The Natural Americans
(See Cover) Ambassadors have no battleships at their disposal, or heavy infantry, or fortresses. Their weapons are words and opportunities.
--Demosthenes, 343 B.C.
Modern ambassadors administer vast arsenals of peaceful weapons: food, loans, technical assistance--and in crisis, their advice to the government back home can even fetch battleships and airplanes. But words and opportunities remain the basic armament of diplomacy. In an age when heads of state can conveniently meet face to face, when foreign ministers crisscross the globe like soldier ants, when lies as well as truth travel with the speed of thought, it is still the ambassadors in every world capital who must explain their governments' policies to friends and foes, restrain the hasty, encourage the weak. For no nation in history was this task ever as demanding as for the U.S.
Whether or not it chooses to be involved, it is to the U.S. that the peoples the world over turn in anger or supplication. When an African leader is murdered or a colonial power censured in the U.N., stones rain on U.S. embassies thousands of miles away. If floods sweep through villages in South Viet Nam or drought destroys a wheat crop in Yugoslavia, their governments repair for help almost automatically to the U.S. ambassador. This phenomenon is often exasperating. But in a sense it merely acknowledges the reality that the U.S. is a world power with a worldwide stake in peace and order.
As 1962 opened, 99 U.S. ambassadors were at work, from the snow-clad plains of Serbia to the traffic jams of Tokyo. They included 68 ambassadors appointed by President Kennedy. In their first year on the job, the Kennedy men could scarcely claim many successes and have already suffered a number of setbacks. But they may well be the most promising new group of diplomats that the U.S. has fielded in years. Not all of them measure up to Kennedy's campaign promise that he would name as ambassadors "the best talent" in the U.S. But as a measure of ability, well over half the new appointees speak the languages of the countries to which they are assigned; the great majority have experience of their area's. Of all chiefs of mission now serving abroad, 70% are career Foreign Service men. Obviously this is no guarantee of success but the caliber of the professionals is rising. In some of the world's most complex areas (see story above), career men like Llewellyn E. Thompson were quietly and steadily at work last week. As for Kennedy's 28 "political" appointees, half come from education, law or journalism, while nine more come from other Government jobs. Three of the liveliest choices--and likeliest successes--among the new appointees are notable for their background, personality and high professional qualifications. The three:
GEORGE FROST KENNAN, 57, Pulitzer-prize winning Kremlinologist (Russia Leaves the War), onetime Ambassador to Moscow (1952), top cold war strategist who shaped the U.S. containment policy and the Marshall Plan. In a sharp policy disagreement with John Foster Dulles, he was shunted aside in 1953 after 25 years in the Foreign Service. He became a professor at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study, now is back in diplomacy as Ambassador to Yugoslavia, one of the cold war's key vantage points.
EDWIN OLDFATHER REISCHAUER, 51, Tokyo-born professor, translator and author (Wanted: An Asian Policy), and formerly (1956-60) director of Harvard's Center for East Asian Studies. He has spent 18 years in Japan, has a Japanese wife, is fluent in Japanese, reads Chinese, and is one of the leading U.S. authorities on Asian literature and history. Reischauer has had State Department experience as a Far Eastern deskman during Asia's postwar upheaval (1945-46), is now Ambassador to Japan.
JOHN KENNETH GALBRAITH, 53, bestselling controversialist (The Affluent Society), Harvard economics professor and sometime speechwriter for Adlai Stevenson and Kennedy. Canadian-born Galbraith has had half a dozen Government jobs, since 1956 has compiled searching surveys of India's economy, and is now Ambassador to India.
Shades of Ben. The three professors plenipotentiary have written 25 books among them, are unabashed intellectuals in countries that respect scholars or ideologists. Outwardly, they are as dissimilar as their specialties. Trim (5 ft. 11 1/4 in., 155 Ibs.), athletic George Kennan is blunt, analytical, professional, and a deeply moral man who agonizes over the increasingly "sterile" clash of East and West. Towering (6 ft. 8 in.) Ken Galbraith is a vastly engaging, vastly self-assured pragmatist; given to heavily ironic wisecracks, he likes to be taken for an ogre, and in diplomacy, he claims, he has had to make himself "a lot more agreeable" than is his wont. Slight (5 ft. 11 in., 165 Ibs.) Ed Reischauer is a low-key, hard-driving teetotaler whose Oriental serenity and upbringing have prompted the Japanese to treat him like an honorable cousin.
In their jobs, Kennan, Reischauer and Galbraith have set markedly individual styles. Their joint characteristics are frankness, sensitivity to the nerves and taboos of their host countries, an eagerness to listen as well as a marked capacity for eloquence, love of exercise and travel, impatience with the failures of U.S. society, and ill-concealed dislike of Embassy Row cocktail parties. In one of his books, Ed Reischauer says: "Diplomatic relations have grown out of the exchange of personal representatives between kings, and they still preserve some of the aristocratic aura of their origin. But diplomatic relations today are not really between individual rulers but between whole peoples of entire nations."
Actually, that idea goes back to the Republic's earliest days when Ambassador Ben Franklin appeared at the Court of Versailles wearing an old coat and wielding a crab-apple stick. The name for their own current version of people-to-people diplomacy was suggested by Ambassador Galbraith. Said he: "We don't want the Showy American. We don't want the Ugly American. I am quite willing to settle for the Natural American."
Classic Assets. From language to costume to protocol, * as richly obscure as a Melanesian courtship rite, diplomacy is not really a natural enterprise. Today it is carried on by the U.S. in a world where friends can be more frustrating than foes, where, as far as U.S. aid is concerned, most nations assume that it is more blessed to receive than to give, where every step is shadowed and every misstep exploited by the Communists (who are probably the leading modern exponents of the 17th century notion that a diplomat is an "honorable spy").
Though a pretty wife, a good chef and a good cellar are classic assets, nowadays the only essential for diplomatic success, as the State Department's Loy Henderson insisted, is "political sensitivity--without it a Ph.D. is useless. With it a high school student is invaluable." Messrs. Kennan, Reischauer and Galbraith will not win the cold war by setting fine tables. But they have personable wives, and. above all, they possess political sensitivity to the highest degree.
The Ideologist
Of the three posts, Kennan's is probably the trickiest, because of Yugoslavia's own anomalous situation--a thoroughgoing Communist state that broke with Stalin in 1948, has been heavily aided by the West ever since, is now generally subservient to Khrushchev in foreign policy but proclaims itself neutral. To start with, Ambassador Kennan hoped Tito Communists would be more "objective" than Soviet comrades, that with care and cultivation Tito might be induced to practice true neutrality. For four months, says an old Belgrade hand, Kennan "thought his personality and techniques were reshaping Tito's thinking"--a mistake Historian Kennan has spotted in others, including Franklin Roosevelt in his attitude toward Stalin.
The sobering shock for Kennan came with the conference last September of "nonaligned nations" in Belgrade. After assurances from Tito and top officials that Yugoslavia aimed to act as a "moderating force" on the other countries at the conference, Kennan flatly reported to Washington that Tito's speech would be genuinely neutral. But he did not know that when Russia resumed nuclear tests, Soviet Ambassador Alexei Epishev had called on Tito and left him convinced that Khrushchev needed his support. Unaware of the switch, Kennan was shocked and infuriated by Tito's anti-Western speech, which defended Khrushchev and took the Moscow line on Berlin. Kennan fired off angry cables to Washington. Shortly afterward, President Kennedy called for a review of U.S. aid to Yugoslavia. To many people in the drought-ridden country, it looked like retaliation for Tito's speech, although Kennan told an aide: "I would never play politics with Yugoslav stomachs."
Ambassador Kennan shunned Yugoslav friends for nearly three months until orders came from Washington to negotiate the sale of 500,000 tons of wheat, half the amount requested. Cheered by the news, Kennan attended Tito's annual hunt for Belgrade's diplomatic chiefs of mission. At the traditional hunt dinner (which went on until 6 a.m.), Kennan was surprised to find himself the guest of honor, seated between Tito and Edvard Kardelj, the party theoretician who is Tito's likely successor. For several hours Kennan aired his grievances before Yugoslavia's top leadership. Shorn of his initial optimism, Kennan had reminded himself that the Titoists are genuine Communists, and had reminded them that the U.S. cannot be used as a mere convenience. With guidance from Kennan, who returned for consultations this week, the U.S. expected to make hard-boiled adjustments in the type, priority and amounts of aid to Tito.
"The Yugoslavs have learned," says an embassy officer, "that Kennan won't allow the U.S. to be pushed around. Some of his predecessors just shrugged and said, 'Well, it's a Communist country, and they don't like us.' Kennan's not like that, and now that they know it, they have begun to show him extreme friendliness, deference and interest."
Kennan has conducted a running feud with Borba, the party sheet, and the government daily Politika. (He reads five papers in three languages daily.) "Shocked" by consistent distortion of events in the U.S.--which has pumped $2.1 billion in aid into the country, with its allies takes 60% of all Yugoslav exports--Kennan has fired off five angry letters to the papers. Their editors were flattered to be addressed by Professor Kennan, failed to print the letters, but last fortnight Borba's editor in chief paid him the rare honor, for a Westerner, of giving a dinner party at which Kennan was able to debate with other Yugoslav editors.
George Kennan plainly thrives on the controversy. Says he: "It's a vacation from the strains of scholarship. I feel like a boy out of school." Kennan and his Norwegian-born wife Annelise entertain to advantage (nearly 300 Yugoslavs so far) in their house, just down the street from Tito's villa. He has had six private sessions with Tito, more than any of the 45 other ambassadors in Belgrade. He explores the countryside on horseback or by car, has been busily reading Yugoslav literature (including all four novels by 1961 Nobel Laureate Ivo Andric). When he found that no first-rate history of Yugoslavia exists, Kennan decided that the embassy should write its own, one chapter per officer (his own assignment: medieval Serbia). Always the intellectual, when his turn came to conduct Sunday services at the nondenominational embassy church. Presbyterian Kennan spurned the canned sermons used by his officers, instead delivered a dissertation on "Religion as a Historical Force."
Dictating at breakneck speed without rewriting a word, Kennan turns out some of the best telegrams in the Foreign Service--and he does not necessarily stick to Yugoslav affairs. A Kennan cable is apt to begin: "While bowing to Tommy Thompson's superior knowledge since he is on the scene in Moscow, I do believe it might be useful to consider..."
Two Concepts. Kennan's preoccupation with both history and Russia is a family heritage. Though he is convinced that he "must have lived before and been a Russian," Kennan began his present incarnation in Milwaukee. Son of a tax attorney, he was inspired to join the Foreign Service by his cousin, George Kennan, a 19th century traveler, lecturer and writer who became the leading U.S. authority on Czarist Russia. * George Frost Kennan's intense intellectual and often emotional conflict with Communist Russia produced two famous concepts: containment and disengagement.
As early as 1933, when he opposed establishment of U.S. diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union, he warned: "The Communists mean to see us destroyed." When he first urged containment in 1946, it was, for its day, a tough anti-Communist policy. Largely through its inspiration, the Truman Doctrine was launched (though he insists that containment was always intended as a peaceful-political, not a military policy); and it was Kennan who brought the Marshall Plan to reality. In time, containment came to seem passive and sterile. While others vainly sought a way of "rolling back" Red power, Kennan preached the antithesis: disengagement. With its reference to a demilitarized Europe, the disengagement theory infuriated even Old Colleague Dean Acheson, who accused Kennan of having a "rather mystical attitude" toward power relationships. Wrote Kennan: "We all have to make our compromises with the devil and have our dealings with him."
But he no longer presses for disengagement. Says he: "I have no intention of resuming the role of a voice crying in the wilderness. The important thing is that what I said in the past has been rejected as policy. Another path has been chosen, I am here, and I follow that path without question."
The Knowing Elder
In Yugoslavia, Kennan is trying to prod an ideologically hostile country toward genuine neutrality; in Japan. Ed Reischauer has the opposite task: he must keep an essentially friendly country from moving toward neutrality--or worse. Neutralism, Reischauer believes, is a more potent threat in Japan than Washington realizes. Though the ruling Liberal-Democratic Party has a safe two-thirds majority in the Diet, it commands only about 60% of the popular vote. If this margin swings to the solidly neutralist opposition, the U.S.-Japanese alliance would almost certainly be scrapped, and, argues Reischauer, "neutralism, if not open pro-Communism, would be shown to be the obvious 'wave of the future.'"
As a result of breakneck political and economic progress, says Reischauer, Japan has become "the world's fastest-changing society," no longer has any "central core of ideals on which all groups can agree." The result: "A huge current of discontent within Japanese society, of frustration with present trends, and a strong sense of alienation from the existing order." Visiting Japan in 1960, Reischauer was "shocked" by the savagery that erupted in the May and June riots against the U.S.-Japanese security treaty. In a magazine article a few months later, he accused Ambassador Douglas MacArthur II of making a "shocking misestimate" of the situation, which belatedly prompted cancellation of Eisenhower's trip to Japan. He was a private citizen but also a leading expert on Japan, and so MacArthur asked Reischauer to drop by the embassy. The two men talked for hours, and Reischauer issued a mild apology. Less than a year later, he sat at the other side of the ambassadorial desk in Mac Arthur's place (MacArthur is now U.S. Ambassador to Belgium). Reischauer had been halfway through a new book on Asian history "when this appointment hit me." As a longtime critic of U.S. Asian policy, he now had the critic's rare opportunity--to show that he could do better himself.
Today "Reischauer-san" is something of a hero in Japan. He and his Japanese-born wife (his second; his first wife died in 1955) are treated by Tokyo crowds like movie stars or sumo champions. As the first U.S. ambassador in Japan to speak, read and write the language, he is constantly on TV. When he arrived, one paper warned local politicians that the new ambassador would know exactly what they are up to, headlined: THE MAN WHO KNOWS TOO MUCH ABOUT JAPAN.
Pertinent Points. To the Japanese, gentle Ed Reischauer has "low posture,'' the degree of humility that permits frankness. He eagerly talks to labor-union leaders, journalists, university professors, industrialists, and sees more of opposition leaders and intellectuals than his predecessor. Three months ago, a delegation of robed Buddhist monks came to protest against U.S. nuclear tests. Reischauer discoursed knowledgeably on Buddhism and the bomb in Japanese, explained U.S. reasons for testing, and sent them home wreathed in smiles. *
As a scholar who is admiringly called "Bunka Taishi," the cultural ambassador, Ed Reischauer has an entree to Japanese universities that is jealously denied other foreign officials. In every campus appearance he has scrupulously avoided propaganda, but manages nonetheless to get in some pertinent points. In a discussion of "Japanese History as Viewed from Abroad," he gracefully recalled the oft-forgotten fact that Japan had a thriving parliamentary tradition for 80 years before it was choked by the militarists in the '30s. The between-the-lines message was to Japanese radicals who are impatient with the legal niceties of democracy, which they regard merely as imposed by the U.S. occupation. One of his sharpest arguments: to students who yearn for both neutrality and disarmament, Reischauer points out that the two do not go together: "To be neutral, you must be prepared to be highly militarized, like Sweden or Switzerland."
Premature Genro. Almost all of Ed Reischauer's life has been a preparation for his present task. He is the son of a Presbyterian missionary who taught philosophy for 25 years at Tokyo's big Meiji Gakuin University and, with his wife, founded Japan's first school for deaf-mutes. Asked why he did not become a missionary, Reischauer grins: "Ah, but I am!"
Reischauer spent most of his childhood in Tokyo, graduated from Oberlin ('31), and after his M.A. in history at Harvard spent six years studying and touring as a fellow of the Harvard-Yenching Institute, an independent foundation that supports exchange fellowships and other academic programs in Asia (Reischauer had been its director since 1956). In 1931, at a time when few Americans were interested in Oriental studies, Reischauer was the only student taking Harvard's Chinese classics course, proudly calls himself "sort of a premature genro [elder statesman]." At Harvard he was famed for his basic course in Asian history, affectionately known as "Rice Paddies."
His wife Haru has an East-meets-West background that complements Reischauer's. Her mother was born in the U.S., where Haru's grandfather lived for 60 years and made his fortune as a silk trader. On her father's side, she is the granddaughter of Prince Masayoshi Matsukata, who was twice Prime Minister (1891-92, 1896-97). After attending Principia College in Elsah, Ill., Haru returned to Japan, after the war became a correspondent for U.S. magazines.
Favorable Moment. Both in and outside the embassy, which has responsibility for 2,469 employees (all but 392 are Japanese), Mr. and Mrs. Reischauer are a major social attraction. After its baseball team scored a 6-5 victory over the Japanese Foreign Office team, led by athletic Foreign Minister Zentaro Kosaka, the embassy staff gave the ambassador its Most Valuable Player award. At a festival in the seaport where Commodore Perry came ashore in 1853, Reischauer topped the bill. He wore a yukata, Japan's light cotton robe, and geta (clogs), delighted the crowd by thumping a great drum.
Reischauer knows that diplomacy is not a popularity contest. He arrived in Japan at a favorable moment, when a reaction against the earlier violence had already set in, and he now concedes that Predecessor MacArthur on the whole did a good job in a difficult period. Reischauer's own stiff tests still lie ahead. One of them: defense, U.S. occupation of Okinawa is a continuing source of friction in Japan, which wants to resume full sovereignty (it may soon get a bigger role in the island's administration). Though Japan spends only 1.4% of its national income on defense and relies on the U.S. for its protection, U.S. airbases and 45,000 servicemen (fewest since the occupation) inevitably stir resentment in the world's most densely populated country. U.S. resumption of nuclear tests in the atmosphere would provoke violent reaction. But by far the biggest problem for Japan, the world's second biggest market for U.S. goods, is the Administration's evident intention to raise tariffs on Japanese cotton textiles, which has prompted widespread protest. Reischauer says that Japan, which is running a billion-dollar trade deficit, will nonetheless "keep going ahead economically."
From unusually close contact with his fellow natives of Tokyo, Ambassador Reischauer believes that the tide of neutralism is ebbing. "I'm vastly encouraged," he says. "There is a much clearer realization of world realities."
The Insider
If the U.S. is better understood in Japan today than it was a year ago, its image in India has slightly clouded over. The change is due partly to the U.S. fiasco in Cuba, but more importantly to U.S. criticism of Indian actions: India's bull-headed demand for another unworkable nuclear test ban last October, the unsavory adventure in Goa.
Personally, John Kenneth Galbraith is almost as popular in India as Ed Reischauer in Japan. Natural American Galbraith has shucked business suits and neckties for casual sports shirts and white-hunter-style bush jackets. In his eagerness to talk to villagers in the middle of a paddyfield, he has even shucked his shoes. One of Galbraith's minor but highly welcome public relations gestures was to wheedle a $15,000 Ford Foundation grant so that he could distribute U.S. books to Indians. Jawaharlal Nehru took a bundle on his last vacation, reported that he was particularly tickled by The Last Hurrah. Ken Galbraith still has to fork out $500 a gross for the book that influential Indians seem to want most. Says he: "I thought it would be a bit raw to have the Ford Foundation buy up a supply of The Affluent Society. *
In the Post Office. Before he became ambassador, the Indian government retained him as an adviser. In his reports, describing the inertia and inefficiency of India's state-owned industries, Economist Galbraith coined the catch phrase "post-office socialism," proceeded to place the blame for its mediocre showing on "the socialists, who are responsible for the paralyzing belief that success is a matter of faith, not works." In the U.S., where he is himself known as a devout believer in economic planning, these words would sound strange from Galbraith; but amid India's "post-office socialists," he sounds almost like a free enterpriser, and many Indians are beginning to accept his recommendation that unless state-owned industries are made profitable and allowed to reinvest their profits, the nation faces economic stagnation.
Ken Galbraith is no less critical of the manner in which massive U.S. technical assistance has been frittered away on reams of unessential, unnoticed projects (sample: building better chicken coops). He has persuaded Washington to concentrate technical aid on three high-priority sectors--industrial management, public health, food grain production--that will help India and boost U.S. prestige. Though U.S. aid (nearly $4 billion in ten years) is the biggest outside boost to India's economy, complains the ambassador, it has become so "anonymous and secretive" that few Indians appreciate it.
Instant Wording. Despite occasional strains in U.S.-Indian relations, old India hands rate Galbraith as potentially the best ambassador Washington has sent to New Delhi. The job has been eased for him, he admits, by trends that began during the Eisenhower Administration--increased U.S. concern for the unaligned Afro-Asian nations, the view that free, non-Communist countries should qualify for aid without having to join military alliances. Of his predecessors. New York Businessman Ellsworth Bunker and Kentucky's U.S. Senator John Sherman Cooper were exceptionally able and well liked, while Chester Bowles, though popular at the time, is now remembered as having tried too hard to woo the Indians. Galbraith has a wider field of effectiveness and is closer to Nehru than either of his immediate predecessors, for the simple reason, as New Delhi sees it, that "they have more to talk about."
He is perhaps too confident in his belief that he understands the complicated Nehru, but on the whole he handles him well. Last August, after Nehru made the damaging assertion in the Indian Parliament that he could see no legal basis for Western access to Berlin, Galbraith braced Nehru with documentation. The Prime Minister admitted his error, but said that he would wait to revise his estimate until after the weekend--which would have allowed the error to sink in. At that point, Galbraith suggested a tactfully worded statement modifying Nehru's Berlin judgment. The Prime Minister smiled and, with only one change, agreed to Galbraith's wording.
The sternest test of Galbraith's skill came before the invasion of Goa. He spent two hours trying to dissuade Nehru, rose early next morning to write a forceful two-page memo. Nehru postponed the invasion three days when Galbraith promised that Washington would do its utmost to persuade Portugal to agree to a face-saving U.N. arbitration. The attempt foundered on Portugal's refusal. Once the invasion was over (in 36 hours), Galbraith thought the Goa matter should be dropped, argued that further U.S. censure of India was futile and would only make the Indians tougher to deal with on other issues. He sent off a critical telegram to the State Department when his old friend and sometime political hero, Adlai Stevenson, made a U.N. speech that sharply censured India's action. But Galbraith himself does not hesitate to criticize the Indians for their often inconsistent positions. Citing U.S. intervention against the Trujillos, Galbraith felt that the U.S. received little credit for a courageous decision, added wryly: "Had our pressure been on extremists of the left rather than the right, we would have stirred up a hideous row."
Lazy W. He got his job because President Kennedy wanted "a man I know" to deal with Nehru. Galbraith feels himself an Administration insider, is probably the most independent ambassador in the field.
He travels when and where he chooses, improvises on State Department orders, even ignores them if he feels they are ill advised. "A calculated risk," he says, "is what they say in Washington when they mean, 'I don't think this will work, but don't blame me later.'" On major issues his brisk, elegant telegrams are written more for White House consumption than for the "ice palace," as he sometimes jokingly calls the State Department. The President has blessed Galbraith's independent ways. "It's O.K., Ken," he told the ambassador on one of his reappearances in Washington. "It's why you're paid so highly." *
--Galbraith has an instinctive air of authority, can seem commanding even when he is relaxing on a sofa, his long frame folded into a lazy W. "Rightly or wrongly," he says, "I usually have a perfectly clear idea of what to do." He has always had a passion for politics and for the uses of power. His father, a schoolteacher turned farmer, was a local Liberal Party leader at lona Station, Ont.; but he was as shy as he was tall (6 ft. 8 in., like his son), and never sought political office.
Young Galbraith did not feel such diffidence. He studied animal husbandry (which has stood him in good stead as a tireless cow-patter on Indian farm tours), got a Ph.D. in economics at the University of California, became an instructor at Harvard and Princeton, but, through it all, he yearned for politics. He bounced around the Washington agencies, and in his spare time constructed an elaborate system for price regulation. In 1941, when Galbraith's system was published, he was hired by Leon Henderson as an official in the newborn Office of Price Administration, later became OPA deputy administrator. Galbraith looked on helplessly for two years as his six-man staff swelled to 16.000 and every one of his mechanisms for price control proved unworkable. From a stint at FORTUNE, which he credits with teaching him to write, he returned to Harvard. (In 1937 he had married Kitty Atwater, who became one of Harvard's best German instructors.)
Feudal Friends. At Harvard, Galbraith began turning out books and, at campaign time, Democratic speeches. The experience persuaded him that diplomacy is no different from politics as practiced, say, at a political convention: "You must ask and argue but try to do it without robbing the other person of his personal sovereignty or self-respect."
As a diplomat-politician, Galbraith occasionally forgets his own advice about other people's self-respect. In his early days as ambassador, he refused to meet a maharajah with the lofty comment that he did not want to identify himself with "feudal elements." Later he found that maharajahs can be the best of 20th century company. He publicly ridiculed two "end-use observers" on his own staff (experts who watch how U.S. aid is applied), later conceded that they were useful and that in fact he needed more. If New Delhi has a more serious criticism of Galbraith, it is that conservative business circles--in which he tends to be dismissed as "that socialist"--have hardly glimpsed the ambassador. Galbraith says businessmen are next on his schedule, has concentrated instead on the most volatile segment of Indian society, its left-wing intellectuals. In a series of major speeches, he has not truckled to their prejudices, but has candidly explored the duties and limitations of free societies. At Madras' Annamalai University recently, he discussed the U.S. role in the world in terms that might also have been used by Colleagues Kennan and Reischauer, and indeed by any U.S. ambassador:
"In recent times we have been granting aid which has the purpose of helping countries to attain and maintain their independence. At what point in either ineffectiveness or illiberalism does that assistance cease to be justified? Let me be very clear that there is such a point. There could be no greater error of calculation than to imagine that the U.S. will try to save all comers from Communism, however feeble their own efforts, however maladroit their administration, or however despotic their internal politics. Governments can be so bad either in motive or performance or a combination of the two that they are not worth saving, or cannot be saved. But if we resolved to extend our aid only to perfect democracies, we would have very few clients."
Again and again he stressed the point that others must share in the task: "It may be that the U.S. in past years has seemed too eager to assume responsibility. One sometimes thinks that people have come to expect that everywhere disorder manifests itself, or wherever Communism rears its head there will be an American on hand to put down the disorder, resist the Communists and generally put things right...Our eagerness is not that great...The task is how to assume responsibility without arrogating responsibility. The myth of American omnipotence is a myth. The task of protecting liberty and promoting orderly development and well-being is one that must engage the thoughts and energies of all."
* U.S. ambassadors are among the few diplomats who are never addressed as "Excellency." Their formal attire for almost a century was "the simple dress of an American citizen." as decreed by Andrew Jackson in 1853. Since the order specified long trousers, which were then worn mostly by waiters, U.S. ambassadors were constantly being insulted or tipped. Formal dress for a U.S. diplomat today consists of striped pants, white tie, black coat and black waistcoat, a combination still favored by waiters.
* After hearing Kennan describe Siberia's prison camps, Mark Twain exclaimed: "If such a government cannot be overthrown otherwise than by dynamite, then thank God for dynamite! "
* He uses Japanese in conversation, but his speeches are delivered in English, since the ambassador has no time to compose the precise, formalized rhetoric expected of the Japanese orator.
* It has done quite well enough on its own: 154,000 copies in twelve languages.
* $27,500 plus allowances, Reischauer also gets $27,500, Kennan $25,000.
This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.