Agonized Man

During the war years, as U.S. Ambassador to the Court of St. James's, gaunt, shy John Gilbert Winant lived a hard and nerve-racking life. He came home, after his resignation in March 1946, to accept another hard job for his country--permanent U.S. representative on UNESCO. But last December he asked President Harry Truman to relieve him of his duties. He wanted to "pick up life again as a private citizen in my own country."

It had been a long time since he had been a private citizen. Gil Winant, a rich man's son, had spent most of his life in some kind of service to his country. As a scraggly youth at St. Paul's School in Concord, N. H., he had developed a. burning interest in U.S. history. As a Princeton undergraduate he had left college in 1912 to campaign for Roosevelt I.

He went back to St. Paul's as a teacher--an angular, inarticulate man who reminded his students of Lincoln. But when World War I began he crammed his air training into three days, served in France as a combat aviator. He was to be a squadron commander, came home unscathed--although he had crashed seven times--and settled down in Concord to begin a political career.

He was an odd politician--an idealist and a dismal campaigner. But he burned to help the common man. He was thrice elected Republican Governor of New Hampshire, but when Franklin Roosevelt began the New Deal, Winant disregarded G.O.P. disapproval to back him.

F.D.R. brought him to Washington, in 1941 sent him to Great Britain as Ambassador. The English loved absentminded, honest Gil Winant. Once, when asked to make a speech, he stood in agonized silence for four minutes, finally said, softly: "The worst mistake I ever made was in getting up in the first place."

After his retirement, ten months ago, Winant went back to his house in Concord, devoted himself to writing his wartime memoirs, Letter from Grosvenor Square, about to be released by Houghton Mifflin. In recent weeks his friends had begun to worry a little about him--he showed signs of deep fatigue. But they did not guess how 58-year-old Gil Winant would end it. One night this week he shut himself in an upstairs room of the Concord house, shot himself through the temple with a .32-caliber pistol.

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