In his apartment overlooking Manhattan's Central Park, Abraham Feller sat nervously one morning last week, chatting with his wife. For two weeks he had been acting strangely, had even mentioned suicide. Mrs. Feller left him only momentarily to call the family doctor, then returned to the living room.
"I tried to cheer him up," she said later. "He was an idealist, and his whole life was devoted to the United Nations. He thought he wasn't doing his job well. He was a perfectionist."
Book on a Table. But before the doctor came, Abe Feller jumped to his feet. "It's no use," he cried. "The doctors can't help me!" He ran to the rear of the apartment. Mrs. Feller clung to him—first to his head, then to one arm, finally to one leg. While she struggled, Feller threw open a window. She screamed and cried, "Don't jump!" He broke away, and within seconds his body lay twelve stories below in an open cellarway.
Upstairs on a table in the Feller apartment lay a copy of a book Feller had written about the U.N. and dedicated to his 17-year-old daughter: "To Caroline and her generation." His own generation had been too much for Abe Feller.
Feller, a 47-year-old native New Yorker, was one of U.N.'s pioneers and one of its highest and most valuable officers. A lawyer who spent 15 years in teaching and in New Deal Government service, he joined the U.N. staff when it was being formed in London in 1946 as legal counsel and policy adviser to Secretary General Trygve Lie. A few weeks before his suicide, he had been made acting Assistant Secretary General.
Trials & Tribulations. Abe Feller, a tough-minded man who had long shown an abundance of intellectual and physical resiliency, had been working himself mercilessly, and he had grown progressively depressed in recent weeks over the trials & tribulations afflicting the U.N. He was worried about the U.N.'s inability to end the Korean war (he was one of the two U.N. officials who, on June 25, 1950, advised Secretary General Trygve Lie to advocate U.N. intervention). He was upset over Lie's resignation last week. But what depressed Feller most were the problems and pressures that had been laid on the U.N. in recent months by a Federal grand jury and the McCarran Senate subcommittee, in their investigation of subversive Americans on the U.N. Secretariat. Feller, under no suspicion himself, was the U.N.'s legal adviser on the subject. The hearings uncovered 17 among the 2,000 Americans on the U.N. staff who refused to say whether or not they have engaged in subversive activities.
Lie angrily charged that Abe Feller's suicide had been brought on by the extra strain of defending Americans at U.N. against "indiscriminate smears and exaggerated charges." Senators McCarran, Willis Smith of North Carolina and James Eastland of Mississippi just as angrily called Lie's accusation "irresponsible," and promised to continue the inquiry.