Oriental Agent

One of Secretary of State Hull's ablest agents, a Boston Yankee who has been able to push the pushy Japanese around, sailed homeward from Tokyo last week. He is Ambassador Joseph Clark Grew, going home for a vacation and a course in the more or less continuous seminar for Ambassadors conducted by Franklin Roosevelt.

Joe Grew was two years ahead of Franklin Roosevelt at Groton and Harvard, calls the President "Frank," undoubtedly can and will give his teacher many a pointer on diplomacy as it is practiced in explosive Tokyo. Already rated one of the best career diplomats in the U. S. Foreign Service when Herbert Hoover sent him to Japan in 1932, Ambassador Grew by general consensus has done a bang up job of pleasantly conveying unpleasant news to the Nipponese.

A No. 1 fact about Joe Grew is that the Japanese are his friends. Part of the magnificent, $1,250,000 Tokyo Embassy which the U. S. Government completed in 1931 is a cluster of three tiny tea houses where Ambassador and Mrs. Grew can make the touchiest Japanese patriot feel at home. Mrs. Grew has the background for it: her grandfather was that Commodore Perry who once opened Japan to the western world in 1853; her father was a teacher in Japan, and she was born there.

Joseph Grew was born in 1880 of a line of Boston bankers, was predestined to be one himself.* From his doting father he wangled a post-collegiate trip abroad, succumbed to "the vivid colors and majestic smells and big gun shooting" in the East He also caught a fever in the Malay States, lost his hearing in one ear and while he was ill in India met a helpful U. S. consul. Then & there he determined to be a diplomat. He flunked his first examination, but managed to get a clerkship in Cairo. In 1904, his star began to rise. Hunter Roosevelt I read young Mr Grew's Sport and Travel in the Far East instantly concluded that a man who could crawl into a cave and shoot a tiger as Joe Grew had done, must have the makings of a diplomat.

Diplomat Grew's sporting proclivities serve him well in Tokyo. He is a baseball fiend; so are the Japanese. His faculty for golfing in dignity and black shorts necessarily appeals to a people to whom dignity is everything. His impressively good clothes, grey hair, dark mustache, lithe frame support a slightly British aura of raj, accompanied by a Yankee capacity for work. He drives his embassy staff seven hours a day (a frightful stint for the Foreign Service). Many an Ambassador lets his staff do the handwork. Joe Grew peck-types his own reports, producing documents highly respected at the State Department and the White House.

No straddler, Ambassador Grew does not play the game of "you know how I feel" with the Japanese. Tokyo and Washington alike know that since the Japanese began to get tough, their good friend at the Embassy has urged his own Government to be tough with them. When he larruped them for sinking the U. S. gunboat Panay for downing a Chinese civilian transport endangering a U. S. pilot, for squeezing the dollar out of China and Manchukuo he bespoke his own sentiments as well as those of Franklin Roosevelt. Last week just before he sailed, he protested the Japanese occupation of Amoy and designs on U. S. interests at Shanghai (see p. 26) Joe Grew going home could take no better testament to his fearsome finesse than the fact that the Japanese hope he will return.

*Related by marriage to J. Pierpont Morgan Joe Grew is moderately well off.

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