With diffident grace, as "an Oxford man with an uncertain academic record." Alexander Frederick Douglas-Home. 57, the 14th Earl of Home (pronounced Hume), last week accepted an honorary doctorate from Harvard University. "Amid winds of change, he labors with sure lucidity for community among nations." said the citation. In a Harvard speech, in another in Chicago, in private talks with Secretary of State Dean Rusk in Washington, Lord Home was getting across to Americans what the British have already learned to their considerable surprise: in less than a year on the job. Home has emerged as the strongest British Foreign Secretary in years, a man who seems more realistic about the Communist menace than his boss and old friend, Harold Macmillan.
Crisis Coming. Why is a Berlin crisis coming, Home asked the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations rhetorically last week. "It is in Germany that the Communists are seen to be losing in fair competition with a free society. Every year, a quarter of a million people leave East Germany, voting with their feet. So, apparently, the peace of the world is going to be endangered because this puppet regime cannot survive unless the Iron Curtain is clamped down still more vigorously."
A main purpose of Home's trip was to lay to rest fears that Britain might welsh on its Berlin commitments. "Our signature is on the treaties," he said. "They must be interpreted with intelligence, but we shall never falter or default on them. Some of the columnists seem to think that unless we go around whistling military tunes to keep our courage up that there is disunity among us."
Such ringing conviction was the last thing his critics expected when Home took office last year. In fact, some were unkind enough to hold that his life had peaked 39 years before at Eton, where Classmate Cyril Connolly remembers him as "the graceful, tolerant, sleepy boy who is showered with favors and crowned with laurels, without any apparent exertion on his part. He appeared honorably ineligible for the struggle of life." At Christ Church College, Oxford, Home could not earn his blue at cricket, never matching his brilliant 66 on a sticky wicket for Eton against Harrow. He caught Neville Chamberlain's eye and became his parliamentary private secretary—only to suffer obloquy later for having ridden with Chamberlain through the cheering crowds at Munich. In the 1945 Labor landslide, he even managed to lose his family's "safe" Parliament seat in Lanarkshire. In 1951, he went off to the musty House of Lords after acceding to his father's title and his share of the family's 100,000 acres in Scotland.