The Ambassador

Offered the job of U.S. Ambassador to Japan in 1932, Joseph Clark Grew had deep doubts: Japanese militarists al ready had made clear their intention to try to take over Asia. He consulted his wife, a granddaughter of Commodore Matthew C. Perry who had opened Japan to Western commerce in 1853.

"Finally," he recalled, "I told Mrs. Grew that if we took the post in Tokyo, some day we might be in a position to sway the issue of peace or war between Japan and the U.S."

In his ten-year Tokyo tenure,. Joe Grew found himself in just that posi tion, and his efforts to sway the issue toward peace were, even though un successful, a model of diplomacy at its finest. When he died last week, two days before his 85th birthday, in Manchester, Mass., Grew still symbolized the very best of another era of American diplomacy -- an era in which ambassadors in trouble posts operated un der broad directives, were not bound to the clacking embassy teletype and made considerable policy on their own initiative.

"By Jove!" Boston-born, Grew was educated at Groton ('98) and Harvard ('02), was sent by his family to travel in the Far East, planned to return to the family's banking business. While in China, he shot a tiger in a cave -- a feat that later enthralled big-game-hunting President Theodore Roosevelt. During that trip Grew became fascinated by life abroad and decided to enter the foreign service. By the time Teddy heard from a mutual friend about the tiger-slaying exploit, Grew was a $600-a-year clerk in the U.S. embassy in Cairo.

The President cried: "By Jove! I'll have to do something for that young man."

Within 24 hours, Grew was appointed third secretary of the embassy in Mexico City.

From there, Grew moved upward through posts in St. Petersburg, Vienna and Berlin--where, in 1916, he was counselor of the embassy and worked with futile desperation to head off American participation in World War I. Later he became chairman of the Examining Board for the State Department's Division of Foreign Service Personnel, where he became a sort of career-service saint in his emphasis on the need for trained professional men rather than political hacks. He wryly told candidates: "You gentlemen have a very easy time entering the service. All you have to do is to answer a few questions. I had to shoot a tiger."

Grew's first full ambassadorship was in Turkey in 1927, where he won the trust and respect of the capricious Mustapha Kemal. Then Tokyo.

"The Only Kind." Shortly after he arrived there, he defined his approach to his job in unmistakable terms: "Nowadays indirectness is a weakness, not a strength. Nowadays he who indulges in false phrases is discredited, and he who indulges in expressions of genuine good will must prove it in his dealings. That is the only kind of diplomacy, the only kind of friendship that I know."

His mustache was impeccably groomed, and he seemed born to striped pants. He wore a hearing aid, sometimes turned it off when he felt that diplomacy dictated that some comment should go unheard. He loved golf and was an appalling player, swinging left-handed from a camelback stance. Yet he often found that he could get more effective diplomatic work done on the golf course than in the halls of state; among other things, top Japanese were of friendly disposition, if only because they could--legitimately--beat him.

Above all else, Grew was a precise and accurate diplomatic reporter. He typed his own dispatches with a rapid, unerring, two-finger technique. As early as Dec. 14, 1940, he wrote President Roosevelt warning that "unless we are prepared to withdraw bag and baggage from the entire sphere of 'Greater East Asia,' we are bound eventually to come to a head-on clash with Japan."

On Jan. 27, 1941, more than ten months before Japanese bombs fell on Pearl Harbor, he sent a communique to Secretary of State Cordell Hull: "There is a lot of talk around town to the effect that the Japanese, in case of a break with the U.S., are planning to go all out in a surprise mass attack on Pearl Harbor."

In an effort to head off the inevitable, Grew tried desperately to arrange a meeting between F.D.R. and Japanese Prime Minister Prince Fumimaro Konoye during the summer of 1941. That failed. Grew kept trying to find some diplomatic solution to the situation, and as late as the night before Pearl Harbor he was on the telephone attempting to gain an audience with Emperor Hirohito.

Polcer & Morale. Grew did not learn of the attack until several hours after it occurred, and then he found out from a press dispatch rather than official channels. The entire U.S. embassy staff was interned for more than six months, and Grew helped keep up morale by organizing endless games of poker and building a miniature golf course on the embassy grounds. In June 1942, Grew and his staff were released in exchange for Japanese diplomats who had been interned in the U.S.

In 1952, Grew published a two-volume, 1,500-page book, Turbulent Era, which was a compendium of some 40 volumes of diaries, journals, letters and communiques he had written over 40 years of diplomatic service. Among the communications was one dated May 19, 1945, about World War II. "As a 'war to end wars,' the war will have been futile," he wrote, "for the result will be merely the transfer of totalitarian dictatorship and power from Germany and Japan to Soviet Russia, which will constitute in future as grave a danger to us as did the Axis."

Grew retired from the foreign service later in 1945, and his last active job was as board chairman of the National Committee for a Free Europe, which operates the Radio Free Europe network. When word of his death reached Tokyo, his old friends were saddened that he had never returned to Japan. "There was one thing we long wanted to do," said Shigeru Yoshida, 86, former Premier and now Japan's elder statesman. "That was to invite Mr. Grew to Japan and ask him to see what really has happened in this country since he left. I am sorry. Really sorry."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.