The Ambassador

/ do not think we can look forward to a tranquil world so long as the Soviet Union operates in its present form. The only hope, and this is a fairly thin one, is that at some point the Soviet Union will begin to act like a country instead of a cause.

--Charles E. Bohlen, Witness to History 1929-1969

In a world rife with the rhetoric of detente, this admonition might sound like the words of a cold warrior, but it was certainly not that. Rather it was the final judgment of a coolly professional career diplomat who, after 42 years of specializing in Soviet affairs, remained optimistic about improving U.S.-Russian relations in such limited areas as trade and cultural and scientific exchange but exceedingly wary of the Soviet system. In his memoirs, published less than a year before his death last week at age 69, Charles Bohlen counseled that "illusion has no place in any negotiations with the Soviet Union." Above all, he maintained, the U.S. must keep its defenses "sufficiently strong to deter the Soviet Union from any possibility of yielding to the temptation of a first strike against the United States."

For three decades, perhaps more than any other man, "Chip" (a nickname he picked up at Harvard) Bohlen contributed to the workings of U.S.-Soviet policy. In 1934, he joined the staff of the first U.S. embassy in Moscow. Thirty-four years later he helped draft

Lyndon Johnson's denunciation of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. In the years between, he served as interpreter (and sometimes adviser) to Franklin Roosevelt at the Teheran and Yalta conferences and to Harry Truman at Potsdam (where he tried without much success to explain the intricacies of American baseball to Joseph Stalin).

Until he retired in 1969 as the highest-ranking officer in the U.S. Foreign Service, he counseled every postwar U.S.

Secretary of State on Soviet affairs.

Trading Quips. In appearance, Chip Bohlen was almost a Hollywood typecasting of what an American diplomat of the mid-century ought to be --tall, broad-shouldered, his language and his clothes tailored with equally elegant understatement. But Bohlen, who was reared in Aiken, S.C., and Ipswich, Mass., as the son of a modestly wealthy family, was also an engagingly informal man who propped his feet on his desk, spilled pipe tobacco on carpets, and organized late-night poker parties.

To his friend and colleague George Kennan, he was "a man of exceptional native brilliance who never ceased to throw off thoughts and ideas like sparks from a sparkler." He even won the grudging respect of Charles de Gaulle.

When advised that President Kennedy was thinking of sending Bohlen to Paris as the U.S. Ambassador, De Gaulle reportedly remarked, "Well, if it has to be an American, he is probably the best one."

During the 1950s Bohlen served four years as U.S. Ambassador to Moscow, reporting on the rise and fall of Premier Georgy Malenkov, the ascendancy of Nikita Khrushchev, the Suez crisis and the Hungarian revolution. Khrushchev apparently loved to trade quips with him. At a diplomatic party, the Russian dictator once remarked to Bohlen that Soviet Defense Minister Marshal Georgy Zhukov was putting away the refreshments "as if he had starved for a week."

Replied Bohlen: "It must be because you cut his budget." The mood was not always so mellow.

In 1956, during a particularly troubled moment in U.S.-Soviet relations, Khrushchev collared Bohlen at another reception. "I want to talk to you about Suez!"

he bellowed. "And I," declared Bohlen, "want to talk to you about Hungary."

In the last year of his life, as he fought a losing battle against cancer, Bohlen was often in pain and difficult to converse with.

But a visitor needed only to mention a scrap of news from Moscow or a question from Russian history, wrote his friend Columnist Joseph Alsop last week, "and instantly, as though by magic, he would be his old shrewd and endlessly knowledgeable self again."

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