Gladwyn Jebb

Hubert Miles Gladwyn Jebb was born on 25 April 1900 into a world that would spend the next half-century tearing itself apart and trying to stitch the seams. He rose through the British civil service and diplomatic corps with the kind of steady competence empires rely on. In 1945, with the United Nations freshly chartered and no permanent leader yet chosen, Jebb stepped in as acting secretary-general and ran the fledgling institution through 1946 - the makeshift year when procedural details mattered as much as grand ideals. He later became the 1st Baron Gladwyn, a title that landed him in Parliament and kept him in the machinery of postwar international order. He died on 24 October 1996, having watched the UN survive long enough to argue over what it was for.