Background
William Walton Butterworth was born on September 7, 1903 in New Orleans, Louisiana, the son of William Walton Butterworth, a physician, and Maude Revencamp Campbell.
William Walton Butterworth was born on September 7, 1903 in New Orleans, Louisiana, the son of William Walton Butterworth, a physician, and Maude Revencamp Campbell.
William Butterworth was educated at the New Orleans Academy from 1909 to 1916. From 1916 to 1921 he attended Lawrenceville Preparatory School. In 1921 he entered Princeton University, graduating with honors in 1925. From 1925 to 1927, he was a Rhodes Scholar at Worcester College of Oxford University, where he studied American and English literature.
In May 1928, Butterworth joined the United States Foreign Service. After a year of service and training at the State Department in Washington, D. C. , he was posted to Singapore as vice-consul. He returned to Washington, D. C. , in the summer of 1931.
After a year he was assigned as third secretary to the American Legation in Ottawa, Canada. He remained there from 1932 to 1934 before being promoted to second secretary and then being reassigned to the American embassy in London. He acted as financial attaché working on trade policy relations for the Lend-Lease Program, which began in January 1941.
From late 1941 to late 1942 he was in Washington, D. C. , again, on temporary assignment as a special assistant to the undersecretary of commerce. His next appointment was as a member of the Advisory Commission of Trade Policy in Relation to Lend-Lease.
From 1942 to 1944 he served as first secretary of the American Legation in Lisbon, Portugal, and then as first secretary for the American embassy in Madrid, Spain. He simultaneously worked on the Iberian peninsula as director general for operations of the United States.
Commercial Company, a government-owned corporation engaged in preclusive buying of strategic materials. In 1944, Butterworth began a twenty-month stint as consul of the American embassy in Madrid. He held the same position with the rank of minister in Nanking, China, from 1946 to 1947.
There he served with General of the Army George C. Marshall, who had been dispatched to China by President Harry S. Truman to attempt a rapprochement between Chiang Kai-shek and his Nationalists and Mao Tse-tung and his Communists.
Six months after Marshall left his impossible and failed China mission in January 1947 to become secretary of state, Butterworth returned to Washington, D. C. , to become assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern affairs. Having agreed with many of the viewpoints of the foreign service officers in China known as the China Hands, Butterworth ran afoul of Chiang Kai-shek, T. V. Soong, Representative Walter Judd of Minnesota, and the "China Lobby. "
During Butterworth's arduous confirmation hearings, one senator denounced the Marshall Mission and declared that Butterworth was a "symbol of American failure in China. " Despite being passed over fourteen times as assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern affairs, his confirmation was finally approved, and Butterworth served in this position until 1950.
In the spring of 1949, he rejected pleas from the Chinese Nationalists for a multimillion-dollar loan to bolster their crumbling regime, supporting instead the Truman administration's stand not to "pour more United States aid down the bottomless 'rat hole' of China. "
In 1950, as Senator Joseph McCarthy and others began their Communist witch-hunts of branches of the government--especially the State Department--Butterworth was posted to Sweden as American ambassador. At a time when many of his colleagues, among them, Davies, Vincent, and Service, had their careers ruined by accusations and innuendo of communist sympathies, President Truman sent Butterworth to Stockholm to remove him from harm's way.
After three years in Sweden, he returned to London as minister and deputy chief of the United States. Economic and Aid Mission; he served in this capacity from 1954 to 1955. With the humiliation of Senator McCarthy, Butterworth's career finally became secure again.
In early 1956 he became the American representative to the European Coal and Steel Community with the rank of ambassador. In 1958 he simultaneously took on the job of American representative to the European Economic Community for the European Atomic Energy Commission. Both assignments came to an end in 1962, when Butterworth was posted to Ottawa, Canada, as American ambassador. It was a pleasant and fruitful experience for Butterworth, despite the controversies of the Vietnam war, which hardened United States - Canadian relations.
When he retired in 1968, one Canadian cabinet minister declared that all Canadians were grateful to Mr. Butterworth for "forthrightly speaking Washington's mind. " After forty-one illustrious years in the State Department, he retired to Princeton.
From 1969 to 1974 he traveled, lectured at Princeton, and spoke to many conferences and scholarly meetings.
William Walton Butterworth died on March 31, 1975 of cirrhosis of the liver. While his last residence was in Mercer County, New Jersey, he was buried at Metairie Cemetery, City of New Orleans, Orleans Parish, Louisiana.
His friends said that during his service in China as a member of the Marshall Mission, which attempted to bring the Nationalists and the Communists together in the aftermath of World War II.
A big, husky man who combined the courtliness of a Southern gentleman with a capacity for blunt, straightforward talk.
Quotes from others about the person
Among those who worked with him on Asian issues were the preeminent Harvard scholar and dean of Asian Studies in the United States, John King Fairbank, who said of Butterworth: "He's outgoing but in a dignified sort of way. " Another former foreign service colleague, Oliver Edmund Clubb, added "Mr. Butterworth was honest, capable, and courageous. "
“Mr. Butterworth was honest, capable and courageous, ” O. Edmund Clubb, head of the China Desk in the State Department in 1950, said yesterday.
On November 10 of the same year he married Virginia Parker; they had two children. Mr. Butterworth left his wife, the former Virginia Parker; a daughter, Cynthia Burns; a son, J. Blair; a sister, Mrs. Lloyd Morris; and two grandchildren.