Aide for Aid

One U.S. diplomat who can claim to have bested the U.S.S.R.'s Premier Nikita Khrushchev in a face-to-face cold-war skirmish is Careerman James W. Riddleberger. Time: May 1955. Place: Belgrade, at a Yugoslav dinner party in honor of visiting Premier Khrushchev. Busy at his favorite party game of U.S. baiting, Khrushchev attacked the U.S.'s "positions of strength" policy. Retorted U.S. Ambassador Riddleberger: "I had some personal experience with Soviet efforts to act from a position of strength. I was in Berlin during the blockade." Khrushchev switched to deploring the sad plight of the workers in the capitalist U.S. When Riddleberger countered that U.S. workers were in fact pretty well off, Khrushchev rumbled that Riddleberger had no connection with the working class. Replied the ambassador: "I have been a farm hand, bricklayer and house painter. I think I had just about as much connection with the working class as you had."

Riddleberger's contacts with pitchfork, trowel and paintbrush were strictly as a young man in Woodstock, Va. He studied at Georgetown University, taught international relations there for three years after taking his master's degree, won appointment to his first foreign service post, vice consul in Geneva, in 1929. After a long career as a specialist in German affairs he was sent to Belgrade in 1953, worked hard at his end to get the Yugoslavs to enter into the agreement with Italy settling the nagging Trieste problem. In early 1958, President Eisenhower appointed him Ambassador to Greece.

Last week President Eisenhower named firm-jawed, tough-minded James Riddleberger, 54, to a demanding new job: director of the International Cooperation Administration, the agency that administers U.S. foreign aid. A longtime economic specialist and sometime political adviser to ICA's ancestor EGA, Riddleberger will have a fresh chance in the economic cold war to get back at the old business of talking back to Khrushchev.

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