Ambassador Extraordinary

FOREIGN RELATIONS

When Richard Nixon lost the California governorship race in 1962, an acerbic English journalist wrote a political obituary. "Nixon's record suggests a man of no principle whatever," chided the pseudonymous columnist "Flavus" in London's New Statesman. Flavus, alias John Freeman, then editor of the socialist weekly, added for good measure in 1964 that Nixon and some other leading Republican hopefuls were "discredited and outmoded purveyors of the irrational."

Times change. This week Freeman flies to Washington as Britain's 35th diplomatic representative to the U.S. Paramount to Ambassador Freeman's mission will be getting along with the revivified Richard Nixon, now the occupant of the White House.

Bedrock of Statesmanship. Despite such unpromising beginnings, the auguries are surprisingly auspicious. Nixon could have asked Whitehall to send someone else, but did not. When President and envoy met in London last week, Nixon was notably gracious.

"Freeman is the new diplomat," he remarked to Britain's Cabinet, "and Nixon is the new statesman." "It's true that I have been critical of Mr. Nixon," Freeman admits, not retracting a single word of what he then wrote. Yet he is moved and impressed by the "new" Nixon's astonishing comeback from oblivion. "I think a man who does this," Freeman observed, "has a quality of guts and courage and steadfastness of purpose which is part of the bedrock of statesmanship." If steadfastness is a criterion, then Freeman, now 54, is no statesman. His mutant career has led through the House of Commons, Fleet Street journalism, television and diplomacy. The son of a well-to-do lawyer, Schoolboy Freeman was converted to socialism by the sight of Depression hunger marchers in 1931. As a young Member of Parliament, he was spotted as a comer by no less a judge than Winston Churchill. But in 1951, he joined another ambitious young Laborite named Harold Wilson in resigning noisily from the socialist administration to protest Britain's rocketing defense spending. In 1955, disenchanted with active politics, he quit the Commons for journalism.

Good Subject. A decade later, Prime Minister Wilson turned to Old Comrade Freeman to be Britain's High Commissioner (ambassador) in India, where embroilment in India's quarrels with Pakistan seemed unavoidable, but where, as a diplomatic greenhorn, Freeman often found it advisable to lie low. The New Statesman's immense prestige among Indian intellectuals boosted the personal popularity of its former editor, and Freeman's vivacious dark-haired third wife, Catherine, won praise for her relief work in famine-ravaged Bihar.

It was as a television performer between 1959 and 1962 that handsome, red-haired John Freeman became a nationwide celebrity though British viewers of his astringent Face to Face interview show each week seldom saw anything but the back of his head as the cameras zoomed in for closeups of the object of his relentless inquisitorial style. One TV star burst into tears when questioned about his homosexual inclinations. Nixon, who submitted to a Freeman interview in 1951, impressed the future ambassador as "a very good subject indeed," even though they were poles apart in their political views.

Britain's diplomats in Washington do not count among Embassy Row's real swingers, even though Freeman will enjoy an annual entertainment allowance of $96,000. Disliking cocktail parties, he prefers dinners for a score of guests or fewer, a custom that will not devalue the cachet that Washington society has always attached to invitations embossed with the lion and unicorn of Britain. As a man who professes to enjoy most of all "lurking round the edges of politics," Ambassador Freeman is bound to find plenty of entertainment in Byzantium-on-the-Potomac.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.