Veteran diplomat retires

Press, 8 December 1988, Page 12

Veteran diplomat retires

MR MIKE MANSFIELD, who was Senate majority leader through the Johnson, Nixon and Ford presidencies, announced his retirement this week, at the age of 85, as American Ambassador in Tokyo. The length of his ambassadorship, 11 years and 6 months, has been extraordinary.

President Carter sent him to Japan when he was 73, and President Reagan kept him there. Before that Mr Mansfield served 34 years in Congress, 24 of them in the Senate, where he took the place of Lyndon Johnson as majority leader upon Mr Johnson’s becoming Vice-Presi-dent in 1961.

Montana, Mr Mansfield’s state, is no great power base. He was a miner there, and then a history professor, before he entered Congress during the Second World War.

He has always been the least flamboyant of politicians: physically spare, economical in speech, unpretentious in manner, an affectedly austere man upon whom the bits of pomp that go with office have never been seen to make any impression at all. His acquaintance with the Far East started nearly 70 years ago when he served as a naval seaman and, soon after, as a marine. He went back to China repeatedly, before and after the resumption of relations. He had an excellent understanding of Indo-China which the Johnson and Nixon administrations would have done well to make use of.

He maintained a friendship with Prince Sihanouk when the prince was quite out of fashion in Washington. The European allies regarded Mr Mansfield for many years

with dread for the action he regularly mounted in the Senate to order severe cuts in the United States forces in Europe. He became convinced in the 1960 s that the troops were being kept in Europe largely from habit and inertia, and he never modified his view.

He never won, either, but he sometimes gave the establishment a fearful fright. In 1971, witnessing the parade of past presidents, secretaries of state and defence, ambassadors, supreme commanders and other high brass that the Nixon administration mustered to fend him off, he called it the resurrection of the old guard. “Excess, waste, and obsolescence,” said Mr Mansfield, “are not bargaining chips. They are as an albatross.” That about sums him up.

Copyright—The Economist.