Our Man in Moscow

In Washington last week, Soviet Press Attache Oleg Sokolov turned to his American luncheon companion and asked sourly: "Who's Kohler?" Sokolov knew perfectly well, since Foy David Kohler, 54, just named by President Kennedy to replace Llewellyn E. Thompson Jr. as Ambassador to the Soviet Union, has been at the center of East-West negotiations over Berlin--probably the knottiest, longest-standing tangle in the cold war. But if the Russian was simply expressing predictable skepticism, quite a few Americans were asking the same question about the man who is about to take over the U.S.'s most important diplomatic post abroad.

Off to Turkey. In his 31 years as a Foreign Service officer, Ohio-born Kohler has rarely made headlines. He even looks far more like the bank teller he once was than like the suave, striped-pants stereotype of a professional diplomat; smallish and rumpled, he speaks in a flat Midwestern accent and wears indifferently tailored brown or blue suits. But he is regarded in Washington as a highly competent operator, and his considerable experience with the Russians goes back a long way. He speaks Russian, which has become a prerequisite for the top Moscow job. He was assigned to Moscow in 1947 as first secretary at the U.S. embassy, a year later moved up to counselor of the embassy. From 1949 until early 1952, he ran the Voice of America.

Late that year, however, it seemed as if Kohler's promising career was at an end. While driving home from an Arlington, Va. dinner party with him, his wife rammed a telephone pole. Kohler was convicted of public intoxication, his wife of drunken driving. Worse yet, it turned out that Kohler's briefcase, containing two secret documents that he had removed from State Department files without permission, was locked in the auto's trunk at the time of the accident. Kohler was reprimanded by the State Department, suspended without pay for 30 days, dropped from his job on the prestigious Policy Planning Staff and shipped off to Turkey.

On to Russia. Few Foggy Bottom employees could have ridden out that kind of storm. But 'Kohler went on to distinguish himself by ability and hard work in Ankara, returned to Washington in 1958 as Deputy Assistant Secretary for European Affairs. In 1959 he was the top State Department official accompanying Vice President Nixon to the U.S.S.R., and had charge of arrangements for Premier Khrushchev's visit to the U.S. The next year he was made an Assistant Secretary of State. Last summer, at the height of the crisis over Allied air access to West Berlin, it was Kohler who drafted an unusually strong protest accusing the Soviet Union of a "scarcely veiled threat of aggression."

At his press conference. President Kennedy gave his new ambassador a ringing sendoff: "I've worked very intimately with him for the last year and a half because he's been a head of the so-called task force on Berlin, and has participated in all the ambassadorial meetings. So that he goes to the Soviet Union with complete knowledge of the Government's policy and also with my complete confidence."

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