Calling the Plays

The State Department's new superintendent of Latin American affairs got down to business in a hurry. Arriving in Washington last week from Honduras, where he had just shucked his job as the U.S.'s second youngest Ambassador,* 44-year-old Paul Daniels showed up at his green-carpeted office the first morning at a quarter to nine. As Director of the Office of American Republics Affairs (ARA), he knew he had his work cut out for him. Besides riding herd on 20 U.S. Ambassadors south of the border, he will be the top-level State Department contact for Latin American Ambassadors assigned to Washington.

Planner. The first morning, Paul Daniels summoned his deputy, Robert F. Woodward, and spent an hour with him going over general diplomatic problems. Then, at 10:30, Career Man Daniels, who has worked all over Latin America in 20 years of foreign service, hustled off to the Pan American Union to tackle his toughest assignment of the moment. As U.S. representative on the Inter-American Economic and Social Council, Daniels was soon knee-deep in planning for the Pan American Conference to be held at Bogo ta in January. On the council's work largely depends the success or failure, at least from the U.S. standpoint, of the Bogota get-together.

Latin Americans have a lot of ideas about what should be done at Bogota, particularly in the economic field. Most Latin American nations are hungry for dollars, many have full-blown inflation. Colombia last week outlined to the Pan American Union planners a scheme for a $5 billion U.S. loan to finance industrialization of Latin America, stabilize local currencies. In Rio de Janeiro, U.S. -wise Brazilian Businessman Valentim Bougas urged Latin Americans to follow the ex ample of European nations, which met in Paris last summer to canvass their needs. Latin delegates, Bougas said, should get together at Bogota ten days before the conference "to discuss beforehand the Marshall Plan for South America." An other proposal that Latin Americans would like to discuss: an Inter-American Bank, with the U.S. putting up the lion's share of the capital.

Signal-Caller. The State Department, for its part, would like to see the conferees at Bogota limit themselves to one main enterprise: a more effective and tightly knit union of the Americas. This would be achieved by treaties to strengthen Pan American cooperation in military and political matters. State hopes that the conference will avoid embarrassing floor-wrangling over economic aid. Such controversies, successfully postponed at the Rio Conference last summer, should be postponed again, the U.S. feels, until a purely economic meeting to be held later in 1948.

To prevent any open splits at Bogota is Daniels' first task. As able as his colleagues think Daniels is (he has come to the top the hard way, in the little posts),* they know it is no one-man job. Teams of experts mass daily around long conference tables in windowless State Department rooms, preparing pounds of data on pet U.S. projects and on topics the Latin Americans may bring up.

Daniels is the quarterback. He will carry out the plans of his superiors (Truman, Marshall, Assistant Secretary Norman Armour), but he must call the plays when the going gets fast and rough. Paul Daniels is preparing himself to call the right ones.

* George Allen, Ambassador to Persia, is eight days younger.

* At one, the steaming Colombian port of Buenaventura, Vice Consul Daniels set something of a Foreign Service record by asking not to be transferred: he was having too good a time shooting alligators. Buenaventurans still call him el simpadtico Senor Daniels.

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