Diplomat's Death

In a red clapboard cottage nine miles southeast of Ottawa, Mrs. Lester Kipp was cooking breakfast one morning last week when something about the throb of a nearby aircraft made her look up at the sky through the kitchen window. She was just in time to see a plane explode in the air over a neighbor's barn, then crash in a great ball of orange flame in a nearby field. "Lester," cried Mrs. Kipp to her husband, "go help the people."

The people on the crashing plane were beyond help. One crewman had managed to parachute to safety. The others, including Laurence Adolphe Steinhardt, 57, U.S. ambassador to Canada, were dead in the tangle of shattered metal burning itself out on the snowy field.

Lowered Flags. Within a few hours Canada's capital was in mourning for Laurence Steinhardt, one of the ablest and most popular ambassadors the U.S. had ever sent abroad. All over the city (except at the Soviet embassy) flags flew at half-staff. Telegraph companies hired extra messengers to deliver the stacks of telegrams. At the U.S. embassy, a second receptionist was assigned to receive the crowds that came to pay respects.

Canada was impressed with Ambassador Steinhardt from the moment he arrived in October 1948. Until then, many Canadians had always thought of the U.S. embassy as a rest home for weary U.S. diplomats or a testing ground for fledglings. Steinhardt fitted neither pattern. He was a successful Wall Street lawyer, a heavy contributor to Democratic campaigns, whom Franklin Roosevelt first rewarded with the ministry to Sweden. No mere fat cat, hard-driving Laurence Steinhardt immersed himself in his job, soon became a virtual career ambassador in one hot spot after another.

After a prewar tour of duty in Lima, Peru, he was ambassador to Russia for nearly three hard years through the Hitler-Stalin pact and the Nazi invasion. Even when the Germans seemed likely to take Moscow, Steinhardt remained confident that the Russians would hang on. He laid in a 100-day food supply at an emergency refuge outside the city, an extra stock of surgical supplies, and prepared his staff for a long siege. President Roosevelt called him "a good fixer and boss trader." In 1942 F.D.R. switched him to Turkey, where Steinhardt was matched against Germany's crafty Franz von Papen in the diplomatic wrestle for Turkey's friendship. After the war, before coming to Ottawa, Steinhardt served the U.S. in troubled Czechoslovakia, then starting on its painful journey through the Communist rolling mill.

Expert Envoy. From Ottawa, Steinhardt traveled from one end of Canada to the other. When Canadian and U.S. troops finished Exercise Sweetbriar on the rim of the Arctic two months ago, he was on hand in bitter weather to watch the windup. He made friends officiating at such functions as the Stampede in Calgary and the dog derby in Ottawa.

In workaday diplomacy, Canadian government leaders liked the attentive hearing Steinhardt gave their problems and his willingness to go to bat for Canada in Washington. "The trouble with Canadians is that they never make enough noise,"

Steinhardt once told a friend. In Canada, as in his other posts, Laurence Steinhardt's energy and willingness to make noise when noise was needed enabled him to speed up the machinery of diplomacy and to serve his country well.

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