Better Than Gypsies

DIPLOMAT (299 pp.) -- Charles W. Thayer--Harper ($4.50).

Throughout much of history, diplomats were considered several cuts below highwaymen and only slightly above strolling actors and gypsies. At the sight of a diplomat, a prince might well lock up his papers, his money and his women. In Machiavelli's time, an ambassador was expected to bribe a ruler's servants, seduce his wife and, in a pinch, kill him. As late as the 17th century, a member of the House of Commons seen talking to a foreign diplomat might lose his seat. If such distrust lingers today, it is probably because a great many governments and their representatives still practice what Louis XI of France advised his ambassadors in the 15th century: "If they lie to you, see to it you lie much more to them."

After almost 20 years as a U.S. career diplomat (he resigned in 1953) and onetime head of the Voice of America, Charles W. (for Wheeler) Thayer does not believe in lying diplomacy. In this urbane, witty and information-packed volume of shoptalk about the diplomatic life, West Pointer ('33) Thayer outlines his notion that diplomats ought to rely on patience, sound education, a controlled temper--and honesty. That, feels Thayer, is the basis of the West's diplomatic tradition, despite occasional blunders and deceits. But there is another diplomatic school, the Byzantine, and its deceitful and violent tradition survives forcefully in Soviet Russia.

Thayer cites the case of a loth century ambassador named Liudprand. who represented the Holy Roman Emperor in Constantinople and in the process was insulted, nearly starved, and quartered in a house with a leaking roof, which also lodged several unfriendly lions. Nearly 1,000 years later, in 1934, when U.S. Ambassador William Bullitt set up the first post-revolution U.S. embassy in Moscow, he was not troubled by lions, but otherwise, suggests Thayer, he got equivalent treatment.

All in all, Author Thayer also believes that the style of Russian diplomacy has not fundamentally changed since the 16th century, when a local Cossack leader addressed the Turkish Sultan Mahomet III in a letter whose milder passages read: "We will lick you on land and sea, you hostile son-of-a-bitch . . . You Alexandrian goatherd, you Babylonian cook, you Macedonian wagonmaker, Jerusalem's traitor, Kamchatka cat, Podolian villain, swindler of the world, and evildoer of the underworld . . ."

Poodle Diplomacy. Author Thayer totally disagrees with the frequently heard opinion that the speed of modern communications has reduced diplomats to the status of their governments' Western Union boys. He illustrates the point by a detailed account of the life at the U.S. embassy during the 1958 Lebanon crisis (he was on the scene as an interested visitor). Ambassador Robert M. McClintock's problems ranged from the influx of new code clerks required for the emergency ("No serious love affairs resulted," said one of the resident clerks later) to the matter of just how to cope with the arrival of the U.S. Sixth Fleet.

After the landings, there was still some question whether Lebanese troops would open fire as the U.S. Marines prepared to move from the beaches into Beirut. Ambassador McClintock politely but firmly put the Lebanese military commander into his embassy Cadillac; up front he placed an embassy guard with Golly, McClintock's poodle. The Cadillac moved ahead of the column of marines, and the ambassador was proved right in his assumption that nobody would fire on a poodle.

Harem Asylum. Author Thayer is a fascinating raconteur of diplomatic lore; he knows about the envoys who used to smuggle silk stockings for their Russian mistresses into the Soviet Union via diplomatic pouch, and about Sir Mortimer Durand, onetime British minister in Teheran, who agreed to extend political asylum to 300 dissident members of the Shah's harem. Thayer is equally enlightening about diplomatic immunity (even corpses are immune from autopsies), espionage (one of his favorites is the operative who transported his supply of invisible ink by impregnating his socks with it), the character of embassy receptionists (they are apt to be old maids) and about foreign correspondents (they have a "suppressed longing to act like diplomats").

Thayer has an old-fashioned sense of style when it comes to diplomatic correspondence. He regrets the passing of the formal dispatch, which was invariably to be addressed to "The Honorable, The Secretary of State," and started with "Sir: I have the honor to report . . ." Using these phrases, says Thayer, "the writer was at once in the proper mood of dignified respect for the recipient and at the same time filled with a sense of responsibility as the author of a state paper that one day might appear in the history books."

Perhaps it is the British diplomatic service that remains most concerned with future history books and with style. Letters to a British ambassador abroad must always end thus: "I am, with great truth and respect, Sir, Your Excellency's obedient Servant." In accord with British status symbolism, "instead of 'respect,' the British minister gets 'regard,' and a British charge d'affaires must content himself with the 'great truth' alone."

Diplomacy being what it is even five centuries after Louis XI, "great truth" is impressive--and rare--enough.

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