Career Man's Mission

(See Cover)

Bright & early one day last week a black Packard limousine with a U.S. crest on the door hummed through the maddening boulevard traffic of central Buenos Aires. As it passed, police snapped respectfully to attention. In the Plaza San Martin, where flowers were in bloom, the car came to a decorous halt before the rococo Argentine Foreign Office.

Out stepped a grey, bespectacled man with a grey, correct bearing. He carried a walking stick. In the lapel of his neat tan suit bloomed a flaming carnation. He fussily flicked a speck of dust from his coat, coughed with the conviction of a man swearing, and walked into the Foreign Office's cavernous hall for an interview with Argentina's suave Foreign Minister, Dr. Juan Atilio Bramuglia.

The caller was George Strausser Messersmith, U.S. Ambassador to Argentina. As usual, he was hard at work. For at 63, George Messersmith, veteran of 32 years in the foreign service, has a strenuous mission: to break, if possible, the impasse which has stultified U.S.-Argentine relations for more than a decade and thus to bring some realism and understanding to U.S.-Latin American policy in general.

No Frowns. He had his methods. First & foremost he conceived it his duty to see to it that the U.S., in the person of George Messersmith, gets along with Juan Domingo Peron, the Argentine strong man who was elected President last spring despite U.S. frowns. Secondly, he believes strongly in the policy of non-intervention in Argentine domestic affairs (no more such frowns). This is not only a reversal of Spruille Braden's policy, which preceded Messersmith's advent in Argentina, but a reaffirmation of one of the cardinal aims of the Good Neighbor Policy, established by Franklin Roosevelt and Sumner Welles in 1933.

As subsidiary points to his program -- but not regarded by him as meddling -- Messersmith conceives it his duty to do all he can to get the Peron Government over its sentimental attachment to Axis nationals and Axis business firms. Beyond that, as a sympathetic friend of U.S. businessmen, he has the good diplomat's interest in furthering foreign trade.

Private Chats. On the first point of his mission, George Messersmith has succeeded extraordinarily well--helped not a little by Juan Peron's intense dislike of Messersmith's predecessor, hulking, excitable Spruille Braden. Just a few days after his arrival in Buenos Aires last May, Messersmith was informed by an influential Argentine that Peron would welcome a private chat. The meeting was held, and was followed by similar get-togethers. The two men took each other's measure, and talked through the whole range of U.S.-Argentine problems.

Messersmith, who has the career diplomat's predilection for the gloved hand, liked this approach to his new job. He had gone to Buenos Aires with the firm conviction that the speechmaking, note-writing tactics of Spruille Braden must end; that the patching-up job, if it could be done at all, must be done behind the scenes. In this he was privately seconded by Secretary of State Byrnes.

Messersmith's success on the other points of his mission cannot yet be judged. The Peron Government has rounded up a few German and Japanese nationals, and announced plans to nationalize Axis-controlled industries. The Strong Man has said that in the .next war, Argentina would fight alongside the U.S. But at least one important wartime Nazi agent has been cleared by the Argentine courts, and others continue to hold high places in Government councils.

Words & Deeds. The prelude to George Messersmith's Argentine mission is as long and weird as any chapter in U.S. foreign relations. In the cloistered halls of the U.S. State Department, the word "policy" has two meanings. To one group of men "policy" means something you say; to another it means something you do.

In the early '30s, when the Good Neighbor Policy was instituted, the man to whom policy mainly meant words was good, grey Secretary of State Cordell Hull; the man to whom it meant deeds was glacial Under Secretary Sumner Welles. Today, Hull's position has been taken by Spruille Braden, who is still Assistant Secretary of State for American Republic Affairs, and George Messersmith's immediate boss. The chief exponent of the philosophy that policy means deeds (or tactics and approach) is George Messersmith.

The Good Neighbor Policy, which had as its aim the bringing together of all Western Hemisphere nations in a democratic group, worked, in effect, when it was administered by Welles (along with some shrewd and cold-hearted Welles meddling in internal Latin American affairs). It was least effective when it was merely pronounced in righteous terms by Cordell Hull, who had an unhappy faculty of alienating sensitive Latinos with the Tennessee mountain vigor of his epithets.

But the war shoved the Good Neighbor Policy in the background, especially in relation to Argentina. In 1943 a military junta pulled off a coup d'etat in Buenos Aires. Falteringly, the U.S. first recognized one militarist regime, then denied recognition to the next.

As the Nazi war machine expired, the U.S. heart seemed to soften. In February 1945, the U.S. met with other American republics in Mexico City to open the gate for U.N. Argentina was not invited. The Act of Chapultepec, however, pointed the way back into the fold. Argentina might regain the family bosom if she 1) agreed to a system of collective security in the Western Hemisphere, 2) wiped out Axis commercial influence and deported Axis spies, 3) declared war on the Axis.

Belatedly Argentina went through the paper process of declaring war. But before she had fulfilled any of the other conditions of Chapultepec, the U.S. hastily thrust out a forgiving lollipop: recognition of the new Argentine regime. Then, at San Francisco, the U.S. found itself sponsoring Argentine membership in U.N.

Harassment. The months between Chapultepec and San Francisco marked the period of supreme vacillation in U.S. policy toward the Argentine. The real reasons for the sudden shifts probably will not be known until the official documents are published years hence. But after San Francisco, the policy shifted again.

Prodded by public opinion, Secretary Stettinius sent Spruille Braden to Argentina as Ambassador. Braden undertook to harass the fast-rising Peron clique. He became a kind of hero--a lone man standing up to a dictator. It was a hopelessly unequal contest--quite apart from the question of whether a U.S. Ambassador should have embroiled himself in such a contest in the first place. Peron's triumph at the polls was merely underlined by the State Department's Blue Book, issued two weeks before the 1946 election. The Blue Book clearly demonstrated that the Argentine Government had tolerated German agents, had collaborated with them, and had taken no effective steps to destroy German penetration in Argentina. But, partly because the war was over, partly because of Argentine sensitivity to Yanqui interference, and partly because of Peron's popularity at home, the Blue Book, and Braden's policy in general, merely strengthened Peron's hand.

The Schoolteacher. In this impossible situation, the U.S. called on career diplomat George Messersmith. He had been in many a ticklish spot before, and had survived some distant detours (including the consul generalship in Argentina in 1928). Dutifully he had touched every rung of a tedious ladder--vice consul in Fort Erie, Ont., and the Netherlands West Indies; consul and consul general in Antwerp; consul general in Buenos Aires and Berlin; Minister to Austria; Ambassador to Cuba and Mexico. His squirrelly energy kept propelling his stubby figure up an incline that has defeated many a less persistent and less energetic man.

Born of durable German stock in eastern Pennsylvania, George Messersmith first pointed for the respectable lot of a schoolmaster. At Keystone State Normal School and Delaware College he acquired a modest education. He became superintendent of schools in several quiet Delaware towns, wrote a solid text on the state government of Delaware. Newsmen who do not warm up to his cold manner complain that they sometimes feel as if they were being lectured by their old grade-school principal.

At 30 he was still a bachelor and settling slowly into the demeanor appropriate to a vice president of the Delaware Board of Education. Then, in 1914, he broke the traces. He married Marion Mustard, the daughter of a moderately fixed Pennsylvania Dutch family, and joined the U.S. Foreign Service. With his bride he embarked for Fort Erie and a new start.

Exporter. A schoolmaster's training suited a consul's search for U.S. business opportunity abroad. He ferreted happily among forms, statistics and the economic lore of each new foreign post. He worked fiercely, snowed Washington under voluminous surveys. Upon a pile of Messersmith's trade reports a harried assistant in Buenos Aires once slipped an extra form: "Name--George S. Messersmith. Business--Biggest exporter of paper in Argentina."

Businessmen admired his thoroughness, but his ruthless working habits ruined his digestion. In 1921 he underwent an operation for stomach ulcers, and he has had recurrent disorders ever since. He does not drink. He refuses all but a few dinner invitations, invariably nibbles at home first on his special diet of boiled vegetables and milk. His lament: "It is not very amusing just to sit and watch people eat and drink for 26 years."

Dangerous Situation. Although the Messersmith stomach is weak, the Messersmith will is strong. When he makes up his mind, it is like snapping the jaws of an iron trap. As consul general in Berlin from 1930 to 1934 he quickly acquired a viselike antipathy for the Nazis. In 1933 he wrote home: "There is a real revolution here, and a dangerous situation."

On more than one occasion he stalked grimly out of gatherings where a Nazi Speaker was making derisive remarks about the U.S. His scrupulous concern for protecting the rights of U.S. citizens won the favorable notice of F.D.R. In 1934 he was advanced to ministerial rank in Vienna. He came back to Washington as Assistant Secretary of State before the German tide rolled over Austria.

Messersmith's reaction to Germany's revolution of the Right stamped him as a man not likely to be fooled by the fac,ade of fascism. But another side of his nature recoiled almost as violently from an upheaval of the Left. After Pearl Harbor the State Department sent Messersmith to Mexico. During four wartime years in politically aroused Mexico City he took no pains to conceal his contempt for the radical strain of Latin emotionalism. He crossed swords often with militant Vicente Lombardo Toledano, former leader of Mexico's leftist workers.

Mexicans, who set great store by amiability, did not take naturally to this buzz saw of a man who worked all day and went to bed early with a pile of detective stories. Although he spoke Spanish passably well, a sandpaper larynx caused strange cacophonies in that musical language.

Compliment. Popular or no, he performed his mission loyally and well. He wangled enough from wartime-restricted U.S. resources to slake Mexico's rapidly growing industrial and food needs. He ran his Embassy staff with topnotch efficiency.

He made some mistakes. When former King Carol of Rumania turned up in Mexico City with red-headed Magda Lupescu (Messersmith had met them both in Cuba), he went to extreme lengths to try and get them admitted to the U.S. Loyalty to old friends is a Messersmith trait. Leftists attacked him for kowtowing to royalty, and tarnished royalty at that. To an acquaintance who took him to task for his efforts he replied: "For 13 years he [Carol] has been faithful to her; and for 13 years she has not looked at another man. Which is more than you can say."

Parallel. Just before leaving Mexico last May for Argentina, George Messersmith said what was on his mind:

"There are many of us who see in what is happening today a definite parallel between the period from 1933 to 1938. . . . We have nothing better than an armed truce. ... I am sorry to say that I am resting today under none of the illusions I rested under after the end of the first World War. . . . Then I sincerely believed that war had ended forever."

Correspondents leaped to fill in the comparison between the 1933 Hitler threat--which George Messersmith had recognized at first glance--and the present-day threat of Communism. There was no mistaking what George Messersmith meant. Like many another diplomat in Latin America, he knew that the principal cell of Communist infiltration in Latin America in the late '30s and early '40s was in Mexico, under the skilled hand of the late Constantine Oumansky. Like others, he now believes that the cell has shifted to South America, where Communists are working and organizing like beavers (see LATIN AMERICA) . In Buenos Aires, Messersmith can only watch--from the splendor of the colonnaded U.S. Embassy. He feels it is his principal job to get along with Peron, while seeking to contain the Peron influence in Argentina and preventing its spread to the rest of South America.

In this effort he is hampered by the divided U.S. policy and the clash of State Department personalities. At Chapultepec, the nations of the Western Hemisphere agreed to meet soon thereafter at Rio de Janeiro for two purposes: 1) to draft the treaty for the Act of Chapultepec (which was a wartime agreement); 2) to discuss an inter-hemispheric defense agreement under which the U.S. would undertake to furnish standardized arms to all Western Hemisphere nations. So far, Spruille Braden, unwilling to let Argentina in, has refused to set a date for it. Until that conference is held, Latins will still be skeptical of genuine U.S. good-neighborliness, and confused by U.S. policy. And until Secretary of State Byrnes or the foreign-affairs leaders of the new Congress take time out from world "peacemaking" to look at the hemisphere, U.S. policy will stay divided.

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