Koo to Tong

V. K. Wellington Koo joined China's diplomatic service with the establishment of the Republic in 1912, and for nearly 45 years spoke brilliantly and urbanely for his awakening country at every major international conference, at almost every major capital. A graduate of Columbia University, he was Minister to Washington at 28; he was three times China's Foreign Minister, once its Prime Minister, once its Finance Minister. He is one of two living diplomats* who drafted the League of Nations Covenant in 1919; nearly a quarter century later he helped draft the U.N. Charter.

Last week, at 68, ten years after he returned to Washington to speak for free China, Wellington Koo delivered his last message and retired to live in suburban Westchester County, outside New York. From John Foster Dulles, who first met Koo at the 1919 Versailles Conference, where Dulles was a junior member of the U.S. delegation and Koo headed the Chinese delegation, went a warm letter. Koo's replacement: Hollington K. Tong, 69, member of the first class graduated by Columbia University's School of Journalism, China's propaganda minister in World War II, Nationalist China's Ambassador to Japan since 1952, good friend of the U.S. and of Chiang Kaishek.

*The other: Britain's Viscount Cecil of Chelwood, 1937 Nobel Peace Prizewinner.

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