Coping with the Bung

"I am glad to be here and I am looking forward to my assignment," announced the U.S.'s new Ambassador to Indonesia, Marshall Green, 49, arriving at Djakarta airport.

Spoken like a true diplomat, since Green undoubtedly knew the well-rehearsed sort of welcome he could expect. Act I took place at the Presidential Palace, where he presented his credentials, and consisted of champagne toasts with President Sukarno, together with a cordial lecture from the Bung on how U.S.-Indonesia relations were at their lowest ebb, all because U.S. policies in Viet Nam and Malaysia were "discouraging the Indonesian people in their wish to develop friendship with the United States." Act II, performed as Green drove back to the U.S. embassy, featured 2,000 Communist students and women chanting "Green, go home," and waving posters saying GET OUT OR WE'LL KICK YOU OUT. By way of epilogue, another 1,000 youths stoned the U.S. consulate at Medan, plastering its walls with signs reading GO HOME

YANKEE and GO HOME GREEN.

Tactful Transfer. Still, red-haired Green is a tough, talented envoy who thrives on contrasts and postings where U.S. influence is, to put it mildly, mild. He underwent his apprenticeship as personal secretary to the late, gallant U.S. Ambassador to Japan, Joseph Clark Grew (TIME, June 4, 1965) during the last stormy days before Pearl Harbor. As officer in charge of the U.S. embassy in Seoul in 1961, when General Chung Hee Park unseated the democratically elected President John Chang, Green outspokenly opposed the unconstitutionality of the new government, after which the State Department tactfully transferred him to Hong Kong as consul general.

In Djakarta, his first ambassadorial assignment, he replaces genial Howard P. Jones, whose seven years of effort to win over Sukarno with tolerant understanding did not deter the Bung from continuing to heap contempt and ridicule on the U.S. Whether a blunter approach will bear fruit is anyone's guess. The U.S. sympathizes with Malaysia, but would like to cling to some friendly ties with Indonesia, however tenuous. Sukarno may be angry at the latest U.S. loan to Malaysia for military equipment, but the Malaysians of late have been equally miffed by the proposed sale of $4,000,000 worth of communications gear by a U.S. company to Indonesia's armed forces.

Final Takeover. In any case, Green will be manning a post that is fast becoming an outpost. With the phasing-out of the U.S. AID mission, the USIA and the Peace Corps, the number of Americans on Government business in Indonesia has dropped to about 70.

A few hundred missionaries still operate, mostly in remoter Borneo and West Irian, and there are about 800 employees (and their families) of Stanvac, Caltex and the American rubber companies. But the rubber companies were expropriated in February, and Sukarno is expected to give in to the demands of his own nationalist party, the P.N.I., and the powerful P.K.I., world's third largest Communist Party, for complete takeover of the oil companies, last remaining major American investments in Indonesia, by the end of the year.

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