In Chancery

THROUGH EMBASSY EYES--Martha Dodd --Harcourt, Brace ($3).

One of the queerest choices Franklin Roosevelt ever made was to pick William Edward Dodd, a history professor brimming with academic ideals, stiff-necked with homey truths and tactlessness, as U. S. Ambassador to Germany. That Martha Dodd is her father's daughter any reader of Through Embassy Eyes will quickly see. Her account of the increasingly uneasy four and a half years the Dodds spent in Berlin is like a series of blurted indiscretions. But no one could live so long in such a focal spot in complete diplomatic immunity: some of what Martha Dodd has to tell is worth listening to, and now & again she pokes the nodding reader in the ribs with a shrewd bit of prattle.

Nothing in her book quite lives up to her wide-eyed statement on p. 14 that "our family ties were abnormally close" -- unless it is her name for the family's official residence in Berlin -- "The Chancery." Before she would admit that she was really in chancery, Germany had other, very different holds on her. When she landed there in 1933, she was practically a predigested Nazi. She liked everything she saw, discounted rumors of things unseen.

She became great pals with Rolf Diels, the Chief of the Secret Police, who looked like a Hollywood gangster, with "Putzi" Hanfstaengl, who swore that she was just the woman Hitler needed. (He introduced her to the Fuehrer, but nothing came of it.) She attended the Reichstag trial, other social events that were much duller.

Gradually Martha Dodd got over her Nazi measles, and by the time of the Purge (1934), she was even more violently anti-Nazi than her father. A trip to Russia, on which she never once removed her rose-colored spectacles, confirmed her in the anti-faith. She describes horrific tortures inflicted on concentration-camp prisoners ("a few I know of directly"), thinks "there is still a good deal of organized opposition among the people in Germany."

Best blurt: Goering as a host, standing "buxomly around greeting the women guests, in his rather badly acted role of naive confusion."

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