The Ambassador Departs

Tokyo was the unhappy climax of Ambassador Grew's career. It was the most difficult post a U.S. Ambassador could be given, and tall, grey, patrician Joseph Clark Grew had earned it by becoming the No. 1 U.S. career diplomat.

One day in 1904 Joe Grew, a young Boston-Groton-Harvard-man, crawled into a cave in China and shot a tiger just four feet in front of him. This feat so impressed Theodore Roosevelt that, although he was leary of Boston snobbery in the diplomatic service, he appointed Joe Grew clerk to the consul general in Cairo.

As Joe Grew's long diplomatic life in Mexico City, St. Petersburg, Berlin, Vienna and Ankara fully revealed, T.R. had had nothing to fear. Grew had grace and kindliness, quiet firmness when it was demanded, a subtle understanding of foreign temperaments and manners.

For nine years he worked at his exacting Tokyo job, which he conceived of as a great opportunity to bring about genuine Japanese-U.S. friendship. His appeal was to the peaceful Japanese whose interests were in international trade and, therefore, amity. He won the high personal regard of countless Japanese, and returned it in full measure. But months before Pearl Harbor he told Washington that his reports had to be brief; Japan's military dictators were operating in dark secrecy. Then, for more than six months after Pearl Harbor, he was obliged to bide his time in Tokyo while the land where so much compelled his affection made war on his native land.

Last week Joe Grew reached Lourengo Marques, Mozambique, aboard the diplomatic exchange ship Asama Maru, on the first leg of his homeward trip to Washington. The 62-year-old Ambassador's unhappiness was made plain in quotations from a speech which he had delivered to his Embassy staff in Tokyo on May 30. Said he: "I have not an iota of doubt of our ultimate victory in this war of nations. I myself, during these past months, have had plenty of time to survey the ruins of a life's work as an architect might regard, after an earthquake and fire, the ruins of a great building he had conceived and endeavored to erect with a solidarity that might permanently withstand the elements. Alas, the castle has crumbled about us. It is not a happy vision."

As often happens in personal crises, Joe Grew's large distress was accompanied by small discomforts. The Japanese had allowed no dogs on the Asama Maru and the Ambassador had been obliged to leave behind his four-year companion Sasha, a white spitz.

A previous dog of Ambassador Grew's, a black spaniel named Sambo, once drew from His Imperial Majesty Hirohito-one of the few informal remarks an Occidental has ever heard from the Emperor of Japan. One day in 1934 Ambassador Grew took Sambo walking outside Tokyo's Imperial Palace. Sambo skidded and fell 30 feet into the sluggish water of the medieval moat that surrounds the palace walls. Japanese bystanders rescued the dog. The Tokyo press featured the incident. A few days later Ambassador Grew had an audience with the Emperor on matters of state. Like all such audiences, it was an affair of iron ceremony in which the Emperor's elevated sentiments were in Japanese, translated for the Ambassador's benefit. But as Ambassador Grew meticulously bowed his way out of the Imperial presence, the sacred Son of Heaven asked, in nonchalant English: "How's Sambo?"

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