Word: foreign
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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After expertizing at the Washington Conference on the Limitation of Armaments and after a grand tour of the East as Consul-General-at-Large, Nelson Johnson was called home again. On his way he stopped in Japan, just after the great Yokohama earthquake of 1923. Cardinal requisite of any foreign service diplomat is that he shall be able to write clearly, vividly, movingly. Of the earthquake Nelson Johnson reported: "I found Yokohama in ruins. I left it busy removing the last vestiges of the confused masses of brick, a city of small galvanized iron shops and houses looking...
...rides to the Embassy Office in a four-coolie sedan with specially strong bamboo lift-poles. There he reads and answers 40-odd telegrams from China sore-spots each day. If there is a big rush on, he helps decode messages. Some errand may take him to the Foreign Minister, less frequently to the Finance Minister, very seldom to Generalissimo Chiang Kaishek. In the evening he occasionally gives a stag dinner (his wife and two children live in Peking), otherwise reads something light and goes to bed-sometimes to be wakened in the middle of the night...
Thus ticks a prime foreign servant of the U. S. He may seem happy-go-lucky, too casual to force a grave issue, too apt to wait and see. But no legate could be a better Bearer of Good Will to the gentle people of China. Nelson Trusler Johnson is the sort of roly-poly man a Chinese can respect, love, even fear far more deeply than the man with bayonet, dollar, or arrogance...
Until the artillery and the bombs proved he was not fooling, most foreign diplomats in Moscow thought that Joseph Stalin's last wish was an ever so tiny war. They believed until the last minute that Comrade Stalin was merely trying a "war of nerves" on the Finns. So sure was U.S. Ambassador to Russia Laurence A. Steinhardt that there would not be war that he was caught off-base in Sweden, rushed back by special plane to Moscow where he had plenty to do expressing the U. S. Government's ideas...
First Pressure was applied on Sunday, when the Red Army reported an incident-on the border which, the Soviet Union claimed, killed or wounded 13 soldiers. Premier-Foreign Commissar Viacheslav Molotov dispatched a note to Finland immediately demanding that Finnish troops be moved from twelve to 15 miles back of the border. On Monday the Finns formally disavowed the incident, replied with a refusal to move their troops unless the Soviet Union did likewise. After that the Finnish-Soviet timetable was crowded with angry notes, inflammatory speeches, useless diplomatic parleys...