Trade Paper

Diplomats are not figures of fun to Journalist Ladislas Farago, a short, soft-spoken Hungarian. He wants the world to realize that diplomats are not "striped-pants people and cookie-pushers." To show the shirtsleeve tenor of the new diplomacy, he has launched a self-styled "international journal," Corps Diplomatique, a Washington fortnightly.

Farago's first issue featured sober articles on U.N.'s Military Staff Committee, the plans to broaden Britain's traditionally upper-crust Foreign Office, and Russia's efforts to dominate civil aviation in Eastern Europe. But Corps Diplomatique still seems most at home in its social column, "Embassy Row," served up with heady whiffs of the old monde elegant: "The other day we met Baroness van Boetzelaer in what Milton called the best company: alone. . . . Emerson's wisdom that art teaches us manners and abolishes haste attains its perfect example in the First Lady of Washington's Diplomatic Corps [Brazilian Sculptress Senhora Maria Martins]."

Farago defends diplomacy's "obsolescent" verbiage: "Diplomacy would lose much of its spell once stripped of the belle tournure of its nomenclature." Corps Diplomatique itself is no slouch at belle tournure. With scholarly assists from Longfellow, Goethe, Lord Cecil, Dr. Johnson, Sir Henry Wotton,* Rousseau, Burke, Schiller, Lenin, Lord Castlereagh and Bronson Alcott, it delivers itself of such pearls as: "The bores and the bored whom Byron-called the 'two mighty tribes of society,' are still around and about. But diplomats, who are the best society, now follow Ruskin's advice and keep out of it." The Washington Times-Herald says that Farago's new venture is "causing much excitement and perking up of interest about blase Washington." But so far sales seem limited to the tight little trade along the world's Embassy Rows.

* His classic definition: "An ambassador is an honest man, sent to lie abroad for the good of his country." (For another definition of a diplomat, see MILESTONES.)

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