Politics Makes Strange Envoys

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The President showed a bit of whimsy in the timing of his first such nomination: he announced on St. Patrick's Day that William Edward McCann, 50, an insurance executive from Short Hills, N.J., and a Reagan-Bush fund raiser in the 1980 campaign, was his choice as Ambassador to Ireland. Several other appointments are now said to be in the works: Brent Scowcroft, 56, former National Security Adviser under President Ford, as Ambassador to the Soviet Union; John J. Lewis Jr., 54, chairman of Phoenix's Combined Communications Corp., to Britain; Robert Neumann, 65, the vice chairman of Georgetown University's Center for Strategic and International Studies and a former Ambassador to Afghanistan and Morocco, to Saudi Arabia; Robert Nesen, 63, a California Cadillac dealer who owns a ranch next to Reagan's, to Australia; Paul Nitze, 74, former disarmament negotiator in the Nixon Administration, to West Germany; Theodore E. Cummings, 72, former supermarket-chain owner, to Austria; John L. Loeb Jr., 51, New York investment banker and major Republican contributor, to Denmark; Maxwell Rabb, 70, a presidential assistant to Dwight Eisenhower, to Italy.

Not all rumored appointments come to pass, of course. But Republican Senator Charles Percy, whose Foreign Relations Committee must act on the nominations before they go to the full Senate, last week urged the Administration to speed up its selections. As things stand, he protested mildly, the committee is getting so much pressure from people who would like to be ambassadors and their backers that it is being diverted from its more urgent business. ∎