Travel Orders

Upon announcing that Admiral George W. Anderson Jr. would not be reappointed as Chief of Naval Operations, President Kennedy promised that Anderson would be given a post of "high responsibility. " Last week, after an hour's talk with Anderson, the President picked the new job: Ambassador to Dictator Antonio de Oliveira Salazars Portugal.

As a diplomatic port of call. Lisbon is hardly on the grand circuit. It provides such minor challenges as working for steady trade in wine, sardines and cork. There are also the knotty problems of negotiating the renewal of a treaty for continued use of U.S. military bases in the Azores*and of smoothing out relations ruffled by U.S. support of U.N. anticolonial resolutions involving the Portuguese colony of Angola. To make way for Anderson, the present ambassador, C. Burke Elbrick, 55, a career diplomat who has held the Lisbon post since 1958, will be reassigned.

Admiral Anderson has many Portuguese friends, made during numerous visits when he was commander of the Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean from 1959 to 1961. And Administration officials were pleased to point out that the U.S. is sending an admiral as envoy to a land whose seafaring tradition is still nourished by the long-ago exploits of Prince Henry the Navigator and Vasco da Gama. But even so, for George Anderson the new job is quite a comedown.

*From those bases, granted by Salazar in 1943. antisubmarine planes helped turn the tide against German U-boats in the Battle of the Atlantic.

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