Word: ambassadors
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...appalling," grumbled H. G. Wells, "that this blinkered, pleasant, gossipy, gullible snob," Sir Samuel Hoare should be named British Ambassador to Spain. Wells was not the only one to wince. The nauseous memory of the Hoare-Laval Deal to appease Mussolini (1935) was still fresh. That of the Hitler-sweetening at Munich was even fresher. In 1940 Britain needed someone to talk straight, not sweet, to Spain's Franco. Sir Samuel hardly seemed the man. He had passed "from experience to experience, like Boccaccio's virgin," said a wag, "without discernible effect upon his condition...
Like former U.S. Ambassador Carlton J. H. Hayes (Wartime Mission in Spain), Sir Samuel speaks warmly and gratefully of Jordana, who died in August 1944. Unlike Hayes, who apparently considered Franco a "cautious" if annoying politician, he rips the "little Generalissimo" up & down: "Fat, smug, self-complacent . . . convinced that all his actions are inspired from heaven . . . the chief cause of a Spain divided within itself and isolated from the civilized world...
...China's Ambassador to the U.S., Wellington Koo, was extraordinarily frank (for a diplomat) in explaining why the U.S. had a special responsibility for supporting Chinese sovereignty over Manchuria. He called attention to the new Russian position in Northeast Asia, which had been greatly strengthened by acquisition of the Kurile Islands, occupation of northern Korea and half-ownership and control of Manchuria's principal railroad. Said...
...immediate point he was specific; he hoped, as did Vandenberg, "to proceed with a negotiation of a mutual assistance treaty in accordance with the Act of Chapultepec at the projected Rio Conference. But we do not wish to proceed without Argentina, and neither our Ambassador nor any official of the State Department is of the opinion that Argentina has yet complied with the commitments which she as well as the other American Republics at Chapultepec agreed to carry...
...This Way. Bill Lewis made his living by interpreting the U.S. to Britons, but he won his knighthood for explaining Britain to Americans. He never took his official honor too seriously, or his titles of "unofficial ambassador" and "dean of correspondents." When a friend asked what it meant to be a knight, he boomed: "Well, I'll tell you, old boy. Willmott Lewis used to fetch $250 per lecture. Sir Willmott Lewis gets...