"I Fear It Not"

(See Cover)

Among Warren Austin's more vivid memories is his maternal grandfather Robinson. The vinegary old Vermonter, when aroused, used to terrify his grandson with a cryptic and thunderous shout: "The Dragon! The Dragon!"

What the expletive meant, the boy Warren never knew. Last week, six decades later, he could wonder if his grandfather, who was something of a family oracle, might not have been crying a prophecy. In the forum of the U.N. the dragon of Communism snarls and spits and spreads its terror. Destiny, framed by TV, thrust Warren Austin spang before the threatening beast. To millions of U.S. televiewers, at least, he became--more than any other ambassador at Lake Success--the voice, conscience and counsel of the free world.

Dragon fighters, especially from Vermont, should be lean, crabby, clipped and pithy in speech. Listening to the invective of Communist spokesmen, Austin could be as grimly attentive as Hawthorne's Great Stone Face. There, any resemblance to the legendary Yankee ends.

The U.S. Ambassador is elderly (73), stout (200 Ibs. on a 5 ft. 10 1/2 in. frame), genial-jowled, courtly and oracular in an oldtime way. He is no shaft of lightning in extempore debate. He can bumble well-meaningly as he did during the 1948 Israel crisis, when he urged disputatious Arabs and Jews to get together and "settle this problem in a true Christian spirit." He cannot match India's Sir Benegal Rau in subtlety and sophistication. Britain's Sir Gladwyn Jebb is his superior in verbal riposte. But Austin sallies into U.N.'s polemic fray with certain granitelike inner qualities: tenacity, common sense, Old Testament righteousness, and a God-fearing faith in the cause of freedom and collective security.

Austin's approach to his task is measured by his words to the Senate when he was appointed to U.N. in 1946. A Republican internationalist, chosen by a Democratic President and acclaimed by both parties, he responded: "I go with such determination to work for the cause, and such will to throw everything I have, and that God may give me in the future, into that cause, that I fear it not. It is like a divine dispensation...to serve my country and serve mankind..."

"Even with a Battle-Ax." Austin does not make U.S. policy in the U.N. That is the job of the State Department, consulting with the President.

The State Department has a Bureau of U.N. Affairs under Assistant Secretary John D. Hickerson, a bouncy, pipe-smoking, veteran careerist. From this clearing point, directives flow to the Lake Success delegation--a staff of about 180, headquartered at 2 Park Avenue.

But Austin is no mere mouthpiece. State wants and expects his advice on policy, and he gives it. So far, says Foggy Bottom, there have been no "disputes," only "discussions" between Austin and the Washington policymakers. The Ambassador's foremost chore is to present and advocate the policy ultimately approved by Harry Truman. He and a battery of aides, topped by able Ambassador Ernest Gross, have the important corollary task of canvassing, negotiating and lobbying among other U.N. groups.

Austin thus functions in a tightly controlled compass. His effectiveness depends largely on the effectiveness of U.S. foreign policy. When that policy emerged clear and firm, as it did during the North Korean invasion last summer and during last week's debate over the moral condemnation of Red China (see above), Austin's performance was eloquent and forceful. When policy seemingly vacillated, as earlier this month in Washington's order for its U.N. delegation to approve an appeasing petition to Peking, Austin's hand appeared palsied.

Above & beyond immediate issues, Austin is a U.N. rock of confidence. He never falters in his belief that the U.N. is on the way to One World, tolerant and peaceful. Last week he would not admit that U.N.'s timidity in the face of Chinese Communist aggression has any ominous resemblance to the League of Nations' historic breakdown when confronted by Japanese aggression in Manchuria and Italian aggression in Ethiopia. "You can't kill the United Nations, even with a battle-ax," he insists. "The people of the world would never allow this organization to quit."

For Alienation of Affection. When Warren Robinson Austin was a village boy (birthplace: Highgate, pop. 300), his dragon-swearing grandfather predicted: "Warren, you'll never amount to anything. You have 20 irons in the fire at once and you never finish any of them." Austin never forgot how he ran out to the barn to weep on the neck of his favorite horse. "When I could talk," he remembers, "I told that horse and myself that I'd never start anything in life I couldn't finish."

He started his career, after graduation from the University of Vermont and reading law in his father's office, as a small-town lawyer and politician. He got elected state's attorney for Franklin County, then mayor of St. Albans. Abruptly, he turned from politics to private enterprise.

Through 20 years he was eminently successful as a trial and corporation lawyer. On the side, he made profitable investments (example: the Rock of Ages granite company at Barre, Vt.). Jolly and convivial, he joined the Elks, Odd Fellows, Rotarians, etc., became a popular speaker for after-dinner and graduation rituals.

Versatile, painstaking, hard-working in his profession, he had a trick of preparing his brief, then preparing an opposing brief just to test and sharpen the arguments he would use in court. A spellbinder before juries, he won the celebrated alienation-of-affection suit known as Woodhouse v. Woodhouse. For his client, a lowly soap salesman's daughter wooed and won, then spurned, by the son of one of Vermont's wealthiest, haughtiest families, Austin wangled a record jury award: $465,000, a high price for affection--especially in Vermont. (The judge cut it down to $125,000.)

In 1915 the American International Corp. retained him for a big job in China: negotiation of a $130 million loan for railway and canal construction. The trip to the Orient became part of Austin's broadening horizon of travel; at other times, on bar-association or diplomatic business, he has also been to Canada, Latin America, Europe, the Near East and the Philippines.

Against Big Government. At 53, the counselor decided to haul in his shingle and toss his hat once more into the political ring. Dubbing himself the "young guard," Austin defied his state's Republican machine, won a bitterly contested primary, thus assured his election as U.S. Senator. He went to Washington in 1931 and stayed on, winning two re-elections.

His opposition to the New Deal never wavered. He distrusted big government, viewed with alarm the growth of executive power and centralized bureaucracy. He liked to recall the days (1777-91) when Vermont carried on as a free republic, coining its own money and keeping 10,000 British redcoats at bay, until at last it voluntarily entered the Union under the Federal Constitution. "Any attempt to break down...that Constitution," he orated, "excites me to battle."

As the New Deal aged and World War II cast its shadow, Austin became more & more absorbed in the crucial debate between isolationism and internationalism.

Toward Good Manners. The Ambassador is now fond of tracing his internationalist evolution from a bar-association meeting he attended at Montreal in 1913. Among the distinguished speakers was Britain's Lord High Chancellor Viscount Haldane, who discoursed on the growing evidence of international good manners created by national selfdiscipline.

Austin has paraphrased the gist of Haldane's remarks in these words: "If you are walking down a street and you move aside, just a bit, to avoid jostling a neighbor--what made you move aside? Was it a law that forced you to move? No. You had simply learned to exercise your own independence without disturbing your neighbor. That is the higher ethics."

World War I jostled out the Era, of Good Manners. Austin thought the League of Nations doomed because it leaned on self-discipline and "the higher ethics" instead of enforcement power. In 1937 he called for a U.S. alliance with the League to impose sanctions against Japan. A year later he told isolationist Chicago: "Isolationism is impossible. We are inextricably involved in the affairs of the world."

He joined hands with Franklin Roosevelt's foreign policy, voted for repeal of the Neutrality Act, supported Lend-Lease. From 1942 on, the Administration invited him to periodical conferences on postwar foreign policy; from these sessions emerged the idea of U.N. At the Chapultepec conference in 1945, Austin did a sterling job of bipartisan cooperation for inter-American friendship. A year later came his appointment as America's "Ambassador to the World" at Lake Success.

Out of Righteousness. Until last June the U.N., like the League of Nations before it, often seemed more a dawdling talkfest than a decisive weight in world affairs. Then it met the shock of aggression, as the League had never done. Once more excited to battle, septuagenarian Austin went forth to smite the foe.

All summer long, deftly seconded by Britain's Jebb, the U.S. Ambassador denounced the Big Lie of Russia's Jacob Malik--that the U.S., and not Communism, had committed aggression in the Far East. The free world had no champion quite like the portly, pince-nezed American. His voice had the range and righteousness of an Old Testament prophet as he flailed Communism's "shameless travesties of the realities." He flushed with anger, waggled his forefinger, brandished his hands, quavered his voice. A dramatic moment came on Sept. 18, when he rebutted Malik's claim that the Russians had supplied no weapons to their Korean comrades, by waving aloft in the Security Council a Russian-made Tommy gun captured from the North Koreans.

He was, in fact, too histrionic for TV. Later, he toned down his delivery; he was most effective in quiet but resonant question & answer thrusts: "Whose troops are attacking deep in the country of somebody else? The North Koreans. Whose country is being overrun by an invading army? The Republic of Korea...Who has the...power to call off the invading North Korean army? The Soviet Union..."

He countered the brass-knuckled propaganda of Malik, and later of Red China's disdainful General Wu Hsiu-chuan, with oratorical cudgels of his own. He stigmatized Communist satellites as "subservient puppet governments--zombie governments that breathe and speak and act--but have no soul." He reached into his Yankee cupboard for a dissertation on the Communist "false-label trick," or "falsehood presented as fact." It was like a jar of applesauce, he said, falsely labeled peaches. "I am in a position to open that falsely labeled jar and let the world see what is inside--applesauce."

In Thy Hand. The Ambassador's fan mail ran as high as 900 letters a week. He prized especially the one from a New Jersey housewife who told how her three sons and their friends, after watching the show at Lake Success over television, scampered off to play "Security Council." A twelve-year-old got the role of "Warren Austin" because he was oldest and "knew the most." The part of "Malik" was shunted on to a two-year-old because "nothing he said made sense."

A wizened Vermont country editor, who undoubtedly would have rated Austin as the state's "finest citizen since Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys took Ticonderoga," said: "Hell & tarnation, of course he ain't a hero. Warren's just a Vermonter doing the job that God laid out for him." It was a tribute that the Ambassador really understood. In a similar vein, many letter writers prayed that Austin would have God's help. To such well-wishers, the Bible-reading, Congregationalist Ambassador replied with a quotation from Samuel Longfellow:*

Thy calmness bends serene above, My restlessness to still; Around me flows Thy quickening life, To nerve my faltering will...

Embosomed deep in Thy dear love, Held in Thy law, I stand; Thy hand in all things I behold, And all things in Thy hand . . .

International Orchard. In his younger days Austin was very much a ban vivant and something of a fashion plate. His wife of 49 years, the pert and capable former Mildred Mary Lucas, recalls how he impressed her at college dances with his high, starched collar that never wilted. Later she discovered he had fresh collars under the hallway stairs; between dances, Warren would dash out for a change.

For relaxation, the Ambassador used to fish and play a bit of golf. Since he took on the U.N., he feels himself a dedicated man. He once said that he could be parted from the task only "if the United Nations were torn out of my heart." He sticks faithfully to a daily 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. routine, dividing his time between Lake Success and his Park Avenue office. His official residence in New York is in the Waldorf-Astoria Tower, where nine well-appointed rooms on the 42nd floor are set aside for his use. He has two sons, Warren Jr., a Burlington attorney, and Edward, a lieutenant colonel in the Regular Army. There are six grandchildren.

Now, on weekends the Ambassador and his wife take a plane for Burlington and their cedar-shaded Georgian brick house on Williams Street. The place is unpretentiously furnished with family antiques, including alabaster figures of Venus & Adonis under an Early American pier glass. An old sampler, "God Bless Our Home," hangs in the hall. Rugs and draperies are mostly blue, the Austins' favorite color. A library on the ground floor serves as the Ambassador's retreat.

Season and weather permitting, Austin prefers to don flannel shirt, galluses, work pants and gloves, gather pruning shears, sprayer and other tools, and hie to his big orchard back of the house. It is mostly an apple orchard. Vermonters call it "oldfashioned" because it has so many varieties--high-flavored Spitzenburg, hardy Wealthies, late-ripening Fameuse, good-cooking Greenings, fine-for-cider Russets, as well as English Pippins and an Australian species. Austin calls it an "international" orchard. "Among my trees," he has said, "I am a pruner like the prophet Amos."* From Lake Success he often wires home for sustenance from his orchard: "Send me down a box of Russets," or "Would like some Wealthies this week." An apple a day, plus Yankee righteousness in the hand of God, may help keep the dragon away.

* Brother of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. A Unitarian clergyman, Samuel wrote poems, hymns, and a life of his more famous poet brother.

* One of the Old Testament's minor prophets Amos described himself as "an herdman and a gatherer of sycomore fruit."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.