank's governing council from 1941 to 1948, helped at the Paris conference that set up the Marshall Plan and served in a Social Democrat cabinet without ever joining a party. In 1954 he took his late father's seat in the Swedish Academy.
At the UN he set out to win over staff, shaking hands in every department, eating in the cafeteria and opening the Secretary-General's private lift to everyone. He had a meditation room built for people of any faith. In 1955 he travelled to China to negotiate the release of 11 captured American airmen, and during the 1956 Suez Crisis he oversaw the first UN peacekeeping force.
The Congo tested him most. The UN operation there reached nearly 20,000 troops, the Soviet Union demanded his resignation and a three-person leadership, and declassified papers suggest he was less neutral than he claimed, so his record remains deeply disputed in Africa. He died in a plane crash in September 1961 on the way to ceasefire talks and remains the only person awarded the Nobel Peace Prize posthumously.
Source: Dag Hammarskjöld
