Field Report

DIPLOMAT AMONG WARRIORS by Robert Murphy. 470 pages. Doubleday. $6.95.

Other memorialists who have trampled over the well-furrowed ground (roughly 1940 to 1960) covered in Diplomat Among Warriors have been quicker to assign blame and point morals. Certainly Robert Murphy was in a position to do so. For two decades his duties took him to the centers of crisis: North Africa, where he laid the groundwork for the U.S.-British landings; Berlin during the airlift; Belgrade, Panmunjom, the Middle East, London during the Suez crisis. But for the most part, Murphy was an implementer, not a maker, of policies. His qualities were composure under fire, persuasiveness and an encyclopedic grasp of detail.

In retrospect, Murphy feels that at one point during his 40-year career he should have resigned in public protest. That was in the summer of 1948 when the Russians had sealed off Berlin and Murphy, who was serving as civilian political adviser to Military Governor Lucius Clay, was summoned with his boss to Washington to discuss the blockade. It consisted at that time of a wooden pole suspended across the highway at Helmstedt--and removable, Murphy was convinced, by a token show of force. The decision to launch the Berlin airlift seemed to him a serious mistake. The dramatic success of the airlift obscured the reality: that the U.S. had meekly surrendered its claims for "surface-level access." He did not resign, but he adds that he would feel better today about the episode if he had.

By temperament and training, Murphy was committed to "obedience to official policy"--an attitude perhaps admirable in a career diplomat but less so in a memorialist. Thus Diplomat Among Warriors has little to say about the overall foreign policy of the period that it covers. But it has a few footnote comments to add to the period's history.

-- Pierre Laval was not only "the shrewdest, most forceful personality in Vichy," but an intensely patriotic Frenchman whose tragic flaw was not :hat he sympathized with Hitler but that ie had "astonishing ignorance about the Germans and supreme confidence in his ability to outsmart them."

-- General de Gaulle, from the time of he Casablanca Conference in 1943, lost all interest in the war and, calculating hat victory was certain, "concentrated upon restoring France as a great power." He shared with Stalin the knowledge that he could "exact greater concessions in the midst of total war."

-- Generals Matthew Ridgway and Maxwell Taylor were responsible for canceling an airdrop on Rome that, by Murphy's calculations, might have shortened the Italian campaign by eight months. But, he adds, the 82nd Air--orne Division was an important part of the assault plans on Salerno, and may have been withheld for that reason.

-- As Roosevelt's personal envoy, Murphy was in on more top secrets than virtually any other man in the foreign service. The North Africa landings in 1942, for example, were kept so secret that neither high American officials nor their French allies, notably Admiral Darlan, knew anything of the plans until the invasion fleet was on its way. Said Roosevelt to Murphy, who was worried because Secretary of State Cordell Hull had not been informed: "Don't worry about Cordell. I will take care of him; I'll tell him our plans a day or so before the landings."

-- Truman was a novice in foreign affairs, but he was a quick learner. His first lesson was at Potsdam, where he proposed his pet scheme: the permanent internationalization of all inland waterways. He argued his plan personally before Stalin and received a nyet even before the translation into Russian was finished. Murphy was sitting behind Truman, saw him turn to Secretary of State James Byrnes and say in plain astonishment: "Jimmy, do you realize that we have been here seventeen whole days? Why, in seventeen days you can decide anything."

-- The British, thoroughly briefed in advance by Churchill, turned up at Casablanca with a 6,000-ton ship crammed with essential files from the War Office designed to bolster their argument for further military commitments in the Mediterranean. The U.S. delegation was "totally unprepared to meet this well-marshalled argument." The result was that Eisenhower, who had wanted to pull out of Africa as quickly as possible and proceed with a cross-channel attack from England, found himself committed to the occupation of Sicily and a Mediterranean strategy that "kept him fighting"--needlessly, Murphy suggests--"for more than two years in this traditional sphere of British influence."

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