The Man with the Oilcan

"This ridiculous situation," snapped Britain's Manchester Guardian, "must be providing Moscow with their best laugh this year." NATO, with all its prestige, was unable to find a man to fill its top civilian post.

Sir Oliver Franks, British ambassador to the U.S., was everyone's first choice when the new job of NATO secretary general was created at Lisbon (TIME, March 3). But Sir Oliver said no. The job was next offered to Canada's External Affairs Secretary Lester ("Mike") Pearson, and then to The Netherlands' Foreign Minister Dirk Stikker. Their governments refused to spare them.

Did no one want one of the most crucial jobs in the Western world? At this absurd point, Winston Churchill stepped in: he proffered his own closest wartime comrade and personal friend, 64-year-old General Lord Ismay.

The Mad Mullah. As Churchill's personal chief of staff during World War II, "Pug" Ismay knew, Churchill later wrote, "exactly how my mind was working from day to day." He patiently stayed up night after night, adjusting himself to Churchill's "nocturnal hours, went with Churchill to Casablanca, Cairo, Moscow, Teheran and Yalta. "The man with the oilcan," top Allied leaders called him. "When he's around, the wheels turn."

Pug Ismay was born in India, and raised to be a soldier. After Sandhurst, he served in the Punjab, and in World War I successfully led a camel corps in Somaliland against the fanatical forces of the "Mad Mullah" Mohammed Ibn Abdullah. Churchill first saw and admired Ismay during England's near-revolutionary general strike in 1926. Ismay, then on the Imperial Defense Committee, called out the territorial army to help put the strike down. Churchill signaled him to his side when he became Prime Minister in 1940.

Clement Attlee was impressed by Ismay too, and sent him to India as Viceroy Mountbatten's chief of staff in the ticklish days when Britain handed over power to the Indians.

The Heavy Harness. A big, robust man, Ismay has the tact and shrewdness needed for NATO's new job. He, himself, in a House of Lords speech last year, was searchingly critical of NATO's unwieldy complexity: "Rather a lot of harness and not much horse," he called it. "I believe there is a hiatus at the summit."

At Lisbon, the harness was lightened. To do the work of 35 to 40 ministers, who were too busy with their own domestic concerns to devote much time to NATO, a new day-to-day council of 14 full-time ambassadors from NATO's 14 countries was set up (U.S. representative on the new council: William Draper). It will meet in Paris, near General Eisenhower's headquarters.

Ismay will be the council's permanent chairman, the chief administrator of its staff, its top civilian liaison man with its nominal military subordinate. General Eisenhower, and the man who must nudge the governments to make sure they carry out their commitments. It will be up to Ismay to see that the hiatus at the summit is filled.

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