The Frontiersman

To many of his colleagues in the U.S. Foreign Service, long-legged Angus Ward was always a bit of a trial. When Angus joined the service in 1925, after a varied career as a lumber salesman, army officer, exporter and timber evaluator for the Bureau of Internal Revenue, an Ivy League degree was assumed to be part of a U.S. diplomat's equipment. In such company Canadian-born Angus Ward, who spoke with a Scottish burr and who had no degree at all, stuck out like a sore thumb.

Moreover, Diplomat Ward was guilty of constant breaches of the rigidly conventional behavior that Foreign Service officers demand of one another. Whenever he and his Finnish wife moved from post to post, a small menagerie went with them. In 1934, when Moscow's Savoy Hotel refused to admit a bearded Korean hen named Skippy, which the Wards had brought with them from China, Angus promptly rented for Skippy a country house complete with personal maid. In off-duty hours Ward affected loud plaid jackets, burgundy shirts, and tartan tam-o'-shanters or astrakhan fur caps. This sort of costume, reinforced by his Vandyke beard, produced a distinctly undiplomatic effect, and veteran Foreign Service men still recall with delight the day when a newly arrived junior official, mistaking him for the doorman of the Moscow embassy, curtly handed U.S. Consul Ward his luggage and a two-ruble tip.

Final Chapter. Eccentric as he sometimes appeared, Ward was a cool, competent diplomat. Scholarly and hardworking, he mastered several Chinese and Mongolian dialects in addition to the Russian taught him by his Russian-born mother. Above all, in a series of posts in or on the borders of the Soviet world--Mukden, Tientsin, Moscow, Vladivostok, Teheran--he gathered a specialist's knowledge of two ominously interrelated subjects: China and Communism.

A final, unique chapter in Ward's diplomatic education came in November 1948, when the Chinese Communists captured the Manchurian city of Mukden, where he was consul general. For seven months Ward was kept under house arrest, and Washington heard nothing from him. The State Department, determined at that point not to be beastly to the Chinese Reds, made no protest. Even when Ward and four of his aides were jailed on trumped-up charges (of having beaten up a former Chinese employee of the consulate), it was only after the Scripps-Howard newspapers launched a campaign against passive U.S. acceptance of Ward's imprisonment that the State Department finally bestirred itself enough to get Ward released.

Familiar Problems. Few if any other U.S. diplomats had ever faced an ordeal like Angus Ward's. He had spent nearly a month on a bread-and-hot-water diet, two weeks of it in semi-freezing solitary confinement, and throughout had stubbornly refused to give the Reds a "confession." Ironically enough, this very nearly ruined his career. Irritated by the controversial publicity he had received, Foreign Service brass was inclined to regard Ward as a nuisance, and in September 1950 he was named consul general in Nairobi, a job that made little use of his peculiar qualifications and background.

Ward himself was outspokenly disappointed with the Nairobi assignment, and his complaints were loudly echoed by powerful admirers, including California's Senator William Knowland. In 1952, after leaving Diplomat Ward in Kenya for two years, the Truman Administration bowed to continued criticism and named him Ambassador to Afghanistan.

In Afghanistan Ward found himself up against familiar problems. Soviet economic penetration of the country was going on apace, and the xenophobic Afghan government was increasingly hostile to the U.S. In thousands of miles of voyaging in a specially built "safari car" (which has eight forward speeds, its own winch and a built-in altimeter), he got to know the wild interior of Afghanistan better than any other Western diplomat.

Last week, after 31 years as a diplomatic frontiersman, Angus Ward, 62, resigned to devote his "remaining years to private pursuits"--probably carpentry, metalworking, and the completion of a Mongol dictionary that he started in 1927. Said President Eisenhower: "You have served your country with true distinction . . . and have won for yourself the admiration and confidence of the people in the countries to which you have been assigned, as well as of your fellow citizens."

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