New Man in Paris

The 123rd session of the Paris peace talks was perhaps even less productive than usual last week, with the U.S. again demanding elaboration on the Communists' seven-point program and an unconditional cease-fire while negotiations continue. Again the Communists called the U.S. position "absurd" and refused to explain their seven points further. When the short meeting was over, the chief U.S. negotiator in Paris for the past twelve months, David K.E. Bruce, rose and, without pretense of civilities, left the old Hotel Majestic for the last time.

The gruelingly unsatisfactory negotiations had been disturbing the 73-year-old ambassador's health for some time, and last May he asked President Nixon to be relieved. Word of his departure leaked out early last month and was officially announced last week by Nixon, who used unusually warm language to praise Bruce's "dedication and unselfishness."

The First Sign. Bruce, who came out of retirement after a long, distinguished diplomatic career to accept the Paris job, was bitter about the negotiations. "I am profoundly convinced," he told Nixon in his letter of resignation, "that the policies you have sponsored in respect to the settlement of the problems [of Southeast Asia] have been sound and constructive. It is [our opponents], and they alone, who bear responsibility for the continuation of the war in Indochina."

During virtually all of Bruce's tenure in Paris, the talks have been deadlocked. The first sign of some progress came with the seven-point Communist proposal, which coupled the demand for a set U.S. withdrawal deadline to the gradual release of those P.O.W.s captured in South and North Viet Nam, but not those seized in Laos or Cambodia. To many critics of the Administration, it seemed that Nixon was missing a chance to end the impasse, since the Communists were at last offering a formula for dealing with the difficult prisoner question. Bruce tried for several weeks to pry more details of the plan out of the Communists and coax them into secret talks.

U.S. hopes for the Paris talks will now rest on William J. Porter, the highly skilled career diplomat who is expected to succeed Bruce. Porter, who has been U.S. ambassador to South Korea since 1967, is relatively unknown outside diplomatic circles. But behind a bland, pedantic appearance, he is a shrewd negotiator who is widely respected in the State Department and admired for his perceptive, sometimes earthy analyses. Nixon evidently was especially impressed by Porter's handling of recent negotiations to withdraw 20,000 U.S. troops from South Korea.

From the Ranks. Although now thoroughly Americanized, down to his accent, Porter was born in England and came to the U.S. with his widowed mother at an early age. He attended Thibodeau Business College in Fall River, Mass. He clerked for a time in a Fall River haberdashery, where he met a customer who was then U.S. minister to Budapest. They fell into conversation, and after several more chats, the diplomat launched Porter's career by hiring him as his private secretary.

Porter rose from the ranks, working first in Baghdad as an embassy clerk and then in Beirut and Damascus. Toward the end of the war, he joined the Foreign Service and served in various posts as an expert on the Middle East. In 1965 he moved to Saigon as deputy U.S. ambassador in the midst of the burgeoning U.S. commitment to the war. "His performance has been uniformly first rate, from his clerking in Baghdad to this day," says one longtime colleague. Porter will find Paris a further test of his gifts of agility, realism and patience.

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