FOREIGN RELATIONS: The Professorr Is Out

For a long time there was a littlesign on the door of a small Columbia University office which read: “Professor Jessup on leave until Feb. 1.” Someone thoughtfully crossed out “until Feb. 1” when gangling, affable Philip Caryl Jessup, having used up his year’s leave as a U.S. delegate to the United Nations, went off to Washington to become Secretary of State Dean Acheson’s top negotiator, with the title of ambassador at large.

Last week State announced that Phil Jessup was sticking to his decision to leave Government service next March. His notice followed by a week the resignation of Policy Planner George (“Mr. X”) Kennan, who will leave in June after spending the most of the next six months reviewing U.S. policy in Latin America and Africa. Like Kennan, Jessup yearned for the quiet of academic life. He reckoned he was just about eleven months behind schedule in returning to the Hamilton Fish Chair of International Law and Diplomacy at Columbia where, a scholarly friend explained, he had some “grinding” thinking to do.

Undercover History. Phil Jessup’s latest excursion into public life was certain to enter him in his colleagues’ history books. Hardly had he settled down in his small paneled office in the State Department before he was making undercover trips to Manhattan to work out the settlement of the Berlin blockade with Russia’s Yakov Malik. In the pale-pink glow of hopefulness that followed, he served Acheson as alternate chief of delegation at the Paris four-power conference, proved to himself once again that the Russians had altered their basic strategy not one whit.

A diplomat with a lawyer’s incisive mind, Jessup was picked as the ideal man to thread a way through the evasions and admissions of the State Department’s shaky 1,054-page white paper on China, turned out a report that put the best face on the U.S.’s weak and vacillating policy in Asia. Then he turned to an even tougher task. As head of a three-man committee, he set to auditing the entire U.S. Far Eastern policy.

Final Mission. He had hoped to wind up the job by February and get back to Columbia for the spring semester, but Secretary Acheson urged him to take on one final mission. This week Envoy Jessup boarded ship in San Francisco for a five-week swing through the Far East to talk to General MacArthur in Japan, visit Korea, Formosa, the Philippines, and end up in Thailand where he will preside over an extraordinary conference of U.S. chiefs of mission in southeast Asia.

On the results of that tour the State Department was expected to base some of its most critical decisions of 1950. If Diplomat Jessup, who had sometimes questioned State’s wait-until-the-dust-settles policy, could provide the basis for a revitalized U.S. policy in Asia, his seat in the little paneled office in the State Department would be even harder to fill.