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"Where Cockroaches Abound." Chris Herter tried to join the Army in 1917, but was turned down for being too tall and too skinny, instead took the Foreign Service exams. On the day he was notified that he had passed, he learned that his brother Everit, one year older, had been killed by German shrapnel. In his grief, Christian Herter (who is convinced that his brother would have been a great painter if he had lived) resolved somehow to spend his life working toward the cause of world peace.
At the Versailles peace conference, where he met two other promising diplomats named Foster and Allen Dulles, Herter served as aide to U.S. Delegate Joseph Clark Grew. After Versailles, he was in on the birth of foreign aid, traveling around hungry, war-torn Europe as an assistant to Food Commissioner Herbert Hoover. When Hoover became Commerce Secretary under Harding in 1921, he tapped Herter as an assistant.
Only his loyalty to Hoover kept idealistic Chris Herter in Warren Harding's Washington for nearly four years. "Washington is like a dirty kitchen where cockroaches abound," Herter wrote afterward. After getting out of the kitchen in 1924, he spent several unpaid years as co-owner and co-editor of the venerable (founded in 1848), unprofitable Independent, self-styled "Journal of Free Opinion." In Independent editorials, Herter crusaded for clean government, urged the U.S. to "shed its isolationist fears" and join the League of Nations. In 1929-30, after selling his interest in the Independent, he lectured at Harvard on international relations. Then, by what he calls a "pure fluke," he got into politics.
That Indefinable Something. Even apart from the good fortune of being born to culture and marrying wealth, Christian Herter has displayed over the years what 18th century Author Horace Walpole called "serendipity"—the gift (possessed by the heroes of an old tale, The Three Princes of Serendip) of finding good things without having to seek them. He has never sought a new job, says Herter, because he always liked whatever he was doing; he was often urged or invited. "Almost every step I've taken," he says, "was a pure fluke."
Herter stepped into politics when the longtime representative from Boston's upper-crust Fifth Ward decided to retire from the state legislature. He knew and liked Herter, and so did the ward's Republican leader, who had roomed with Chris at Harvard. Talked into running, Herter won. Aristocratic, sometimes aloof Christian Herter, a fellow politician once said, "never did have that indefinable something that makes children and dogs follow him down the street"—but he has never lost an election.
Ugly Realities. Herter did a shining job during his twelve years in the legislature, rose to be speaker of the lower house during his last four years, 1939-43. "He was the best parliamentarian the legislature ever had," says Democrat John Powers, now president of the state senate. In 1942, at the urging of Massachusetts Republicans who wanted to unseat an isolationist G.O.P. Congressman, Herter agreed to run for Congress, scraped by with some help from that old Massachusetts political custom, a gerrymander of his district.*