George L. Sherry | U.N. official, 87

George L. Sherry, 87, a former U.N. official who helped calm crises around the world, died in New York City on Friday of complications from Parkinson's disease.

In the years after the founding of the United Nations in 1945 - when speeches from the General Assembly and the Security Council were widely broadcast - Mr. Sherry became known as the English-speaking voice of Andrei Y. Vishinsky, the Soviet delegate.

"Deputy Foreign Minister Andrei Y. Vishinsky spoke yesterday in tones that were in quick succession impassioned, angry, sarcastic, sardonic, pleading and furious," the New York Times reported Sept. 19, 1947.

It was Mr. Sherry who spoke that 92-minute speech, a good deal of it extemporaneously. At the time, 24 and a graduate of City College in New York, he would go on to a four-decade career at the United Nations, rising to assistant secretary-general for special political affairs.

For most of his career he worked beside Undersecretary-Generals Ralph J. Bunche and Sir Brian Urquhart, helping to organize mediation and peacekeeping missions. In 1963, he helped negotiate the entry of U.N. troops into what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo, ending a long war.

After retiring in 1985, he became a professor of international studies at Occidental College in Los Angeles and founding director of the college's U.N. program, which brings students to New York to work as interns there.

- N.Y. Times News Service