"That Awkward-Seeming Man"

After five years in London, John Gilbert Winant resigned last week as U.S. Ambassador to the Court of St. James's. He would be succeeded by William Averell Harriman, who quit a month ago as U.S. Ambassador to Russia. Winant would assume a new post as permanent delegate to the United Nations Economic and Social Council (a body he helped create).

Most of Washington wondered why Harriman got the job--he had served competently but not brilliantly in Moscow, had come home saying he wanted to stay there. As for quiet Gil Winant--the nation seemed to remember him best as the man who looked like Lincoln.

But New Hampshire, Washington, and Britain had much clearer memories of him. The son of a New York blue blood, he had been shy and scraggly at St. Paul's School in Concord, N.H., shy and scraggly at Princeton, which he left without a degree to campaign for Teddy Roosevelt in 1912. At St. Paul's, where he returned to teach history, students sometimes had difficulty hearing him. But his low-voiced earnestness had an incandescent quality they never forgot.

After World War I he returned to New Hampshire, was elected to the State Legislature, and to three terms as governor--one more than the traditional limit.

Franklin Roosevelt drafted him in 1935 as chairman of the Social Security Board. After a tour as director of the International Labor Organization, he went to blitzed and bleeding England in 1941.

Refreshing Change. In London, Gil Winant was a striking contrast to his predecessor, that ruddy salesman, Joe Kennedy. He gangled; his hair straggled down in a black shock over a craggy face in which only the eyes crackled; he vibrated with a strange intensity. Once, shortly after his arrival in 1941, a luncheon crowd demanded a speech. Winant rose with a glazed look, and for four straight minutes of silent agony, stood shifting from one leg to the other. Then he whispered: "The worst mistake I ever made was in getting up in the first place."

The big things--the blitz, the grinding work of the wartime embassy, the immense task of selling Britain to the U.S., and the U.S. and Britain to Russia--held no such terrors for Ambassador Winant. In high conference he was slow, sure, and overwhelmingly honest. After bombings he walked the streets of London, helping dig people out. The British grew to love his gaunt figure. He talked to them in trains, buses, subways, and ministries, and reported shrewdly to the President--whom most of the world thought of as the real U.S. Ambassador to Britain. To Britain's leaders, Winant plugged away relentlessly at his great theme: a democratic postwar world.

The effect was neither sudden nor spectacular. The results of his embassy were slow but lasting; they showed in Allied war solidarity, in understanding between nations, and in the lasting impression of America-at-its-best that Gil Winant left in Britain.

London's Daily Express wrote last week:

"Second only to President Roosevelt, Mr. Winant has seemed to us the personification of the finest part of America's character. We shall miss that tall, thoughtful, awkward-seeming man."

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