Ralph Bunche - An American Life

Ralph Bunche was one of those people history occasionally produces to make the rest of us look like we have spent our lives mostly misfiling envelopes. Born in Detroit, raised in Los Angeles, brilliant at everything, and apparently insufficiently warned that the twentieth century was going to be a paperwork-heavy catastrophe, Bunche became scholar, diplomat, civil rights thinker, United Nations grandee, and Nobel Peace Prize winner — which is quite a lot to fit on a business card, even before the UN starts adding acronyms.

Brian Urquhart’s Ralph Bunche: An American Life follows Bunche from American segregation to the strange, carpeted battlefields of international diplomacy, where wars are not so much ended as persuaded to sit down in another room with a pot of coffee and a dangerously vague draft agreement. Bunche was involved in some of the great machinery of the post-war world: decolonisation, peacekeeping, the United Nations, the Middle East, Congo, civil rights, and all the other cheerful little subjects that make a normal committee meeting feel like arranging the village tombola.

This is not the life of a man who simply “rose above adversity”, that terrible phrase beloved of dust jackets and people who have never had to rise above anything more serious than a delayed train. Bunche had to be exceptionally clever in a world that often preferred him to be invisible, impeccably composed while dealing with systems built by people who were very confident, very well dressed, and frequently wrong. He moved through universities, government offices and international crises with the calm air of a man who knew civilisation was basically held together by minutes, maps, and someone staying polite for five minutes longer than everyone else.

Urquhart gives us Bunche as a public figure and a private human being: ambitious, principled, overworked, sometimes cautious, sometimes bold, and frequently trapped in that ghastly modern role of being expected to represent an entire people while also doing the actual job. He was a Black American intellectual in rooms where the furniture had often arrived before the conscience, and a global diplomat at a time when empires were trying to leave the stage while still taking the curtains with them.

For anyone interested in the United Nations, civil rights, modern diplomacy, post-war history, or the peculiar business of trying to make peace between people who have already decided peace would be very inconvenient, this is a substantial and humane biography. It has the satisfying heft of a serious life seriously told, with enough twentieth-century turmoil to make you grateful your own inbox is merely irritating rather than historically significant.

Near Fine copy, as sold by Crappy Old Books: a handsome survivor of the diplomatic shelf, looking far more orderly than the century it describes. A book for readers who enjoy biography, history, and the faintly absurd spectacle of one highly capable person being asked to help tidy up the planet.

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