The Diplomat

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As the Queen Mary slipped into Southampton last week, British reporters begged Winston Churchill, "Could you give us one of your famous sentences? 'Whatever the outlook is, it's getting better' or something like that? Everybody is waiting for it."

Churchill's bulldog features broke into a grin. "I hadn't prepared any famous sentence," he replied, "but you may be quite sure that His Majesty's Government will do their duty, irrespective of whether what they do is popular."

This week in the House of Commons, His Majesty's Government was doing its duty and testing its popularity. Winston Churchill's most trusted lieutenant, Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, faced the fire of M.P.s eager to know where Britain now stands in the world, how deeply it is committed, how ready to face the risks. Even in a week when the government confronted its people with the worst economic news in years (see above), such questions rained down upon the Tories. The economic news--of cuts and shortages and redoubled austerity--was of personal concern to every Briton, but, to this nation of 50 million people who once ruled the waves and still reckon themselves mighty, so were the decisions on foreign policy.

The Loyal Opposition had some sharp questions to ask of Churchill and Eden. The questions grew partly out of a unique new transatlantic fact: that Winston Churchill, after his talks with President Truman, should be in the position of pleading his case to two different parliaments--Congress in Washington, the House of Commons in London--each wanting a different set of assurances. Just what had Churchill promised the Americans? That Britain stands ready to join the U.S. in bombing and blockading Communist China if the truce talks fail? To his listeners in London, Churchill explained his words in Washington.

"I thought it better," said he, "to speak in general terms of the action we should take in the event of a breach of the truce, and I used the words 'prompt, resolute and effective.' I do not believe they were bad words to use. Certainly . . . they are better than 'tardy, timid and fatuous.'" He had made, he added, to the obvious relief of his listeners, "no final commitment."

Ready to March. One critical sector had eased. Egypt's flare-up had preoccupied Churchill on his homeward voyage; messages in cipher raced back & forth between the Queen Mary and Downing Street. Eden, who had flown back from Washington, worked late and long in emergency conferences. So did the War Office. Britain's strategic reserves on Cyprus were readied for transfer to the Canal Zone; the Mediterranean Fleet was alerted. If King Farouk had not put down the revolt, the British were prepared to move on Egypt. After Farouk's action, Eden turned to conciliation, said Britain was ready to satisfy Egypt's "legitimate national aspirations" so long as Britain's strategic interests were safeguarded. The British lion might be aging, but it could still roar.

Thus last week the Ministers to the King fought a gallant fight to arrest the decline of Britannia, to defend their course and to assert their strength. The battle was in the command of Winston Churchill, Anthony Eden and that grey, inscrutable institution, the Foreign Office. Churchill provided the guiding genius--the audacity, the grand sweep, the long view. Foreign Secretary Eden and his Foreign Office provided the tools--the machinery of persuasion and negotiation, the technicians to run it, the treasure of experience gleaned in decades of leading the world.

Six Elegant Feet. Eden and the Foreign Office are like a mirror and its reflection. In its 170 years (for the Foreign Office as such goes back only to the days of the American Revolution), the "Office" has been a way of international life, and a breeding ground of a particular kind of British character.

From the greying top of his head down to his polished boot tips--a straight drop of six elegant feet--Robert Anthony Eden is the epitome of that character. Now a suave but grey and furrowed 54, the diplomatic "Boy Wonder" of the '30s sits in the red and gilt office of His Majesty's Principal Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs as if it had been fitted to him by a Savile Row tailor.

His working day stretched sometimes to 16 and 17 hours, beginning usually with breakfast and a quick skim of the London Times in bed at 8, followed by a stroll to take the air in nearby St. James's Park. At his Foreign Office desk, his back to a glowing coal fire and a gleaming portrait of George III, he opened & closed a steady stream of red leather dispatch boxes in which the Office has traditionally handed about the cables, reports and memoranda that link Whitehall with the rest of the world. Twirling his horn-rimmed glasses, massaging his eyebrows with fingertips, he studied dispatches, scribbled notes, and conferred with assistants in groups of two or three at a time.

Occasionally, Eden telephoned to No. 10 Downing Street, or bounded across the street to consult Winston Churchill and other Cabinet members personally. One morning he flew over to Paris for urgent talks about French-German quarrels over European rearmament, and hopped back next afternoon. There was business also in the House of Commons, where Eden, the ablest Tory parliamentarian, is also in his element. There he sat languidly, stretching his legs, hands deep in pockets, his head on the back of the bench, and looking for all the world like a Hollywood casting director's conception of a brilliant, handsome, urbane Tory Foreign Secretary.

Certain Sort of Perfection. Anthony Eden has spent much of his life grooming himself to preside with Etonian perfection over the technical machinery of Britain's foreign affairs. The process began before his birth. Windlestone Hall, a handsome, porticoed house in the northern county of Durham, where Eden was born, has been the family seat for four centuries. In the 18th century one Eden was in Parliament, two of his brothers were ambassadors, and a fourth governed Maryland.

Anthony's father, Sir William, 7th baronet of West Auckland and 5th of Maryland, was an eccentric who loved art, painted well, and despised politics, red flowers, the smell of whisky or tobacco, and the high-pitched voices of young children, including those of his four sons (Anthony was the third) and one daughter. It was Eden's mother, a Sargent portrait come to life, who nurtured her son's interest in politics.

At Eton, Eden was a competent but not brilliant scholar, with a fleeting interest in theology. When World War I came, 28 members of Eden's Middle Fourth went, like him, into combat; nine were killed. Two of his brothers also were killed in that "slaughter of the finest," which robbed England of the flower of a generation. Eden went into the King's Royal Rifle Corps as a lieutenant at 18, came out of France a captain with the Military Cross.

At postwar Oxford he "took a first" (highest honors) in languages (Persian and Arabic), founded an art society, began collecting French art (his favorite: Cezanne), and fixed on politics as his career. He was assigned the "safe" Tory seat of Warwick and Leamington, in England's dead center, in 1923, and has held on to it handily in every election since. To the voters there, Socialists and Old Guard alike, he is still "Captain Eden." Good looks, a good brain and an influential father-in-law (he had married Miss Beatrice Beckett, daughter of an owner of the Yorkshire Post) caught the practiced eye of Stanley Baldwin.

Eden advanced fast, although not all the Tories were overwhelmed right off by his performance. "My God," exclaimed Winston Churchill many years later after listening to an Eden speech. "He used every e in the English language with the possible exception of 'God is love' and 'Gentlemen will please adjust their dress before leaving.* "He is still a somewhat soporific speechmaker, but in Parliament is widely respected for having that mystical quality known as "a sense of the House" --an ability to know when to parry, when to thrust, when to break off.

His reliability, earnestness and interest in foreign affairs brought him into the Office, as parliamentary private secretary to Foreign Secretary Sir Austen Chamberlain. "A first-rate second-rater," Chamberlain found him, "who some day may be a big man." By 1931, he had become Under Secretary.

The Eden Boy. The handsome, Homburg-topped Eden profile became familiar alike in ladies' magazines and in the chancelleries of Europe. For his speeches in the League of Nations he was called "that young man who wants peace so terribly much." In Berlin, he was "Der Eden Knabe [the Eden Boy]." Mussolini marked him one of Fascist Italy's enemies, delighted in calling him "the best-dressed fool in Europe."

At 38, Anthony Eden became Britain's youngest Foreign Secretary in a century. He served Neville Chamberlain, though he was out of sympathy with Chamberlain's policy of appeasement. Chamberlain was determined to recognize Mussolini's conquest of Ethiopia, in hopes of an Anglo-Italian understanding. Through a secret go-between, he went so far as to negotiate with Italian Ambassador Dino Grandi behind Eden's back. In February 1938, after Chamberlain, Eden and Grandi had conferred most of one day, Grandi reported to Rome:

"Chamberlain and Eden were not a Prime Minister and a Foreign Minister discussing with the Ambassador of a foreign power a delicate situation . . . They were . . . two enemies confronting each other, like two cocks in true fighting posture. The questions and queries addressed to me by Chamberlain were all, without exception, intentionally put with the aim of producing replies which would have the effect of contradicting and overthrowing . . . Eden."

Two days later, Anthony Eden resigned --with a characteristic lack of fire. A dramatic outburst against a policy he was certain would lead to disaster might have changed the course of Britain, perhaps of history. Instead, Eden chose to bow out with an undramatic, technical speech that quickened no bloodstreams and hurt no feelings. "I do not believe we can make progress in European appeasement," he said in its strongest passage. "... I am certain that progress depends above all on the temper of the nation and that temper must find expression in a firm spirit."

Still, in a world in which resignations on a matter of principle have gone out of style, Eden's act produced a thrill. "There seemed one strong young figure standing up against long, dismal, drawling tides of drift and surrender," wrote the Tory who was soon to step in to arrest the drift. "My conduct of affairs would have been different from his in various ways," Winston Churchill added, "but he seemed to me at this moment to embody the life hope of the British nation."

In the Shadow. The Churchill-Eden partnership grew out of that moment in 1938. Eden, installed once again in the Foreign Office in 1940, came through the war years with enhanced prestige and a conviction that after the peace "we must dare once more and do better." His cautious, spongelike grasping for all the facts --a quality which causes him to treat a weighty decision like a hooded cobra--fitted well with Churchill's decisive, sweeping and sometimes impetuous dealings. Churchill respected Eden's qualities of polish and restraint, which he himself lacks; he designated Eden as heir apparent --though never ceasing to point out, with impish satisfaction, that Gladstone was 82 the last time he became Prime Minister. Eden, outwardly at least, seemed content to stand in the shadow of the Churchillian oak. If ever Eden has felt resentment towards his chief, the public has never seen signs of it. "Anthony is no Brutus," says a friend.

In the Conservatives' six bitter years of postwar exile, Eden became a trusted mediator between the Old Tories and the Young Turks who were coming to the fore. Even when Eden in 1950, after three years of separation, divorced his wife Beatrice on grounds of desertion, his popularity did not suffer. Divorce might have ruined the political future of a less respected man. Today Eden is the only big box-office draw which the Tories can boast, outside Churchill. Not only is he the most popular Tory inside the party--shortly before last fall's election, a Gallup poll showed 49% of Conservative voters favoring Eden as Prime Minister to 34% for Churchill--he is also by far the most popular with non-Tories.

The very qualities which make Eden charming and popular--the pleasant diffidence, the "all charm and middle-of-the-road" which is his trademark, the willingness to concede the other fellow's point--are also Eden's shortcomings as a leader. London's far-left Tribune, house organ of Nye Bevan's group, has editorialized: "Descent from the big Durham landowners . . . the usual progress through Eton and Oxford, a good war record. With as good grace as they can muster, the Tories accept his leadership--for lacking of a challenging competitor. So in the House of Commons, with blood-curdling yells, they watch him unsheath his wooden sword and then subside again as he proves once more how much there is to be said on the other side of the question.

"He is the favorite gladiator of the Tory garden parties, the D'Artagnan of the drawing rooms, the man who storms into the contest with all the zest of Ferdinand the Bull. In brief, Anthony is the best of the bunch, even if his record has blotches, even if his platitudes pall."

Preferably Dukes. In the tight little world of diplomacy that Eden runs, things have changed, but not as much as in the outside world. Traditionally the British diplomat, discreet, reliable and unruffled, has come from the aristocracy, wearing the old tie of Eton, Harrow or Rugby and the casual gloss of Oxford or Cambridge. A candidate for the diplomatic service had to have a private income of at least $2,000 a year. He stood little chance unless he had spent four or five years on the Continent, mastering French and German, Italian and Spanish. As late as 1943, he needed two reputable sponsors, preferably dukes, and had to survive a board of purse-lipped oldsters with a gimlet eye for the cut of a fellow's jib and the sturdiness of his pedigree.

Today a candidate from the outer reaches of British society may make the grade, but not unless he graduates fairly well (a "second class") from a university. Competitive exams usually knock out half the several hundred applicants. The survivors move on to a large old house on London's Chesham Place, once the Czarist Russian embassy, for a harrowing two-day grilling. There, in groups of six, the candidates show their paces before a government official, a psychologist and perhaps a university don. Each is required to make a speech, write a memorandum, chairman a mock committee meeting. The examiners no longer look so closely at clothes or manners. "Of course," said one, "if a man comes in with his hands in his pockets and smoking a cigarette before he has even asked to, he makes a rather poor impression."

As a final test, the candidate writes two brief descriptions of himself--as his severest critic and as his best friend would see him. Then he must give his opinion on how his fellow candidates would do as 1) civil servants, 2) holiday companions. Each year, about 25 survivors are picked as third secretaries in the Foreign Service. Many are already adept in that ancient talent of British diplomacy: the ability to open one's mouth and move one's lips to emit words which give the illusion, but only the illusion, of a reply.

In the field, in the Home Office or in one of the Service's special schools in Slavic, Middle Eastern or Oriental languages, the third secretary gets his diplomatic education. He also learns that his hat should be a black Homburg or a bowler from Lock, his tie subdued, his shoes black. It helps to have a rich wife. For the guidance of young Third Secretary John Bull and his wife, an official in the Foreign Office service four years ago wrote a confidential manual of procedure. It was distributed, but hastily withdrawn. Sample advice:

P: Avoid silence, especially at dinners. "On sitting down, Mr. Bull should without delay engage one of his two neighbors in conversation ... Be careful not to fall into a vacant stare."

P: Don't miss funerals. "In some countries, [they] are unrivaled as occasions in which to cultivate acquaintances. How many an interesting political connection was first conceived by a certain foreign head of a mission in a convulsive handshake in a funeral cortege . . ."

No System Is a System. But it was not small talk and tiny deeds that made British diplomacy so successful. In a recent speech, Harold Nicolson, a scholarly ex-veteran of the Foreign Office, got to the point. "Continental critics and admirers," he said, "are united in the awe with which they regard the skill, persistence and flexibility that our diplomatists . . . have manifested in extracting advantage from the passions of less dispassionate countries.

"The less experienced . . . attribute our deft gifts of maneuver to diabolical cunning, masquerading as stupidity. The more experienced realize that . . . our diplomatic tactics [have] been governed by what ... is really an infinite capacity for adjustment to changing proportions of power."

"What is the English system?" Frederick the Great was asked. "The English," he barked, "have no system." That "no system" has been a system in itself. Britain's foreign policy has been dictated not by planned ambition (e.g., Germany with its Drang nach Osten), by preoccupation with a single enemy (e.g., the French fear of the Germans), or frequent declaration of high-minded and distant goals (e.g., the U.S.). British policy has been to keep the sea lanes open, the trade doors open (at least to itself), and to balance world power by chipping away at any state or group of states that threatened to tip it. British diplomatic tactics have been to avoid long-range commitments, deal with problems only as they arise, seek not "solutions" but "adjustments," which can be counted on to last for perhaps ten years.

It was a policy which Lord Salisbury once characterized as "floating lazily downstream, occasionally putting out a diplomatic boat hook to avoid collision." A Socialist who had held high position in the Foreign Office said to an American correspondent last week: "We were like you once. When things really get tough, you just say, 'Oh well, a hundred million dollars will settle it.' In our case, it was cruisers. Some of the most awful mistakes were made, but then we would send around a couple of cruisers."

Boat hooks, cruisers and skilled diplomats can no longer save Britain from frightening collisions. It has been booted ignominiously from Iran, set upon in Egypt, ambushed in Malaya, even sniped at by Argentina. Burma has left the Commonwealth, Ceylon is thinking of leaving. Six of the great overseas Dominions are now as sovereign as Britain itself, legally bound to the mother island only by the thread of mutual allegiance to the Crown. India, though a Dominion, does not even recognize the Crown. Except for short periods, Britain has been unable to pay its way since 1918. At an alarming rate, its once-rich holdings overseas have gone.

But the ledger is not all in red ink. Britain still controls some 50 strategic colonies, territories and protectorates, totaling 7,068,170 square miles and 83,000,000 people, from Hong Kong to Basutoland to Trinidad. Also on the ledger, though written in invisible ink, is the abiding loyalty of its Dominions: Britain can count on them to help fight its battles and ward off its bankruptcy. An empire which, having lost so much, is still able to hold so much, still has some kind of toughness and durability in its diplomacy.

Partner Troubles. Knowing that their Britannia no longer rules the waves of current history, Winston Churchill and Anthony Eden crossed the Atlantic in December to call the U.S. to the rescue. "Britain and the U.S.," proclaimed Churchill, "are working together and working for the same cause." Privately, he recognized rifts. He felt that the U.S. now treats Britain as a junior partner, as one of a net of European allies; Churchill would not be dealt with as part of a blob. On their side, U.S. officials found Eden and Churchill, after six years in exile, dismayingly out of touch with many of the facts of international life. In that time the U.S. has hardened its position, and perhaps its heart. Eden came to the U.S. full of conventional diplomacy. Was the gap too wide between East & West? Let there be small agreements with the Soviets, and upon them trust might be built. In that way, though still wary of each other, East and West might come to live together in peace, if not in harmony. It was the familiar British formula: adjustments, not solutions.

In the field, there were tensions too. Aggressive U.S. diplomats moved into places like the Middle East ready to admire their British opposites for their easy self-assurance and legacy of experience. But many Americans in the field found British diplomacy flawed by a sparse knowledge of what went on in the streets, and a blindness to the growth of nationalism.

Over & above specific differences hangs a divergence in national viewpoint: the fact that the U.S., by instinct and origin, emotionally responds to colonial peoples' cry for freedom--while its best friend is frankly in the colonial business.

The Impulsive Friend. This week in the House of Commons, Winston Churchill, with all his oratorical skill, and Anthony Eden, with all his practiced adroitness, tried to reassure Parliament that the U.S. is an impulsive friend but a necessary one. They complemented each other, this bold 77-year-old and his loyal lieutenant, who faithfully conceals his occasional dismay at some of Churchill's drums and tramplings. The best twelve years of Anthony Eden's political life have been lived in the shadow of Churchill, and not much grows in the shadow of such an oak.

But some day the oak may no longer be there. Then the model diplomat, capable and correct, must prove how well the British Foreign Office tradition of expertism and caution can adjust to the incautious and wild demands of the second half of the soth century. The answer must wait until Anthony Eden steps out of the oak's shadow.

*A ubiquitous sign in English public lavatories.

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