The Circus of Dr. Unger

The shiny black Checker limousine skimmed along Vientiane's pitted streets like a water beetle supported by surface tension. There was plenty of tension in the Laotian capital, but the burly, brush-browed man in the car did not show it. U.S. Ambassador Leonard Un ger was at his unflappable best as he coordinated the search for two downed American aviators and pressed the case for fighter escort to accompany continuing U.S. reconnaissance flights over the Plain of Jars. The ambassador stopped by a cocktail party to talk with a rightist leader, then dropped in on Premier Souvanna Phouma for a little genteel arm twisting.

For a diplomat who thrives on crisis, life in Laos is a circus in which the performer must star in every act from tightrope walking to elephant riding.

The tightrope is symbolic and means dealing with the tenuous Laotian coalition government. The elephants are real and are usually ridden at every Laotian boun (festival). Len Unger finds the boun a boon for he is an excellent ele phant rider.

Victory & Puck. Through two years of duty in Laos, Unger, 46, has demonstrated what one State Department admirer calls "that uncanny ability to keep several balls in the air at the same time." Born in California, Unger was educated at Harvard (B.A. in geography, 1939), experienced his first diplomatic crisis during the Trieste negotiations of the 1950s, and graduated to Southeast Asia in 1958. In the inter national cat's cradle of Bangkok he learned not only to speak Thai (which is related linguistically to Lao) but also how to keep cool in a hot climate.

Since 1962 Unger has handled three major and countless minor crises in Laos, ranging from the assassination of Foreign Minister Quinim Pholsena through bullet-spanging dustups between rightists and Pathet Lao forces. At the same time, he has managed to play endless rubbers of bridge with Prince Souvanna, and tries to get in half a dozen sets of hard-slamming tennis a month. When trouble appears, Unger as likely as not will send his children out riding along the banks of the Mekong River on their Laotian ponies, Victory and Puck, to show family calmness. He accepts the topsy-turvy Asian world with wry good humor. "Any time you're really in trouble here,^ he says, "the telephones don't work."

Cards on the Table. By that standard, the bells cannot have been ringing in Laos last week. "It's been a very rough spell," Unger said during one of his rare breaks. "It's not good enough to sit here and try to put out fires from day to day. I wish we had more time for constructive thinking for the long run." As he explained the current crisis: "The Pathet Lao attacks in the Plain of Jars represent a flagrant land grab. We don't intend to see the whole country gobbled up."

Beneath his affability, Unger is a hard operator. When Premier Souvanna Phouma last week balked at allowing U.S. fighters to accompany reconnaissance flights, Unger called on his old bridge partner. Just what cards he used were not revealed, but one rumor had it that Unger warned Souvanna to either accept the armed escorts or get set for more drastic U.S. intervention. By week's end, Souvanna seemed once again to be seeing eye to eye with Unger.

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