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Bright & early one day last week a black Packard limousine with a U.S. crest on the door hummed through the maddening boulevard traffic of central Buenos Aires. As it passed, police snapped respectfully to attention. In the Plaza San Martin, where flowers were in bloom, the car came to a decorous halt before the rococo Argentine Foreign Office.
Out stepped a grey, bespectacled man with a grey, correct bearing. He carried a walking stick. In the lapel of his neat tan suit bloomed a flaming carnation. He fussily flicked a speck of dust from his coat, coughed with the conviction of a man swearing, and walked into the Foreign Office's cavernous hall for an interview with Argentina's suave Foreign Minister, Dr. Juan Atilio Bramuglia.
The caller was George Strausser Messersmith, U.S. Ambassador to Argentina. As usual, he was hard at work. For at 63, George Messersmith, veteran of 32 years in the foreign service, has a strenuous mission: to break, if possible, the impasse which has stultified U.S.-Argentine relations for more than a decade and thus to bring some realism and understanding to U.S.-Latin American policy in general.
No Frowns. He had his methods. First & foremost he conceived it his duty to see to it that the U.S., in the person of George Messersmith, gets along with Juan Domingo Perón, the Argentine strong man who was elected President last spring despite U.S. frowns. Secondly, he believes strongly in the policy of non-intervention in Argentine domestic affairs (no more such frowns). This is not only a reversal of Spruille Braden's policy, which preceded Messersmith's advent in Argentina, but a reaffirmation of one of the cardinal aims of the Good Neighbor Policy, established by Franklin Roosevelt and Sumner Welles in 1933.
As subsidiary points to his program — but not regarded by him as meddling — Messersmith conceives it his duty to do all he can to get the Perón Government over its sentimental attachment to Axis nationals and Axis business firms. Beyond that, as a sympathetic friend of U.S. businessmen, he has the good diplomat's interest in furthering foreign trade.
Private Chats. On the first point of his mission, George Messersmith has succeeded extraordinarily well—helped not a little by Juan Perón's intense dislike of Messersmith's predecessor, hulking, excitable Spruille Braden. Just a few days after his arrival in Buenos Aires last May, Messersmith was informed by an influential Argentine that Perón would welcome a private chat. The meeting was held, and was followed by similar get-togethers. The two men took each other's measure, and talked through the whole range of U.S.-Argentine problems.
Messersmith, who has the career diplomat's predilection for the gloved hand, liked this approach to his new job. He had gone to Buenos Aires with the firm conviction that the speechmaking, note-writing tactics of Spruille Braden must end; that the patching-up job, if it could be done at all, must be done behind the scenes. In this he was privately seconded by Secretary of State Byrnes.