FOREIGN RELATIONS: Specialist's Diagnosis

Seldom, if ever, has the U.S. had an envoy more enthralled by his assignment than Lincoln MacVeagh. Seldom has it kept a top-ranking envoy longer at the same post. He has been accredited to Greece for more than eleven years. This week he was summoned home for consultation.

The son and grandson of U.S. ambassadors (to Japan and Italy), Link MacVeagh gave no early sign that he would follow the family calling. Educated at Groton and Harvard, his interests were literary and classical. For ten years, as a highbrow publisher (the Dial Press), his heart was in the highlands of Greece. Commuting between Manhattan and Connecticut, he read Ulysses' voyages instead of Dow-Jones averages.

This preoccupation with things Hellenic impressed another Groton-Harvard graduate and good friend, Franklin Roosevelt, who sent MacVeagh to Athens as Minister Plenipotentiary in 1933. MacVeagh followed the presentation of his credentials with a speech in classical Greek which few of his hearers understood but all applauded. Since then he has learned modern Greek, which is less euphonious but more useful. An amateur archeologist, he has scrabbled under the ruins of the Acropolis for the broken dishes of pre-Christian housewives.

MacVeagh shared the Greek Government's exile after the Nazi conquest and (promoted to ambassador) shared in its tragic return. His reports, once prized for their wit, have recently been soberly serious. A philosophic democrat, MacVeagh has seen Greece, which gave the word democracy to the world, sick from within and under assault from without. To cure the inward sickness, MacVeagh holds emphatically, in his quiet voice and brilliantly phrased dispatches, that the U.S. must move in and virtually run the country to make its aid effective. Yet, with Byron, he has "dreamed that Greece might still be free," and striven with Byronic fervor to make the dream come true.

Vastly different from MacVeagh is his colleague assigned to Ankara, Edwin Carleton Wilson, 54, who was also called to Washington. No specialist, he is a general practitioner in the diplomatic profession, which has been his lifelong career. During more than a quarter-century divided between faraway legations and duty at the fountainhead in Washington, Wilson has acquired sureness and efficiency. Not only is his embassy the best-run in Ankara; he has a knack of anticipating State Department wishes. Perhaps most important, Wilson is willing to take responsibility for quick decisions when there is no time for consultation—a quality of great value in the Near East these days.