The Secretary-General for the San Francisco conference was named at Yalta but announced only last week—lanky, Harvard-trained Alger Hiss, one of the State Department's brighter young men.
Alger Hiss was one of the Harvard Law School students whose records earned them the favor of Professor (now Justice) Felix Frankfurter and a year as secretary to the late Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. He was drafted from a New York law firm by the New Deal in 1933, joined the State Department in 1936, accompanied President Roosevelt to Yalta.
At San Francisco he and his secretariat of 300 (mostly Americans) will have the drudging, thankless clerk's job of copying, translating and publishing, running the thousands of paper-clip and pencil chores of an international meeting.* But Alger Hiss will be an important figure there. As Secretary-General, managing the agenda, he will have a lot to say behind the scenes about who gets the breaks.
* At Secretary Stettinius' insistence, scholarly, bespectacled John Foster Dulles, Tom Dewey's foreign affairs adviser in 1944, last week agreed to go to San Francisco as an adviser to the U.S. delegation.