Top of the Ladder

As head of the U.N. Security Council, Juan Atilio Bramuglia had put the name of Argentina high on the list of big-time diplomacy. Few Argentines knew that. President Juan Domingo Peron had told Argentina's controlled press and radio to ignore Bramuglia. The cold-shoulder treatment extended even to Bramuglia's visit to Washington, where last week he talked with President Harry Truman and top Government officials.

Son of poor Italian immigrants, Bramuglia had come up the hard way. Somehow he got himself through school, and eventually earned a law degree, but as a lawyer he scarcely made expenses. Until he met Colonel Peron in 1943, he worked at a civil-service job that paid 300 pesos ($90) a month. He picked up another 900 pesos as lawyer for the railway workers' unions. Colonel Peron, as Secretary of Labor & Social Welfare, hired Bramuglia as an adviser. Soon he was deep in poli tics. In 1945, he landed in the fat post of Governor of Buenos Aires. The next year, when Peron became President, he made Juan Bramuglia his Foreign Minister.

Peronistas and opposition alike respected Bramuglia's integrity, his open dealing. Foreign diplomats found him easy to see and thoroughly a man of his word. Peron liked to boast that Bramuglia was exhibit A in the story of how a poor man could make the grade under his regime.

If Bramuglia was the President's pride, he was no hit with the First Lady. The Foreign Minister last year had opposed her gaudy European tour. More recently, Dona Eva has been angry because Bramuglia had been unable to get the U.N. to consider seriously her Declaration of Rights of Old Age. Worst of all, in sharing the Paris dinner table--and the headlines --with U.S. Secretary of State George Marshall, Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister Andrei Vishinsky and British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin, Bramuglia had reached the top of the ladder. In Argentina there is room for only one person (and wife) on the top rung.

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