THE CABINET: Excellency in a Ricksha

(See Cover) One quiet day ten years ago United Pressman Lyle Wilson burst into the press office of the State Department with a little model airplane in his hand. The State Department’s genial Press Division Chief Michael McDermott was talking with a few reporters. Wilson began sailing his plane around the room.

“Hey,” yelled McDermott, who is wonderfully kind to cub reporters but a bull dog to rowdy ones, “cut that out, or we’ll throw you out.” “I’ll ask the boss about that,” said Wilson in a mock huff, and walked down the hall to the office of the then Assistant Secretary of State Nelson Trusler Johnson (who had just been notified of his appointment as Minister to China). Two hours later someone put his head in the Assistant Secretary’s door. Nelson Johnson and Lyle Wilson were tossing the airplane at each other, laughing like ten-year-olds.

Next day Reporter Wilson went back to the store where he had bought the plane to get some more. Told that the planes were sold out, Wilson protested that there had been a whole boxful the day before. “Yes,” said the salesman, “but a big, fat guy who said his name was Johnson came in and bought all I had.”

Not long afterward Nelson Johnson left for Peking and one of the most important posts in the U. S. diplomatic service. He carried with him the supply of little paper airplanes. For ten years since then, U. S. Far Eastern policy has ridden on little paper wings—unpredictable, steered by prankish winds—which Nelson Johnson, most of the time roaring with laughter, has launched.

Since the outbreak of war in Europe, the importance of Chungking and Tokyo in the U. S. Ambassadorial scale has increased tremendously—so much that only London and Paris now rank them. There are good reasons. Britain, France, Germany and, to a lesser extent, Russia have all turned Westward. Of important powers, only Japan and the U. S. are just now conspicuously active in the Orient. Masters of the East and West shores of the Pacific, they are natural opponents. One of them is big, rich, complacent, lazy, subject to delayed reflexes; the other small, inordinately ambitious, troubled with intellectual cramps and an inferiority complex. The big fellow, slow as he is, has finally begun to realize he must do one of four things about the Orient, particularly China:

1) Get out. Extreme isolationist view is that U. S. interests in China (with only two-thirds the value of the U. S. domestic barber business) and U. S. resources in the Philippines (gold, iron, chromite, manganese, tobacco, hemp, timber, sugar) are not worth holding at the risk of conflict; that the U. S. should withdraw to the Panama-Hawaii-Alaska front, strengthen defenses there.

2) Keep a boot wedged in the Open Door. This would mean taking a strong line against Japan—not only by keeping the flag above the Philippines but by resisting every Japanese advance in China and the East Indies; and would presuppose a willingness to oppose Japan with arms if necessary. After two years as High Commissioner to the Philippines, Paul Vories McNutt returned to the U. S. as a burning apostle of this view. The present High Commissioner, Francis Bowes Sayre, is a rabid convert to it. And it is a good bet that some time soon Filipino President Manuel L. Quezon will publicly beg the U. S. to postpone Philippine independence beyond 1946 and keep Japan out.

3) Appease the aggressor. Businessmen (who want quick turnover) and cynics (who deride quixotic sympathies) think the U. S. should make a new, and better, trade treaty with Japan when the abrogated Treaty of 1911 expires next month. Japan has no better customer than the U. S., and is the U. S.’s third best. To get on Japan’s good side, argue the protagonists of this plan, it would be worth swapping away spheres of interest in China, which, they say, are already lost anyhow.

4) Wait and see; not abandon interests, but not provoke Japan in holding them; sit tight on the status quo. This policy, for many reasons, is the one which the U. S. is most apt to follow. It is what the indispensable, kindly, wise adviser of the State Department, Stanley K. Hornbeck, calls “a course of self-denial and restraint.” It is certainly the course which Ambassador Johnson represents.

Career Diplomat is the phrase to remember about Nelson Trusler Johnson. Born in Washington 52 years ago, he studied at Friends School and George Washington University. He was such a whiz at Latin, Greek and German that one of his professors casually said he ought to get a language appointment in the foreign service. He liked the idea, got a list of required subjects for the diplomatic exams, borrowed some books, read without instruction, passed in a walk, and before he knew it was at the end of the world.

He loved China. He was like a blotter for the language, and soon he was reading both newspapers and classics. His early changes of post gave him a habit of restlessness from which he has never relaxed: from Peking to bleak Mukden, Russified Harbin, hilly Hankow, busy Shanghai, river-girt Chungking, remote Changsha.

At 24 he was made judge in a Shanghai court. He was lenient to a fault. One day he freed a coolie accused of having stolen four ducks because evidence was insufficient—and the next day found four ducks missing from his own duck pond.

In 1918 he was called back to F. E. (as State Department officials call the Far Eastern Division). Here he learned for the first time what the State Department really is: not a policy-making machine, not a stable of thoroughbred cutaway-horses, not a mess of pigeonholes, but an extremely expert research body for the use of one man, the President. He found it full of extraordinarily well-informed men, was delighted to learn that State’s Far Eastern representatives, both at home and in the field, are traditionally among the best. And he learned how heartbreakingly slow the action of U. S. foreign policy is.

After expertizing at the Washington Conference on the Limitation of Armaments and after a grand tour of the East as Consul-General-at-Large, Nelson Johnson was called home again. On his way he stopped in Japan, just after the great Yokohama earthquake of 1923. Cardinal requisite of any foreign service diplomat is that he shall be able to write clearly, vividly, movingly. Of the earthquake Nelson Johnson reported: “I found Yokohama in ruins. I left it busy removing the last vestiges of the confused masses of brick, a city of small galvanized iron shops and houses looking for all the world like a crude mining town in Alaska or a boom town of the prairies, and no longer the oriental city of Kipling and the whaler.

I shall go back presently. But whatever Yokohama becomes I shall always see in it and behind it the ruined city, the piles of confused brick and heat-twisted iron, the china doll’s head lying beside the whitened incinerated bones of the child, here where two were killed, there where two hundred were roasted alive, and it will always be a city of ghosts.”

His new Washington appointment was as Chief of F. E.—most important link in the chain of policy, the agent who boils down for President and Secretary of State the mass of reports from the field. Here Nelson Johnson was so useful that in 1927, at 40, he was made Assistant Secretary of

State, and, two years later, Minister to China.

Johnson On the Spot. The occasion on which he was welcomed to China as Minister was a landmark in the course of U. S.-Chinese relations. At a vast, formal tea at the Grand Hotel in beautiful Tsingtao, the city’s acting mayor rose, rustled his black silk gown, made a pretty, set speech in Chinese. An interpreter laboriously translated. Then Mr. Johnson got up, paused, bowed to hosts and guests. The audience set itself for a weary, long-winded speech which most of them would not understand. With a grin, Nelson Johnson proposed a toast and made a short speech in perfect Mandarin. From then on, he had no need of paper airplanes to make friends. Here was a white man who treated his yellow hosts as equals—as superiors, sometimes.

Through trying times—civil war, Japan’s invasion of Manchuria, the Shanghai warfare of 1932—he was Johnson on the Spot. He watched the Shanghai bombings from the roof of a cotton mill. He liked to call himself the Commuting Minister, and preferred the hinterland ton Westernized coastal cities; only went to Shanghai, he said, when he thought it was time to change his shirt. Almost everywhere he went, his favorite book, Alice in Wonderland, went with him.

Until he was 43, he lived alone. In 1931, a tall, pretty, quiet, 30-year-old schoolteacher from Cody, Wyo. named Jane Beck arrived in Peking with her brother on a round-the-world tour. The Becks and the Johnsons had been friends for three generations, so Jane and her brother stayed at the Embassy mansion. The guests stayed on & on, but since that is the way of Peking, no one was surprised —till one day the bachelor diplomat quietly told his friends that he and Jane Beck would be married the next day at six.

On Sept. 17, 1935, Nelson Johnson was graduated from Minister to Ambassador, his salary raised from $10,000 to $17,500. All the while Japan was becoming more & more threatening, and by July 1937, when North China hostilities began, Ambassador Johnson had a really big job on his hands. It then took four hours for a cable to get to Washington, and considerably longer for an answer to return; and so he usually made decisions and consulted afterward.

At 52, Nelson Johnson is a regular Old King Cole. He is plump as a pillow. He has thinning pale-gold hair, with lashes and brows to match, a face all shades of pink, from salmon to sunset, big enough nose, strong chin, mouth with a chronic smile. In ricksha, cutaway or gas mask he looks more like a tire salesman than an Ambassador.

He is 100% American. He is apt to receive reporters in his underwear, reading a mystery novel. At various times he has played a ukulele, guitar, saxophone. The golf-bug has bitten him. Nothing is more fun for him than to roar out a lusty song (favorite: My Name Is Jon Jonson, I Come From Wisconsin), especially at formal dinners. At parties he sits on the floor if he can. When he drinks, it is not much; when he smokes, it is a Hatamen cigaret—cheap brand the coolies use.

The quality which above all others makes Nelson Johnson a really good diplomat is the ease with which he translates his corny U. S. traits into polished Chinese formulas. When he sits down at an important conference with Chinese statesmen, he begins by saying (in Chinese): “Well, boys, have I told you the one about the traveling salesman and the old farmer?” He can sing Chinese songs, too, and play the pipa (lute).

The U. S. Embassy in China now does business at three stands. The fancy establishment is at Peking, the working one at Chungking, the routine one at Shanghai. When the Embassy set up offices in Chungking last year, it was housed on the top floor of a U. S. Navy canteen, and the staff had to use packing cases for desks and sit on bamboo chairs.

In his Chungking home, across the Yangtze from the city proper, Nelson Johnson rises at seven, eats a hearty breakfast (Sundays he has the staff in for waffles and chicken). He rides to the Embassy Office in a four-coolie sedan with specially strong bamboo lift-poles. There he reads and answers 40-odd telegrams from China sore-spots each day. If there is a big rush on, he helps decode messages. Some errand may take him to the Foreign Minister, less frequently to the Finance Minister, very seldom to Generalissimo Chiang Kaishek. In the evening he occasionally gives a stag dinner (his wife and two children live in Peking), otherwise reads something light and goes to bed—sometimes to be wakened in the middle of the night by an air raid alarm. The Embassy has a stout dugout, but a direct hit would demolish it, Nelson Johnson, and U. S.-Japanese relations.

What to Do? Fortnight ago Nelson Johnson left Chungking for the Shanghai establishment. There he hastily conferred with Commander in Chief of the Asiatic Fleet

Admiral Thomas C. Hart and Shanghai Consul General Clarence E. Gauss, who were about to leave on Admiral Hart’s Flagship U. S. S. Augusta for Manila for talks with Commissioner Sayre. The subject: what should the U. S. do?

Britain and France had just reduced their China garrisons. Japan was fulminating against the U. S. in its role of watchdog. The conferees went off to Manila with their boss’s judgment (coinciding with their own): if Japan takes the present war as an occasion to move in on French and British interests, the U. S. must do everything short of war to resist. If you live in a firetrap, Nelson Johnson might say, and the apartment of the two people across the hall catches fire, you don’t go on reading that romantic novel; you get busy. Occidentals want to go on hearing the sweet music of trade in the orient. For the time being, Nelson Trusler Johnson must bear the White Man’s baton.

From Shanghai and business, Ambassador Johnson went to Peking and pleasure. In Peking with the Ambassador’s wife are her son, Nelson Beck (“Nubby”), 6, and daughter, Betty Jane, for whose fourth birthday this week he made the trip north. He had not seen his family since last May (in the U. S., after a trip out of China via the then brand new 2,100-mile Burma road, over which the Ambassador was the first civilian to drive).

When he arrived home last week, Nubby cocked a sleepy eye at his father’s new-grown, straw-colored mustache and said: “That’s got to come off.” Next morning Nubby, Betty Jane and mother rigged a barber chair, forced the Ambassador into it, and hacked the thing off themselves—occasionally bringing the U. S. Ambassador closer to death than Japanese bombs ever have.

Thus ticks a prime foreign servant of the U. S. He may seem happy-go-lucky, too casual to force a grave issue, too apt to wait and see. But no legate could be a better Bearer of Good Will to the gentle people of China. Nelson Trusler Johnson is the sort of roly-poly man a Chinese can respect, love, even fear far more deeply than the man with bayonet, dollar, or arrogance.