The Chosen Leader

GREAT BRITAIN The Chosen Leader (See Cover)

A tired, sick, dispirited man emerged from 10 Downing Street, climbed into his official car, and sped through the chill January darkness to Buckingham Palace. Minutes later, the palace announced that Queen Elizabeth "was pleased to accept" the resignation of Sir Anthony Eden. Swinging out through the palace gates, Eden's black Humber rolled through London's darkened back streets, flashing headlights to warn police of its approach. It stopped opposite the Victorian pile of the Museum of Natural History, where another car waited. A slim, feminine figure in a red cossack hat and pale, loose coat, and carrying a yellow hatbox, jumped out of the waiting car and got into Eden's car. As the door closed, Clarissa Eden opened the hatbox, took out a small cushion and tucked it behind her husband's head. From a following car, newsmen could see Eden's head roll tiredly from side to side on the cushion as the car roared at 60 miles an hour toward Chequers, carrying into retirement and the long shadows of history an exhausted man on whose shoulders rested a burden of disaster few men have had to bear. Thus ended the 642 days of the prime ministry of Sir Anthony Eden--one of the shortest and most melancholy in Britain's proud history.

Next morning, while London pundits predicted almost with one voice that his successor would probably be Lord Privy Seal Richard Austen ("Rab") Butler, curious crowds gathered before the palace gates. At 1:45 p.m. a cry went up when a small, dusty Wolseley entered the palace gates: "Here comes Butler!" Then some one recognized the bareheaded man sitting next to the driver in the front seat, and shouted: "It's Mac, the bookie!" Forty minutes later, Chancellor of the Exchequer Harold Macmillan, half-American grandson of a Scots tenant farmer, ex-Grenadier Guardsman and wartime friend of President Dwight Eisenhower, walked out of the palace as Her Majesty's Prime Minister and First Lord of the Treasury.

Eden Must Go. Few had anticipated Macmillan's choice: the Economist called it "startling." But for weeks, Tories had known in their hearts that Sir Anthony would have to go; it had only been a question of time. It was not merely that he had miscalculated grievously on a matter of vital national policy--straining the U.S. alliance as it had never been strained before, bitterly dividing his own country, coming within a hairsbreadth of shattering the Commonwealth, blocking the canal he sought to seize. A man of greater flair might have carried off as great a blunder and outlived it. Rather it was that, faced with the consequences of his miscalculations, Eden was not up to rectifying the damage. In the Suez aftermath, nobody hated Eden; he was seen as pathetic. As a leader, Eden could have survived hate. He could not survive pity.

Even before Eden's health collapsed under "severe overstrain" and he flew to Jamaica for three weeks' rest, the talk in St. James's political clubs had been on the choice of the man who should succeed Eden. Eden, fully aware of the talk, was ready to go as soon as the succession was settled.

He got his nerve back in Jamaica. Returning in mid-December, he told the nation that he was "absolutely fit," and defiantly insisted: "I am convinced-more convinced than I have ever been before about anything in my public life--that we were right. History will prove us right." Plainly, Eden had no intention of quitting just then. Perhaps he had hoped that, in his absence, the bitter dispute over Suez would have subsided.

It had not; in fact, it was still so virulent that in many clubs the topic of Suez had to be tacitly forbidden. In the House of Lords, Lord Tedder (Ike's air marshal in World War II) called Suez "a tragic mistake" which had split the nation. "One even knows of families who are giving up their Christmas gathering because they know there will be fighting over this issue."

Despite his burnished Jamaica tan, Eden was still a very sick man. In Jamaica he had suffered a recurrence of fever and of the stomach trouble for which he had earlier been operated on three times--the last time in a delicate and rare operation to remove an obstacle in the bile duct, at Boston's famed Lahey Clinic in 1953. Reports trickled back from the Caribbean that he had sometimes waked shouting in the night. At Cabinet meetings, colleagues noticed that his cheeks were hollow, his face lined, his eyes tired and lackluster. "He could still lose his temper, but at points he seemed too tired even to bother to do that," said one colleague.

In Parliament Eden doggedly defended his policies. Before the Christmas recess, he answered a last question: "I would be compelled, if I had the same very disagreeable decisions to take again, to repeat them." Those were to be the last words he was ever to speak in his 34 years in the House of Commons. As the Speaker broke in to move adjournment, Eden fell back onto his seat, head lolling on the green cushioning as he stared vacantly upward. Only when a colleague tugged at his arm did he heave himself to his feet and walk into the lobby to vote. "There goes a 'done' man,'' said one watching M.P.

Lonely Journey. Over the Christmas holidays Eden's doctors hustled down to Chequers several times. A week ago, intimates knew that Eden had reached a decision. The secret was closely held, eluded all the London press. No one even suspected when on Tuesday Eden and his wife boarded a train at London's Liverpool Street station and journeyed 100 miles north into the bleak Norfolk flatlands to see Queen Elizabeth at her country estate at Sandringham. There Eden told her of his decision.

The Edens stayed overnight. Next day it was publicly announced that the Queen was returning to London. Suddenly, all Whitehall was agog.

The Edens, returning by train, reached 10 Downing Street at 2 p.m. The Queen followed by car, arrived at Buckingham Palace at 5:20 p.m. Twenty minutes before. Eden had confronted his hurriedly assembled Cabinet ministers. Briefly and curtly, toying with a pencil in his fluttering fingers. Sir Anthony explained that his doctors declared his health was giving them cause for concern. There were very difficult times ahead, and he felt it his duty to say forthwith that his health was not good enough to sustain him through these tasks. The formal visit to Buckingham Palace followed.*

Final Failure. The resignation, even though it was inevitable, caused a momentous shock, not only in Britain but also around the world. For few men had ever seemed more thoroughly equipped by education and experience for leadership than Anthony Eden. Descendant of a centuries-old landed family, educated at Eton and Oxford, decorated for gallantry in World War I. Foreign Secretary at 38, Eden was the handsome glamour boy of the prewar international scene, made himself the hero of millions when he resigned in 1938 to protest Chamberlain's policies of appeasement. He was probably the most skilled diplomatic technician of his time. When, after long years in the shadow of the great Churchill, Eden became Prime Minister in 1955, he led the Tories to an electoral victory which tripled their majority in the House. Polls showed his popularity higher than Churchill's, and all men wished him well.

Less than nine months later, critics were calling him a "ditherer," and the staunchly Tory Daily Mail wailed: "We cannot go on like this''--a chorus so loud that No. 10 Downing Street felt impelled to deny formally that Eden had any intention of resigning.

His final failure came, ironically, in foreign policy, the field he knows best, and in the Middle East, the area which had been his specialty since he majored in Arabic at Oxford. How could this expert so ineptly misjudge at Suez? The answer may be that he was too long imbued with the technique and tradition that belonged to another time. It was a tradition that remembered fondly how Britain drew borders and created kingdoms for idle Hashemite Kings in Iraq and Jordan, or rolled tanks up to Farouk's palace in 1942 to force the King to accept a Premier of British choosing. Princes placed in office in such fashion can be as easily removed, to the public's indifference. But Nasser had not reached power that way, and was not so easily dislodgeable. This was one expert miscalculation; the second was the misjudgment of world opinion. In the deception that preceded the Suez venture and the evasions that followed it, Eden damaged the world's image of Britain. History's kindest verdict may be that he meant well and should have known better. The Evolution. The initiative to resign was Eden's own. The Tory Party was caught unprepared. In theory, the Queen herself designates the new Prime Minister; in practice, the parties give her no choice at all. The Labor Party is unequivocal: it caucuses, elects a new leader, and proposes him to the Queen. The Tories, oldest of all political parties, work more subtly. In Tory eyes, open elections solidify splits; leadership should "evolve." Usually the heir apparent is recognized well in advance, as Eden was in Churchill's time. But until the past few weeks, the Tories expected no immediate need to evolve an Eden successor, and preferred to postpone what did not have to be faced. So it happened that at 6:55 on Wednesday night, as Anthony Eden was speeding to Chequers, the Tories found themselves without an agreed candidate. What happened in the next 19 hours was the unique, mysterious process of internal consultation, without formal votes or speeches, of the Tory Party with itself, which produced a Prime Minister.

Logically, the favorite candidate was Rab Butler, the austere, coldly intelligent son of an Indian civil servant, and sometime Master of Pembroke College. Cambridge. As architect of the "new" Conservatism in domestic policies and leader of the younger Tories. Rab Butler was informally rated No. 2 Tory, chaired Cabinet meetings when Eden was away. Though Butler loyally defended Eden's Suez policies, he had managed to convey that he was less than enthusiastic. Otherwise he made no effort to challenge Eden's leadership: at 54, he recognized that he was young enough to wait his turn.

Sad-eyed. Edwardian-elegant Harold Macmillan was ranked No. 3. An ex-Guards officer and book publisher, he was married to a daughter of the Duke of Devonshire, and was related through her to Senior Tory Party Leader Lord Salisbury.

During prewar days, Salisbury, Churchill, Eden and Macmillan had been a quartet outspoken in opposing the appeasement policies of Neville Chamberlain (while Butler, as foreign-policy spokesman in the House, was defending Chamberlain). At 62, Macmillan was three years older than Eden, had only recently joked about resigning soon to accept the peerage "that is my right" as a retiring senior Cabinet member. He had supported Eden on Suez: a vote for him did not involve admitting that Suez was a blunder.

At Boodle's. The subtle machinery of Tory policymaking went to work. After Eden left the Cabinet room, Lord Salisbury and the Lord High Chancellor. Lord Kilmuir (better known as ex-Home Secretary David Maxwell Fyfe), stayed behind. As the other Cabinet members left, they asked each to come back individually later to give his private views on his choice for successor. In another room, the junior ministers talked. In both cases the consensus was reportedly overwhelmingly in favor of Macmillan. All evening long, at the Carlton Club, in Beefsteak and Boodle's, at White's and the Bath Club, and across Piccadilly at the Turf, the same curious process of evolution went on. Thirty Suez-Group backbenchers gathered privately, sent word to the party chiefs that they would not serve under Butler. Butler's chief support came from "progressive" Tories who liked his social-welfare theories. Tory right-wingers were terrified of Butler's "pink socialism." and heartily annoyed at his presumed disloyalty to Eden on Suez. To this kind of Conservative, even if Macmillan reached the same answer as Butler on an economic question, he would have done so by sounder processes. And he had proved himself true Tory blue on Empire. Furthermore, Macmillan, as a businessman himself and an able administrator, had the confidence of the Tories' business and financial backers.

As the night wore on, it became apparent that Butler would command broad but unenthusiastic support, but would arouse bitter opposition from the right-wingers. Macmillan would get only tepid adherence from the Tory left, but their opposition would be far less virulent than the Suez Groupers' against Butler. In a word, Butler's supporters would acquiesce in the choice of Macmillan; Macmillan's supporters would bitterly oppose Butler. On balance, the choice was clearly Macmillan.

By morning, that tacitly agreed decision was conveyed to the Tory leaders by means and methods that are beyond any outsider's comprehension: at that moment London newspapers were still proclaiming Butler the probable choice.

The Phone Call. The Queen summoned only two men to advise her. First was Lord Salisbury, 62, widely regarded as the ablest Tory of them all, but disbarred from becoming Prime Minister by the unwritten 20th century understanding that he must be a member of the House of Commons. Next came Sir Winston Churchill himself. Both are longtime friends of Macmillan but only colleagues of Butler. Both, presumably, advised her to call Macmillan. But neither could have tendered that advice if the Tory Party had not reached its mysterious concurrence in the course of the long night. And what if the Queen had preferred Butler? It would have been necessary for someone to tell her, as Melbourne told Victoria, that she risked having a government formed against her known wishes.

All morning long, Butler and Macmillan worked at their desks as usual, each waiting for the fateful phone call summoning him to Buckingham Palace. At 1:30 widower Butler went home to a lonely lunch. A few moments later the phone rang in 11 Downing Street, official residence of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Macmillan rushed off to "kiss hands upon his appointment."

The New Man. Britain's new Prime Minister has the elegance of an aristocrat, the literacy of a scholar, the drive of an executive. His oratorical gestures are as widely expansive as his mustache, his eyes are hound-dog sad, but his wit is quick and cheerfully malicious.

He is proud that his grandfather was a Scottish crofter, or tenant farmer (he keeps a picture of the croft on his desk). In 1843 grandfather left his farm on the barren Isle of Arran and walked to London, there founded the famed publishing house, Macmillan & Co. Ltd. Macmillan's mother was an American girl, Helen Belles, from Spencer, Ind.,* who met his father when she, recently widowed, had gone to Paris to study singing and he to study music. Young Harold won scholarships to Eton and Oxford, where he was secretary of the Oxford Union and hailed by the undergraduate paper as "quite the most polished orator in the union--perhaps just a little too polished."

Called from his studies by World War I, Macmillan served gallantly in the Grenadier Guards, was wounded three times. After the war he served long enough as aide to the Duke of Devonshire, then Canada's Governor General, to meet and marry his daughter. Lady Dorothy Cavendish. Through his marriage, Macmillan acquired links with one of the few remaining great families which (as left-wing politicians like to say) "control the Tory Party." His wife's brother married a sister of Lord Salisbury, a member of the great Cecil family who have been advisers and ministers to Britain's Kings since the first Elizabeth. Through these connections, Macmillan is related to at least 200 members of the ruling class--in Commons, the Lords, and the higher reaches of the civil and foreign services.

Elected to Parliament in 1924 from the tough shipyard and foundry constituency of Stockton-on-Tees, Macmillan was deeply moved by the suffering that the Depression brought to his constituents, established "dole schools" which he personally financed, to teach unemployed workers useful crafts. In Parliament he acidly attacked the inaction of his own Conservative Party, called it a "party dominated by second-class brewers and company promoters." In 1936 he even crossed the aisle to vote with Labor in censuring the government's inaction in depressed areas. The task of his generation, he cried, was "to conquer poverty ... To invent new social devices for the regulation of plenty." In a 1938 book called The Middle Way, he urged government planning to reform the economic order and create welfare services, was promptly labeled a "Conservative New Dealer," and backbenchers dismissed his whole group as Y.M.C.A. boys. Wrote Macmillan: "The dynamic of social change resides in our discontent with things as they are. If that discontent is shared by the comfortable as well as the unfortunate, then these changes can be accomplished by a process of peaceful evolution."

His other major dissent from the Tory leadership was foreign policy. Two years before Eden, he renounced the party whip (roughly equivalent to resignation from the party) in 1936, in protest against the failure to impose economic sanctions against Mussolini's Ethiopian invasion.

When Churchill came to power in 1940, he called Macmillan to serve in the Ministry of Supply. In 1942 Churchill sent him to North Africa as British political representative at the Allied headquarters of General Dwight Eisenhower. There, in two years of close cooperation, they became "Mac" and "Ike." Macmillan, who was taught French by his mother before he spoke English, was given a large measure of credit for patching up the truce between the feuding French Generals Giraud and De Gaulle. He moved on to head the Allied Control Commission in Italy, where he conducted the negotiations with Italy's Marshal Badoglio. Late in the war Macmillan was sent to Greece to mediate in the savage civil war; he installed as Regent the bearded Archbishop Damaskinos, who held Greece in an uneasy peace for another year.

At war's end Macmillan returned to London bedecked with honors and praise, only to see the Conservatives go down to defeat. In the debacle he lost his own Stockton seat, but soon returned to Parliament from the safe constituency of Bromley, near London. In opposition, he turned his acid tongue on the Socialists ("The brave new world has turned into nothing but fish and Cripps"), but was gratified to find himself no longer a rebel in his own party--it now agreed with him. Laborites detested his tart, hectoring manner. The Laborite Daily Herald snapped: "He merely gibes and sneers and ogles for cheap laughs like a fifth-rate comedian."

When his old friend and sponsor Winston Churchill returned to power in 1951, Macmillan became Minister of Housing. A major Tory electoral pledge was that they would build 300,000 houses a year; Labor said it could not be done. Macmillan did it, and did it well. He bounded around Britain in his Edwardian greatcoat and cap, inspecting new homes, wading into ankle-deep mud to view damage in the 1952 floods. He insisted on building "people's houses" within the reach of workers making only $25 or $30 a month (at a time when his brother-in-law, the new Duke of Devonshire, was appealing to the government to reduce $6,000,000 in death duties on his father's estate). After three years, Macmillan was promoted to Defense, presided over Britain's "New Look" which converted British forces to the atomic age.

When Churchill retired and Eden took over, Macmillan became Foreign Secretary, a job he did not hold long enough to distinguish himself in. A Foreign Secretary, he said, is always "poised between a cliche and an indiscretion." Among his indiscretions: returning from the summit meeting at Geneva, he bounded off the plane and declared expansively: "There ain't going to be no war"--as if the Russian assurances had settled everything.

New Lease. His transfer to the Treasury in 1955, succeeding Rab Butler, gave him a new lease on political life. Treasury officials found Macmillan quick to absorb new problems, and economists have generally approved his efforts to moderate Britain's threatening inflation. He succeeded, where Butler had not, in dramatizing the danger Britain is in, won himself a series of nicknames from opponents (deriving from Three Penny Opera), ranging from "Mac the Knife," because of his pledge to cut government expenditures by $300 million, to "Mac the Bookie," because of his introduction of "lottery" bonds. And he cheerfully indulged his taste for metaphor. Sample: "The credit squeeze is not that of a boa constrictor but of the masseur." But his greatest contribution has been his sponsorship of a common European market. From the bloody World War I fields of Flanders, where he saw so many of his friends die, Macmillan has brought a conviction that the only way Europe can find some way out of its endless strife is in a new unity. He is the most European-minded of any British politician.

With age and responsibility, Macmillan has moderated the gibes that used to make Laborites squirm, has also toned down the Edwardian mannerisms that set their egalitarian teeth on edge. His stiff collars and Edwardian suits have been replaced, his sheepdog mustache trimmed. Currently he is rated the best orator the Tories have, but now his oratory rests more on clarity than on biting sarcasm. More and more, Labor benches listen to his argument instead of bristling when he rises to speak.

Macmillan constantly polishes and practices his speeches, to achieve what Churchill calls "calculated improvisation." When a happy phrase occurs to him, he jots it down for use later--a process he calls "hatching eggs"--and deposits it in what he calls "the eggbox." When composing a speech for Commons, he often fishes out an appropriate sentence and uses it. He reads prodigiously, found time last summer between official papers to read all of George Eliot, Lucretius (in Latin), several Trollope novels, and Stendhal's Le Rouge et Le Noir in French. (In Flanders, wounded and pinned down in a shell hole, he had whiled away the time by reading a volume of Aeschylus in the original Greek.) Weekends, he repairs to his big, sprawling house in Sussex, where he gets in some shooting and presides over the large-scale family gatherings. He has one son, an M.P., three daughters (one of them married to another M.P., angry Suez Rebel Julian Amery), and ten grandchildren.

As he took over as Her Majesty's First Minister last week, Macmillan was greeted with relief, but no wild acclaim. The Tories themselves seemed chiefly relieved that an open split had been avoided. "At least he will do a better job of holding the party together than Butler could," said one ex-minister. Said former Party Chairman Lord Woolton: "Macmillan is tougher." The London Times, conceding that he was "essentially a man of good will," regretted that "he is generally believed to stand on the right half of the party." The Manchester Guardian grumbled that "a greater change of leadership would have been preferable." "Almost the worst Prime Minister possible from the national point of view," growled the Laborite Daily Herald, which might also be read as grudging acknowledgment of a formidable opponent. From Harvard, where he was lecturing, Labor Leader Hugh Gaitskell demanded an immediate general election, and on his instructions, the Labor Party began a foolish outcry that the Queen had somehow been put upon in her choice.

After formally clearing his new Cabinet with the Queen, Macmillan made it public. Selwyn Lloyd, as much tarred as Eden with the diplomatic evasions of Suez, remained as Foreign Secretary, at least for a while: removing him now might be taken as a victory for Nasser. Rab Butler, the man who had lost out, stayed on as Lord Privy Seal (a job with no important duties), and became as well Home Secretary, a post equivalent to Secretary of the Interior. To a reporter he confided: "It was a very close thing--closer than many people imagined--but let us say that the best man won. Those who missed the bus must resign themselves to walking. It would be foolish to pretend that I was not disappointed by the Queen's decision . . . I am still comparatively young." Two even younger men who got top promotions were: Peter Thorneycroft, 47, who succeeded Macmillan at the Treasury, and Winston Churchill's son-in-law, Duncan Sandys, 48, who became Defense Minister in place of a Suez casualty, Antony Head. Most people had expected, and hoped for, more sweeping changes.

With this team, Macmillan had to get Britain past the immediate crisis brought on by the blockage of the canal. He had to restore some self-respect to the Tory Party. In foreign policy, his first priority was to re-establish the old confidence between the U.S. and Britain. It was a task easier for Macmillan, who during the Suez crisis had described himself as "half American," than for Eden. Washington, which rebuffed all recent attempts of Eden to see

Eisenhower, made known that Macmillan would be welcome any time.

From Sir Anthony Eden, Macmillan inherits a comfortable Tory majority of 59 in the House of Commons, with which he will probably hope to hold off a general election until the Tories' five-year term runs out in 1960. Labor can be expected to demand a general election now, on the grounds that a new Prime Minister, and one who was not naturally heir apparent, should request a new mandate. As he came out of n Downing Street the first day, Harold Macmillan was asked whether he favored an early election. "No," he said with a confident bristle of his mustache. "But when there is one, we should win it."

-* Eden announced that he was also resigning his seat in Parliament. Since outright resignation is considered a show of disloyalty to the Crown, he will follow the ancient practice of disqualifying himself by applying for a job of "honor and profit" under the Crown. This post has since 1742 been "Bailiff or Steward of the Chiltern Hundreds" -- a job originally established to protect the Chiltern Hills from bandits, and which once carried the nominal salary of -L-i a year. The salary, like the bailiff's duties, has long since receded into traditional fiction. Eden also turned down "for the present" the Queen's prompt offer of an earldom -- the customary reward for retiring Prime Ministers. *Last year Macmillan visited his mother's home town, peered through the window of the house where she had lived, gallantly tried eating fried chicken with his fingers, and at the invitation of the pastor read the lesson in the Methodist Church where his mother had worshiped (he himself is Church of England).

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