The Old Pros

Lyndon Johnson's unhappy relations with the intelligentsia have not impaired his uncanny skill for dealing with the tough-minded thinkers who are the stars of U.S. diplomacy. Rounding out his foreign bargaining team after former Attorney General Nicholas DeB. Katzenbach's switch to the State Department, the President used his special brand of persuasiveness to retain two consummate professionals in Government service long after retirement age and introduce an internationally minded businessman to the delicate art of bar gaining among nations.

Keep Them Talking. As ambassador to Moscow, succeeding Foy Kohler, Johnson picked Llewellyn E. Thompson, 62, one of the best working Sovietologists in Government. "Tommy" Thompson has spent nine years in the Soviet Union, five of them as ambassador--longer than any other American envoy --speaks fluent Russian, and has been a Kremlin watcher since 1933, when President Roosevelt first recognized the Bolshevist regime.

Thompson's cold-war technique is the essence of diplomacy: to keep talking when both sides are scarcely on speaking terms and to set a breakneck pace for negotiations at the first sign of a thaw. To win withdrawal of the Red army from Austria, Thompson haggled fruitlessly through 379 meetings for nine years, then achieved agreement in eleven hectic days in 1955.

As ambassador to Moscow from 1957 to 1962, Thompson was able to work more closely with Soviet leaders than any other postwar U.S. envoy. His firsthand knowledge of Nikita Khrushchev's mind helped Thompson to divine Moscow's reactions throughout the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. He has been the State Department's chief resident negotiator with the Russians ever since.

Top Banana. To succeed Thompson as ambassador at large, Johnson named Ellsworth Bunker, 72, a courtly, tough-minded troubleshooter. It was Bunker's Yankee courage and persistence, above all, that brought peace and honest elections to the Dominican Republic in 1966 after its acrid civil war. As an envoy of the Organization of American States, the tall, white-haired New Englander-moved unconcerned past furious rebels and through gunfire to meet the warring politicos and cajole them into signing a ceasefire. Later he served as mediator during the cliff-hanging months before President Joaquin Balaguer's inauguration. Bunker's patience won him the esteem of all Dominican factions save the pro-Communist Castroites, who called him El Pato Macho del Mangoneo (The Top Banana of Machinations). Said Rebel Colonel Francisco Caamano Deno: "I have the respect for that man that I have for my own father." Caamano's archrival, General Antonio Imbert Barreras, agreed.

Dark Horse for Latins. The O.A.S. ambassadorship will be filled by Sol M. Linowitz, 52, chairman of Xerox International, Inc. Linowitz, a brilliant businessman and liberal dark horse for this year's Democratic nomination for Governor of New York, has been one of the Administration's leading private advisers on foreign aid, and his Rochester-based company (a wholly owned subsidiary of Xerox Corp., which he also guides as executive-committee chairman and general counsel) has been active in Latin America. Linowitz also becomes U.S. representative on the Inter-American Committee on the Alliance for Progress, a job he inherits from Presidential Special Assistant Walt W. Rostow.

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