Revisiting the Early-History Pages of the UN

Dan Plesch’s book, “America, Hitler and the UN,” is something of a historical revelation. First school, then university and then four years covering the United Nations itself taught me that it was created by the victorious Allies at the end of World War II, not in the middle. Indeed, when I was the BBC's UN correspondent, I used the Pathé newsreel of the San Francisco Conference, where the UN was said to be founded, in countless broadcasts, with the newsreader solemnly telling cinema-going audiences that the UN had been signed into existence “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.” But Plesch reveals that U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt first used the phrase to a naked Winston Churchill, the prime minister of Britain at the time, on the morning of Dec. 29, 1941. Winston was emerging from his morning bath when he heard the wheelchair-bound U.S. president calling him -- just weeks after Pearl Harbor and after Hitler's declaration of war against the U.S. -- to say that Roosevelt had hit upon the name “United Nations” to define the countries allied against the Axis powers. The State Department had come up with the more tedious and infinitely less catchy “Associated Powers,” which Roosevelt discarded.