U Thant

Thant was born on January 22, 1909, in Pantanaw, a market town in the Irrawaddy delta of British-ruled Burma ^[1]. The honorific "U" that later attached to his name is a Burmese term of respect, roughly equivalent to "Mister", not a given name. His father, Po Hnit, was a landowner and rice merchant who had studied in Calcutta, spoke English, and helped found a Rangoon newspaper. The family placed unusual weight on books and public affairs, and the household took both Burmese and English publications ^[1].

His father died when Thant was fourteen, and a dispute over the inheritance left the family in reduced circumstances. As the eldest of four brothers, Thant shortened his ambitions to fit his obligations. He completed two years at Rangoon University rather than a full degree, then returned to Pantanaw in 1928 to teach at the National High School and help support his mother and siblings ^[2].

Even as a young teacher he wrote constantly. He contributed articles to Burmese journals under the pen name Thilawa and translated works into Burmese, building a modest reputation as an essayist on education and civic life ^[2]. At twenty five he became headmaster of the Pantanaw school, a post he won through a competitive examination.

The friendship that defined Thant's career began in Pantanaw. U Nu, who would become independent Burma's first prime minister, served as school superintendent in the town, and the two men grew close through shared work on education and journalism ^[3]. When Burma gained independence from Britain in 1948, Nu brought Thant into government, first as director of broadcasting and then as secretary in the Ministry of Information ^[3].

Through the early 1950s Thant worked at the center of Burmese politics without ever standing for office. He served as secretary for projects in the prime minister's office and became one of Nu's closest advisers, drafting speeches and handling sensitive assignments ^[2]. He helped organize the 1955 Asian-African Conference at Bandung, an early gathering of states that would form the non-aligned movement, an experience that widened his diplomatic contacts across Asia and Africa ^[3].

In 1957 Nu appointed him Burma's permanent representative to the United Nations in New York. Thant proved a skilled and well-liked delegate, chairing committees on Algerian independence and serving as a vice president of the General Assembly session in 1959 ^[1]. Colleagues noted his even temper and his habit of listening longer than he spoke, qualities that would soon matter far beyond Burma's delegation.

Dag Hammarskjöld's death in a plane crash in September 1961 left the UN leaderless at a dangerous moment. The Soviet Union had been demanding a three-person "troika" executive in place of a single Secretary-General, and the deadlock threatened the office itself. Thant emerged as the candidate acceptable to Washington, Moscow, and the growing bloc of newly independent states, and on November 3, 1961, the General Assembly appointed him acting Secretary-General ^[4]. He was confirmed in the post in his own right a year later, the first Asian to lead the organization.

His test came almost immediately. During the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, Thant sent parallel appeals to President John F. Kennedy and Premier Nikita Khrushchev urging a pause, asking the Soviets to suspend arms shipments and the Americans to suspend the quarantine while talks proceeded. His messages gave both leaders room to step back, and he flew to Havana to negotiate with Fidel Castro over verification arrangements ^[4]. Kennedy later acknowledged that the Secretary-General's intervention had helped make a peaceful outcome possible ^[5].

Other crises crowded his first term. He brought the UN operation in the Congo to a close in 1964 after the secession of Katanga collapsed, and he negotiated the framework that placed West New Guinea under temporary UN administration before its transfer to Indonesia, the first time the organization directly governed a territory ^[4]. In 1964 he established the UN peacekeeping force in Cyprus, which deployed within weeks of the outbreak of intercommunal fighting ^[6].

Any honest account of U Thant achievements has to include quiet institutional building alongside crisis management. He pressed for the creation of the UN Conference on Trade and Development in 1964 and the UN Development Programme in 1965, reflecting his conviction that the gap between rich and poor nations was as dangerous as the arms race ^[6]. He championed the designation of the 1960s as the UN Development Decade and gave early, forceful warnings about population growth and the human environment, helping set in motion the 1972 Stockholm conference on the environment ^[6].

Vietnam shadowed his second term. Thant worked persistently and mostly in secret to arrange direct talks between Washington and Hanoi, and in 1964 he believed he had secured North Vietnamese agreement to meet, an initiative the Johnson administration declined to pursue ^[5]. He grew openly critical of the American war effort, stating that the conflict could not be settled militarily, a stance that cooled his relations with the White House while raising his standing among non-aligned states ^[5].

The sharpest controversy of his tenure came in May 1967, when Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser demanded the withdrawal of the UN Emergency Force from Sinai. Thant complied, concluding that the force was stationed on Egyptian territory with Egyptian consent and could not lawfully remain without it. War between Israel and its neighbors followed within weeks, and critics charged that the withdrawal had removed the last buffer ^[4]. Thant defended the decision for the rest of his life, arguing that the troop-contributing countries were already pulling out and that a peacekeeping force could not fight its way into staying ^[7].

Thant married Daw Thein Tin in 1934, and the couple had several children, though the family knew repeated grief. One son died in infancy, a daughter died young, and his surviving son Tin Maung Thant died after falling from a bus in Rangoon in 1962, during his father's first year as Secretary-General ^[2]. His daughter Aye Aye Thant lived with the family in New York, and her son, the historian Thant Myint-U, later wrote extensively about his grandfather and about Burma ^[7].

A devout Buddhist, Thant meditated daily and often described his approach to diplomacy in terms of equanimity and detachment. He neither drank nor sought publicity, kept his temper famously under control, and told interviewers that a Secretary-General needed the patience to absorb abuse from every side ^[2]. He continued writing throughout his life; his memoir, View from the UN, appeared after his death and set out his own account of the crises he had managed ^[7].

Colleagues found him reserved but warm at close range. He listed his recreations as reading and photography, and he remained deeply attached to Burma even as its military government, which seized power in 1962, kept him at arm's length ^[3].

Thant declined a third term and left office on December 31, 1971, telling the General Assembly he felt a great sense of relief bordering on liberation ^[4]. He was succeeded by Kurt Waldheim of Austria. In retirement he served as a senior fellow of the Adlai Stevenson Institute and worked on his memoirs at his home in Riverdale in the Bronx ^[1].

He had been treated for cancer during his final years in office, and the disease returned. Thant died of lung cancer in New York City on November 25, 1974, at the age of sixty five ^[1]. What followed became one of the stranger episodes in modern Burmese history. General Ne Win's government refused any official honors for the country's most famous citizen, and when Thant's body arrived in Rangoon it was left without ceremony. On December 5, 1974, students seized the coffin and buried it on the grounds of the former Rangoon University student union, turning the funeral into a protest against military rule ^[8].

Government troops stormed the campus days later, retrieved the coffin, and buried Thant near the Shwedagon Pagoda. The crackdown killed and injured students, and the episode, remembered as the U Thant crisis, left a lasting mark on Burmese political memory ^[8].

Thant redefined what the UN's top job could be. Where Hammarskjöld had been an activist innovator, Thant practiced patient, low-key mediation, and he showed that a Secretary-General from a small, non-aligned country could command the confidence of both Cold War blocs ^[6]. The peacekeeping missions he launched or wound down, in Cyprus, the Congo, West New Guinea, and Sinai, supplied precedents, good and cautionary, that still guide UN operations.

His early advocacy on development, population, and the environment anticipated agendas the UN later placed at its center. The Stockholm environment conference, UNCTAD, and the UN University all trace lines back to initiatives he supported or proposed ^[6]. In New York, an island in the East River opposite the UN headquarters was renamed U Thant Island in his honor, and his Riverdale years are remembered in the neighborhood he called home.

In Myanmar his standing has only grown. His grandson's biography and the restoration of his Rangoon residence as a museum have renewed attention to a figure the military once tried to bury without honor ^[7]. For readers of any U Thant biography, the essential U Thant facts endure: a schoolteacher from Pantanaw held the world's most exposed diplomatic office for a decade, helped pull two superpowers back from nuclear war, and never stopped insisting that patience was a form of strength ^[5].