"Mike" Steps Up

An old friend of Franklin Delano Roosevelt stepped down last week to let a younger man step up. On his 75th birthday, kindly, white-haired Leighton Goldie McCarthy resigned as Canada's Ambassador to the U.S. To his post Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King promptly appointed McCarthy's assistant, Lester Bowles Pearson, O.B.E., one of the ablest men in Canada's small but expert foreign service.

Ambassador McCarthy resigned because he felt that his job was done and that he was entitled to a rest. At Mr. King's insistence he had gone to Washington reluctantly, early in 1941, because the Prime Minister felt he needed a trusted friend at the White House. An internationally known corporation lawyer (one of his clients: Aluminum, Ltd.) and president of the $300,000,000 Canada Life Assurance Co., Ambassador McCarthy was as well-known in New York City and Washington as in his own Toronto.

His successor is no cookie-pusher. Ambassador-designate Pearson was nicknamed "Mike" by his comrades in Salonika in 1915 because, as they told the 18-year-old soldier, "Lester is no name for a fighting man. ..." He worked in the Chicago stockyards, taught history at Toronto University, was an ice hockey and football coach before he entered the foreign service. He was Secretary of Canada House in London when World War II broke out. When he left, the Manchester Guardian paid him a fulsome compliment: "one of the best-known Canadians in England."

Reassigned to Washington as Minister-Counselor, he soon picked up important extracurricular jobs. He was named chairman of the United Nations Interim Commission on Food and Agriculture, the potent supplies committee of UNRRA. and last summer was chairman of UNRRA's Montreal meeting. His big job now will be to press upon the U.S. Canada's claims for an effective voice in any world-security organization (see above).

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