UNITED NATIONS: Quiet Man in a Hot Spot

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From the edge of the Elisabethville airport, black, handsome Moise Tshombe, president of the rebellious Congo province of Katanga, watched somberly as a white Convair circled slowly over his capital. At last the Elisabethville control tower gave the Convair permission to land but first warned that the seven troop-laden transports behind it must turn away. Back from the Convair crackled a curt message: Unless all eight planes were allowed to land, the entire flight would return to Leopoldville. Toying with a tourist booklet entitled "Elisabethville Welcomes You," Tshombe (pronounced Chombay) hesitated briefly, then gave clearance to all the planes and stepped out onto the field to greet Dag Hammarskjold, Secretary-General of the United Nations.

As the slim, sandy-haired Hammarskjold marched past a Katanga honor guard, a crowd of several hundred Belgians and Africans set up a cry of "Down with the United Nations." At the sight of the 240 Swedish troops,* the U.N. advance guard who, Dag said, were under "my exclusive, personal authority," the crowd jeered again.

But as Katanga jeered and Belgians fretted, most of the rest of the world cheered. New York Times Reporter James Reston called Hammarskjold "one of the great natural resources in the world today." A Netherlands editorialist saw him as a "supranational figure," Italy as "a world-famed arbitrator . . . who imposes his own will," Japan as "the bridge between the reality of the world situation and the ideal of world peace."

Behind most of these cheers lay the sense of relief expressed by a British diplomat who asked, "Can you imagine what the situation would be in the Congo now if it had not been for the U.N. ?" and promptly answered himself: "Intervention by the two superpowers and a dangerous clash between them." Along with the relief ran pleased surprise at Hammarskjold's positive achievements in the Congo and some concern over what he had let himself and the U.N. in for. In a month of swirling diplomatic maneuver, Hammarskjold had sometimes seemed to falter but in the end prevailed. He steadily pressured the Belgians toward renouncing their angry reoccupation of the Congo that they had so recently freed. He had kept the Congo's erratic politicians, at least for the moment, from plunging their infant nation into civil war, and checked the threatened intervention of such pan-African adventurers as Ghana's Nkrumah and Guinea's Sekou Toure. In the process he had stretched the U.N. Charter into shapes undreamed of by its authors and established the precedents for vastly in creased U.N. authority over member nations suffering from internal convulsions.

Eighty-Two Obligations. The quiet man who has done all of this is a 55-year-old bachelor who was born in a lakeside castle in Sweden of a long line of aristocrats and intellectuals. Despite his athleticism (mountain climbing, cycling), slope-shouldered Dag Hammarskjold has a mild and even frail appearance. He converses sedately in four languages (excellent Swedish, English and French, adequate German), and when he sees a listener has got his drift, will often finish up, "and so forth and so on."