What qualities make a successful diplomat? Says Machiavelli: he must have "little regard for good faith and be able, by astuteness, to confuse men's brains and ultimately overcome those who have made loyalty their foundation." Says Talleyrand: "Above all, not too much zeal!" Says the U.S.'s John (Open Door) Hay, Secretary of State from 1898 to 1905: "There are three species of creatures who, when they seem coming are going, when they seem going, they come: diplomats, women and crabs."
One day last week Old Diplomat John Foster Dulles, who has been in the game since he got a job as a secretary to the Imperial Chinese delegation at The Hague peace conference in 1907, used the current troubles of two U.S. diplomats to say something basic about diplomacy as practiced by the U.S. in 1957.* The two:
Maxwell Gluck, Ambassador-designate to Ceylon, who "brought glee to Democrats, made Republicans glower when he admitted that he could not "call off" the name of Ceylon's Prime Minister Solomon West Ridgeway Dias Bandaranaike (TIME, Aug. 12). Said Dulles of this incident: "Now, the question of the selection of any particular person depends primarily upon whether he has integrity of character, whether he has a sharp and quick intelligence, and whether he is genuinely devoted to the public service. We believe that out of those three qualities can be made a competent and efficient ambassador worthy to represent and able to defend the interests of the U.S. We believe that Mr. Gluck has all three of those qualities."
Earl E. T. Smith, new Ambassador to Cuba, who infuriated Cuba's Dictator Fulgencio Batista by putting out a statement criticizing police mistreatment of Cuban women demonstrators. Said Dulles: "I want to say that it is a statement which, perhaps, from a purely technical point of view, may not have been perfectly correct. But it was a very human statement. I'm glad that we have some, in fact I hope many, ambassadors who are not mere automatic machines but who do have sentiments of humanity which they sometimes express without regard, perhaps, to the diplomatic niceties . . .
"And a person of flesh and blood and heart would, I think, under the circumstances of the case, have made the kind of statement that he did. I'm confident that, even if it was in certain technical respects perhaps not correct, there will be an understanding of it on the part of the authorities in Cuba because it was a very human thing to do, and, as I say, we want our ambassadors to be human people."
*Also last week he learned that he was the object of a nightclub torch song called I Made a Fool of Myself Over John Foster Dulles. Singer: pert Texas Redhead Carol Burnett, 24, at Manhattan's Blue Angel. Sample lyrics (by Ken Welch):
I made a fool of myself over John Foster
Dulles.
Oh, I made a chump of myself over John Foster
Dulles.
The first time I saw him 'twas at the U.N.
I never had been one to swoon over men,
But I swooned, and the drums started pounding,
and then—/
I made a fool of myself over John Foster
Dulles.