Some Person of Wisdom

(See Cover)

The King of Great Britain, feeling the need of friends and funds, sent a letter: "To all and singular to whom these presents shall come, greetings! Whereas it appears to us expedient to nominate some person of wisdom, loyalty, diligence and circumspection to represent us ... know ye that we, reposing especial trust and confidence in the discretion and faithfulness of our trusty and well-beloved Sir Oliver Shewell Franks . . . have nominated, constituted and appointed [him] . . . to be our Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary at Washington . . . Giving and granting to him in that character all power and authority to do and perform all proper acts, matters and things which may be desirable or necessary for the promotion of relations of friendship, good understanding and harmonious intercourse between our realm and the United States of America . . ."

The King's letter went on & on in that vein. What it boiled down to in the American language was: "Oliver, we're getting along all right with the Americans, but the situation is ticklish and might come unstuck. Go over there and keep a sharp eye on things, keep in touch with the right people, keep selling the good old Empire--and don't let Bertie McCormick bite you."

No Guff. His Excellency the Right Honorable Sir Oliver Franks, Knight Commander of the Bath, Commander of the Order of the British Empire, arrived at Washington. He did exceedingly well at one of the key posts of the postwar world. Anglo-U.S. cooperation is the cornerstone of the peace, of the effort to restore and extend prosperity and of the defense of the West against Communism. The roots of this cooperation strike deep into the histories of the two peoples. But friendship between nations, like marriage and moneymaking, requires attention to detail. As one U.S. State Department official expressed it bluntly last week: "International intimacy doesn't come naturally. There's nothing to all this guff about natural cousinly affection."

Although Sir Oliver's tenure as Ambassador coincides with the highest peacetime level of the Anglo-U.S. amity in history, there is many a serpent in that garden of friendship. Unique in history is the place of a dominant world power which gave way, without defeat in war, to a new dominant power and accepted the role of helper and next friend of the new leader. Such a transition is not accomplished without pain and tension. Part of Sir Oliver's job is to ease the pain, to save face for his government. In the recent monetary crisis that led to the pound's devaluation (see above), Sir Oliver performed, behind the scenes, a masterly job of transmitting the U.S. pressure for devaluation in a way that cost Britain a minimum of dignity. In the style of the King's letter, Sir Oliver did it with diligence, discretion and circumspection.

His Majesty's well-beloved Ambassador must also deal with persistent American Anglophobia. This infects only a minority of Americans, but a highly vocal one. It was only 20 years ago that Big Bill Thompson was winning election campaigns with the promise: "If [King] George comes to Chicago I'll crack him in the snoot." Of late, the U.S.'s McCormicks and Hearsts have missed no chance to agitate many a U.S. taxpayer who isn't Anglophobe with the half-truth that he is being soaked to finance Socialist experimentation in Britain.

Sir Oliver, therefore, has a tough job. He has to "do and perform" quite a lot of "acts, matters and things." The British Embassy is a big, high-powered, smooth-running mechanism for taking in information and putting out influence. The youngish (44) man who runs it is a big, high-powered, smooth-running mechanism for taking in complex facts and putting out clear, precise statements of what they mean.

Diplomatic Back-Bends. This is how he goes about it. Not long ago in his paneled office at the British Embassy on Washington's broad Massachusetts Avenue, Sir Oliver scanned the top-priority, top-secret cable. Hurriedly typed on the familiar "Incoming" pink sheet, it had just been rushed to his desk from the code machines in the cipher room above. It was an urgent call from the London Foreign Office to speed a new Anglo-U.S. attack on Britain's desperate dollar shortage.

Sir Oliver summoned his key aides: his Minister, his Treasury expert, his second-and third-level liaison officers with EGA and all U.S. fiscal agencies concerned. In less than 60 minutes, the task force had mapped its program: the Ambassador had phoned Dean Acheson's office for the earliest possible appointment, each aide had scheduled his meeting with his opposite U.S. number and knew precisely what he was going to tell him.

Early next morning, the Embassy swung into action with the gusto and "blanket coverage" of a tabloid covering the hottest gangland killing. Through the Embassy gates streamed the line of official cars, led by the Ambassador's gleaming Rolls-Royce, each carrying a British diplomat to charge a key citadel of U.S. officialdom. By noontime, every U.S. official from Acheson down who had any concern with the problem had been fully briefed. U.S. decisions could be taken before dinnertime. A third-level State Department official reflected admiringly: "When I was called into Secretary Acheson's office to consult on the matter, I had already had an hour to look over the documents. I was ready with some answers. Naturally, I lean over backwards to do something for an Embassy like that."

The Embassy is doing things like that every day. Its twelve code clerks this year have handled 13,100 cable messages; six switchboard operators daily handle more than 2,600 calls; it takes 700 typewriters to keep letters and dispatches rolling (last year they chewed up more than five million sheets of paper); three photostat machines grind out more than 10,000 pages of documents a month; the Embassy's go-odd cars, buses, trucks and station wagons fill a four-story garage; there are 72 messengers alone on the staff of 1,012 making up Washington's biggest diplomatic delegation.

Spit & Polish. The British mission to Washington has never (in peacetime) been as big and busy as it is today, although it has always been regarded as important. It has been presided over by a varied and colorful line of ministers and ambassadors: P:Stratford Canning (1820-23), who reported with lordly condescension: "I have met with few instances of impertinence . . . Chewing and smoking appear on the decline; indoor spitting is also less common . . ."

P: Lord Lyons (1859-65), who took the hot blast of Northern resentment at British help to the South. P: James Bryce (1907-13), who was well known in the U.S., before he became Ambassador, for his great book The American Commonwealth. Bryce was widely respected; when he attended the Old Presbyterian Church in Washington he was always escorted to Abraham Lincoln's pew. P: Sir Cecil Spring Rice (1913-18), the World War I Ambassador, so supercautious that he dared make only one public speech in his five years in the U.S. P: Rufus Isaacs, Lord Reading (1918-19), the fabulous genius of finance and the law who rose from cabin boy to England's Lord Chief Justice and Viceroy of India. Before he became Ambassador Lord Reading had served his country well in the U.S. The story goes that he asked the House of Morgan for a billion dollars in war credits. "I'll give you half that," said J. P. Morgan. Reading agreed. Half a billion was what he had been instructed to ask for. P: Sir Ronald Lindsay (1930-39). Six ft. 3 in. tall, he resembled a contented moose. When he held a huge garden party for his visiting King in 1939, he coolly consoled those he could not invite: "It's like heaven. Some are taken and some are left."P:Lord Lothian (1939-40), a Scottish Liberal and Christian Scientist who once lived in a hut next to Gandhi, loved speech-making and Southern fried chicken. Some said he had been in favor of appeasing Hitler, but his wartime patriotism was ardent and eloquent. P: Lord Halifax (1941-46), who also arrived with a faint aroma of appeasement clinging to his reputation, but soon became one of the most respected men in Washington. His character was an inspiring blend of force and gentleness, of practicality and high purpose. P:Lord Inverchapel (Sir Archibald Clark Kerr) (1946-48), a professional diplomat who could play the bagpipes and would rather talk about Scottish wild. flowers than about politics. He was said to look like "a cigar-store Indian with a high polish." This could have been misleading; he was much smarter than a cigar-store Indian.

Franks lacks Reading's vast experience of affairs. Lothian's enthusiasm and Halifax's impelling warmth. But Franks is in his own right an interesting specimen of homo britannicus. As a friend summed him up recently: "Franks believes passionately in the Sermon on the Mount, but he does not think that, unaided by men of intelligence like himself, the Sermon can do it all alone."

Frightening Logic. Just ten years ago, on a beautifully golden October day in the treacherously peaceful autumn of the "phony war," a lanky, 34-year-old man, with a wide-brimmed hat pushed back from his high scholar's brow, stepped from the Glasgow train, plowed through the crowds to find himself a night's lodging in a cheap London hotel. "I can't even find my way," complained the young man to a friend, "from Piccadilly Circus to Trafalgar Square." Beginning that day, Oliver Franks found his way fast--from a lowly civil servant in the Ministry of Supply to the post that ranks, after Prime Minister, Chancellor of the Exchequer and Foreign Minister, as the fourth most important in his country's service.

Young Oliver was already a man who had never wasted much time nor missed many chances. Born in a village just outside Birmingham, son of a distinguished Congregationalist minister, the Rev. R. S. Franks, he had raced through most of the weighty philosophical tomes in his father's vast library by the time he was twelve. At Bristol Grammar School, his flashy brilliance won him so many prize books that "old Franks and his books" became a school joke. "He had a mind," said one of his teachers, "that was so logical it was almost frightening." He also showed a quality which his admirers call purposefulness and his critics call opportunism. He had, for instance, no interest in athletics; but when he realized he should be seen on the playing fields to be an "all-round" star, he proceeded to captain his rugby team to the school championship. It was characteristic of the calm, deliberate quest for achievement that was to mark Franks's whole career.

Complete Self-Confidence. At 18, he headed for Queen's College, Oxford, where he was to make his home, off & on, for the next 25 years. He earned the nickname "Father Franks" with his grave mien, his sober scholarship, his teetotaling. Recalled a friend last week: "He felt that people drank either to bolster up their own self-confidence or to escape from boredom. Since he was always completely self-confident and never bored, he didn't need to drink." (Now he takes an occasional drink, not because he likes it, but because he has found conviviality a good way to make friends.)

On his final exams, Queen's College extended "ceremonious congratulations," promptly appointed him (at 22) fellow and praelector in philosophy. In 1931, the professor married one of his students, Barbara Mary Tanner, a Quaker girl. Six years later, they moved to Glasgow, where the University gave the 32-year-old professor the chair of moral philosophy once held by Adam Smith.

The man who came to London that autumn of 1939 was deceptively conventional in outward show. His habits and tastes were, and would remain, modestly middleclass. Without interest in art or music, he liked simple vacations at the Devon seaside, merely sitting on the sand, tossing pebbles at the waves. Significantly, for all his scholarship, the mature Franks read little and wrote less: his library at Oxford was probably the smallest there. "Franks doesn't believe in books," recalls an Oxford associate. "He prefers thinking and talking to reading."

From his near-bottom rung in the civil-service hierarchy (at a salary of -L-850 yearly), the man who didn't know his way in London had, by war's end, thought, talked and worked his way up to being Permanent Secretary of the combined Ministries of Supply and Aircraft Production (at -L-3,500 a year). To explain the phenomenon, some of Franks's friends fumble with such fuzzy words as "elusive" and "intuitive" to describe his gifts, but one who has known him for years put it very simply last week: "Franks is essentially a very simple man on whose shoulders a big, beautiful piece of mental machinery has been placed."

His knack for administration was uncanny: he showed an instantaneous grasp of personnel problems, gave subordinates snappy decisions which constantly left them with an awed "why-didn't-I-think-of-that?" feeling. He handled his bosses with equal ease. The day he learned that peppery Lord Beaverbrook was taking over the Ministry, young Franks mourned to a friend that "that awful little man" would wreck the organization. Then he had a second thought, and added: "I think I'll look into the office over the weekend."

As he had doubtless calculated, Beaverbrook, bristling like a new broom, also showed up at the office on Sunday morning, demanded to know who was on the job. Oliver-on-the-spot had a long talk with the Beaver, instantly and deeply impressed the new boss. Thereafter, Beaverbrook rarely turned a wheel without consulting Franks.

Once, when Beaverbrook did act without consulting Franks, he got himself into difficulties. The Beaver turned up at a cabinet meeting with a set of inaccurate labor figures, which Franks and his statisticians could have told him were wrong. Bevin, who loathed Beaverbrook, was quick to spot the error. In the cabinet meeting they started quarreling and Churchill had to intervene saying: "I really can't have two of my cabinet ministers carrying on like this," "Well,", said Bevin, "I won't accept those figures from Beaverbrook. I'll accept them only from Franks."

Furious, Beaverbrook returned to the Supply Ministry with his figures, called for Franks and asked him if they were right. Franks told him candidly they were wrong. But as Beaverbrook was still reluctant to admit the error to his archfoe, Bevin, he ordered Franks to try to find some way to reconcile these figures with the right ones. Franks smiled, went to work with his statisticians and devised an ingenious way of doing it. Having proved he could achieve this little triumph of twisted cunning, Franks burst out laughing. "That," said he, "is what I would call chicanery. Now let's get the real figures."

Franks was then sent to Downing Street to give Churchill the right set of figures. Bevin was deeply impressed by Franks as "the only man in the Ministry of Supply whom Beaverbrook couldn't bully."

Fancy Knots. When the shooting war was over, Franks ("the greatest civilian discovery of the war") could have been head of Britain's Steel Board or had his pick of many glittering big business jobs. He turned them all down to go back to Oxford as provost of his old college. But the following year, in 1947, when a stricken and bankrupt Europe was feverishly fingering the hope just held out by the Marshall Plan, Ernie Bevin, now Foreign Minister, called Franks from his cloister to head the British delegation to the 16-nation Paris conference.

At that historic meeting, the boyish-looking professor did more than just a good job; his sparkling clarity of speech, his remorseless logic, his deft and delicate handling of clashing national views made him the conference star. He presided over his own delegation briskly and competently, telling them: "Gentlemen, we must now decide just what is our official position so that when we depart from it we will know what we are departing from." The professor was learning fast how to tie fancy knots in his diplomatic ropes.

When the conference ended, Franks was picked to head the European delegation to Washington to lay before the U.S. the 16 nations' thoughts and plans. To a spellbound conference of U.S. officials,

Franks put on a show they have never forgotten: he talked for 2 1/2 hours on the whole European recovery program without notes, pause or repetition.

At year's end, his job superlatively done, Franks went back again ("to recharge my batteries") to his beloved Oxford. This time London gave him two months, then sent him to Washington.

There, in the hardest job of his life, Father Franks lives close to his work. The day begins at 7:15 when the Franks children (Caroline, 10, and Allison, 4) rouse their parents. Breakfast is in a small room off Lady Franks's bedroom (just fruit juice and coffee for Sir Oliver, who has to watch his weight; once when he was laid up with a broken arm, he put on 10 Ibs.)

Shortly after 9 a.m., his quiet "Good morning, where is the mail?" starts his private office staff fluttering. The first half-hour goes to the mail, the second to reviewing the pile of cables decoded during the night. His first conference is with Minister Sir Frederick Hoyer Millar, a veteran of 26 years in Britain's Foreign Service and the Ambassador's alter ego. The morning's problem may be anything from London's attitude on the Austrian peace treaty to an analysis of how to soothe ruffled U.S. feelings over the Anglo-Argentine trade treaty. Tactics are studied: Is the issue crucial enough for a personal visit by Franks to Acheson--or will more be gained by "underplaying" it and sending a counselor to his State Department opposite number? After 6 1/2 years' experience in Washington, the Minister is pretty shrewd at pacing and directing the attack.

Following Sir Frederick comes the Embassy No. 3 man, genial, 39-year-old Counselor Dennis Allen. He may refer to

Franks a question from any of the area specialists under him: a new facet on the Palestine issue, more on German dismantling, something new on trade with Tito. By 11:30 starts the parade of "outside visitors," roughly from three categories: 1) visiting British dignitaries, 2) other ambassadors or ministers accredited in Washington, 3) newspapermen.

Back at his study at 2:30, Franks may find an official from one of his 20-odd consular offices waiting to report. The procession continues through the afternoon. As his day's work ends, Lady Franks may come in with a hostess problem: Would champagne for the visiting British bishops be too ostentatious? Sir Oliver thinks so.

In the last social year, the Frankses accepted 260 invitations to all sorts of Washington parties, entertained some 5,000 at their Embassy. In a single typical week last autumn, they had 354 guests at luncheons, dinners and cocktails, attended nine functions outside--ranging the social scale from an Indian Embassy dinner to a reception honoring the unification of British & American screw-thread standards.

Far from the Cocktails. Big as Father Franks's Embassy is, it is slickly streamlined to maintain the most sensitive contact with the State Department at all levels--especially the ones just below the top, where decisions are so often born.

Through all relations with the U.S. Government, Franks moves with supple grace. In conference, he is concise and convincing. He shuns the tedious insistence of some diplomats on speaking only with the Secretary of State, welcomes fruitful discussion on any level. He has lately achieved a remarkable triumph over his own personal reticence--that gravity and sobriety that had made many of his diplomatic colleagues find him chilly. He is on a first-name basis with such key officials as Dean Acheson, John Snyder, State's Assistant Secretary Jack Hickerson. With the more intellectual U.S. policymakers, e.g., Planner George Kennan, he spends long quiet evenings, far from the distracting clink of the cocktail glasses. Although he has deliberately thawed his manner-as part of his job of thawing U.S. dollars, Franks's conversation still reflects the icy clarity of his mind.

Franks prizes the quality of clarity above all others a public servant may have. Early in 1947, he delivered at the London School of Economics a series of lectures on "Central Planning and Control in War and Peace," in which he described the ideal cabinet minister as having "clarity, precision in thought . . . Only a synoptic mind can at once master the mass of necessary detail and yet keep a sharp lookout for the essential." Whitehall gossips, who have long noted Franks's ambition, believe that this passage indicates that Franks feels himself well qualified to be Prime Minister. Certainly, Oliver Franks's description of the ideal minister bears a striking resemblance to Oliver Franks.

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