Hot & Cold Brush-Offs

At 5 p.m. Hjalmar Johan Procope entered a side door of the gloomy old State Department, was ushered into the office of the protocol chief, bald, urbane George T. Summerlin. Fifteen minutes later Mr. Procope hurried out, brusque and ruffled. The Finnish Minister to the U.S. had been handed his passport, had been told to get out of the country as soon as he could arrange it. Thus, in a way almost unprecedented in U.S. history,* ended the Washington career of the man who only a few years ago was the capital's most lionized diplomat.

Exit Finns. Handsome, clever and soon divorced, Minister Procope became the ideal extra man at dinner almost as soon as he arrived in 1939. When he finally eloped with the niece of a British countess (he was 50, she 29), hearts broke all over Washington, from Chevy Chase to Georgetown. Minister Procope's popularity was more than personal. He represented the one country that continued to pay back its World War I debt to the U.S. (he paid an installment just 24 hours before he was expelled). Finland, too, was then the brave little nation which, in 1939-40, stood up and slugged it out with what was then known as Red Russia.

When the U.S. entered the war as an ally of Russia, and the Russian Army was toasted at Washington parties, Minister Procope stubbornly went right on fearing and hating Russia. Naturally he became less popular.

At week's end the rigid rules applied to Minister Procope were relaxed a little when the Department learned that Mme. Procope will have a child in the next fortnight. And the move did not clarify U.S.-Finnish relations, it turned out; the official announcement said: "This action does not constitute a rupture of diplomatic relations."

Exit Poles. The Finns, as near-enemies, had thus been given the coldest of brush-offs. Now up stepped the Poles, as near-allies, to get the warmest of brush-offs. Polish Premier Stanislaw Mikolajczyk had been given the full red-carpet treatment. As he prepared to leave Washington he went with the warmest of goodbyes from Franklin Roosevelt and a qualified promise--not, of course, of any American aid to the Poles in their boundary quarrel with Russia. But Franklin Roosevelt did promise that all possible military aid would be rushed to the Polish underground. This, of course, would not hold, the Polish premier was told, if the Russians objected.

* Other ejected diplomats: in 1793, French Minister Edmond Charles Genet, because he had been appealing to the American people to upset President Washington's neutrality laws; in 1888, British Ambassador Lionel Sackville-West, after publication of a letter he wrote to a U.S. citizen advising him to vote for the re-election of President Cleveland.

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