Kal Raustiala's "The Absolutely Indispensable Man"

Kal Raustiala is the Promise Professor of Comparative and International Law & Director of the Ronald W. Burkle Center for International Relations at UCLA.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, The Absolutely Indispensable Man: Ralph Bunche, the United Nations, and the Fight to End Empire, and reported the following:

Page 99 of The Absolutely Indispensable Man falls in the midst of the crucial story of the creation of the United Nations itself. Ralph Bunche is on the State Department team that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, shortly before his death, sends to San Francisco in the spring of 1945 to negotiate the UN Charter. The war is not yet over—though Germany surrenders in the midst of the negotiations—but the end is very much in sight. While the Allies have essentially won the war, their agenda now is winning the peace. The new “United Nations Organization” they are creating will be the central feature of what they hope will be a new—and far more peaceful--world order.

Bunche, the only State Department official with any real experience in the colonial world—and the only Black man on the team--is the key player on the question of how the UN will handle empire. From the vantage point of today colonialism seems a musty, distant phenomenon. But in 1945 it was a central feature of world politics, and one that few believed would end anytime soon. Bunche had dedicated his early career, as a professor at Howard University, to the twinned questions of colonial governance and racial justice. Now, in San Francisco, he is in the position to put those ideas into practice—and they would lead to a political revolution that was, in many respects, the greatest of the 20th century. All these points are reiterated on page 99 and the American negotiating team is described—from Edward Stettinius, the US Secretary of State Time Magazine dubbed “impressively handsome” (but Bunche thought was “a dud” clearly not up to the task) to the diplomatic legend John Foster Dulles.

The central themes of The Absolutely Indispensable Man are Ralph Bunche’s key roles in both the early United Nations and the 20th century fight against empire, and the way his quest for racial justice informed both of these efforts. The Page 99 Test captures these remarkably well.

Learn more about The Absolutely Indispensable Man at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue