A Job for Joe

Handsome, patrician Joseph Clark Grew, who has had nothing much to do since Pearl Harbor ended his ten-year ambassadorship to Japan,* last week moved into a spacious new State Department office with a fine view of the White House. With the new office went a new job: Director of the Office of Far Eastern Affairs. The appointment was a significant clue to the way the Administration is beginning to think about the problem of postwar Japan.

The man whom Joe Grew succeeds is Stanley Kuhl Hornbeck, a longtime lover of China and passionately anti-Japanese. Grew, on the other hand, has consistently preached a policy of firm but humane moderation toward a defeated Japan. "The approach to the peace table," he declared in Chicago last December, "should be guided by those who intimately know the Japanese people and should be formulated on a basis of plain, practical common sense, without pride or prejudice, or the vindictiveness which is inherent in human nature." In with the new Director last week as chief assistants moved three other veterans of diplomatic service in Tokyo.

* Scheduled for publication next week is ex-Ambassador Grew's diary of Ten Years in Japan (Simon & Schuster: $3.75).

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