MR. EUROPE

Appointed last week to the top administrative post in NATO: Paul-Henri Spaak, Belgian statesman and longtime champion of European unity. He will succeed able, self-effacing Lord Ismay, who retires as Secretary-General in April. Spaak will be given more power than Ismay.

Background: Born in Brussels on Jan. 25, 1899, Spaak, like his native land, is an amalgam of two widely divergent strains. His Flemish father was one of Belgium's best-known artists, a poet, playwright and director of the Brussels Royal Opera. His mother, a Walloon, was Belgium's first woman Senator, the daughter of one of the nation's great 19th century liberal leaders and the sister of a former Prime Minister.

Career: A brilliant, if often erratic student, young Spaak was taken prisoner by the Germans in 1916 when he tried to cross the Belgian frontier to join King Albert's expatriate army. Released at war's end, he studied law at Brussels, finished the five-year course in 2% years and, well-endowed with his father's gift for the dramatic, had a brief fling at the bar before entering politics as a fiery young Socialist (he was called a "Bolshevik in a dinner jacket"). In 1938 he became his nation's youngest Prime Minister, and has spent most of the years since either in that job or as Belgium's Foreign Minister. His nationwide popularity was dented strongly only once: when he led the successful but divisive campaign to prevent the return of Leopold III to the throne (Leopold at last agreed to abdicate in favor of his son Baudoin).

Family: Married in 1924 to the daughter of a wealthy industrialist. They have three children, one married to a British diplomat.

Outlook: Spaak was the first president of the U.N. General Assembly in 1946. In 1948 he called loudly and clearly for the West to organize and arm itself against the threat of Russia. Ever since then, he has been in the forefront of every effort toward European unity, impatient at "lip service" and "halfway measures toward that end as he has been active and ardent in support of practical progress." "To believe that we can still defend our selves, by ourselves," he told the Belgians last year, in support of NATO "is completely absurd." And he added: "For me, NATO must also be the political center of the West." Speaking in Moscow at the time of the Suez invasion and the Russian intervention in Hungary, he came back to denounce U.N., privately but in strong terms, for being ineffectual. Personality: Sometimes called a "junior Churchill" because of his genial, jowly resemblance, balding, 230-lb. Spaak is an eloquent and dramatic speaker in his own right, with an inexhaustible fund of energy and a warm passion for good talk, good food and good company. Writhing in histrionic impatience on a parliamentary bench, his face contorted with unspoken rejoinders, he has been known to reduce opposition speakers to near paralysis. At work alone, however, he is calm, efficient and dictatorial. "You can do whatever you want," runs his formula for those who work with him, "so long as you want what I want." As presiding officer of NATO he will undoubtedly exercise just such forceful authority. "Spaak," says one European statesman who has sat under the gavel of a Spaak chairmanship, "is perfectly capable of locking you in a room and saying, 'Messieurs, you don't get out till the treaty is signed.' "

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