Winant Reports

Ambassador Winant is coming home this week to report to the President. He will report on the progress of a relationship and a vision: war and post-war collaboration between the U.S. and Britain, some plan now unformed and unnamed, to build a better world. In such a world, in such a union the U.S. and Britain must meet each other with more than words, handshakes or good intentions.

In the U.S., that seaborne vision was having heavy weather. Anti-British jokes had cropped up again, anti-British criticisms crept even into friendly editorials, were ridden hard by Anglophobes, spurred on by Axis propaganda. Many a U.S. citizen thought the closest U.S. ally a failure.

John Gilbert Winant, believer in the brotherhood of man, knew better.

Blue-Blooded Liberal. Gil Winant is a blueblood, son of an aristocratic New Yorker who made a fortune in real estate. As a boy at St. Paul's School in Concord, N.H., he was awkward, scraggly, uncouth; he concentrated on American history, barely crawled by in his other subjects. As a Princeton undergraduate, he left college in 1912 to campaign for Roosevelt I.

He went back to St. Paul's as a teacher: a bachelor whose arms always seemed to be coming out of his sleeves, who groped painfully for the right word, hooked his hands in his pants-top like a Midwestern farmer, always looked funny in a hat, lived in a single room so littered with books that there was no place to sit. When he talked to his classes, in a soft, throaty whisper, he was hard to hear, sometimes hard to understand.

But no master at St. Paul's had such an influence as Gil Winant. His shaggy, outthrust head, his dark burning eyes made those who saw him think of Lincoln. His young pupils found themselves wishing he had been born in a log cabin, were convinced that he would be President some day. They did not know whether this gauche, inarticulate teacher was a great man; but he made them sure that great men existed.

In 1917 he left his job as teacher. On the desk of the St. Paul's business manager he dropped a sheaf of unpaid bills, all his money and stocks to meet them. Nine-tenths of the bills were for milk sent to neighboring poor people. He went off to Newport News, crammed 25 hours of air training into three days, went to France to fly.

As a flyer Gil Winant was absentminded. But he led a charmed life. The day before a big drive he came back from reconnaissance duty with 90 bullet holes in a wing and the motor half torn off. He took up another plane, had it shot from under him, spent the rest of the day in a third plane.

Altogether he cracked up seven planes. He flew with famed Eddie Rickenbacker. Years later Winant asked Rickenbacker if he had ever been frightened in the war. "Only once," said Rickenbacker. "When you taxied me around a field."

The Little New Deal. After World War I, he married Constance Rivington Russell, whose father was the wealthy law partner of Eleanor Roosevelt's father. They settled down in a rambling white frame Colonial house in Concord. There Winant took up his political career. He scorned political machines, political patronage, was a dismal campaigner. But New Hampshire was ripe for his liberal, common-man political philosophy. He got elected to the State Legislature; in 1925 he beat Colonel Frank Knox, now Secretary of the Navy, for Governor, broke the New Hampshire anti-third-term tradition in 1933.

As Governor, Winant set up a Little New Deal before Roosevelt. In the early '30s he was often mentioned as a possible 1936 Republican candidate for President. The New Deal noticed him too--and took him into camp. He went to Washington as first chairman of the Social Security Board, became director of the International Labor Organization, and finally representative of the international New Deal as Ambassador to the Court of St. James's.

Honest Gil. Winant's absentmindedness, honesty and great human kindness are legendary. He refused pay for his first two days on the Social Security Board because he had done some private business on those days; he emptied his pockets for handouts, was eternally grateful to waiters who brought him a second cup of coffee.

One day when he was supposed to visit the White House, he arrived at his office with muddy shoes, rolled-up pant legs, two ties hitched together in place of a belt. He had been on a stroll in muddy Rock Creek Park, had forgotten to change.

Office aides who took him to the ship for Europe, on an I.L.O. mission, asked him if he had any money, found that he had 12-c- in his pocket. Assistants who arranged Pullmans for him on trips discovered that he sat up all night in coaches talking to people.

Winant in London. At Bristol airport, when Winant arrived, he was supposed to be welcomed by the Duke of Kent, but the Duke had not yet appeared. Winant obligingly climbed back in his plane, to keep from embarrassing the Duke. As Ambassador to the knee-breeched Court, Winant is unworldly and unkempt as ever. He arrived with one grey suit, which promptly fell into baggy-kneed disrepair. His conversations are brief sentences between long, groping pauses, long minutes of staring at the floor.

He arrived in an England that had grown tired of ruddy Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy's cheerful salesmanship. And Kennedy had slept out bombings safely in the country, had returned to the U.S. to talk a sort of anti-British isolationism. Winant's modesty, his sincerity, washed the bad taste out of England's mouth.

The Ambassador and Mrs. Winant took a modest four-room flat in London, stood on the roof watching the brutal bombing attacks of 1941's spring. Often he walked all night through the streets when bombers were overhead, talking to the people.

England liked Gil Winant, and showed it by dropping him out of public notice. At a luncheon shortly after his arrival, the crowd insisted on a speech; he stood up, shifted his weight from one long leg to the other through four straight minutes of agonizing silence, finally said softly: "The worst mistake I ever made was in getting up in the first place." After that they usually let him alone.

Britons on the U.S. The common people of England did not have to be sold on a democratic new world. Some Britons thought America should have been in the war sooner; some took a perverse satisfaction in Pearl Harbor. But most Britons had a soft spot for the U.S.

The British Admiralty was frank to admit that its 50 U.S. destroyers had saved it from defeat in the Battle of the Atlantic in 1940; the receivers of Bundles for Britain, thought Americans the most generous people in the world. Little U.S. influences were all over England: movies, the tune The White Cliffs of Dover, most popular song in England; even Chicago pinball machines in London's penny arcades. The Briton-in-the-street, from constantly gazing at the menus of Hollywood, believed Americans the most fabulous doers and makers of all time. He would always prefer his Britain, just as it was; but some day he would like to see America for himself.

It was to Britain's leaders that Winant had been sent; it was to them that he plugged away at his theme of a democratic post-war world. He had long talks with Winston Churchill; met Anthony Eden several times a week; consulted labor leader Ernest Bevin; became fast friends with such Britons as Author-Professor Harold J. Laski, Sir Stafford Cripps, Press Lords Camrose and Kemsley, the WVS's Dowager Marchioness of Reading, one of England's most influential women.

The Goal. Winant's slow-spoken, slowly thought speeches showed what he was driving at: "The great mass of common men . . . want a friendly, civilized world of free peoples in which Christian virtues and moral values are not spurned as decadent and outmoded, a world where honest work is recognized and a man can own himself.

". . . I believe there is more kindliness in England today than in all its history. The fear that the discipline of war would harden the hearts of men and dam social progress has not materialized.

"[The post-war world] calls for a political philosophy which . . . reaches beyond selfish nationalism to a plan of political and economic collaboration in order that we may join together to create a prosperous and peaceful world. ..."

To his President, Ambassador Winant would report great progress on the British front for his great post-war dream. He would hear, in return, discouraging news from the home front. But Gil Winant would certainly not give up. He believes in difficult things. He said once: "It is never easy for one country to understand another country."

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