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Britain and France had just reduced their China garrisons. Japan was fulminating against the U. S. in its role of watchdog. The conferees went off to Manila with their boss's judgment (coinciding with their own): if Japan takes the present war as an occasion to move in on French and British interests, the U. S. must do everything short of war to resist. If you live in a firetrap, Nelson Johnson might say, and the apartment of the two people across the hall catches fire, you don't go on reading that romantic novel; you get busy. Occidentals want to go on hearing the sweet music of trade in the orient. For the time being, Nelson Trusler Johnson must bear the White Man's baton.
From Shanghai and business, Ambassador Johnson went to Peking and pleasure. In Peking with the Ambassador's wife are her son, Nelson Beck ("Nubby"), 6, and daughter, Betty Jane, for whose fourth birthday this week he made the trip north. He had not seen his family since last May (in the U. S., after a trip out of China via the then brand new 2,100-mile Burma road, over which the Ambassador was the first civilian to drive).
When he arrived home last week, Nubby cocked a sleepy eye at his father's new-grown, straw-colored mustache and said: "That's got to come off." Next morning Nubby, Betty Jane and mother rigged a barber chair, forced the Ambassador into it, and hacked the thing off themselves—occasionally bringing the U. S. Ambassador closer to death than Japanese bombs ever have.
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.