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On Sept. 17, 1935, Nelson Johnson was graduated from Minister to Ambassador, his salary raised from $10,000 to $17,500. All the while Japan was becoming more & more threatening, and by July 1937, when North China hostilities began, Ambassador Johnson had a really big job on his hands. It then took four hours for a cable to get to Washington, and considerably longer for an answer to return; and so he usually made decisions and consulted afterward.
At 52, Nelson Johnson is a regular Old King Cole. He is plump as a pillow. He has thinning pale-gold hair, with lashes and brows to match, a face all shades of pink, from salmon to sunset, big enough nose, strong chin, mouth with a chronic smile. In ricksha, cutaway or gas mask he looks more like a tire salesman than an Ambassador.
He is 100% American. He is apt to receive reporters in his underwear, reading a mystery novel. At various times he has played a ukulele, guitar, saxophone. The golf-bug has bitten him. Nothing is more fun for him than to roar out a lusty song (favorite: My Name Is Jon Jonson, I Come From Wisconsin), especially at formal dinners. At parties he sits on the floor if he can. When he drinks, it is not much; when he smokes, it is a Hatamen cigaret—cheap brand the coolies use.
The quality which above all others makes Nelson Johnson a really good diplomat is the ease with which he translates his corny U. S. traits into polished Chinese formulas. When he sits down at an important conference with Chinese statesmen, he begins by saying (in Chinese): "Well, boys, have I told you the one about the traveling salesman and the old farmer?" He can sing Chinese songs, too, and play the pipa (lute).
The U. S. Embassy in China now does business at three stands. The fancy establishment is at Peking, the working one at Chungking, the routine one at Shanghai. When the Embassy set up offices in Chungking last year, it was housed on the top floor of a U. S. Navy canteen, and the staff had to use packing cases for desks and sit on bamboo chairs.
In his Chungking home, across the Yangtze from the city proper, Nelson Johnson rises at seven, eats a hearty breakfast (Sundays he has the staff in for waffles and chicken). He 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 by an air raid alarm. The Embassy has a stout dugout, but a direct hit would demolish it, Nelson Johnson, and U. S.-Japanese relations.
What to Do? Fortnight ago Nelson Johnson left Chungking for the Shanghai establishment. There he hastily conferred with Commander in Chief of the Asiatic Fleet
Admiral Thomas C. Hart and Shanghai Consul General Clarence E. Gauss, who were about to leave on Admiral Hart's Flagship U. S. S. Augusta for Manila for talks with Commissioner Sayre. The subject: what should the U. S. do?