The Search for Excellencies

"When I go into an embassy and see sitting as our ambassador a fat, bloated, ignorant, rich major contributor to a presidential campaign . . . it's an insult to me and to the people of America and to the people of that country."

In the hope of avoiding the sort of ambassador he had criticized during his campaign, Carter asked Florida Governor Reubin Askew to chair a 20-person panel that would review potential ambassadors. Its members include Democratic Elder Statesmen Dean Rusk and Averell Harriman, Republican William Scranton and a sprinkling of academics and authors. For the past month, panel members have been meeting at the State Department in great secrecy, sifting a list of 400 names submitted by members of Congress, the foreign policy community and Carter's staff. Key criteria: foreign experience, language skills and "special considerations," a category that includes friendships with foreign leaders--and friendship with Carter himself. Explains Askew: "If you have a well-qualified person who has some identity with the President of the U.S., that's a special consideration in many countries."

The painstaking review has gone slowly but last week three choices seemed all but certain:

> Kingman Brewster, 57, president of Yale University, to Great Britain. A confirmed Anglophile who vacations in England, Brewster has one apparent drawback: insufficient wealth. The appointment to the Court of St. James's has traditionally gone to those who could afford to supplement the U.S. embassy's presumably meager budget (currently $49,500) for entertainment and related expenses. However, Carter aides have vowed that personal wealth will not be an ambassadorial requirement in even the poshest post.

> Lawrence Eagleburger, 46, to Yugoslavia. This would be a surprise appointment, since Eagleburger, an old Balkan hand, is better known as the right hand of former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. It was thought the Carter team would not accept a close Kissinger associate. But Eagleburger qualified (he coolly coordinated U.S. aid after Yugoslavia's 1963 earthquake, earning the nickname "Larry of Macedonia"), and Kissinger delivered a personal plea for Eagleburger's appointment to his successor, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance.

> Samuel Lewis, 46, to Israel. Though a professional diplomat, he too is a surprise, since he has had little experience in the Middle East. ("Maybe that's his biggest advantage," quips a senior State Department official.) Lewis, a Texan who joined the Foreign Service in 1954, served in Brazil during the '60s and later became Latin American specialist for the National Security Council. Most recently, he has been deputy director of State's Office of Policy Planning and assistant secretary for International Organization Affairs.

At week's end the names became known of other candidates high on the lists. For India, contenders included Phillips Talbot, president of the Asia Society, and Robert Goheen, former president of Princeton; for Japan, Marshall Green, one of State's foremost Asian experts and a former Ambassador to Indonesia and Australia, and Arthur Hummel, a former Ambassador to Burma and Ethiopia and lately assistant secretary for East Asia and Pacific Affairs.

Predictably enough, some Georgians were expected to make it past the screening committee. Philip Alston, 65, Atlanta attorney and key Carter fund raiser, said to be in line for Australia; Anne Cox Chambers, 57, Atlanta socialite and one of the owners of the Atlanta Journal and Constitution, and a big political contributor, is likely to go to Belgium.

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