HER MAJESTY'S NEW REALIST

With diffident grace, as "an Oxford man with an uncertain academic record." Alexander Frederick Douglas-Home. 57, the 14th Earl of Home (pronounced Hume), last week accepted an honorary doctorate from Harvard University. "Amid winds of change, he labors with sure lucidity for community among nations." said the citation. In a Harvard speech, in another in Chicago, in private talks with Secretary of State Dean Rusk in Washington, Lord Home was getting across to Americans what the British have already learned to their considerable surprise: in less than a year on the job. Home has emerged as the strongest British Foreign Secretary in years, a man who seems more realistic about the Communist menace than his boss and old friend, Harold Macmillan.

Crisis Coming. Why is a Berlin crisis coming, Home asked the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations rhetorically last week. "It is in Germany that the Communists are seen to be losing in fair competition with a free society. Every year, a quarter of a million people leave East Germany, voting with their feet. So, apparently, the peace of the world is going to be endangered because this puppet regime cannot survive unless the Iron Curtain is clamped down still more vigorously."

A main purpose of Home's trip was to lay to rest fears that Britain might welsh on its Berlin commitments. "Our signature is on the treaties," he said. "They must be interpreted with intelligence, but we shall never falter or default on them. Some of the columnists seem to think that unless we go around whistling military tunes to keep our courage up that there is disunity among us."

Such ringing conviction was the last thing his critics expected when Home took office last year. In fact, some were unkind enough to hold that his life had peaked 39 years before at Eton, where Classmate Cyril Connolly remembers him as "the graceful, tolerant, sleepy boy who is showered with favors and crowned with laurels, without any apparent exertion on his part. He appeared honorably ineligible for the struggle of life." At Christ Church College, Oxford, Home could not earn his blue at cricket, never matching his brilliant 66 on a sticky wicket for Eton against Harrow. He caught Neville Chamberlain's eye and became his parliamentary private secretary--only to suffer obloquy later for having ridden with Chamberlain through the cheering crowds at Munich. In the 1945 Labor landslide, he even managed to lose his family's "safe" Parliament seat in Lanarkshire. In 1951, he went off to the musty House of Lords after acceding to his father's title and his share of the family's 100,000 acres in Scotland.

Front Seat. When Macmillan elevated Home from Commonwealth Relations to the Foreign Office last July, the Laborite Daily Mirror called it "the most reckless political appointment since the Roman Emperor Caligula made his favorite horse a consul." Home admitted wistfully that "one would have to have the hide of a rhinoceros not to be affected by the criticism." But he defended his apprenticeship for the job. "After all, for five years it was my job to explain foreign policy to the Commonwealth." Officials used to his rather dour predecessor, Selwyn Lloyd, were charmed by Home's wit and informality (Home rides up front in official cars, putting the Scotland Yard man in the back). His subordinates were also surprised at his grasp of the issues.

"I have some very clear ideas," says Home. "The main one is security," which Britain can achieve, he believes, only "by making and keeping friends"--notably the U.S. Where Macmillan likes to emphasize the possibilities of negotiating with the Russians, Home warns that Communism is "an international and militant crusade. As long as Communism deals in subversion, aggression and domination, the relations between East and West, must be considered principally in the context of power." It is just such a cold assessment of power that led Home to favor backing down on Laos--he calculates that a war there would sap the West and leave it ill-prepared to meet a crisis in Europe.

Last week, to his Chicago audience, Home stoutly defended British colonialism, which "since the war has established ten fully independent nations in Asia and Africa. In the next generation, if we are given time--and I say this pointedly in the United States--it will be responsible for the first nonracial societies in Africa." He warned that the U.S. should not judge Britain by the ban-the-bombers, "a few whose minds are as fluffy as their beards." He added: "Do not be misled into thinking us soft. Napoleon called us a nation of shopkeepers. The memorial to him in London is a railway station called Waterloo. Shopkeepers we may be, but neither our principles nor our alliances are for sale."

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