National Affairs: Fighter's Retirement

Dedicated to the single principle of "resisting the power and influence of Communist China because I believe to do otherwise is to build up the enemy," Walter Spencer Robertson, Virginia investment banker and China economic expert, built up unusual influence in six years (1953-59) as Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs. He advocated strong U.S. support for Nationalist China's Chiang Kai-shek and South Korea's Syngman Rhee while restraining them (in personal missions) from impulsive counterattacks, helped build the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization, recommended U.S. support for Nationalist China's defense of the offshore Quemoy and Matsu islands. He outargued liberal critics who urged the recognition of Red China, drew his moral from the record of the Truman Administration. "The U.S.," said he, "does bear a very large part of the responsibility for the loss of China to the Communists. If we had applied the policies we used in China to our European allies, we would have lost them too."

Suffering increasingly in recent years from ulcers, headaches and fatigue, Walter Robertson sought to resign as long ago as January 1957. Secretary of State Dulles, an old friend, put his arm around Robertson's shoulder and said: "You just can't leave. I want you for policy matters, and you can leave the detail stuff to other people." Last July Robertson wrote out a formal letter of resignation to President Eisenhower, was turned down again. Reason: the Quemoy crisis was brewing, and Robertson's resignation might be read by Red China to mean a softening of the U.S. position. Last week, when ailing Walter Robertson, 65, finally persuaded the President to accept his resignation effective July 1, he got a warm letter from the President, treasured most a sentence that read: "The policies which you have helped develop form a significant part of our broad national policy."

Robertson's hand-picked successor: his Deputy Assistant Secretary James Graham Parsons, 51, Groton and Yale ('29). "Jeff" Parsons, onetime protégé of farsightedly anti-Communist Ambassador to Japan Joseph Grew, is a Foreign Service officer who served ably as deputy chief of Mission to Japan (1953-56), as U.S. Ambassador to Laos (1956-58), and sees eye to eye with Virginia-bound Walter Spencer Robertson on the need to base policy on the principle—proved correct again in Tibet—that Red China is "the enemy."