FOREIGN RELATIONS: Moffat to Ottawa

James H. R. Cromwell, no diplomat, was Minister to Canada for 142 days. Twenty of these passed before he took office; of the remainder, it was said that nothing could break the bonds of U. S.-Canadian friendship. Installed in the Legation at Ottawa, Mr. Cromwell announced that he would soon resign to run for Senator of New Jersey—a declaration which aroused more enthusiasm in the State Department than had amateurish Mr. Cromwell’s passionate but undiplomatic denunciations of Hitler.

Up to World War II few U. S. citizens took U. S.-Canadian relations seriously. Last week President Roosevelt indicated how seriously they could take them from now on by planking one of the ablest and most experienced U. S. diplomats into the post that Mr. Cromwell had vacated. To the Senate for confirmation (immediately forthcoming) he sent the name of Jay Pierrepont Moffat, 43, chief of the all-important European Division of the State Department.

Washingtonians could set their clocks by Diplomat Moffat’s daily walk to the State Department. A fast walker, he first strides three-quarters of a mile to the swank Metropolitan Club, arriving at 8:20, reads the morning papers for exactly one-half hour, leaves, walks in his office door at 8:55. Only hard work and a good, long record (he joined the Foreign Service in 1919, has served at Warsaw, Berne, Tokyo, Constantinople, Sydney) prevent Jay Pierrepont Moffat from being a lady novelist’s version of the ideal diplomat: he goes out socially a great deal, plays flawless bridge, is esteemed as a dinner companion, is perfectly groomed, properly reserved. But because he traveled with Sumner Welles on his European trip last winter, has the British Empire as part of his regular beat and is one of the top policy-making State Department officials close to the President, the meaning of his appointment was plain: Ottawa loomed large at last among the world’s capitals.

Popular idea of the duties of U. S. functionaries in Canada has been that they carry on glacier-slow discussions of the St. Lawrence Seaway and, at the opening of each new international bridge, call attention to the 3,897 miles of U. S. Canadian frontier that have no fortifications whatsoever. New U. S.-Canadian relations involve staggering possibilities: that the seat of the British Empire might be moved to Ottawa if Britain should be overrun, that the British fleet might be forced to seek bases in Canadian ports, that Nazi Germany might claim Canada if she won—in which case unfortified bridges and boundaries would comfort neither U. S. citizens nor Canadians. Smooth Mr. Moffat raised no such grim prospects. Quizzed over the phone by a Toronto newspaper on how long he would stay (“Mr. Roper and Mr. Cromwell each spent about three months”) he was reassuring: “I know … I know . . . I’ll stay longer. . . . There will be more and more to do. What these things are we can’t reveal now, but Canada has become a most important post.”