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On the dingy brick wall of No. 9 Grosvenor Square, where London workmen are still repairing blitz damage, there is an inconspicuous blackened plaque: "In this house lived John Adams, first American Minister to Great Britain, May 1785-March 1788, afterwards second President of the United States."
A few yards away, at No. 6, another plaque marks, the bomb-battered, 4½-story mansion where Ambassador Walter Hines Page worked himself to death trying to get the U.S. into World War I. At No. I Grosvenor Square, housed in a massive, brick-faced concrete & steel structure, are the headquarters of Lewis Williams Douglas, 46th U.S. envoy* to the Court of St. James's.
The three numbers symbolize a great and striking change in world diplomacy. At No. 9, John Adams was a scarcely tolerated rebel whose main job was to keep the U.S. out of Europe's troubles. At No. 6, even though he was a dogged Anglophile, Walter Page was but a second-level member of London's diplomatic corps in an age when most Americans still thought of international diplomacy with all the repugnance of a Victorian lady contemplating sex.
But last week, as Lew Douglas flew back to No. I Grosvenor Square from consultations in Washington, he was the most important diplomat of the most powerful nation in the world. In his fat calfskin briefcase he carried the skeleton of the most ambitious economic foreign policy in history: the reconstruction of Western Europe. In 1947, U.S. diplomacy was big business, as big as the enormous wealth and prestige of the richest and most powerful nation on earth.
Dowagers & Movie Stars. The change was not immediately apparent, especially last week, the week of Princess Elizabeth's wedding. Like every U.S. envoy, Lew Douglas had traditional diplomatic rites to perform. He went to a reception at Buckingham Palace, to a dinner with the dowager Marchioness of Reading, and to a St. James's Palace reception to see Princess Elizabeth's wedding gifts.
One morning he had a sadder duty. Sitting in St. Paul's Cathedral, Lew Douglas heard the memorial service for the late Ambassador John Gilbert Winant, to thousands of wartime Britons, the shy, gaunt symbol of U.S. help, a man Britain will not forget.
When Secretary of State George Marshall flew in for the opening of this week's Foreign Ministers' Conference, the big business of Big Diplomacy began. In between a cocktail party for visiting movie stars and an honorary degree for Marshall, Douglas and Marshall got to work.
Their talks ranged over the whole set of problems which beset the U.S. in its efforts to organize the world for peace and fight the cold war against Russia. Within the larger framework of the Marshall Plan and the future of Germany, they touched on the two facts which particularly concerned Douglas in Britain: British dollars and British coal. Marshall was the policymaker in Washington; Lew Douglas was his most articulate interpreter abroad, and a trusted adviser besides.