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Show r i ,z WHO'S NEWS This Week By Lemuel F. Parton Consolidated features. WNU Kelease. XJEW YORK. Just after he won -L1 the world heavyweight championship, cham-pionship, Jack Sharkey was dining at Tail's restaurant in San Francisco. Fran-cisco. The Psychological By- waiter Products of North brought Africa Mount Daily h!m a lo,bi" r ster with one claw missing. Jack wanted to know about that. The waiter explained ex-plained that two lobsters had been brought together In a crate from Martinez; that they had a fight and this one lost its claw. "Take this bum away and bring me the winner!" bellowed Jack. The quite human desire to string with a winner is manifesting mani-festing itself in Latin-American countries, and perhaps elsewhere, else-where, since the U. S. A. cut loose and started swinging in North Africa. Dispatches from several countries tell of sentiment senti-ment shifting to the Allies, and away from the Axis. More specifically, Argentina's distinguished distin-guished hair-splitting legalist, Sr. Enrique Ruiz Gulnazu, is caught off dead-center for just about the first time in his long and amiably noncommittal career. ca-reer. As foreign minister of Argentina, he cables to the II. S. A. his felicitations and his expression of Argentina's "solidarity" behind our North African campaign. There is the rumble of the band-wagon as well as of guns throughout the world. During the Pan-American conference confer-ence at Rio de Janeiro last January, Janu-ary, gleaners among the senor's learned and bland evasions could not find so much as a straw in the wind. Seven months earlier, he had been elaborately feted at Washington, Wash-ington, with state dinners and a big, jovial stag party by the President, and as time passed it appeared that we might not even get our bait back. Our later cultural phalanxes moving on Argentina, seemed equally equal-ly ineffective. Argentina remained our hardest nut to crack. Perhaps General Eisenhower has cracked it. Representing Argentina at the League of Nations for many years, Sr. Ruiz Guinazu was an eminent personage in the great academic tournaments which deplored but sidestepped the oncoming Axis juggernaut. jug-gernaut. He was president of the League of Nations council in 1935, and in that year voted with the opposition op-position when it was proposed to throw a switch on Mussolini, en route to Ethiopia. He is a veteran of Argentinian statesmanship, profoundly pro-foundly learned in International law, and political theory, for several years ambassador to Switzerland. Cautious and cryptic, although always al-ways gracious and smiling, he is at last on record for "the safeguarding safe-guarding and security of the Americas," Amer-icas," as he cables Secretary Hull. ' IT WAS nearly two years ago that Robert D. Murphy, then counsellor counsel-lor for our embassy at Vichy, started on a little publicized tour of North Africa, in- W e Have Had a specting Lawrence of North our con-- con-- - . . r sulates," as Africa on the Job cautiou3 little newspaper handouts of the time would have it. There were subsequent trips which made it clear that Mr. Murphy's Mur-phy's interests were not confined to consular efficiency. General Eisenhower Eisen-hower supplies additional and final proof in leading the greatest sea and air borne invasion of all time strategically and politically readied read-ied by Mr. Murphy's preparation. As to the bournous and all the other traditionally romantic fixings fix-ings of such enterprise, it's quite the reverse so far as Mr. Murphy is concerned. He is a trim-rigged diplomat, dip-lomat, whose genial and ready smile, as well as his name, suggests sug-gests his Irish antecedents. He has been correct and dependable in diplomatic dip-lomatic punctilio. Much of Mr. Murphy's activity seems to have been adroitly political. He rallied Free French adherents everywhere and he made strategical use of American food and clothing supplies. sup-plies. The latter was, of course, denounced as appeasement of Vichy, with an insistence that the supplies would find their way into German hands. The Germans put us right on that. If we were reading their Paris newspaper Aujourd 'Hui, of February 10, 1941. They villi-fied villi-fied Mr. Murphy as a conspirator conspira-tor working with the DeGaulle forces. Bom and reared in Milwaukee, Mr. Murphy attended Marquette academy and George Washington university. He entered the career service of the state department in 1917. Stationed at consular posts in Europe and Africa, he frequently was entrusted with strategic and scouting missions. Department insiders in-siders have long known him as s quiet, cagey, political explorer, with a camera eye and a nose for inside news. For the preparatory work Mr. Murphy has done in North Africa, Af-rica, ne deservedly takes a bow along with General Eisenhower |
