BRITAIN'S FOREIGN SECRETARY

Harold Macmillan, 61, Eden's successor in the Foreign Office, has long been regarded as the Conservatives' "other" expert on foreign affairs in the House of Commons. With a self-assured stride, Macmillan last week left his desk at the Ministry of Defense and moved to Downing Street, where sits Her Majesty's Principal Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs.

Proper Background. In appearance, manner and background, Macmillan is typecast for Foreign Secretary. He is tall (6 ft.) and debonair, with a dashing guardsman's mustache and expensive tailoring casually worn. His grandfather, Daniel Macmillan, was a Scots crofter (tenant farmer) who migrated to London, and in years ago founded the now prosperous book-publishing house of Macmillan & Co., Ltd. Macmillan's mother, the former Helen Belles of Spencer, Ind., gave him what the English call "an American connection." Wealth and precocity led to good schools (Eton and Oxford), good marks (a first at Balliol), good regiment (Grenadier Guards), good military record (wounded three times in World War I), good marriage (the second daughter of the ninth Duke of Devonshire). To these accomplishments, Macmillan added personal qualities of ability, ambition, independence.

Rebellious Years. Despite a proper Tory preparation, Macmillan spent the first half of his 30 years in politics in rebellion and dissent. In Depression years he attacked old-fashioned Tory economics, urging a society that would be "neither jungle nor beehive." He once attacked the whole government bench as "a row of disused slag heaps," and said the party was "dominated by second-class brewers and company promoters." He protested Baldwin's appeasement of Italy in the Ethiopian war by "renouncing the whip," choosing the role of parliamentary independent almost two years before Eden's better-remembered withdrawal from the Chamberlain cabinet in 1938.

Climb to Power. When his friend Winston Churchill came to power, Macmillan, at 46, at last got his first post, No. 2 in the Ministry of Supply. Two years later, he was in North Africa as Churchill's Minister Resident and political troubleshooter. There he helped negotiate the settlement between France's Generals de Gaulle and Giraud, and became a good friend of Lieut. General Dwight Eisenhower. With his "American connection," and acquaintanceships begun in North Africa, he feels a confident ease about relations with Washington. "We have been through it all together before," says Macmillan.

After Churchill was driven from office by the Socialists in 1945, Macmillan, along with Rab Butler, played a workhorse role in modernizing Tory doctrine and preparing the party's electoral comeback. His reward: the Ministry of Housing, where, working a 16-hour-a-day clip, he brought the building of houses in Britain from 205,000 in 1950 to 354,000 in 1954.

Personality. In the House of Commons, where Anthony Eden has long solicited and won the esteem of his opponents. Macmillan prefers the acid remark and hypodermic tongue. This method enlivens debate, but it also multiplies his enemies on the Labor side. Sample Macmillanism: "The brave new world has turned into nothing but a fish-and-Cripps age." Macmillan's speeches are carefully prepared and lucid, the wit rehearsed until it seems almost impromptu. Result: Next to Churchill himself, he is the Tories' best speaker.

Left on his own, he may give Britain a tougher foreign policy than Eden did, being less compromising by temperament. Last month, supporting the Churchill government's decision to build an H-bomb, Harold Macmillan remarked: "Until the passions of mankind can be cooled by reason or by love, they must be chained by fear, and there is no other way."

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