Mr. Biddle Drops In

Elegant Anthony Joseph Drexel Biddle Jr., the world's only sextuple ambassador, turned up in Washington last week. He skated down the marble halls of the ancient State Department to see his chief, Cordell Hull, emerged 35 minutes later, debonair, gay, loquacious as always.

"So glad to see you, old boy," he said to the first reporter he saw. "I've never seen you looking better." The reporter had never seen Mr. Biddle before, but Tony Biddle is always glad to see everybody, invariably hail-well-meets him as "old man," "old boy," and sometimes "old fellow."

Tony Biddle regretted, in his best diplomatic manner, that he would not be able to talk of his work as U.S. Ambassador to the exiled governments of the Poles, Czechs, Norwegians, Belgians and Dutch, and Minister to the Luxembourgers. ("Really, old boy, I've just scratched the surface in my talk at the State Department.") But he would be quite willing to give newsmen the pitch on other things, if you like, old boy.

"Would he be Senator Joe Guffey's candidate for the other Senatorial post from Pennsylvania?"

Tony Biddle clutched his hand to his heart, caught his breath, replied: "Don't tell me they want me to run. Honestly, I haven't been talked to as yet. There will be but one answer: 'No.' I plan to go back to London very shortly, boy."

Tony Biddle paused to brush a few long, white dog hairs off his blue business suit. He was, as always, faultlessly dressed: white shirt with horizontal black stripes, grey tie, red pocket handkerchief.

He was disturbed by the flu epidemic in London: "Everybody is coming down with it, you know. It's really only a very light kind of flu, keeps you in bed only four or five days. The only really bad part is that you get up with a very low blood pressure. . . . The aftereffect is really alarming, old boy. Understand you're getting a similar epidemic here. Better watch the blood pressure, you know."

The British, said Tony Biddle, had found a cure for the flu, an old and trusted remedy: anyone who shows the slightest symptoms is given a healthy shot of whiskey.

''And really, it's not a bit hard to take. Quite painless, you know." Asking another question, the reporter's voice suddenly grew hoarse. "God bless you, old boy," said Tony, "you'd better take some of my advice on all this."

He was off, down the long corridor, off for a weekend at his Philadelphia home. "Just to dust off the family cobwebs a bit, old boy."

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