National Affairs: The Gifted Amateur

Rarely since John Adams set up the U.S.’s first ministry in London had a U.S. ambassador-designate faced more difficult diplomatic beginnings than John Hay (“Jock”) Whitney, 52. In the bitter aftermath of Suez, Jock Whitney, nominated last week to succeed Ambassador Winthrop Aldrich, faces the awesome task of restoring full U.S.-British concord and confidence in a country split by a new sense of its own rights and wrongs, in which the U.S. is the most convenient scapegoat.

But Jock Whitney was born and raised to be nobody’s scapegoat. During 30 years in the public eye, he has interested and involved himself energetically and capably in so many facets of American life that he is well equipped to hold his own on behalf of the Eisenhower Administration.

Push for Pushcart. Whitney’s grandfathers were Teddy Roosevelt’s Secretary of State John Hay, and William Collins Whitney, a street-railway tycoon and multimillionaire. Thanks principally to Grandfather Whitney, Jock Whitney is endowed with a fortune of some $60 million (which will tide him through the London embassy’s estimated excess expenditure of $50,000 a year above the ambassador’s $27,500-a-year salary and allowances), but he has always managed to combine the graces of a patrician upbringing with shrewd common sense. Once he ordered his name expunged from the New York Social Register because he considered it “a travesty of democracy . . . with absurd notions as to who is and who isn’t socially acceptable.” When a Florida businessman tried to drive a hard real-estate bargain by whining that he had started life with a pushcart, Jock Whitney urbanely sent back word that Jock Whitney “may not have started off with a pushcart, but . . . he hasn’t any intention of ending up with one, either.”

Whitney was raised on Long Island amid 28 cars, including four Rolls-Royces—but he still charged his friends 5¢ for rides to school. From Groton and Yale he crossed the Atlantic to study history and literature at Oxford (a point which should help him in Whitehall). From his first job as a $16-a-week Wall Street buzzer boy, he rose to head the highly profitable J. H. Whitney & Co. (investments). Even as he was getting into the social news with his stable of racers and steeplechasers, his polo playing, his first marriage to Mary Elizabeth (“Liz”) Altemus, and his second to Betsey Gushing Roosevelt, he was combining business and the arts by backing some 30 Broadway plays, e.g., Life With Father, and helping stake Hollywood Producer David O. Selznick in such highly profitable productions as Rebecca and Gone With the Wind.

Gone from the Nazis. In World War II Jock Whitney was a public-relations and liaison officer (colonel) in the Air Corps, an agreeable berth that was disrupted one day during the invasion of Southern France when he headed his jeep beyond the American positions and got captured. When the Nazis packed him off north in a boxcar along lines that the Allies were bombing, coolheaded Jock Whitney regaled his fellow P.W.s with a running commentary—”Now they’re peeling off to come in! God, it’s lovely! Now the first one is leveling off!” During one of those raids he broke out of his boxcar and escaped to rejoin his unit. Only damage: a chip in the gold and amber ring he still wears, bearing the personal seal of Grandfather John Hay.

After the war Whitney managed the John Hay Whitney Foundation and his $10 million investment firm (sample risks: uranium in New Mexico, frozen orange juice in Florida), which has doubled its worth since 1946. More and more he interested and involved himself in politics. He was for Ike before Chicago, contributed heavily to the Eisenhower-Nixon 1952 campaign, served afterward on presidential committees on higher education, foreign-service organization and foreign economic policy. He called regularly on Dulles, played golf and bad bridge with Eisenhower.

When Whitney’s appointment was announced in London, British newspapers were generally mildly approving (“The Yank from Oxford,” said Beaverbrook’s usually anti-U.S. Daily Express, “is going to be the Yank at the Court of St. James’s”). The Daily Telegraph was moved, in passing, to talk about “the American attitude of appointing gifted amateurs to some of the main diplomatic posts in the world. Some of these appointments are brilliant successes, but the practice does not always turn out equally well.” For Whitney the U.S. held high hopes, for, as the New York Times editorialized, he “has become one of the best-rounded and versatile representatives of the modern American business world, which to the outside world is still the key factor that makes America tick.”