THAILAND: Smiling Jack

They stood and watched the police parachute-drop demonstration, U.S. Ambassador John E. Peurifoy and his two sons, Clinton, 14, and Daniel, 9. Then handsome Jack Peurifoy and the boys got into his robin’s-egg-blue Ford Thunderbird and headed back to the Thai beach resort of Hua Hin, 85 miles southwest of Bangkok, for lunch. It was a holiday outing, a lark for the boys, and just the occasion for Peurifoy to open up with his prized Thunderbird. He gunned it up to 70 m.p.h. and left his four-jeep police escort behind. They were used to it.

But one of the dangers of the road across Hua Hin’s green rice lands is a series of one-lane bridges across irrigation canals. Sweeping down toward one of the bridges, Peurifoy saw a truck approaching from the other side. He had two choices-to speed up and try to slip through ahead of the truck, or to brake hard and hope the truck would, too. Peurifoy hit the brakes —too late. The Thunderbird smashed head-on into the truck. The ambassador and his younger son were killed almost instantly; the other boy was badly injured.

Open-Shirt Diplomacy. Peurifoy died as he lived—audaciously, dramatically, at high speed. Though anything but an orthodox diplomat. Jack Peurifoy had performed outstandingly in difficult assignments—Greece, Guatemala, Thailand. He was essentially a political operator—jaunty, backslapping, forever doing favors, confidential with correspondents, quick at sizing up the practicalities of a situation, ever willing to take the apparently radical course from which the highly trained, career-conscious professionals are likely to hang back. Said Peurifoy once: “The State Department was ripe for guys like me.”

The son of a South Carolina prosecuting attorney, Peurifoy was neither rich nor Ivy League. He had to resign from West Point in his second year, after his father’s death. Starting out in Washington as a $90-a-month elevator operator in the House of Representatives, he soon got a job as a clerk in State and rose rapidly. Catching George Marshall’s eye, he was made Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Administration, the department’s No. 3 job. He was personally popular on the Hill when the State Department was not. He was good at getting appropriations, but it was also his casual candor in referring to the dismissal of 91 homosexuals that gave Joe McCarthy so valuable a weapon for attacking the department.

Joining the career foreign service at the top in 1950, Peurifoy soon showed that he was a diplomat of a different sort. He preferred open shirts and slacks to striped pants, driving his fast cars to riding in limousines, and man-to-man talk to courtly ambiguities. In Athens, as U.S. ambassador, he started out by telling Premier Sophocles Venizelos: “Look, Soph, you call me Jack. Let’s talk frankly about all this.” Within two years, by his direct methods, he had helped to install a strong, anti-Communist government and to raise U.S. prestige.

Gun on the Hip. Sent next to Guatemala, where Communists were fastening their grip on that Caribbean republic, he spent one long evening with President Jacobo Arbenz and cabled Washington: “If he isn’t a Communist, he’ll do until a better one comes along.” When the anti-Arbenz pressure exploded into revolution last year, Peurifoy, sport-shirted and packing a pistol, maneuvered the rival revolutionary chieftains into an agreement and averted a nasty civil war. As the U.S. saluted the ouster of Guatemala’s Communists as a major victory, ambitious Jack Peurifoy was off to Bangkok to succeed “Wild Bill” Donovan as Ambassador to Thailand. There he made fast friends with Premier Phibun Songgram, who himself drives a swift Mercedes 300 SL.

A big, open-mannered man who was on first-name terms with more members of Congress than anyone else overseas, “Smiling Jack” often said that after finishing his Thailand assignment, he would like to jump into South Carolina politics and run for the Senate. He was a man who was going places, and knew it. He had already gone far before his sudden death last week.