Winant to London

Specifications for an ideal U. S. Ambassador to the Court of St. James's:

1) Must look, talk, act like a characteristic U. S. citizen, whose sentiments truly reflect the U. S.

2) Should be forceful, direct, able to talk for an hour every other night with hard-hitting Winston Churchill, get the President's views across to the Prime Minister. And vice versa.

3) Should be able to adjust the dated but still lingering economic and ideological conflicts between London and Washington--a conflict summed up by President Roosevelt's sending of Harry Hopkins (extreme New Dealer) to England, while the British War Cabinet dispatched as Ambassador to Washington Lord Halifax (conservative and ex-appeaser).

4) Should be able to explain to harried Britons why the U. S., if determined on all aid short of war, if convinced that its own safety is endangered by a British defeat, does not subordinate everything to the great job of making aid to Britain effective.

Last week President Roosevelt picked John Gilbert Winant as the new Ambassador to the Court of St. James's. Nobody claimed that Mr. Vinant met all those specifications. A tall, awkward, slow-speaking, artless man of 51, Ambassador Winant has long been halfon, half-off the U. S. public scene, with his friends constantly predicting a great role for him just as he would quietly step out of the limelight. Background: wealthy New York family; St. Paul's School ('08); Princeton ('13); captain of a U. S. observation squadron in World War I; master at St. Paul's; liberal Republican Governor of New Hampshire, 1925-26, 1931-34; head of the first Social Security Board, 1935-37.

Through all these stages admirers have been waiting for Gil Winant to live up to the promise they found in him. Through all of them he has remained the same: a man of slow gestures, always digging his hands in his pockets or twisting and turning awkwardly, as if he had caught his arms in the lining of his coat sleeves, while he expresses flawless liberal sentiments in a slow, pained voice. His friends marvel at Ambassador Winant's dress, wonder how he manages to keep his trousers so impressed, where he finds so many pale blue shirts with frayed cuffs and collars.

The high point of his friends' ambition for him came in late 1933, when he was mentioned as a possible liberal Republican Presidential candidate. Those hopes promptly evaporated when he disappeared into obscurity as the New Deal's appointee to the well-meaning, ineffectual International Labor Office at Geneva. Last week there were no doubts expressed about Ambassador Winant's suitability for the London post on the scores of manner, beliefs, earnestness, sympathy with labor; his well-wishers just worried about his slowness of speech, abstractedness, and zeal for holding conferences.

Plainest significance of the appointment was that Franklin Roosevelt had discarded the conventional specifications. The reasons he had done so were equally obvious : Mr. Roosevelt believes that Britain's Minister of Labor Ernest Bevin and other British labor leaders will grow increasingly powerful during the war, be still more powerful after it. Ambassador Winant knows the leaders of British labor from his days in Geneva, has their confidence as no career diplomat or wealthy businessman like Joseph Kennedy could hope to gain it. The desperate urgency of Britain's plight may have united Britons more than doctrinaire and class-conscious U. S. citizens can believe possible; but the U. S. is taking no chance of being caught unawares if dissatisfaction develops in British labor. Before the Winant appointment was a week old it was disclosed that Benjamin Cohen, of the defunct New Deal law-writing team of Corcoran & Cohen, would accompany him to London as counselor-of-embassy.

Other diplomatic shifts last week:

The President had made a wholesale diplomatic reshuffle. To London as Ambassador to Poland, Belgium and Minister to The Netherlands and Norway, will go Barrymore-collared Anthony J. Drexel Biddle. Jay Pierrepont Moffat, Minister to Canada, will also act as Minister to Luxembourg's refugee Government. Plump Nelson Trusler Johnson, wearied by the strain of his five years of tension and overwork as Ambassador to China, was shifted to the Australian legation, and the Australian Minister, horse-faced Clarence Edward Gauss, transferred to Chungking. Another transfer brought Bert Fish, now Minister to Egypt, to Portugal, at the same rank; while swell-shirted Herbert Claiborne Pell, the Newport bolshevik, moved from the hot spot at Lisbon to one at Budapest, as Minister to Hungary. Edwin Carleton Wilson, at Uruguay and William Dawson, at Panama, changed jobs, both at Ambassadorial rank, and spare, smooth Alexander Comstock Kirk was promoted from Rome Embassy counselor to Minister to Egypt.

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