New Gullivers

A month ago Arthur Bliss Lane returned to the U.S. from the hardest assignment of his 31 years in the Foreign Service. As Ambassador to the Russian-dominated government of Poland he could remember little but frustration. So that he would be free to speak as a private citizen on Poland's "tragedy," tired Arthur Lane resigned. Last week Harry Truman picked his successor. Warsaw was in for something. The new Ambassador will be 59-year-old Stanton Griffis.

Griffis is better known in Wall Street than in Washington. "I'm not a diplomat," Griffis protested. "I'm just a tough business man." Said Harry Truman "That's what we want."

Born in Boston, Stanton Griffis was a prizewinning orator at Cornell. He raised apples for a while in Oregon but gave that up for Wall Street, where he became a banker, a promoter and a tycoon. In 1920 he moved in on Lee Tire & Rubber Co. In 1933, with Atlas Corp.'s Floyd Odium, he acquired control of Madison Square Garden. He helped pull Paramount Pictures out of a $100 million hole, along the way picked up Brentano's book stores.

During the war he went to Europe with the OSS. He admits he doesn't know "a damn thing about the Polish Government." But he knows about democracy. "Democracy survives on wellfed people and on good business," he booms.

Resembling an oversize Foxy Grandpa, Griffis lives in an oversize, 14-room apartment on Manhattan's elegant Sutton Place. Five bathrooms are done in various pastels--one in baby blue. Decor runs to silver zigzag-patterned wallpaper, thick cream rugs. The bric-a-brac is Brobdingnagian. Twice married, twice divorced, Griffis keeps his current philosophy, stitched in a sampler, hanging on a wall of his pine-paneled library: "High hopes faint on a warm hearthstone. He travels the fastest who travels alone."

As Businessman Griffis prepared to depart, another U.S. businessman quit the Foreign Service. Richard C. Patterson Jr., onetime vice chairman of the board of RKO, resigned the ambassadorship to the Russian-dominated government of Yugoslavia, where he had been as frustrated as Lane was in Poland. Private interests required his attention, said Patterson. As his successor, Harry Truman picked a State Department careerist: 52-year-old Cavendish Welles Cannon, whose large, pale, triangular face has been appearing in the trouble spots of southern Europe for 20 years, most recently in Lisbon, where he was First Secretary and Consul.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.