With Book & Umbrella

For the No. 1 post in U.S. Protestantism, the Federal Council (see above) last week picked a lank, unassuming Virginian. Episcopal Bishop Henry St. George Tucker's election was a vote for Protestant harmony. "It is hard to believe," says one of his admirers, "that any human being can actually be as wise as the Bishop sometimes looks when debate is heated around him."

The Tuckers are a Virginia dynasty. The Bishop's grandfather escaped to Canada at the end of the Civil War when the Union put a price of $100,000 on his head. The Bishop's father married Maria Washington, daughter of Mount Vernon's last private owner, great-grandniece of George Washington. He begat 13 children, was the last Confederate soldier to sit in the Episcopal House of Bishops. Two sons have followed him there--Henry St. George and Bishop Beverley Dandridge Tucker Jr. of Ohio. Two other sons are U.S. rectors and two more missionaries in China. Twelve Tuckers are now on the Episcopal clergy roll.

Bishop Tucker himself spent 24 years as a missionary in Japan, attributes his quietude to the fact that for so long he preached in Japanese only. His favorite relaxation is sea bathing, equipped with an umbrella and a book. He wades through the breakers, then floats and reads with his umbrella against the sun. The book may be Plato or Dashiell Hammett. The exercise has helped him keep fit, at 68, for more of the diplomacy that, in his four years as Episcopal Presiding Bishop, has drawn complaints neither from high churchmen on the right nor from low churchmen on the left.

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