Job in Java

In the dark days of 1942, when Prime Minister Churchill broke the news to Premier Stalin that there would be no second front that year, it looked as though the worst had happened. With beleaguered Briton and resentful Russian glaring at each other, the war might be lost. The man who had the two allies warmly toasting each other's health before they parted was His Majesty's Ambassador to Moscow: an emollient, easygoing Scot named Sir Archibald John Kerr Clark Kerr. Last week Clark Kerr (pronounced clark karr) was set for more peacemaking in Britain's current hot spot, Indonesia.

Officially, Sir Archibald's mission will be "to help in the attainment of an amicable . . . settlement" between the squabbling Dutch and Indonesians. Unofficially, his ticklish task will be to extricate Britain soon from an imperial mess. For services rendered and expected, he was raised to the peerage this week.

Flowers & Porcelain. Since he left his native Scotland as a boy, Clark Kerr has spent his life in a dozen capitals on four continents selling sweet British reasonableness. He looks and chats like the headmaster of a fashionable boys' school. Preferring hound's tooth jackets and mixed tweeds to ambassadorial tails, he would sooner talk on Scottish wild flowers and Chinese porcelains than on politics and policies. But few diplomats can be more persuasive in ten languages.

In China, where he began a four-year stint in 1938, he won friends and influenced people for Britain at a time when his country's stock was painfully low. His hilltop home overlooking Chungking was a haven for Chinese politicians and intellectuals who wanted good books and elegant conversation -- in Chinese, which the Ambassador found "very straightforward" to learn "because it has no grammar at all." In Russia he served for three wearing, critical years. He first met Stalin accidentally in a Kremlin air raid shelter. Like anyone else, the Premier thawed to the Clark Kerr personality. In the summer months the sporty, informal Scot startled the Russians by dictating reports in the Embassy backyard, stripped to the waist. But they understood and admired his blend of closemouthed diplomacy and forthright candor. In the recent negotiations over broadening the Rumanian Government, Clark Kerr successfully leaped into one of his rare rages as the only means of bringing to heel the Soviet's strong-arm man, Andrei Vishinsky.

Clark Kerr is finicky in his tastes. He reads and paints for relaxation, but scorns bridge as "the world's worst way of wasting time." His vast collection of pipes has been assembled all over the world, will almost certainly follow him to Java. He takes his Scotch with water, prefers old-fashioned goose quills to fountain pens. He can still play the bagpipes -- with discretion.

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