Friday, Jun. 09, 1961
HOW TO BECOME AMBASSADOR TO THE U.S.
IT all began in the 1930s, when Father Joe Kennedy was Ambassador to the Court of St. James's. Son John F., then a student at Harvard, was often in residence at the embassy during vacations, and naturally enough, fell in with the Rt. Hon. David Ormsby-Gore. Young Ormsby-Gore was not only heir to the title of his father. Lord Harlech, a Shropshire landowner and onetime chairman of the Mid land Bank, but also nephew of Tory Kingmaker Lord Salisbury. "We were just young people going around together." says Ormsby-Gore. Then Jack Kennedy's kid sister Kathleen ("Kick") up and married Ormsby-Gore's first cousin, the Marquess of Hartington. The marquess was killed in World War II and Kathleen in a 1948 airplane crash, but the friendship between Jack and David endured.
In time. Ormsby-Gore became a Conservative Party Member of Parliament, father of five and brother-in-law to Maurice Macmillan, son of the Prime Minister. When Jack and Bobby Kennedy visited England in 1951. they looked him up. Ormsby-Gore returned the visit in 1955 when he came to the U.S. on a lecture tour, and again last March, when he dropped by the White House for a call and a chat. Bobby Kennedy afterward took him on a personally conducted tour of Bull Run. At places and times unknown, he was caught up in the Kennedy clan's family sport. The evidence: interviewed on the BBC last week, he boasted that he was ''one of the few living Britons who understand and enjoy American football'' but conceded that he himself had played "just a couple of games of touch."
The British Foreign Office, which never willingly misses a chance to turn personal friendships to diplomatic advantage, last week announced that come fall. David Ormsby-Gore will become Britain's Ambassador to the U.S. Scarcely a year younger than Kennedy. Ormsby-Gore had other qualities to recommend him. Although his record as Conservative Member of Parliament for eleven years' standing is not remarkable, he has shown skill and application in the field of diplomacy. He has been Britain's alternate delegate at the U.N. for the past 2 1/2 years and its top negotiator at the Geneva nuclear test-ban talks.
Ormsby-Gore will replace Career Diplomat Sir Harold Caccia, 55, who has been in the job nearly five years, and among other things was largely responsible for smoothing over Anglo-U.S. differences after Suez. Sir Harold will step up to Permanent Under Secretary of State, highest job attainable by a career diplomat.
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