The Worldly Americans

Most of them wince when you call them expatriates. Few are genuine émigrés. They are Americans, they'll be quick to tell you, Americans who just happen to live or to work abroad. Most intend to return home someday. Many don't remember how they happened overseas in the first place. The familiar American wanderlust took hold of them at some point, but instead of carrying them westward, it guided them beyond the continental U.S.A. Taxes may have had something to do with it. ("If the income-tax exemption for the first $25,000 earned overseas each year were ever revoked, you'd suddenly see a lot of repatriates," an American broker in (continued on page 136)Worldly Americans(continued from page 125) Paris once told me.) The lure is strongest for professionals and those who manage the foreign branches of American corporations, but the U. S. cash base is just as important for those who choose to live abroad in search of new existential pleasures or a second start in life. Whatever their motive, it remains a remarkable fact that this vast continent, so recently subdued, which only a century ago was still a great magnet for Europe's burgeoning masses, should have grown too small for so many so soon.

First came the Lost Generation. But they were a piddling handful of artistic experimenters compared with the rush that started after 1945. The State Department last year counted 1,048,925 Americans--not including more than 1,000,000 military personnel--who reside outside the U. S. No other nationality is so widely dispersed. This becomes quickly evident to any traveler.

I remember once arriving in Bujumbura. Who would want to visit Bujumbura, particularly during a military coup? It is the capital of a tiny central African mountain state whose only well-known export is the Watusi. The town seemed empty when I arrived. Yet when I settled at a table in the Crémaillère, its only decent restaurant, I soon discovered that three of the five other people in the place were Americans. One had slipped across the border from Tanganyika a few hours earlier; he was traveling across Africa on Stanley's trail. Another was a local diamond dealer who had set up shop in Bujumbura to capture some of the trade in wildcat Kasai gems. The third described himself as an economist based in Nairobi, though more likely he was from the CIA.

These postwar Kilroys no longer bother to scribble their names on latrine walls. They have become very sophisticated and discreet. At the Raffles hotel in Singapore, an American is likely to be indistinguishable from a resident British banker. In Vienna, the place not to look for him is the Intercontinental--strictly reserved for the if-it's-Tuesday-this-must-be-Brussels crowd. In Paris or London, resident Americans are so numerous that real-estate agencies specializing in services for them have sprung up. "And why is it that Americans always find the most attractive apartments in town?" a young Parisienne once asked me on the terrace of former Newsweek bureau chief Joel Blocker's penthouse. Money isn't the only answer. She herself had just plunked down a respectable sum for a three-bedroom place in the recherché 16th arrondissement. Its living room looked down on a bit of manicured green and the bedrooms faced another modern apartment house; the place might have been in Rochester or Boston for all the view it offered. Blocker's vista included the statuary of the Grand Palais and the Pont Alexandre and a glimpse of the Eiffel Tower.

Americans have developed an eye for that sort of thing, even if their name isn't Peggy Guggenheim. A well-known American writer couple, Tom and Claire Sterling, have an ancient town house on Rome's charming Piazza Montevecchio. Everyone in Paris knows that James Jones has done very well for himself on the exclusive Ile St.-Louis, where a friend of mine, Bernie Frizell, a writer with a less-developed sense of real-estate values, now rents small digs from the Duchess of Bedford. Frizell's place comes with beamed ceilings and dormer windows giving directly onto the flying buttresses of Notre Dame. Comfort and convenience usually take second place in an American's choice. Curiously, it is the Europeans who most often concentrate on these qualities nowadays.

Younger Americans no longer seem to have to go abroad to shed puritanical hang-ups. Still, many worldly Americans will insist that on arriving in Europe, they felt a shower of pleasure and release. Bernie Frizell can still recall his own first reactions. He arrived in the mid-Thirties, straight from an Ivy League college, armed with a scholarship to the prestigious Ecole Normale. "I stepped off the train at the Gare St.-Lazare. The sun was out over the rooftops of the city. I could look down narrow streets, angling away in every direction. A friend who had come to fetch me took me to a small bistro on the Left Bank. My first meal in Paris. I'll never forget it. We ate pigeon and petits pois. Finished it up with delicious strawberries en feuillete. A blonde sitting alone at a table across from ours was eating asparagus with her hands. I couldn't take my eyes off her. I knew then this was the place for me."

When Frizell first went to Paris, its spirit was still lodged securely in the past. Today Americans set the style of the future. The French satirist Pierre Daninos once told me, "We simply expect Americans to be better adapted to our times. They seem to be born with voices that carry well on the telephone. They are more at ease in airport lounges." In his first play, Look Back in Anger, John Osborne explodes bitterly, "I must say it's pretty dreary living in the American Age--unless you're an American, of course. Perhaps all our children will be Americans." Virgil Thomson, an American composer and critic--as well as an emeritus of that Lost Generation that suddenly found itself in Paris between the wars--put a much more forgiving slant on it. "In my day, France was very habit-forming. Nowadays it is the other way around. Everybody wants to be like us."

The pervasiveness of America's cultural hegemony combines slang with high diction. On the one hand, you have the ubiquity of its pop culture: Woodstock imitated on the Isle of Wight; French Leftists wondering how they can get an underground going, à l'américaine; Western clubs in Picardy, and Italians making cowboy films in Tuscany for distribution in Japan. But the pop aspects of our culture are merely more in evidence than the work of serious American artists. William Einstein, an American Jew converted to Catholicism, has been replacing the medieval stained-glass windows of the church of Abbeville in Picardy with his own creations. John Taras had a go at whipping the ballet of the Paris Opera into shape. The playbills of theaters on the Continent are studded with pieces by Miller, O'Neill and Albee. The Living Theater, which toured Europe during its exile from Greenwich Village, had a profound impact on dramatic aesthetics.

The stage is one thing; but where the American influence is felt most strongly is in the movie industry, despite the famous English, French and Italian innovators. Dick Overstreet, a young American director who went to Europe to acquire the rudiments of his craft, believes it was much easier for him than it would have been in Hollywood. "In France I could work as a cutter, a cameraman or in any of the technical departments without a union getting in the way." French film makers have a respect for American craftsmen that borders on idolatry. "You never realize how appreciated we are as Americans until you come over here," he told me, "and, to be quite frank, we all exploit it somewhat." He believes that Raoul Coutard, one of the finest talents behind a camera in the world, was willing to join him in making his first, completely independent feature, "in part because he wanted to work with an American." Not that Coutard needed it. He had made his reputation as Jean-Luc Godard's cameraman.

A few years ago, John Bainbridge coined the word Ameropeans to describe Americans living in Europe. He purposely focused on a few hundred affluent expatriates looking for "another way of living" there. But he nevertheless did point out just how the postwar rush to Europe really began: "After the war," he wrote, "there was a tremendous demand for Americans to go overseas for limited periods of time to administer foreign-aid programs and participate in the expansion of American business." A lot obviously stayed and more have been coming ever since.

According to the U. S. Department of Commerce, foreign affiliates of American corporations spent an estimated 14.7 billion dollars on new investments overseas (continued on page 238)Worldly Americans(continued from page 136) in 1971--up 12.2 percent from 1970. No national economy--except possibly that of Japan in its best years--has registered comparable growth rates in industrial investments. The last estimated value of U. S. plants abroad was about 78 billion dollars. The actual value today is closer to twice that amount. Surprisingly, the bulk of these investments has been made in the so-called developed countries, such as Canada, Britain, West Germany and France--which is exactly where most Americans have gone.

This postwar expansion was, of course, triggered by the purchasing power of the dollar and buoyed by the tremendous advances U. S. industry has made in productivity. The decisive factor, however, has been the expansionary vitality of the corporations themselves and of the people in them. As U. S. corporations have spread, there have been cries of economic exploitation and even neocolonialism on the old Continent. The American Challenge, by Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, a French publicist turned politician, was the most intelligent and best-read reaction to the phenomenon. "In about 15 years," Servan-Schreiber wrote, "the third industrial power of the world, after the Soviet Union and the United States, could well be ... U. S. industry in Europe." The book sent shivers through European board rooms. Bankers on the Continent who used to sit behind Directoire desks making sure their pulse was nice and regular have since learned to hustle, too. The more visible signs of the changes wrought by the American presence are legion. Who would ever have imagined a Levittown on the outskirts of Paris, drugstores on the Champs Elysees, billboards along French highways, advertising on Britain's publicly supervised TV network? Though not always as garish as the home product nor yet quite so numerous, the symptoms and symbols of America's economic influence have begun to filigrain the texture of life everywhere. A chain of hamburger heavens under the Wimpy label was started in Britain; now it's spreading all over the Continent. In France, a man named Jacques Borel has been opening Howard Johnson--type eateries along new superhighways, complete with orange-tiled roofs to attract motorists.

Though it could never be upheld by arms, America's corporate empire is, of course, also the fallout of a military supremacy established at the end of World War Two. The U. S. entered that war reluctantly and, in a sense, Americans never quite came to terms with their inherited predominance. Congressional conservatism, parochial pressures on each administration and remnants of a traditional isolationism took the initiative out of the hands of the Government. From the beginning, it was a few private institutions, rather than Congress or the Government, that seized the opportunities offered abroad. Britain used to claim that in her empire, "Trade follows the flag." Americans reversed the process by going where their corporations went. And as often as not, they left the flag at home and called themselves multinational. Offshoots of a continent where nationalities and races have always tried to live side by side--even if they failed to melt, as was once assumed--they have since taught other people to think in new dimensions. The corporation was the spearhead of America's expansion and still is. Through it Americans have supplied the non-Communist world not only with computers, aircraft and sophisticated electronic gear but also with the bulk of its razor blades, shaving cream, baby food and automobiles--as well as a supranational ethic.

A Fortune article claimed that the only thing holding up the multiplication of overseas branches of large U. S. banks "is that they cannot find enough people to staff them." The predicament is widespread. American students who start out on a bit of postgraduate work in Europe often end up being recruited on the spot. This is what happened to my friend Peter Napier. When I first met Peter in 1959, he was trying to sell some troop-carrying helicopters to the West German Bundeswehr. He and a few other members of the Boeing lobby had installed themselves in a private villa opposite the U. S. ambassador's residence in Bad Godesberg and were spending a good deal of their time sailing off the Hook of Holland. (It takes an awful lot of patience to sell anyone 200 helicopters, even when your prospective customer is rich and rearming.) Peter had originally gone to Germany to prepare a Ph. D. in engineering at the University of Munich's School of Technology. From Boeing's headquarters in Bad Godesberg he moved to Paris, a strategic site for the exchange of aircraft know-how. A year later, the company reported that his work with governmental, research and academic institutions had helped provide many European scientists with their first direct contact with an American aerospace company. In the process, Boeing evidently learned as much as it taught, since one of Peter's jobs was to keep close tabs on the development of the Anglo-French Concorde project. From Paris, Boeing transferred Peter to London to start a similar affiliate there. The stint was interrupted for a year in the U. S., but after a couple of job changes, the Napiers are back in Europe--with no plans to return home again, at least in the foreseeable future.

Young, worldly Americans like Peter and his wife have little in common with retired millionaires looking for a second act in life and even less with that diminishing band of brash tourists who still wonder whether the water is drinkable or the toilet paper soft enough. The new breed speaks softly--in at least one or two foreign languages--never flaunts its nationality, frequently marries Europeans and ends up moving with familiar ease on both sides of the Atlantic. Quite unconsciously, they have become the new frontiersmen of the Americanization of the world. The continuing campaign of the United States Information Service to generate respect for the American way of life appears inconsequential next to what Europeans learn by watching Americans work. What the rest of the world really emulates in Americans is their efficiency, their skills, the way Americans organize themselves (and anyone within earshot) wherever they go, the simplicity of some of their managerial techniques and their unabashed disrespect for time-honored ways of doing things. In short, their pioneering spirit.

Peter found, "We Americans have less of a tendency to accept historical reasons as valid when it comes to optimizing productivity." This is a polite way of saying that Americans will take less truck from the unions. Yet, slowly, even the most recalcitrant, class-conscious labor leaders are waking up to the fact that American productivity gets results. In France, for instance, "le management" is all the craze nowadays. Every week a new book comes onto the market commending American techniques. The specialized press exhorts French corporations to keep an eye on "le cash flow" and never to underestimate the importance of "le marketing." Olivier de Sarnez, a well-known economic consultant in Paris, told me, "We should congratulate ourselves whenever an American company settles anywhere in Europe." A deputy from Rouen in public life, De Sarnez has gone to frequent pains to convince his electorate that it makes little sense to be nasty to the Americans. Man for man, whether hippie or square, "Americans are 20 years ahead of us," he told me. "We can only learn from them."

One wishes it were always so. At times the penchant for the good life in Europe gets the better of schemes for improved efficiency. A Gillette man in France decided to put up a factory near Lake Annecy, mainly because he liked to be near the skiing in the nearby French and Swiss Alps. "There was absolutely no economic factor to dictate the choice of that site," I was told. "It was no good for exports to Switzerland, which is not a member of the Common Market trade zone, and in France, most of our sales are concentrated in the Paris area."

I suppose the same goes for many an American company seat in Geneva, though tax advantages were originally cited as the main reason for settling there. When I stopped off there to call on John Hadik, who manages the local office of the Fiduciary Trust Company of New York, he had just returned from an extended weekend at Méribel and was tanned and relaxed. "We don't have as active a social life here as we would in New York," he said. "But then, we no longer have to take our children to Central Park on Sunday afternoons, where all you can do is join the poor saps who throw a football around as an excuse for exercise." Hadik has been on the foreign circuit almost without interruption since he graduated from Harvard in 1956 and went to Geneva for graduate work in comparative government. Through 16 years and several banking jobs, he has had an excellent chance to observe American moneymen in Europe. A few years ago, Geneva was still buzzing with young Americans on the move--lawyers, men just out of the Harvard Business School, computer experts and company consultants full of go-go. But the halcyon days of American financiers in Geneva ended with the collapse of Bernard Cornfeld's Investors Overseas Services (IOS), which squandered much of the good will Americans used to have there. "IOS went through hundreds of millions of dollars of the money people had entrusted to them," Hadik told me, "which is a lot of money by anyone's standard." These days it's no longer so easy to gain acceptance for American expertise, despite the fact that Swiss bankers' methods of managing money are as archaic as ever.

"Setting up an office like this involves a lot of nitpicking problems," Hadik says. "But I'm convinced it's better than if I'd stuck it out in New York, where success depends on how well you read The New York Times and the company reports in The Wall Street Journal." Besides, he likes the places he can travel to in Europe: Munich, London, Rome and Paris are only short hops by plane.

The ease with which you can get around the Continent these days seems to fill Americans with delight. Other people are having increasing difficulties in telling Europe's cities apart. Upton Sinclair's famous prophecy, "Thanks to the movies, the world is becoming unified--that is, becoming Americanized," still holds, though I doubt we can attribute it exclusively to the effect of Hollywood's projection of the American life style. André Fontaine, the foreign editor of Le Monde, has written: "Skyscrapers, supermarkets, and even Intercontinental hotels have appeared beyond the Iron Curtain. Cities of concrete and glass are rising from one end of the Continent to the other, so much alike that when you arrive in the evening after a long journey, you can no longer know whether you are in France, Germany, Holland or Sweden. Moviehouses show the same films, radios broadcast the same programs, everywhere the walls are covered with advertisements for the same soaps and bras and cars. Skirt lengths obey the same norms from San Francisco to Ankara, and 'sex shops,' which originated in Copenhagen and New York, are opening simultaneously in Paris and Munich."

Especially as seen from the lounges of airport terminals, the world's cities may have started to look more and more alike. But language and custom, and the cities' inner cores, still differ widely. "It's simply not true that because red ice cream sells well in one country, it has to sell well in another," is one American adman's considered put-down of facile multinationalism. He should know, since he made it his business to discover what colors Germans preferred for their television cabinets. Finding the answer set up Robert P. Eaton, 39, a native of New York City, as one of the hottest management consultants in Frankfurt. In 1966, he broached the idea of coloring the cabinets of TV sets so that they could be fitted into any decor. A few weeks earlier, he had quit as the head of the Ted Bates agency in Germany. Nordmende, a major German manufacturer, bought Eaton's idea and has watched its sales more than triple since then. Eaton still serves as its main consultant. An independent advertising agency which he also launched was subsequently put in charge of the campaign. Today it has nine other major clients and annual billings of more than $8,500,000.

Though in recent years German competitors of the American agencies have been making tremendous strides in both creative ideas and marketing, theirs is still an amateur's game compared with New York's. "I'm constantly on the lookout for real professionals," Eaton says, "but most Americans who apply think they can get away with only a smattering of German. Except in the creative sector, that simply won't do." On trips back to New York, he checks into some of the bigger supermarkets for new ideas in products and techniques of presentation. The trips always turn into talent-scouting expeditions as well. His staff now includes 45 account executives, designers, copy writers and secretaries. German companies sometimes turn to him, "mainly because we are American"; but often they reject a progressive idea, "because it's too American. They say it wouldn't work here." Some companies call on Eaton to solve problems through advertising that can't be solved by it, which is one of the reasons he switched to consulting. "That way I can act as more of a catalyst. In many German companies, communications between different echelons are not as good as they should be. I can tell them, 'Let's all get together.' "

Life abroad contains its own share of paradoxes. For Americans like Eaton, who try to offer an integrated professional service, it can also be harrowing and lonely. "I think we all suffer from varying degrees of professional loneliness in Europe," he has said. "You may live better than you would in the States, but you age faster. Here I always have to deal with the total picture. You can't contract work out as easily as you can in New York." After Germany, he would like to start anew in Southeast Asia or Latin America.

In their unquenchable urge to keep moving, Americans have always treated borders, national distinctions and much of the bureaucratic rigmarole of getting from point A to point B with a certain contempt. I owe my introduction to this attitude to another American friend, who invited me on a sailing jaunt the year we graduated from college. That was in 1957, when moving across borders was still hampered by visa restrictions and currency problems. Mike da Costa, a native of Philadelphia, had been to the Continent the year before, met a Norwegian boatbuilder in a French railroad station and contracted to have a 32-foot yawl built. Nine months later, the boat was ready. He sailed it to the English Channel Islands via Denmark and Holland. We agreed to meet in Paris in late winter for the last leg south, across the Bay of Biscay and the French inland canals to Spain's Costa Brava. National regulations--about which I tended to worry--didn't faze him in the least. He insured the yawl with Lloyd's and hoisted an American ensign. That was all the registration we needed, he said. Travel funds were transferred from a bank in Tangier to an American Express representative in Bordeaux via the "gray market" in Gibraltar. The arrangement turned out to be slightly more cumbersome than Da Costa originally thought. When we reached Bordeaux, the local American Express agent didn't have a banking license. But Mike enlisted the services of a friendly U. S. consul, who simply appointed the agent a banker for the duration of our transaction.

Nor did Mike worry about the weather. On our first day out, it began to snow. "We can't hang around Atlantic ports forever," he declared. "The best way to ride out a storm is at sea. So let's go." After losing our jib and capsizing once in an ebb tide, we finally reached Spain. Mike eventually settled there, made a name for himself in the Mediterranean regatta circuit and married the pixy daughter of a Barcelona heart specialist.

Mike's progress as a sportsman wasn't hampered by a five-figure trust-fund income--the fallout, as he once quipped, of a lucky marriage between one of his paternal grandfathers and a Biddle heiress. A Spaniard in his situation would have been content with a sporting success. One of these nobleman sailors once showed him a pair of immaculate white hands and said, "Look at these. They've never done a day's work"--a sight hard for an American to take. Mike's own spirit of business enterprise matched his ambition to become a top-notch sailor. He drove me to exasperation with his negocios after we landed on the Costa Brava in the spring of 1958 and he had conceived the idea of developing some coastal real estate for tourism. It was a sight worth watching, his tall, hulky figure moving over the craggy promontories of the coast next to birdlike Spanish agents, pecking at him, gesturing toward the horizon, but all of them ready to gyp him out of his dollars. Mike turned all of them down, after months of bargaining, and has lived to regret it. Last year Spain absorbed 25,000,000 tourists. Land prices along the coast have skyrocketed.

He tried everything--bars, boatbuilding, ship chandlering--all with little success. Then, at a banquet to receive one of his many Spanish sailing trophies, a manufacturer of parachutes approached him with an offer to make sails on an industrial scale in Spain. That was all it took to rekindle the old Da Costa enterprise. Within weeks he was signed up by Bruce Banks, the British sailmaker, to manufacture Banks's type of sails under license. Da Costa designed the lofts, trained cutters and hired women to sew, while making arrangements to have a computer in Britain respond to telexed instructions on how the sails should be shaped. In less than a year he had captured half the Spanish market. It isn't yet big money by international standards, he told me. "The real boom is yet to come. Sailing will be the sport of the Seventies and reach multimillion-dollar proportions here, as it already has in France." His main concern now is to keep production geared to expanding sales.

Among the American businessmen in Europe with the greatest impact are economic consultants and efficiency experts. Four years ago, the staid Financial Times proposed that English dictionaries should introduce the verb "to McKinsey," meaning "to shake up, reorganize, declare redundant, abolish committee rule as applied to any organization with management problems." The suggestion was made after Hugh Parker of the McKinsey consulting corporation won a contract to reorganize the Bank of England, which struck many Englishmen somewhat like the queen asking a Marlboro cowboy to tell her what to do with her Horse Guards. A European consultant complained to me, "Actually, we could do most jobs as well as any American firm. They're usually 95 percent European in their staff, anyway. But it's that damned U. S. label that makes all the difference." The ultimate irony came when Servan-Schreiber hired an American campaign specialist to help him win an assembly seat in Nancy. (He won handily with the Kennedy-style slogan "I Can Do More for Lorraine.")

Alan K. Jackson, 41, who arrived in Europe 14 years ago to scout opportunities for American technological know-how, continues to find it easier to spark creativity in U. S. manufacturers than in their European counterparts. Jackson launched a small consulting outfit on the proceeds of the sale of his Austin-Healey sports car in 1960, and has since helped a score of U. S. manufacturers establish themselves on the European market. The willingness to take risks and expand with the market for a product has deep roots in the American psyche, he believes. It starts with the give-and-take at American schools, which ask less pure learning of their students but generate more participation. "As a result, the average American engineer will have an answer ready for you in the time it takes a Frenchman to redefine the question." Jackson is now fluent in French and speaks passable German, Italian and Spanish. "As outsiders, we can appreciate their differences," he says, "once we begin to realize that a man in Turin will react differently to the same situation from a man in Stuttgart."

My friend Edwin S. Matthews, a partner in the Paris branch of Coudert Frères, one of the largest international law firms, would take that thought a step further. "We are the first people to appreciate Europe as an entity," he told me. "To me it is like one country, whereas to a Frenchman, England is still a foreign place." Rather than work as a clerk in a Stateside law office, Matthews took his first summer job in Paris, fell in love with a beautiful French girl and stayed. When I last saw him, he was in the midst of negotiations with a Western government on behalf of a major international company eager to exploit natural resources in underdeveloped countries. "Sure," he said, "the American corporate presence overseas is a tremendous force. It could be a force of progress, but I have developed great reservations about it. We are leading the world today, but we may be leading it in the wrong direction." Two years ago, Matthews took on the job of European representative of The Friends of the Earth, the Washington lobby leading the fight to save what's left of our mutilated ecosphere. He volunteered for the task of proselytizing for The Friends of the Earth in Europe after a trip to Libya, where he visited the ruins of the ancient Roman city Leptis Magna. "The same neglect that handed Leptis Magna back to the desert--you should see it, even what's left makes Rome look dull--is still at work. But in the cities we'll leave, the sands will cover Coke machines instead of monuments of stone." Matthews is now convinced that America, as the biggest spoiler of the earth, also has the responsibility of leading others in halting the dangerous fallout of modern technology.

Even Marie-Claude, Matthews' wife, looks askance at her husband's idealism. "Most Europeans are cynics," she said, "with little faith in the efficacy of the individual. We were brought up to compete, to develop initiative and the like but also to be responsible." Yet his fervor is infectious. Here's this boy from Idaho, whom I remember from college as a carefree, handsome achiever, worrying about how to avoid the conflict between representing and advising U. S. industries abroad and curbing the damage they've done to the world's environment. I wonder whether he fully realizes how far ahead this very concern puts him of any contemporary French or German lawyer in a similar position, who worries mostly about his success, his situation in life, membership in a social class or the narrow interests of his clients.

While America's big success overseas has been mainly a corporate achievement, worldly Americans don't necessarily work for large corporations. Some have decided to incorporate themselves instead. One of the most interesting is Charles Osborne, 36, a tall, affable Virginian. When I first met Osborne in St.-Moritz some years ago, I took him for just another adjunct of the jet set. At the Palace Hotel, he spent hours over the backgammon board, matching stakes with English gamblers. When not playing backgammon, he tried his nerves on the Cresta bobsled run, where you hurtle down an iced track at speeds up to 65 mph with your chin inches from the ground. Later I discovered another layer under the pleasure seeking. Osborne, whose father was an admiral in the U. S. Navy, was destined to represent the family's fifth generation of Southern gentlemen soldiers. His boyhood was spent in military schools all the way into Annapolis. "It took me five years of nightmares to get over that conditioning," he says.

Osborne chose to start by going to Egypt. "In 1961, Cairo was the center of the developing world," he told me. "I made it my business to find out what they most needed." During his three years of scouting, he also learned to speak fluent Arabic. At first he thought of setting up a sales organization for scientific equipment, but few developing countries were ready for sophisticated gear. Yet all of them did need modern, equipped hospitals. He risked some money trying to organize Swedish and then British hospital-equipment exporters. When that failed, he went to France. One by one, he badgered French manufacturers into allowing him to represent them abroad. After another two years of hiring engineers, setting up representatives, traveling through the Middle East, up and down the African coasts and to Latin America, and personally convincing health authorities as well as heads of state, he was ready.

What he offered them were "turn-key" hospitals with French equipment. All the local authorities would have to do was to staff them. It would be as simple as buying a prefabricated house with all the appliances. The sales of Equipement Hospitalier de France shot up, once he had acquired a 90 percent interest in it for 6000 new francs or $1200 and injected his entire savings (plus those of some of his friends) into its recapitalization. In 1969, sales reached $17,000,000. They tripled that a year later. Through Euromedico, a company he set up to hold his controlling interest in E. H. F. and seven other companies, he raised $1,500,000 through the sale of 20 percent of its stock on the Euro-dollar market. By this act, Euromedico became the first European company to tap the 45-billion-dollar Euro-dollar pool with an equity issue.

I find it ironic that a man destined for a military career, who might have had to drop napalm on Southeast Asians, chose to make his fortune in a far more humanitarian manner. Joining the Peace Corps isn't the only way out, after all.

In a sense, the basic idea behind the Peace Corps is not much different. Americans are assumed to possess skills and pragmatic attitudes that, transmitted to other people, should help them develop. In practice, this has meant sending college graduates to tropical countries, where they live and work among the natives. At best, their efforts have been received as patronizing; at worst, edgy, xenophobic governments have gotten rid of them. Who is to say that those who try to make a profit or are driven by any of the traditional motives of American enterprise cannot fare at least as well? Richard Gamble, a scion of the Procter & Gamble fortune, invested some of his money and all of his energies in the manufacture of pots and pans in Nigeria. A former New York architect took off for Thailand some years ago and developed a silk-weaving export business that employed some 2000 weavers, grossed over $1,000,000 a year and made Thai silk world-famous. Arthur D. Little, the well-known consulting firm, has been active for many years in making its managerial and organizational techniques available to developing countries. For those who like the adventure of life on the outposts of our industrial civilization, there is always the chance to do likewise. All they need is a bit of capital, some special technical skills or just a new idea and the willingness to break with habits.

While money has never been an obstacle in smoothing the passage, particularly if one goes abroad without a specific plan, there are dozens of other ways of making it into the American expatriate establishment. The classical route is to acquire a foreign language first, either during or after college, and then to apply for a job with prospects of a foreign assignment. It's no accident that every one of the worldly Americans I met started out this way, no matter whether he later succeeded as a member of an international corporation or on his own. Most Americans who go abroad do not go for an easier life. They are out there earning the revenues that allowed many an American company to weather the severe profit squeeze in the U. S. in 1969. Call it what you will--an empire, part of our overseas establishment or merely a presence, as have some conservative editorialists--the fact remains, as James Reston once observed, that "No nation, not even Britain at the height of her imperial power, ever had such a vast company scattered across the world." John Fowles, the British novelist, put a more romantic accent on it when he wrote that America's new expatriates were not much different from the ones who made the country. "The true expatriate has directed his wagon train toward other frontiers, other trails, other improvisations in new territory, [since] America, for real Americans, is always just over the next range of mountains."