Named last week to be Under Secretary of State: Chester Bliss Bowles, 59.
ON THE floor of the Senate, one day in 1951, members broke into a bitter partisan wrangle over the confirmation of Chester Bowles as Ambassador to India. At one point, Ohio's prestigious Republican Robert Taft rose to speak. "He is not a diplomatic man!" said he. "I have had a great deal of experience with him." Bob Taft's succinct characterization of Chester Bowles gets general approval despite the fact that over a period of 20 years, Bowles has plowed through a long series of jobs that generally require the soft, sure touch of tact. What he lacked in the diplomat's pouch of tact, he made up for with a bottomless bag of ideas, a gift of gab and unswerving earnestness for his causes.
Grandson of wealthy, ardent Republican Samuel Bowles, who edited the Springfield (Mass.) Republican, Bowles got proper schooling (Choate, Yale), left the family newspaper (he opposed his father's opposition to the League of Nations) for Madison Avenue, where he and Friend William Benton organized the highly successful advertising agency, Benton & Bowles. (Bowles's contribution to Hellmann's Mayonnaise: "Double-whipped.") By 1941, Bowles had made himself a million dollars, "retired" at 40 and set out to double-whip the world.
Though a Wilsonian and Rooseveltian Democrat, Bowles was an early member of the isolationist America First Committee, as were many other New Dealers. His eagerness for public service got him at length into Washington, where he was F.D.R.'s price administrator and Truman's boss of the Office of Economic Stabilization. At war's end he fought successfully to keep controls on wages and prices in the name of an orderly transition to a peacetime economy; as a result, he amassed one army of bitter conservative enemies and another of happy liberal disciples. After one earnest but tactless term as Governor of Connecticut (1949-51), he was defeated for reelection, got a Truman appointment as Ambassador to India.
In New Delhi, Bowles was as undiplomatic a diplomat as the class-conscious Indians had ever seen. He and his wife rode bicycles through the streets, sent their three children to local Indian schools, studied Hindi in Thirty Days. He got along fine with Nehru, but sometimes, say his critics, at the expense of the U.S. interest.
Once, Bowles publicly and unprofessionally took India's side in the Kashmir dispute, and some critics thought he bent over too far in helping Nehru squeeze as much U.S. aid out of Washington as the traffic would bear. Bowles's dedication and fervent propagandizing helped to form a strong pro-India lobby in the U.S.