World: The Natural Americans

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(See Cover) Ambassadors have no battleships at their disposal, or heavy infantry, or fortresses. Their weapons are words and opportunities.

—Demosthenes, 343 B.C.

Modern ambassadors administer vast arsenals of peaceful weapons: food, loans, technical assistance—and in crisis, their advice to the government back home can even fetch battleships and airplanes. But words and opportunities remain the basic armament of diplomacy. In an age when heads of state can conveniently meet face to face, when foreign ministers crisscross the globe like soldier ants, when lies as well as truth travel with the speed of thought, it is still the ambassadors in every world capital who must explain their governments' policies to friends and foes, restrain the hasty, encourage the weak. For no nation in history was this task ever as demanding as for the U.S.

Whether or not it chooses to be involved, it is to the U.S. that the peoples the world over turn in anger or supplication. When an African leader is murdered or a colonial power censured in the U.N., stones rain on U.S. embassies thousands of miles away. If floods sweep through villages in South Viet Nam or drought destroys a wheat crop in Yugoslavia, their governments repair for help almost automatically to the U.S. ambassador. This phenomenon is often exasperating. But in a sense it merely acknowledges the reality that the U.S. is a world power with a worldwide stake in peace and order.

As 1962 opened, 99 U.S. ambassadors were at work, from the snow-clad plains of Serbia to the traffic jams of Tokyo. They included 68 ambassadors appointed by President Kennedy. In their first year on the job, the Kennedy men could scarcely claim many successes and have already suffered a number of setbacks. But they may well be the most promising new group of diplomats that the U.S. has fielded in years. Not all of them measure up to Kennedy's campaign promise that he would name as ambassadors "the best talent" in the U.S. But as a measure of ability, well over half the new appointees speak the languages of the countries to which they are assigned; the great majority have experience of their area's. Of all chiefs of mission now serving abroad, 70% are career Foreign Service men. Obviously this is no guarantee of success but the caliber of the professionals is rising. In some of the world's most complex areas (see story above), career men like Llewellyn E. Thompson were quietly and steadily at work last week. As for Kennedy's 28 "political" appointees, half come from education, law or journalism, while nine more come from other Government jobs. Three of the liveliest choices—and likeliest successes—among the new appointees are notable for their background, personality and high professional qualifications. The three:

GEORGE FROST KENNAN, 57, Pulitzer-prize winning Kremlinologist (Russia Leaves the War), onetime Ambassador to Moscow (1952), top cold war strategist who shaped the U.S. containment policy and the Marshall Plan. In a sharp policy disagreement with John Foster Dulles, he was shunted aside in 1953 after 25 years in the Foreign Service. He became a professor at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study, now is back in diplomacy as Ambassador to Yugoslavia, one of the cold war's key vantage points.

EDWIN OLDFATHER REISCHAUER, 51, Tokyo-born professor,