FOREIGN RELATIONS: U.S. Ambassadors

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The U.S. has 59 ambassadors and twelve ministers accredited to the world's sovereign nations. To those nations, the face and voice of each ambassador is the voice and face of the U.S.

The faces and voices are important, though not as important as they used to be. A hundred years ago, when new instructions had to wait for the next packet, an ambassador had to make major decisions on the spot. Today, a diplomat's freedom of action is no greater than his distance from a Teletype. But if the words he speaks are not his own, the manner of his speaking and the energy or tact of his delivery can make a notable difference.

U.S. ambassadors do more than-talk to foreign ministers. They are also public-relations men with a whole nation for a client. They make speeches, inspect public works, judge flower shows, organize charities. They talk to labor leaders, opposition politicians, businessmen. And while they talk, they listen. For the other side of their job is to be the U.S.'s eyes & ears. On their reading of tempers and political moods Washington bases much of its timing and many of its decisions.

Who are these men who speak, look and listen for 155 million Americans? Most are career diplomats, painstaking, patient men who have come up the long ladder through minor embassy jobs to their final rewards. The typical career diplomat was born on the Eastern seaboard and graduated from an Ivy League college (though the younger, rising generation is more scattered in origin and education). His training makes him an observer rather than a doer, a compromiser rather than a shaker, a man of caution rather than a man of decision. Only a rare few have private means of their own, and except in the very biggest missions, riches are no longer a prerequisite.

The career men are generally quiet men, and inclined to be scholarly. One (W. Walton Butterworth, in Sweden) is a Rhodes Scholar; another (J. Rives Childs, in Ethiopia) writes novels and histories under a pseudonym (Henry Filmer), and carries an enormous private library with him wherever he goes.

Some typical career men:

¶James Clement Dunn, 60, U.S. Ambassador to Italy since 1946. Slim, impeccably tailored, a conservative, wealthy man (his wife is the former Mary Armour of the meat-packing clan), he has been in the State Department for 33 years, has served as assistant to three Secretaries of State, as chief of the Division of European Affairs. Born in Newark, N.J., he became a practicing architect before entering the State Department as a clerk. Dunn's main job has been to keep Italy from falling under Communist control, by cajoling, chivying and maneuvering the. Italian government, without laying himself open to charges of interference. One push in the other direction, appreciated by Italians: his efforts to get the terms of the Italian peace treaty relaxed. An indefatigable salesman for the U.S., Dunn is always on hand to dedicate a new bridge built by ECA funds, to present a shipload of toys from the American Legion, or a snow plow from the citizens of Jersey City to an Alpine village.