National Affairs: The Ambassadors

As job after job in the upper echelons of the new Administration was filled at record speed, one name was beginning to become more & more conspicuous by its absence. What did Dwight Eisenhower have in mind for Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., his pre-convention campaign manager who was defeated for re-election to the Senate on Nov. 4? Last week Ike answered the question. He picked Lodge to succeed Vermont’s ailing Warren Austin as head of the U.S. mission to the U.N., with the rank of ambassador.

A grandson of Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, who successfully fought to keep the U.S. out of the League of Nations, Cabot Lodge has long been a leading voice in the internationalist wing of the Republican Party. In his new $25,000-a-year post, he is also expected to be “one of the Administration’s principal advisers and representatives in the formulation and conduct of foreign policy.”

Next day Ike began to fill his list of new U.S. representatives abroad. As Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, he named Winthrop Williams Aldrich, 67, chairman of the board of Chase National, one of the nation’s largest commercial banks. An amateur musician, artist (specialty: watercolor seascapes) and crack yachtsman (navigator of the America’s Cup defender Enterprise), Aldrich is a longtime friend of Britain, was president of the British War Relief Society during World War II, helped swing Britain’s first postwar loan from the U.S.

Son of Rhode Island’s onetime Republican Senator Nelson Aldrich (1841-1915), young Winthrop started out to follow a lawyer’s career, graduated tenth in his class at Harvard Law School. After a sister married John D. Rockefeller Jr., he veered off toward banking. In 1922 he became chief counsel to the old Equitable Trust; by 1933 he was running Chase National, the “Rockefeller Bank,” with headquarters in downtown Manhattan.

Although Aldrich always meant to go back to the law, he found he enjoyed the starchy formality of banking. Once, with a wry grin, he told a friend: “I never smile south of Canal Street.” Long an outspoken critic of New and Fair Deal economics, he served this year on the National Republican finance committee. Created a Knight Grand Cross of the British Empire in 1947, he looks on Britain as his “second home abroad.”