Honor for a Cold Warrior

In 1906, after years of foreign duty, a U.S. consular official came to Jefferson, Ohio to visit his brother, the famed author and editor, William Dean Howells. When he appeared on the streets wearing shorts, a pith helmet and an air of inscrutable mystery, he was nothing less than a sensation. One of those who was dazzled was Loy Wesley Henderson, the 14-year-old son of Jefferson's Methodist minister. He was disappointed to learn that the mysterious stranger was not an explorer (young Henderson had just finished reading Stanley's account of his adventures in Africa), but the memory of the occasion stuck. Years later, after a World War I hitch in Europe with the Red Cross, Henderson decided to try a diplomatic career himself. Last week, in a ceremony in Washington's Constitution Hall, President Eisenhower gave Diplomat Henderson the State Department's highest honor, the Distinguished Service Award.

Disagreement in Moscow. In 32 years of diplomacy at home and abroad, Henderson's career has been consistently distinguished. In Riga, Latvia, long before the U.S. recognized Soviet Russia, he found a convenient listening post for tapping the Communist line (he also married a local girl). For years thereafter, he pursued the moves of international Communism across Central Europe with the astuteness of an Eric Ambler detective.

By 1933, his expertness on this subject was so thoroughly recognized that he was a logical choice to go to Moscow with Bill Bullitt and set up the U.S. embassy. During the 1936-38 Moscow purge trials, he correctly reported to Washington that men were being judicially lynched in an intraparty power struggle; Henderson's boss, Ambassador Joseph Davies, naively accepted the Kremlin line that the accused were traitors.

Unfortunately for his career (and for U.S. diplomacy), Henderson was prematurely antiCommunist. As a specialist in Washington in World War II, he continued to call the Red turns accurately. He was one of the first to spot the Katyn Massacre as a Russian, not a German, crime. When Soviet Ambassador Maxim Litvinov complained of his "unfriendliness," the State Department in 1943 shunted him off as Ambassador to Iraq.

Dislike in New Delhi. Instead of lamenting the end of his 16-year career as a Russian expert, Henderson soon became an authority on the Arab world. He returned to Washington in 1945 to head the office of Near Eastern and African Affairs. When the British Cabinet decided to pull out of Greece, Henderson went to work immediately with his staff and, in a round-the-clock weekend, drafted a plan of aid to Greece and Turkey which emerged as the Truman Doctrine.

In 1947, when the Arab-Israeli war was coming to a boil, Henderson advocated a U.N. trusteeship for Israel. He was unfairly accused of anti-Semitism (Walter Winchell yowled that he was the tool of the big oil interests because the Arabian American Oil Co. had air-conditioned his apartment). When the U.S. recognized Israel, Henderson once more became an embarrassment and was shipped out as Ambassador to India. He and Pandit Nehru quickly developed a keen mutual dislike for each other.

In 1951 Henderson moved on to Teheran to cope with another difficult Asian, the wily weeper, Mohammed Mossadegh.

He played a major role (with Herbert Hoover Jr.) in settling the Anglo-Iranian oil dispute. His D.S.A. citation acknowledges that Henderson is one of the free world's ablest diplomats and most courageous Cold Warriors.

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