Mission to Prague

This week long, lean Laurence Steinhardt, who heard the rumblings of Europe for three years as U.S. Ambassador at the Ankara listening post, was off again for Europe. His destination was Prague, where he would be the first U.S. Ambassador to Czechoslovakia. With him would be Major General Clarence Huebner, commander of the Third Army's V Corps, who would continue to command U.S. troops in eastern Germany and be military attache at the Prague Embassy.

Harry Truman had thus dispatched a crack team to what might well be the most important new listening post in Europe (see INTERNATIONAL). Laurence Steinhardt is a lawyer, economist and author. As ambassador to Russia (193941), he went through the blitz in Moscow, signed the first Lend-Lease agreement with the Russians. He likes them and they like him. In Washington, he is rated as a top-drawer U.S. diplomat.

General Huebner, who rose from a buck private, commanded the ist Infantry on the Normandy beaches. In Germany, he was known for his ability to get on with the Russians. They presented him with a tattered flag from Stalingrad. Czechoslovakia's President Benes also decorated him.

Chief job of Steinhardt and Huebner will be to keep close contact with the Russians in the long ring of buffer states which line the Soviet Union. From their vantage point, they will be able to see what is going on in eastern Europe. Moreover, what happens in Czechoslovakia in the first postwar years might well set the pattern for what will happen in a majority of Europe's small democracies.

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