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¶ C. Douglas Dillon, 49, sometime Ambassador to France, who came to diplomacy from investment banking (Dillon, Read), is now Under Secretary of State for Economic Affairs and Herter's probable replacement as No. 2 man.
¶ Robert D. Murphy, 64, tough-minded, old-pro troubleshooter (TIME, Aug. 25), Deputy Under Secretary for Political Affairs.
¶ Loy W. Henderson, 66, Deputy Under Secretary for Administration, another careerman who has held the posts of envoy extraordinary and Ambassador to Iraq, India, Nepal and Iran.
¶ Livingston T. Merchant. 55, Assistant Secretary for European Affairs, former Ambassador to Canada.
¶ G. Frederick Reinhardt, 47, counselor of the department, former Ambassador to South Viet Nam.
¶ William M. Rountree, 42, Assistant Secretary for Near Eastern, South Asian and African Affairs, his specialty since the early 1940s.
The first-rate team behind him assures that Secretary of State Herter will get sound counsel and assistance, but it will be Herter himself who must make the top decisions and carry out the top negotiations. Inevitably, last week the often-asked question was: How does Herter compare with Dulles?
Dulles had a special advantage that Christian Herter, in the less than two years ahead of him as Secretary of State, cannot hope to match: the unique and towering esteem, slowly built up over years, that Dwight Eisenhower felt for Dulles. But Herter has an advantage of his own: abundant political experience. As an ex-Congressman and a winning politician, he knows something about handling storms of congressional or public opinion. He is liked and admired on Capitol Hill, notably by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee's Chairman William Fulbright, who weeks ago started boosting Herter for Secretary of State.
"A Margin of Time." The differences between Dulles and Herter are likely to be matters of style rather than substance. Partly because of his arthritis, Herter will do a lot less traveling than Dulles did, leave more of the overseas work to aides. Herter will doubtless rely much more than Dulles did on staff work and conferences within the State Department; while Dulles is a man of strong opinions who can be persuaded to change, Herter is a man who makes up his mind after listening to all sides. On European affairs there is no substantive difference between the two men's views (but sensitive Far Eastern experts noted during the Quemoy crisis of mid-1957 that the State Department's Herter was privately urging the evacuation of Quemoy and Matsu). Like Dulles, Herter believes that U.S. foreign policy must pursue, as Herter put it in a recent speech, "a positive approach which accepts competition and danger as elements of survival."