FOREIGN RELATIONS: The Optimist

Edward Reilly Stettinius Sr. made his fortune as a purchasing agent for the House of Morgan during World War I. Ed Stettinius Jr., born in 1900 on Chicago’s Gold Coast, grew up to make a reputation, if not a fortune, as an effective seller of other men’s ideas.

Young Ed was no determined student. In college his grades were so poor that his classmates wondered how he ever lasted out four years at the University of Virginia. Among other things he flunked a course in government. But Ed had other attributes. He was an impressively handsome, exuberantly friendly man who taught Sunday school, became president of the campus Y.M.C.A. and believed that all the world was just as well-meaning as well-meaning Ed Stettinius.

Friend of Everyone. He went to work in a General Motors subsidiary’s stock room and seven years later became vice president of G.M. in charge of industrial and public relations. U.S. Steel hired him as a front man. By the time he was 37, he was chairman of the board, making $100,000 a year, and was a friend of everyone. At the urging of Franklin Roosevelt’s Harry Hopkins, big, expansive Ed went to big, expanding wartime Washington.

He served there on various wartime boards, filled the post of Administrator of Lend-Lease, ably helped to sell Roosevelt’s policies to skeptical Congressmen, succeeded Sumner Welles as Under Secretary of State, spread good will, slapped backs and first-named embarrassed British and Russian diplomats. When the aged Cordell Hull had to quit, silver-haired Ed Stettinius, at 44, became the second youngest Secretary of State in the nation’s history.

He went to Yalta with Roosevelt, carrying his earnest optimism with him. He headed the U.S. delegation to the San Francisco birth of U.N., which he like many others thought “would fulfill the hopes of millions of peoples in … the world.” He left the secretaryship, but stayed in Government as U.S. representative to the U.N. Security Council.

Back to Old Virginia. At 45, he became rector (a kind of chairman of the board) of the University of Virginia. He anticipated Harry Truman’s Point Four program by forming the Liberia Co. to help develop the natural resources of the Negro republic. He traveled, conducted foreign-policy seminars at his estate in Virginia, wrote a book on Yalta (see BOOKS). Last spring, Big Ed’s doctor ordered him to slow down.

After that, he was out of the news. Suffering from a weakened heart, Big Ed took things easy at his own estate and at the Greenwich, Conn, estate of his wife’s brother, Juan Trippe, president of Pan American Airways. There this week, nine days after his 49th birthday, death came to friendly Ed Stettinius.