World: Life of a Lord

To most Americans, the fifth Lord Harlech is the sometime walking, traveling and concertgoing companion of Jacqueline Kennedy and the man widely rumored to be her transatlantic suitor. Many also remember him as Britain's highly successful Ambassador to Washington under John Kennedy. In Britain, however, Harlech is increasingly drawing attention as a man of versatile talents who is making his mark on British life and business. Harlech is already Britain's national film censor and rates as a potentially influential Tory politician. Recently, he took on a multimillion-dollar private venture as the chief executive of a new commercial-television consortium, which begins programming next week with a Special by two of its other stockholders, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor.

Harlech, 49, is well connected in both Britain and the U.S., where his friends from New Frontier days consider him practically part of the clan. "He has a nice urbanity and a rather sardonic view of people and events," says Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. Adds Economist John Kenneth Galbraith: "He has the savoir-faire, the savviness, the wisdom that Harold Macmillan had 25 years ago." Also like Macmillan, to whom he is related by marriage, Harlech has profited by a set of thoroughly gilt-edged circumstances. His father served for 28 years as a Tory M.P. and for two as Colonial Secretary, and his mother was a member of the legendary Cecil family, a prominent force in British politics since the 16th century.

President's Friend. Of all the circumstances that have affected his career, however, the luckiest was a college-age friendship with John F. Kennedy in the late 1930s, when Father Joe was U.S. Ambassador to London. While Harlech, then William David Ormsby Gore, was slogging through a series of unglamorous diplomatic jobs, his friend got elected President and specifically requested Ormsby Gore as Britain's Ambassador to Washington. "I trust David as I would my own Cabinet," said Kennedy—and he saw more of David than he did of most of his Cabinet.

Ormsby Gore turned up frequently on Hyannis Port weekends, at Bobby's Hickory Hill seminars and often in White House inner sanctums. He was beside Kennedy in the Situation Room when the President won his terms on the limited test-ban treaty, urged Kennedy to publish photographic proof of the Cuban missile buildup and persuaded him, over Navy objections, to order a delay in intercepting Russian ships, thereby avoiding a direct confrontation with the Soviets. "It was a freak of history," he says of his influence then. "Those years proved to be the most rewarding of my life." They also instilled in him a loyalty to the Kennedys: Harlech has already endorsed Bobby's presidential candidacy over British TV.