The Chummy Ambassador

Thomas Edward Whelan, 65, is a well-to-do, homespun North Dakota potato farmer and a power in his home state's politics. He has also been U.S. Ambassador to dictatorial Nicaragua for nine years--longer in one post than any other current U.S. ambassador and so long that he hardly seems the man for Washington's new policy of (as Richard Nixon put it) "a warm embrace for democratic leaders and a formal handshake for dictators."

Ever since Republican Whelan was appointed by Democrat Harry Truman in 1951,* Nicaragua has suited him.

With Whelan and the late Dictator Anastasio Somoza it was "Tommy" and "Tacho" from the start, and the friendship deepened as they partied, played poker, junketed around the country together. Tacho was shot and critically wounded by an assassin in 1956, and it was his friend Tommy Whelan who arranged to fly the dying dictator to a U.S. hospital in the Panama Canal Zone. He was succeeded by his sons, President Luis Somoza and Army Chief Anastasio ("Tachito") Somoza Jr.

Sometimes, in his plain North Dakota way, Whelan had tried to persuade old Tacho to allow Nicaragua a little democracy, but then he would quickly agree with Tacho that Nicaraguans were politically too immature for much freedom. Whelan claims a little more success with Luis and Tachito. After his father's death, Tachito was bent on killing the enemies of the Somozas when Ambassador Whelan convinced his friend that this might be going too far. He also encouraged Luis to put through a law prohibiting any member of the Somoza family from succeeding him to the presidency.

But in the eyes of the new generation of democrats come to power in the hemisphere in recent years, Nicaragua remains a sleepy dictatorship run chiefly to protect the estimated $60 million fortune (in sugar, coffee, shipping, cotton) that Tacho corruptly amassed while in power. To Nicaraguans, uncritically chummy Tom Whelan will always be identified with the Somozas and all their works.

* As a reward to North Dakota's maverick-Republican Senator, the late William ("Wild Bill") Langer, who cast a crucial vote against Senate investigation of alleged 1946 vote frauds in Truman's home town, Kansas City.

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