Troubleshooter for Syria

A suave, straight-backed U.S. career ambassador headed secretly across town to Washington National Airport one day last week and flew to Turkey on an urgent mission. Loy Wesley Henderson. 65, the State Department's ace troubleshooter for the Middle East, was off to meet Turkey's Premier Adnan Menderes. Iraq's King Feisal and Jordan's King Hussein to hammer together a common policy against the threat of Communist infiltration in Syria (see FOREIGN NEWS).

Before him there echoed strident Syrian cries: "We are positive neutralists! We are at the outer edge of that policy--do not force us to go beyond it!" Behind him sounded presidential words of caution. "The pattern that is seemingly emerging is an old one for the Soviets." said Dwight Eisenhower at his weekly press conference: "to offer economic and military aid ... to find stooges that will do their will, and finally, to take over the country. Now, in Syria, how far this pattern has gone we don't know."

"Mr. Foreign Service." The man sent to determine the pattern and frame recommendations for U.S. policy is notably suited to do the job. Loy Henderson, Deputy Under Secretary of State for Administration, one of the U.S.'s "five-star" career diplomats,* has risen during 35 years of quiet, stylish diplomacy to successive new highs of influence and prestige in the State Department, where he is often called "Mr. Foreign Service." His specialties: Soviet Communism and the Middle East.

Born on a farm near Rogers, Ark., the son of a man who was studying for the Methodist ministry, Loy Henderson went to Northwestern University ('15) and Denver University Law School (1917-18), served with the American Red Cross during World War I and the aftermath, came home in 1922 with such interest in foreign problems that he took the stiff foreign service exams. Passed and appointed, he performed energetically in junior jobs from Dublin to Moscow, brilliantly in Washington as head of the Office of Near Eastern and African Affairs (1945-48), and as Ambassador to Iraq (1943-45), Ambassador to India (1948-51) and Ambassador to Iran (1951-55).

His impact upon policy was generally to urge that the U.S. ought to take ever stronger stands against world Communism and that the U.S., while not abandoning its friendship with Israel, ought to concentrate upon repairing and rebuilding its friendship with the Arab states. So skillful was his handling of the crisis of Iran's Mohammed Mossadegh that President Eisenhower gave him the State Department's Distinguished Service Award for "courage and leadership during a dangerously unsettled period, for wisdom and unfailing patience in the course of complex negotiations."

Line of Retreat. Arriving in Istanbul this week, Loy Henderson hurried into a series of hours-long conferences with the Turks, Iranians and the Arab monarchs. In the intricate situation that Henderson was exploring, President Eisenhower had set a diplomatic keynote that had a Loy Hendersonian ring. In taking up public positions on diplomatic items such as whether to call Syrian plotters "men of leftish leanings" or "Communists," said the President, the true diplomat should never commit himself irretrievably. "Always," he said, "give your enemy a line of retreat if you can."

*The others: Deputy Under Secretary of State Robert Murphy, 62; Ambassador to Austria H. Freeman (''Doc") Matthews, 58.

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