Word: hendersons
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Disagreement in Moscow. In 32 years of diplomacy at home and abroad, Henderson's career has been consistently distinguished. In Riga, Latvia, long before the U.S. recognized Soviet Russia, he found a convenient listening post for tapping the Communist line (he also married a local girl). For years thereafter, he pursued the moves of international Communism across Central Europe with the astuteness of an Eric Ambler detective...
...this subject was so thoroughly recognized that he was a logical choice to go to Moscow with Bill Bullitt and set up the U.S. embassy. During the 1936-38 Moscow purge trials, he correctly reported to Washington that men were being judicially lynched in an intraparty power struggle; Henderson's boss, Ambassador Joseph Davies, naively accepted the Kremlin line that the accused were traitors...
Unfortunately for his career (and for U.S. diplomacy), Henderson was prematurely antiCommunist. As a specialist in Washington in World War II, he continued to call the Red turns accurately. He was one of the first to spot the Katyn Massacre as a Russian, not a German, crime. When Soviet Ambassador Maxim Litvinov complained of his "unfriendliness," the State Department in 1943 shunted him off as Ambassador to Iraq...
Dislike in New Delhi. Instead of lamenting the end of his 16-year career as a Russian expert, Henderson soon became an authority on the Arab world. He returned to Washington in 1945 to head the office of Near Eastern and African Affairs. When the British Cabinet decided to pull out of Greece, Henderson went to work immediately with his staff and, in a round-the-clock weekend, drafted a plan of aid to Greece and Turkey which emerged as the Truman Doctrine...
...when the Arab-Israeli war was coming to a boil, Henderson advocated a U.N. trusteeship for Israel. He was unfairly accused of anti-Semitism (Walter Winchell yowled that he was the tool of the big oil interests because the Arabian American Oil Co. had air-conditioned his apartment). When the U.S. recognized Israel, Henderson once more became an embarrassment and was shipped out as Ambassador to India. He and Pandit Nehru quickly developed a keen mutual dislike for each other...