Davidson Finds a Loophole
By November 1945, when Alfred E. Davidson joined UNRRA as General Counsel, it was already evident that the agency was dying. Both the State Department and Congress had made it clear that UNRRA's life would end in 1946.
Davidson was young—only 34 years old—but already established as a formidable international lawyer from his wartime work on the US Lend-Lease programme. Like many other senior officials in UNRRA, he was convinced that whatever UNRRA's fate, the work of civilian relief could not simply stop.
Ludwik Rajchman, Poland's delegate to the UNRRA Council, quickly recognised in Davidson a kindred spirit—a man with the legal and administrative experience needed to create an agency able to continue and expand aid to children in devastated countries.
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| Davidson (2nd from left) representing UNICEF in signing the first formal agreement between France and UNICEF. Also in the photo, Georges Bidault, Minister of Foreign Affairs and Germaine Poinso-Chapuis, Minister of Public Health and Population. Having joined UNICEF in 1947 Davidson became Director of European Services in Paris - February 19, 1948 at the Quay d'Orsay |
The obstacle was a major procedural hurdle. The newly formed UN was well along in the process of creating new agencies—WHO, UNESCO, FAO, the International Refugee Organization—but each required years of commissions and treaty negotiations. A children's relief agency created through conventional channels could take eighteen months or longer to establish. How could an emergency relief mechanism be born without the delays that standard UN procedure demanded?
Davidson's solution was simple. He pointed to Article 22 of the UN Charter, which gave the General Assembly explicit authority to "establish such subsidiary organs as it deems necessary for the performance of its functions." By framing the proposed children's fund not as a new specialized agency but as a subsidiary organ of the General Assembly itself, Davidson found the path that bypassed years of negotiation.
The contrast would become apparent in October 1946. When ECOSOC met on October 3, it recommended both a dedicated children's fund and the creation of an International Refugee Organization (IRO, later to become UNHCR) to take over UNRRA's operations. But the two would follow radically different institutional paths. The IRO would be established as a formal specialized agency requiring elaborate treaty negotiations and formal commissions—a process that would consume months or years. UNICEF, by contrast, would operate as a general fund—a subsidiary organ of the General Assembly itself. ECOSOC could recommend it, but the General Assembly could simply establish it—no treaty, no commission, no Congressional gauntlet. Davidson's legal architecture had made speed possible.
Davidson then helped Rajchman frame the fund's purpose in language that transcended geopolitics: a fund focused on children and mothers—categories explicitly positioned as apolitical domains. Children were presented as "apolitical," driven by a humanitarian imperative that even Cold War adversaries could not easily oppose.
LaGuardia Takes Over at UNRRA
On March 1, 1946, President Truman appointed former President Herbert Hoover—a prominent Republican—to chair the Famine Emergency Committee. For Herbert Lehman, the Democrat who had led UNRRA since 1943, this was the final insult. For three years, he had endured relentless criticism over UNRRA's shortcomings, Congress's stingy appropriations, and the writing on the wall: the agency would be forced to shut down. Now Truman was publicly undermining him by appointing a Republican elder statesman to investigate the very crisis UNRRA was meant to address. On March 31, 1946, Lehman resigned.
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| LaGuardia at his UN office |
Truman turned to Fiorello LaGuardia, the charismatic former mayor of New York. What the public did not know was that he was dying—pancreatic cancer had already forced him to abandon his mayoral duties. Yet on April 1, 1946, he accepted the directorship of UNRRA.
LaGuardia was dying, and the institution he believed in was dying alongside him.
He had accepted the post expecting to oversee UNRRA's quick dissolution. But as he toured the war-torn countries of Europe, he was horrified to discover the depth of the trauma from which the continent was only beginning to emerge. He felt, he said, that he had been "thoroughly misled" about the wisdom of shutting down relief so soon.
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| July 14,1946 LaGuardia leaves on a tour of UNRRA operations in North Africa and Europe |
What he found was a continent still in desperate need of help. He recognised that premature termination of aid would endanger the fragile progress already made. More troubling still, he feared that the death of UNRRA would exacerbate Cold War tensions by removing a platform for international cooperation at precisely the moment when the Iron Curtain was descending. And he was particularly concerned about the children—the most vulnerable to sudden calamity, they would be left without guaranteed feeding or medical care.
From mid-1946, LaGuardia deployed what colleagues called his "fire-and-brimstone anger" in an attempt to prolong UNRRA's life. But he was exhausted by the effort. The U.S. and UK administrations remained committed to shutdown; the decision was a fait accompli.
Yet LaGuardia found a way forward. He promised Rajchman that he would ensure resources remained in UNRRA's coffers specifically for children as the agency prepared to close. To fulfil that promise, he personally earmarked $550,000 from UNRRA's residual assets—funds he pledged to "hand over the minute this new organization for children is given life."
Charnow and the Universal Mandate
By late summer 1946, John (Jack) Charnow, a State Department official in the Division of International Labor, Social and Health Affairs, had been assigned a delicate task: managing the children's fund proposal. Working within the special subcommittee that ECOSOC had designated, with Rajchman as its head, Charnow helped craft the resolution language that would move delegates' consciences.
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The opening of the 1964 Session of the Executive Board. Charnow as Secretary is seated on the far left, next to Zena Harman, Chairman of the Board, Maurice Pate, Executive Director and Adelaide Sinclair Deputy Executive Director. |
What made his work extraordinary was a single, seemingly technical revision. The initial proposal restricted aid to children in countries that had been "victims of aggression"—language that would have excluded the children of Germany, Austria, Italy, Japan, and Finland. Charnow, with support from the American delegation, broadened the scope. The resolution would now offer aid "for child health purposes generally, giving high priority to the children of countries victims of aggression."
It was a quiet but crucial pivot. The door was now open to all children in need. This principle had deep antecedents. A generation earlier, the British humanitarian Eglantyne Jebb had been prosecuted in London for distributing leaflets protesting the post–World War I blockade that was starving children across Central Europe. Supported by figures like George Bernard Shaw—who famously silenced critics by declaring, "I have no enemies under the age of seven"—Jebb established the Save the Children Fund as a voluntary relief organization. She later drafted the Geneva Declaration of the Rights of the Child, adopted by the League of Nations in 1924. In building UNICEF's foundation, Charnow and Rajchman invoked both Jebb’s moral principle and her institutional blueprint: a flexible, voluntary fund structure designed to deliver rapid emergency aid without the bureaucratic rigidity of traditional specialized agencies.
Decades later, Charnow reflected on the import of what they had accomplished. He noted that many who had reservations about establishing UNICEF "did not fully realize what was being sneaked in"—that universal mandate, which would "enable it to expand the scope of its aid program both geographically and into new fields."
Meanwhile, Rajchman was working intensively between New York and Washington, lobbying key figures in the U.S. government to secure their support. He understood that American opposition late in the process could derail everything. Back and forth between the two cities, he sought to convince as many people as he could of his concrete vision for UNICEF, which would be incorporated into the resolution. He was determined that UNICEF's basic responsibility for programmes would rest with the governments themselves. In his view, UNICEF's function was to strengthen the permanent child health and welfare programmes of receiving countries and enhance their capacity to improve their children's situation on a long-term basis.
September 30, 1946 : LaGuardia's Eloquence wins at ECOSOC
By late September 1946, the proposal was ready. On September 30, 1946, at Lake Success, Fiorello LaGuardia, as the outgoing UNRRA Director, presented to the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) the case for continuing relief through successor agencies. Drawing on his extraordinary speaking skills, LaGuardia held the assembly spellbound for more than an hour—deliberately buying time while Rajchman worked behind the scenes to finalize negotiations with wavering delegations and secure final commitments.
LaGuardia made the particular moral and institutional case for a dedicated children's fund. He wanted to ensure that the Council would decide on creation of UNICEF, before taking up other business. Only after he had spoken did Rajchman rise to present the resolution itself, speaking in Polish—a deliberate choice, a signal that this proposal came not from Washington but from the international community itself.
Three days later, on October 3, 1946, ECOSOC formally recommended the creation of the International Children's Emergency Fund to the General Assembly, along with recommendations for the International Refugee Organization and the World Health Organization.
Unlike the funds that would go to WHO and the IRO—both destined to become specialized agencies with formal treaty status—UNICEF would be structured as a voluntary "fund," a subsidiary organ of the General Assembly with its own Executive Board. This flexible institutional design, pioneered by Eglantyne Jebb decades earlier with the Save the Children Fund, allowed UNICEF to respond to emergency needs without the bureaucratic rigidity of permanent, treaty-based agencies.
December 1946: UNICEF Is Born
The proposal moved swiftly to the General Assembly's Third Committee in October. On December 11, 1946, at the Fifty-sixth Plenary Meeting, the full General Assembly adopted Resolution 57(I), formally establishing the International Children's Emergency Fund.
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| December 1946 - General Assembly meets at Lake Success |
The resolution's moral force lay in a single binding principle—the non-discrimination clause that Maurice Pate, soon to be appointed Executive Director, had insisted upon:
Charnow's language about what was "being sneaked in"—the universal mandate—was literally embedded in the resolution. The shift from "victims of aggression only" to "child health purposes generally" opened the door to serving all children. Then the non-discrimination language locked it in place.
No limits on which children were eligible. No exclusions based on nationality or political status. The children of Germany, Austria, Italy, Japan, and Finland would receive aid not as an act of magnanimity, but as an expression of principle. UNICEF would recognize no enemy children.
The General Assembly expressed its "earnest hope that Governments, voluntary agencies and private individuals will give the Fund their generous support."
The Transition
During that same week in mid-December 1946, the Sixth and Final Session of the UNRRA Council convened in Washington, D.C. LaGuardia’s mission was over and UNRRA was wrapping up. The machinery of relief that had sustained millions through the war's aftermath was being dismantled. Yet its residual funds would help establish three successor organizations: the World Health Organization, the International Refugee Organization, and UNICEF.
On January 1, 1947, Maurice Pate officially assumed his post as UNICEF's first Executive Director. He took office committed to the foundational mandate: that UNICEF would recognize no "enemy" children, and that all children were worthy of protection and aid regardless of their nation's wartime allegiances. This principle would define UNICEF for generations to come.
By summer 1947, Alfred Davidson had become Director of UNICEF's European Office in Paris. In mid-1947, John Charnow joined as Secretary of the Executive Board, a position he would hold for more than three decades. For the final 12 years of his tenure at UNICEF, he managed relations with NGOs. After retiring in 1981, Charnow authored and co-authored several monographs in the UNICEF History series, including a biography of Maurice Pate.
This article concludes the three-part review of the founding of UNICEF. I had earlier planned to make the next article in this series of articles the story of Maurice Pate up to the time he took on the role of UNICEF's Executive Director, but on reconsideration I have decided to continue with some of the other personalities who made up UNICEF in its early days. I will come back soon, however, to the interesting story of Maurice Pate.
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