THE APOLOGISTS for Mr. Gluck, who admitted to the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee that he could not pronounce the name of India's Prime Minister nor remember the name of Ceylon's, seem to me to have missed the best line of de- fence. Instead of, like Time, putting up the absurd pretence that Mr. Gluck was troubled by `Jawaharlal,' not 'Nehru,' or, like President Eisenhower, saying that although it was known that Mr. Gluck 'was not thoroughly familiar with Ceylon' he could 'certainly learn,' they should have paraded Mr. Gluck's innocence of these Matters as a virtue—the attitude of Mr. Gluck himself ('I did not ask to be an Ambassador; I just wanted to do some good'). It would, too, have been in keeping with an earlier American diplomatic tradition. The official American record of the Paris Peace Conference says of the King- Crane Commission which was sent to investigate the future of Syria in 1919: 'The P.resident felt that these two men were particularly qualified to go to Syria because they knew nothing about it.'
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