Shake-Up

President Harry Truman moved swiftly to tidy up U.S. hemispheric affairs. Within three days, he agreed that Argentina had fulfilled her commitments under the Act of Chapultepec, brusquely accepted the resignations of Assistant Secretary of State Spruille Braden and Ambassador to Argentina George Messersmith.

Braden's insistence that Argentina fulfill the last letter of her anti-Nazi commitments was paralyzing State's Latin American division. Messersmith had attacked his job of smoothing U.S.-Argentine relations with such gusto that he was beginning to look like an apologist for President Juan Peron.

Messersmith's probable successor was smooth, amiable James Bruce, 54, vice president of the National Dairy Products Corp. Son of Maryland's onetime Democratic Senator, Princeton-mate of Navy Secretary James Forrestal, James Bruce was no trained diplomat. Aside from a short tour as assistant military attache in Rome, and as special representative in Montenegro for the Versailles peace conference, he had stuck to banking and finance.

To fill the hole left by Spruille Braden, the President this week picked a different sort of peg: veteran Career Diplomat Norman Armour, who retired in 1945 after 30 years of able service that took him from Leningrad to Madrid. Careerman Armour was slated to take over a new, expanded job as Assistant Secretary for Political Affairs.

Next step: the long-deferred Rio Conference, now tentatively scheduled for late July, which would draw up a mutual defense treaty for the Americas.

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