Diplomacy: The Ambassador

Offered the job of U.S. Ambassador to Japan in 1932, Joseph Clark Grew had deep doubts: Japanese militarists al ready had made clear their intention to try to take over Asia. He consulted his wife, a granddaughter of Commodore Matthew C. Perry who had opened Japan to Western commerce in 1853.

"Finally," he recalled, "I told Mrs. Grew that if we took the post in Tokyo, some day we might be in a position to sway the issue of peace or war between Japan and the U.S."

In his ten-year Tokyo tenure,. Joe Grew found himself in just that posi tion, and his efforts to sway the issue toward peace were, even though un successful, a model of diplomacy at its finest. When he died last week, two days before his 85th birthday, in Manchester, Mass., Grew still symbolized the very best of another era of American diplomacy — an era in which ambassadors in trouble posts operated un der broad directives, were not bound to the clacking embassy teletype and made considerable policy on their own initiative.

"By Jove!" Boston-born, Grew was educated at Groton ('98) and Harvard ('02), was sent by his family to travel in the Far East, planned to return to the family's banking business. While in China, he shot a tiger in a cave — a feat that later enthralled big-game-hunting President Theodore Roosevelt. During that trip Grew became fascinated by life abroad and decided to enter the foreign service. By the time Teddy heard from a mutual friend about the tiger-slaying exploit, Grew was a $600-a-year clerk in the U.S. embassy in Cairo.

The President cried: "By Jove! I'll have to do something for that young man."

Within 24 hours, Grew was appointed third secretary of the embassy in Mexico City.

From there, Grew moved upward through posts in St. Petersburg, Vienna and Berlin—where, in 1916, he was counselor of the embassy and worked with futile desperation to head off American participation in World War I. Later he became chairman of the Examining Board for the State Department's Division of Foreign Service Personnel, where he became a sort of career-service saint in his emphasis on the need for trained professional men rather than political hacks. He wryly told candidates: "You gentlemen have a very easy time entering the service. All you have to do is to answer a few questions. I had to shoot a tiger."

Grew's first full ambassadorship was in Turkey in 1927, where he won the trust and respect of the capricious Mustapha Kemal. Then Tokyo.

"The Only Kind." Shortly after he arrived there, he defined his approach to his job in unmistakable terms: "Nowadays indirectness is a weakness, not a strength. Nowadays he who indulges in false phrases is discredited, and he who indulges in expressions of genuine good will must prove it in his dealings. That is the only kind of diplomacy, the only kind of friendship that I know."