‘Whole in your duty of the moment’

Time, Place

Dag Hammarskjöld is compelling on the topic of duty because he never stopped questioning its meaning and probing his experience of it. There was no dry boundary around something called ‘duty’. At times he viewed it analytically as a network of responsibilities and shared values linking the members of a team, however large. At other times he viewed it intimately, psychologically, as a willing persistence subject to pressures of many kinds. He spoke with himself in one way about it—nearly as a poet, certainly as a religious person; and spoke with others, notably UN colleagues, in a way somewhat cooler but no less felt. His own discipline was to pour himself into his activities as secretary-general: ‘one with your task, whole in your duty of the moment,’ he wrote in 1957 in his private journal at a difficult time.

During a press conference in Stockholm, some five weeks after taking up his post as secretary-general in spring 1953, Dag Hammarskjöld found simple, touching words to describe his state of mind. His nomination and election had caught him by surprise—there had been no discussion beforehand:

A soldier may react when unexpectedly drafted. But once in the fight for what he finds to be essential values in this life of ours, he is just happy.
(PP II, 42)

Four years later, accepting election to a second term as secretary-general, he expressed thanks to the General Assembly through words that convey the same willingness, unchanged, although he now knows the duties and hazards of the office:

Nobody, I think, can accept the position of Secretary-General of the United Nations, knowing what it means, except from a sense of duty. Nobody, however, can serve in that capacity without a sense of gratitude for a task, as deeply rewarding as it is exacting, as perennially inspiring as, sometimes, it may seem discouraging.
(PP III, 1957, 663)


Hammarskjöld’s journal makes clear that he had new insights about duty and the fulfillment of duty as events moved on. The following three entries are of this kind: an insight, a self-reproof, a call. Not long ago, the first was cited among his watchwords by an American CEO.

Your position never gives you the right to command. It only imposes on you the duty of so living your life that others can receive your orders without being humiliated.
(Markings, 1955, 105)

Only if your endeavors are inspired by a devotion to duty in which you forget yourself completely, can you keep your faith in their value. This being so, your endeavor to reach the goal should have taught you to rejoice when others reach it.
(Markings, 1957, 153)

Do not look back. And do not dream about the future, either. It will neither give you back the past, nor satisfy your other daydreams. Your duty, your reward—your destiny—are here and now.
(Markings, 1957, 157)


Hammarskjöld’s analyses of duty, though naturally focused on United Nations issues, can reach beyond themselves to suggest larger patterns and applications to today’s concerns. The following two are representative. His colorful notion of ‘explaining in all directions’ captures his endless concern to further negotiation, to sustain dialogue.

I do not conceive the role of the Secretary-General and the Secretariat as representing what has been called a ‘third line’ in the international debate. Nor is it for him to try and initiate ‘compromises’ that might encroach upon areas that should be exclusively within the sphere of responsibility of the respective national governments.
On the other side I see the duty of the Secretariat to form, in the first instance, a most complete and objective picture of the aims, motives, and difficulties of the Member Nations. Acting in that knowledge it is our duty to seek to anticipate situations that might lead to new conflicts or points of tension and to make appropriate suggestions to the governments before matters reach a stage of public controversy.
(PP II, 1953, 93)

Is it not the duty of the Secretary-General, to all the extent that he can, and it is difficult sometimes, to be objective—not impartial, for that is a…rather sterile and neutral word. And being objective means necessarily to try and explain the viewpoints as well as one can and as deeply as you can understand them, and to explain them in all directions.
(PP II, 1955, 483)


In the Congo crisis of 1960-61, the United Nations was torn apart along Cold War lines, and sound principle often conflicted with obvious fact. In the course of his confidential communications with Rajeshwar Dayal, who led the UN peacekeeping and administrative effort in the Congo at a crucial phase, Hammarskjöld often weighed issues of duty and expediency:

We are in the middle of an extraordinarily complicated and indeed politically dangerous situation. I believe all we can do is to fall back on our right and duty to stand firmly on Charter principles as overriding all other considerations, even if this would lay us open to allegations of partisanship—perhaps even from both sides.
(Dayal [1], 146)


And, of course, this is Hammarskjöld, and so we should hear from him about war and peace and moral risk. The following few words could be inserted without change into today’s most important international conversations:

Only in true surrender to the interest of all can we reach that strength and independence, that unity of purpose, that equity of judgment which are necessary if we are to measure up to our duty to the future, as men of a generation to whom the chance was given to build in time a world of peace.
(PP II, New Year’s Message, 1953, 209)

It is our duty to feel moral responsibility for a war in a remote part of the world as strongly as we would feel for a war in which we ourselves, or those dear to us, were directly threatened in a physical sense.
(PP II, 1954, 256)

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The Nobel Peace Prize--1961

Time, Place

The award of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize to President Barack Obama brings to mind the occasion, approaching 50 years ago, when Rolf Edberg, Swedish ambassador to Norway, accepted the prize on behalf of ‘the administrators of the estate of Dag Hammarskjöld.’ A few months earlier, Hammarskjöld had died in an air crash in Africa; the world was still assessing what he was. In his excellent address (available online through the Resources page at this site), Ambassador Edberg said: ‘Had he stood here today, he would, I believe, have had something to say about service as a self-evident duty.’ Which way should we turn in response to this, with its provocative words ‘self-evident’? Toward an exploration of service—or of duty? Why not both in weeks to come; they were closely linked in Hammarskjöld’s mind and practice. Is duty a dry concept from the past, a bony fossil with no living tissue? Or is it alive, interesting?

Some duties are tacit—for example, duties within a family. Many others are contractual and explicit. Hammarskjöld’s ‘contract’ with the United Nations was embodied in the secretary-general’s oath of office, which he apparently carried with him on a small typed sheet of paper at nearly all times:

I, Dag Hammarskjöld, solemnly swear to exercise in all loyalty, discretion and conscience the functions entrusted to me as Secretary-General of the United Nations, to discharge these functions and regulate my conduct with the interests of the United Nations only in view, and not to seek or accept instructions in regard to the performance of my duties from any government or other authority external to the Organization.


Hammarskjöld had an exalted concept of duty, and we’ll encounter it. But he also perceived duty as a plain necessity, the glue and diligence that make organizations reliably efficient. The exalted and the common meet:

For some people the driving force in life is faith in the success of their efforts. For others it is simply a sense of duty. We need both types of men. We need the man of faith and his imagination, his inspiration, in the search for great achievement. But we also need the other one, who is animated by his feeling of collective responsibility, without consideration of such recompense. We need both the architect and the bricklayer.
(PP II, 297)


That plain sense of duty was evident at the first press conference after his return from Beijing in January 1955, where he had made initial efforts to obtain the release of American pilots held as spies by the People’s Republic of China. There was reason to believe that the negotiations, although still in progress, pointed in the right direction. His language here, stripped to the minimum, is oddly memorable:

Well, first of all, I am glad to see you all again. It was kind of you to applaud. There is no reason for such applause. If I have done what I hope I have done, that is part of what I should do.
(PP II, 441)


The monosyllables just above, acknowledging the possible success of a daring mission, disguise the profound thought which Hammarskjöld had, in reality, given to the topics of duty and service. The following from his private journal, written sometime between August and mid-November 1955, and after the pilots’ release at the end of July, reflects his larger thought:

A task becomes a duty from the moment you suspect it to be an essential part of that integrity which alone entitles a man to assume responsibility.
(Markings, 111)


Hammarskjöld perceived duties as contextual, nested within one another. Speaking with a university audience in 1955, he explored this notion at some length:

At this time of great ideological conflicts and violent clashes of interests, technological and economic developments have, as never before, brought us together as members of one human family, unified beyond race or creed on a shrinking globe, in face of dangers of our own making. In such a situation many ethical problems take on a new significance and our need to give sense to our lives exceeds the inherited standards. True, our duties to our families, our neighbors, our countries, our creeds have not changed. But something has been added. This is a duty to what I shall call international service, with a claim on our lives equal to that of the duty to serve within those smaller units whose walls are now breaking down. The international service of which I speak is not the special obligation, nor the privilege, of those working in international economic corporations, in the field of diplomacy, or in international political organizations. It has become today the obligation, as well as the privilege, of all.
(PP II, 502-03)

And finally—for this week’s edition—we can witness him applying this notion of nested duties to a concrete situation the Middle East. The following is from a private communication to David Ben-Gurion, prime minister of Israel, one of the regional leaders with whom Hammarskjöld met repeatedly in search of peace with justice in the Middle East. Hammarskjöld had the greatest appreciation for Ben-Gurion’s intellect and fiery leadership, despite reservations about some of the strategies Ben-Gurion pursued:

I fear that in our never-abandoned efforts to get nearer to the target we have in common—in your case peace for Israel, in my case perhaps just simply peace—we may have reached a dead point…. Such a situation requires some boldness. Indeed, it seems to me to be a situation where we must individually try to transcend our immediate duty in order to fulfill the higher duty of creative action. You know that my personal confidence in your ability in this respect has never flagged.
(DH letter to Ben-Gurion, April 19, 1957)

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Chain reactions of words and acts

Time, Place

Dag Hammarskjöld often met at first hand the strong reactions of adversaries to one another’s words and acts. A well-intentioned third party finds it challenging to come between them: where is the opening, who is willing? The most astonishing—and mysterious—entry from last week’s discussion concerned the Suez crisis of 1956-57, about which Hammarskjöld wrote: ‘It was one of those irrational and extremely dangerous situations in which only something as irrational on a different level could break the spell.’ Difficult to know just what he is referring to—perhaps to conviction, to the power of intelligent emotion. His words remain provocative. In another letter of 1956 about Suez, he was thinking along the same lines: ‘You saw them caught in the causal chain, making the wrong choice and again making the wrong choice. Maybe you could say that what we succeeded in doing was breaking the causality by rushing up on stage and forcing them to see for themselves—for a moment! And then?’ Some years later, in early 1960, he was again working through issues in the Middle East and thinking about the danger of chain reactions of words and acts. His observations and ideas are startlingly relevant today. Has someone turned on a magical slow-motion camera, so that scarcely anything changes in the larger region? Who will turn it off, with a peaceful hand?

Hammarskjöld said:
We see here, as so many times in the Middle East, a kind of…shuttle reaction. One thing is explained by the other thing. One reaction is explained by another reaction. And in an atmosphere of general distrust which has not diminished in any way, even a move which in its intention is fairly innocent may be misinterpreted by the other side and release, in words or acts, a reaction which in turn seems to justify stronger steps from the side where the ball started, perhaps in all innocence. For that reason it is again a situation where we have to, if possible, break a chain reaction, as I do not believe that we can change overnight the basic atmosphere…. How you break such a chain reaction is extremely difficult to say, because in fact you must come to grips on both sides with the situation.
I know that practically on no side…is this a popular idea at all, but all the same I would say that I do not see any other way than the time-honored one: to strengthen the hand of the United Nations and for the United Nations to stick to its guns.
(PP IV, press conference of February 18, 1960, 543-44)

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