Episode 18: The Dangerous Position

What kind of leader runs toward the fire?

In this episode, I'll explore the often-overlooked truth of Dag Hammarskjöld’s role as Secretary-General of the United Nations: it was not just diplomatic, but dangerous. When others fled war zones, Dag stepped into them. Any trip could have been his last, but he saddled up anyway. Where is this kind of courage in modernity?

Sara's award-winning book, Decoding the Unicorn: A New Look at Dag Hammarskjöld, is available on Amazon: https://a.co/d/dYsncvJ


#DagHammarskjöld #SecretaryGeneral #UNHistory #LeadershipMatters #CongoCrisis #Peacekeeper #WhenOthersRanAway #DecodingTheUnicorn #CourageOverComfort

Transcript

Transcription by Otter.ai.  Please forgive any typos!

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

Decoding the Unicorn, podcast episode, new sound setup, non-fiction project, UN Secretary General, dangerous job, bomb threat, Middle East tension, diplomacy, peacemaker, Congo crisis, mysterious death, silent generation, war machine, modern peacemakers.

Welcome to the decoding the unicorn podcast. Here's your host, Sara Causey.

Hello, hello, and thanks for tuning in. Welcome to Episode 18 of decoding the unicorn the podcast. I appreciate you joining me today. I have a new sound setup, and for some reason, my old podcasting microphone, it was picking up a lot of background noise. It almost sounded like I was trying to record an episode with a hair dryer running or inside of a clothes dryer. Was very odd. So I'm trying a different microphone. If the sound quality is better, that's great. If the sound quality is not as good, I do apologize, it's a work in progress. And speaking of which drum roll please, there's a good segue. I have recently finished the first draft, and I want to emphasize rough draft of my next non fiction project, simply DAG. The first draft of any project like that is always ipso facto rough. You go back through it and you're like, oh my gosh, look at these typos. Look at the poor grammar. I can't believe I missed a comma there. What was I thinking? But when we're writing that first draft, we're very much in the zone. We're inspired. And you know, whether you kind of go in this woo, woo direction or not, we're really communing with the spirit of the person that we're writing with. Because for me, this is not about writing something about DAG. It's about writing something with DAG. It's really about CO creating something that becomes part of the lexicon in a meaningful way. And I was just bowled over by the dangerous nature of his job as Secretary General. I mean no disrespect, but I think nowadays people would be hard pressed to even name who the UN Secretary General is. Again, I'm not saying that to try and be disrespectful. It's just we look at the old headlines and DAGs name was in the newspaper basically every day, and there was a sense of people knowing who he was, whether they agreed with him or not, is a different topic, but they knew who he was, and that role was really kind of jokingly referred to as being the president or the Prime Minister of the entire world. Now I think it really has gone back to just being a nominal figure head position. That's one of the things that I want to talk about in today's episode, not only the dangerous nature of the job that dag had, but also, where is that person in modernity? I touched on this in last week's episode. After all the tensions between the US and Iran, it was like we don't want perma wars. We're tired of this stuff. Please stop. Please stop. And where is this person who rushes into danger, who flies into the war zone when everybody else is flying out, when everybody else has written it off as a lost cause? Where is the peacemaker? Where is the diplomat who says, I will go to the source of danger and try to smooth out the pavement? I want to explore that question today.

Just a reminder, you can find Sara's book Decoding the Unicorn: A New Look at Dag Hammarskjöld on amazon.com. The link is available in the summary for this episode. And now back to the show!

When I was conducting research for Simply Dag, one of the things that I discovered was this bomb threat that came in. Dag had already boarded a plane. He was about to leave for Gaza because there was continued tension in the Middle East. Imagine that on and on it seems to go, which is a terrible shame. So he's at Idlewild Airport. Boarded the plane all of a sudden the pilot and the crew come out of the cockpit, and they're like, We need everybody to stay calm, but evacuate the airplane immediately. So imagine this scene. You know, the minute that somebody says, Stay calm, but get out. People are going to panic. So you have mothers with children, you have businessmen, you have various people that are on this airplane trying to get out because they don't know what's about to happen. And then, of course, you have Dag and his bodyguard, slash friend slash aide de camp bill, that's with him, like, okay, there's bound to be trouble. And they see an armored vehicle roll in along the tarmac, and it's the NYPD bomb squad coming in. It's not difficult to connect the dots on what's happened. And as it turns out, somebody has called in a bomb threat saying that DAG is not wanted in the Middle East. And they basically say, like. You know, I don't know if you remember Folke Bernadotte or not, but he, too, was a Swedish diplomat who didn't know how to mind his own business, and went to the Middle East when he shouldn't have, and we killed him. The very same thing could happen here. So they evacuate the airplane, they go through everybody's luggage. They go through all parts of the plane. Thank God they don't find a bomb on board. And DAG's like, well, then we get back on the plane and we go, Bill is like, are you crazy? We just had this bomb threat. Maybe this is not the time. And he's like, No, this is the time. We're not going to be bullied out of going. We're not going to be threatened out of going. We need to be there. It's important for me to fulfill the duties of my job. And that was, I think one of the things that separated dag from so many other people is that, you know, we think about soldiers being willing to lay down their life in the line of duty, and first responders too, firefighters, police, even at times, people that work in the hospital system or emergency technicians like these. These people may be called upon to put their life in danger to save another human being, and they do it. Dag really had that ethos about diplomacy. I will go where I'm needed to go, I will go where I'm requested to go, and that's not always going to be sunshine, roses and lollipops. Sometimes I get called for a speaking engagement and I go and I give a lovely commencement address at a university. Other times I'm flying to a war zone, other times I'm in a refugee camp, and I see children that have no shoes and they're eating scraps and they're wearing clothing that's little more than rags. He saw so many things that emotionally affected him quite deeply, and I wish that all these years into the future. I was recording this episode to say, thank God all of that has been eradicated, but it hasn't, and this is a topic, especially as I've written this draft of simply DAG, and I'm starting to go back through now to make a second draft and polish it up a little bit better before I hire an editor. I'm going back and I'm rereading some of these stories, and I'm like, it's just incredible the number of times that he was willing to go when anybody else would have said, No thanks. It's not worth it. Dag put his hand in the air and said, I will go. I'll be the person who's willing to make the sacrifice play. And he wasn't a martyr about it. I think sometimes people also have this misinterpretation of Dag as being cold, and I'm trying to think of exactly the right word, like willing to die in the name of peace, in the hope of being seen as some paragon of virtue like a virtue signaler, and he wasn't that way either. For him, it was very much. I accepted this job. I knew what it entailed. Let's don't forget, by the way, that Trygve Lie, the incumbent, who was run out by the Soviets, that was the first Secretary General, told DAG, this is the most impossible job in the world. He pretty much slaps Dag on the back and says, like, good luck pal, because you're going to freaking need it. This is the world's most impossible job. You're going to fail, just like I did, but good luck and have at it. And dag was sort of like, I don't have to view the job that way. It might not be the world's easiest job, but I hesitate to say that it's impossible, because that means we're on a fool's errand. We're not really Don Quixote fighting the windmills. We need to have a different perspective about this, and he kept that perspective throughout his tenure. The Congo crisis took a lot out of him that was also very difficult to write about, especially those last few days, when DAG is in Leopoldville, and he's trying so hard to get chombi to meet with him, and Chom B is evasive. He's all over the place. He's in Northern Rhodesia, and then he's back in and dola, and he's back in Katanga. And there were rumors going around that a group of mercenaries called the ultras had kidnapped chomby, and they were keeping him hostage to make sure that he towed the line. It was just an insane time. And so I think also there's this notion that dag knew, he, quote, unquote, knew that the plane was going to crash. He knew that it was too dangerous to make that night flight to try and meet with Tshombe but he did it anyway. And it's horrible, because he not only killed himself, but he killed everybody else on board. And that's not accurate either. As I said, any plane that dag got on could have been the last plane that dag got on, and I saw that so many times in writing this book, the bomb threats, the death threats, there was even a time when somebody. Called in a bomb threat to the UN Headquarters itself. So dag wasn't even traveling anywhere. Somebody called in a bomb threat and said that they wanted to kill DAG, and so the building had to be evacuated. This happened time and time again. Then we have DAGs pet dying under very weird circumstances. You know, I don't want to get too conspiratorial at the same time. I think we just have to sort of scratch our heads and ask the question of like, nobody's home. And then somehow, greenback dies under very weird circumstances, and then a month later, Dag dies under very mysterious circumstances as well could be a coincidence. I'll leave it to you to be the judge, but you know, I certainly have my own opinions on that. And I sit and I wonder, like in the modern era, who is that person that rushes into danger when everybody else is evacuating? Who is that person that says, I want to prevent another world war. I don't want nuclear weapons to be detonated. I don't want a permanent state of emergency. I don't want a permanent state of warfare. John and Jane Q Public all feel that way.

But where is the person in some position of power who views the world through that kind of lens. I'm reminded of this quote that I read. It was actually written by somebody from the silent generation. So we're talking, in that case, about the generation that came in between the greatest generation and the baby boomer generation. And I think like Gen X, which is my generation, the silent generation, so often is forgotten about. People think about the greatest generation, and they then they immediately leap forward to the boomers. And it's like they forget that there was this other generation of people that came between. It happens with us, between the boomers and the millennials. There'll be articles about, here's what boomers, millennials and Gen Z ers think. And it's like, so did Gen X just blip off the earth. All of us born between 1965 and 1980 don't exist anymore. That's kind of interesting. But this man from the silent generation had written that he was an adult when Dag Hammarskjold was killed, and he was an adult when Bobby Kennedy was murdered in 68 and that just ended it for him. It ended any sense of hope. It ended any belief that there was ever really going to be change, that anybody who even got close to making peace a reality would be killed, and that would be the end of it, because the war machine had to go on. And sadly, I feel like that quote has borne out true anybody that gets close to real, true peacemaking is suddenly just not with us anymore. It's a shame, and it doesn't have to be that way. But perhaps that's why, when I sit here and I opine and I wonder, where is that person that runs into danger, where is that person that says, Blessed are the peacemakers, and I want to be one. Maybe that's why we don't have people like that anymore. Just some food for thought.

Stay safe, stay sane, and I will see you in the next episode.

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