Envoy Extraordinary

Balding, bespectacled Oscar Lange, soon to be Poland's new Ambassador to the U.S., arrived in Washington--without fanfare, without credentials, and (in U.S. eyes) without Polish citizenship. He had flown in not from Warsaw, but from Chicago.

The State Department was embarrassed. It could not officially welcome the University of Chicago professor of economics (and naturalized U.S. citizen) as an ambassador. It was ready to accept him as such, but Warsaw had not yet formally notified Washington of his appointment.

Polish-born, 41-year-old Oscar Lange is no stranger to the State Department, although he is unknown to most of Poland's 25 million. He has been in the U.S. over ten years. Besides Chicago, he has also taught at Columbia, Stanford, the University of California.

A onetime member of the Polish Socialist Party, he was invited to Moscow in 1944. There he talked with Russian-armed Polish troops and Polish WACs, had an extraordinary (140 minutes) interview with Joseph Stalin. His sympathies were always with the Lublin group. Back in the U.S., he reported to the State Department (as a private U.S. citizen), worked hard on Polish-American groups to sell the idea of Russo-Polish cooperation.

The reward of his labors almost at hand last week, Envoy Lange left Washington, secluded himself in a friend's home in Virginia, waited for protocol to catch up with him. He had one other thing to do: renounce his U.S. citizenship.

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