Barbara Abroad

Editor Geoffrey Crowther of London's influential Economist had confidently sent a girl to do a man's job. He told Barbara Ward to spend a couple of months in the U.S., find out what was on the U.S. mind, and then write a series about it. Brisk and brilliant Barbara Ward, who at 32 is a kind of younger, softer-voiced, English edition of Dorothy Thompson, went at it in a big way. Her research project turned into a coast-to-coast lecture tour, with radio dates and extra speeches thrown in. She gave as many interviews as she got, and never ran out of breath or big, round statements. When a Washington reporter asked her to "say something weighty," she heaved him one: "Well, the cost of world order is the cost of American full employment. Think that over."

Last week, when she sailed for home, Barbara Ward left many such simplifications strewn behind her. They left Americans wondering whether she was as wise as she sounded, or wiser. At any rate, no one could quarrel with her cheerful assertion that she "had a horrible facility with words."

Whiz Kid. Brown-eyed Barbara, by facility with word and thought, has won herself a reputation in several careers. Into her expensive education went samplings from a convent at her native Felixstowe, the Lycee Moliere and the Sorbonne, Jugenheim and Oxford (Somerville College), where she took first-class honors in "Modern Greats."* She set her sights on opera, switched to lecturing (in a clear soprano) when she decided that she would never be a topflight singer.

Her first book, at 24, The International Share-Out, caught Editor Crowther's eye in 1938; she has written for his Economist off & on ever since, and is now assistant editor on foreign affairs. On the BBC "Brains Trust" program (the English equivalent of Information Please) Laborite Barbara was one participant who never said "I don't know." Audiences loved her for her quiz-kid memory. Between broadcasts she lectured on politics and economics, labored for the liberal Roman Catholic "Sword of the Spirit" movement.

She lives alone in a book-lined Chelsea flat, rides before breakfast when she can spare the time, puts in an anonymous day's work in the Economist's poky offices, over a teashop in the Strand. She is an inveterate, if slightly wistful, operagoer. She lunches and dines with politicians and economists, who admire her intellectual footwork without mistaking her for a heavyweight. She went on the BBC's board of governors last year and had to give up broadcasting.

Last week, homeward bound with a headful of Americana, busy Barbara Ward was a little disturbed by some U.S. attitudes. Much of the U.S., she said, seemed to be in a mood to let the rest of the world go by. She hoped, nevertheless, that the U.S. would invest thought, action and $10 billion or so a year in world reconstruction. "It used to be sterling that made the world go round," she said. "Today it's dollars. The U.S. could save the world economically, but I'm not sure you're going to do it. The danger isn't American imperialism, as Henry Wallace thinks, but the idea that America may decide to withdraw from the world again."

* Philosophy, politics and economics.

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