No Sitting Down

A tall, lean Briton was going about the country last week with the grave air of a scholar at a county fair. In Washington, the discussions on the North Atlantic alliance were about to resume. But before he settled down to that problem, Sir Oliver Franks, ambassador to the U.S. and onetime professor of moral philosophy, thought it important to make a good-will tour of the U.S. Midwest.

In Detroit, Sir Oliver addressed a meeting of state officials. Speaking of his countrymen, he said: "We have not acquiesced in our difficulties. We have not sat down under them. We are grappling with them . . . Think of us as busy, lively, controversial, changing and resolutely on the job."

From Detroit he went on to Des Moines. There he remarked on the largeness of the pears in a basket of fruit, visited Iowa State College, where he gingerly poked a pig. He looked in some astonishment on an "undulating Iowa countryside," which he had expected to be flat, and drank a glass of sherry at a cocktail party of Iowa bigwigs.

Another traveler, Florida's Governor Millard F. Caldwell, who had run into the ambassador in Detroit, volunteered a typical American appraisal. "Everyone will respect him for his earnestness and sincerity," Governor Caldwell said, but he thought Sir Oliver would be a hard man to get to know.

"Unless you got him away on a hunting trip," he added, "and gave him a few highballs and a pair of dice. Then you might find out what makes him tick."

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