National Affairs: TOP HANDS AT STATE

UNDER Secretary of State Christian Herter, who had slipped away only eight days before on a long-planned vacation at his South Carolina plantation, flew back to Washington last weekend on a MATS Convair bearing the blue seal of his office. Chris Herter, his 6-ft. 5-in. body bent by arthritis (he has recently been using a wheelchair and aluminum half crutches to get around), walked down the steps unaided to be met by Under Secretary of State for Economic Affairs C. Douglas Dillon, his next in command during the period of Foster Dulles' incapacity.

With Herter holding the title and ultimate responsibility and Dillon holding the high respect of Herter, White House and Congress, these two men would be running the West's most important diplomatic post for at least a few crucial weeks:

Christian Archibald Herter

Chris Herter, 63, was born and schooled in Paris, where his American parents were art students. Spindly young Chris was nine when he arrived in the U.S., found himself two years ahead of his age group at New York's Browning School. At Harvard he concentrated on fine arts, graduated ('15) cum laude, then enrolled concurrently at Columbia University's School of Architecture and New York's School of Fine and Applied Art. A Harvard classmate talked him into taking a minor Foreign Service job with the U.S. embassy in Berlin, and World War I turned the diplomatic pastime into a passion that never dwindled. After his elder brother Everit was killed in France with the A.E.F., Chris Herter resolved to make the achievement of peace his lifetime's mission.

In 1917 Herter married Mary Caroline Pratt, daughter of a staid and wealthy Standard Oil family (they now have three sons and a daughter), and took his bride to Switzerland, where he was on State Department assignment to help draw up a prisoner-of-war agreement. After that he went to the Versailles Conference, officially as a secretary but unofficially as hearing aide to U.S. Delegate Joseph Clark Grew, who was growing increasingly deaf. In 1921 Herter returned to the U.S. as secretary to Commerce Secretary Herbert Clark Hoover in the Harding Administration.

Out of the Kitchen. Washington under Harding, Herter recalls, was "like a dirty kitchen, where cockroaches abound." Herter quit, moved to Boston as co-owner and salaryless co-editor of the old magazine of opinion, the Independent, once graced by Henry Ward Beecher. Active as a Republican, he was elected to the Massachusetts legislature in 1930, became its speaker in 1939, and in 1942 was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. Named chairman of a Select House Committee on Foreign Aid, he led his committee abroad on a survey trip, laid much of the groundwork for the Marshall Plan legislation. So strict were Herter's rules that once, when the committee was traveling abroad, a sign appeared in the Queen Mary's lecture room: "Here sat the Committee on Foreign Aid/And worked like hell while the others played."

In 1948 Herter worked as a member of a team drafting foreign-policy speeches for U.S. Presidential Candidate Thomas E. Dewey. Teammate: Doug Dillon. Team coach: John Foster Dulles. Herter met Dwight Eisenhower in Paris in 1951, instantly joined the ranks of Republicans urging Ike to run for the presidency, helped as a campaign adviser in 1952.