If I may refer again to history; we failed to halt Hirohito, Mussolini and Hitler by not acting in unity and in time. That marked the beginning of many years of stark tragedy and desperate peril. May it not be that our nations have learned something from that peril?
Since both Churchill and Eden had been prominent among the anti-Munich Tories at the relevant time, they never scrupled to make the comparison themselves. But they were extremely choosy about those whom they would allow to use the Munich analogy against them. Indeed, Eden finally replied to Dulles in tones of genuine exasperation, albeit via a cable to the ambassador in Washington written to be passed on in more diplomatic form:
Americans may think the time past when they need consider the feelings or difficulties of their allies. It is the conviction that this tendency becomes more pronounced every week that is creating mounting difficulties for anyone in this country who wants to maintain close Anglo-American relations.
No whit abashed, Dulles waited a week before demanding British support for an all-out American bombardment of Vietnam to save the French position at Dien Bien Phu. Eden’s comment on this in his memoirs—that “we might well find ourselves involved in the wrong war against the wrong man in the wrong place”—was to become famous in other mouths and versions long after he had departed the political scene.
After consultation with Churchill, accordingly, the British government announced formally that “the best hope of a lasting solution lay in some form of partition.” And that British imperial solution was what, at the subsequent meeting in Geneva, the Vietnamese got. Representing as it did the very minimum of each participant’s actual desire, partition in Vietnam was to be even less stable than its classic forerunners in Ireland, Palestine, and the Indian subcontinent.
The grudging American acceptance of this outcome was accompanied by two further ironic developments. First, Sir Anthony Eden was denounced all over the United States media and Congress for proposing a “Locarno” alliance of pro-Western states in Asia. Since Locarno had been the name of a failed prewar configuration of countries trying to keep the peace in Europe, it was promptly confused with Munich and Eden had to endure in public what he had already suffered from Dulles in private—the allegation that he favored “appeasement.”
Second, as Sir Anthony himself recorded, in careful “special relationship” prose:
Before leaving England, the Prime Minister and I had read a report from Washington of a meeting between Mr. Dulles and some leading American journalists. According to an account which our Embassy thought reliable, the Secretary of State had declared his conviction that American policy in the Middle East, as well as in Asia, had been badly handicapped by a tendency to support British and French “colonial” views. He was reported to have spoken of his determination to talk bluntly about the Middle East, and of his aim to “shift policies.” Sir Winston and I heard nothing of these misgivings during our talks in Washington. Perhaps they were overshadowed by events in Guatemala.
One could hardly condense more of the contradictions of receivership into one paragraph. Balked of his objectives in Indochina, which arose entirely out of a desire to uphold French colonialism, Mr. Dulles rounded on his “colonial” allies, including the ally, Britain, that had restored French colonialism to Indochina in the first place. Britain’s Foreign Secretary, commenting on this, makes a sarcastic allusion to an American neo-colonial enterprise in Guatemala, about which, as it happened, neither the British nor the American government found it possible to be frank. Within two years, Eden was to appeal for the indulgence of Dulles and Eisenhower in another colonial enterprise at Suez, urging them, in the words of his own memoirs, to consider the matter of Nasser’s Egypt in this light:
The world would have suffered less if Hitler had been resisted on the Rhine, in Austria or in Czechoslovakia, rather than in Poland.
Or, again:
The West has been as slow to read Nasser’s A Philosophy of Revolution as it was to read Hitler’s Mein Kampf, with less excuse because it is shorter and not so turgid.
Mr. Dulles and President Eisenhower chose, on this occasion, to find the Munich analogy unpersuasive. Suez is a thrice-told tale, and not worth retelling in any detail except as a reminder of how intense was British Establishment resentment at American neutrality, and how decided was the American Establishment that the British hour in the Middle East was over. The United States did not actually confine itself to neutrality. It strenuously opposed, at the United Nations and elsewhere, the British collusion with France and Israel in the invasion of Egypt. More, it openly stated its doubts that the British in Cyprus and the French in Algeria were really pursuing a justifiable policy. The first occasion when the British used their power of veto in the United Nations was to defeat a resolution on Suez put forward by Mr. Henry Cabot Lodge which would have condemned the Anglo-French ultimatum to Egypt. “It was not Soviet Russia or any Arab state,” minuted Eden bitterly, “but the Government of the United States which took the lead in the Assembly against Israel, France and Britain.” Vice President Nixon put forward the U.S. government’s line in a speech in which he said:
For the first time in history we have shown independence of Anglo-French policies towards Africa and Asia which seemed to us to reflect the colonial tradition. This declaration of independence has had an electrifying effect throughout the world. [Italics mine.]
No doubt there was a touch of Schadenfreude in the American position, derived from resentment at British high-mindedness and pragmatism over Vietnam. Considering that Eisenhower had extorted British support for his covert invasion of Guatemala by suggesting continued American understanding for the British position in Cyprus and the Canal Zone (a riposte that the British Tories could not possibly make in public), the British reciprocal resentment is not hard to imagine. A glance at the London Times correspondence columns for the autumn of 1956, or the speeches of Conservative backbenchers in the same period, shows the outpouring of a long-pent-up dislike for, and suspicion of, American global intentions and political morality. Significantly, American tardiness in entering the war against Hitler was an almost universal theme in these effusions.
For a few days in the last weeks of 1956, the wartime analogy seemed less of a strain on credulity than it would normally be. Petrol rationing was imposed in Britain for the first time since the war. And there was another reminder of the vulnerability of the pound sterling to the American Treasury, of the sort that had not been driven home since 1944. British reserves fell $57 million in September, $84 million in October, and $309 million in November, to the point where Harold Macmillan, Chancellor of the Exchequer, had to humiliate himself in the House of Commons. In Cabinet he said that unless there was a change of course in the invasion he had so heartily supported, he “could not anymore be responsible for Her Majesty’s Exchequer.”
At this point, or somewhere near it, consideration of the “special relationship” began to weigh in Washington at least as heavily as the consideration of “anticolonialism” in the Middle East. The British had announced a humbling cease-fire only a few hours after their brutal and chaotic landings. Their Treasury could hardly be called their own. The whole thing had turned out so much worse than anybody could possibly have predicted. And even Eisenhower, who had been appalled by British duplicity in respect of himself, could not welcome the total collapse of Eden and his government. Conversations between Winthrop Aldrich, the U.S. ambassador in London, and Eisenhower make it plain that the President wanted to save what he could of Tory prestige. Indeed, as Donald Neff puts it in his surpassing history of the Suez affair:
Although the messages on the secret negotiations between Aldrich and the leadership of the Tory Party remain classified by the government, transcripts of Eisenhower’s telephone conversations make it clear that the Conservative leaders and the Eisenhower Administration now began a secret collusion of their own. Its purpose was to keep the Conservative government in power in Britain.
A word, here, on Ambas
sador Winthrop Aldrich. In his own person, he was the very example of the class and business aspects of the “special relationship.” He was also a good instance of its ethnic solidarity. He was the son of Senator Nelson Aldrich of Rhode Island, a nineteenth-century railway and streetcar king. His older sister Abby married John D. Rockefeller in 1901. The family had English governesses (the Misses Tetlow) and owned rather a good chunk of Warwick Neck, near Narragansett Bay. In the Library of Congress to this day you can find a five-volume genealogy of the Aldriches, privately bound and published, which shows their connection to the posterity of George Aldrich, of Derbyshire, England, who left Derby for Dorchester, Massachusetts, in 1631.
Winthrop Aldrich spent most of his maturity managing the Chase Manhattan Bank and supporting the Republican political interest. During the Second World War he worked for British War Relief and was decorated at Buckingham Palace by King George. At the end of the war, he testified before the Senate on the decisive matter of a U.S. loan to Britain, in the words of his Harvard Business School biographer, “because he thought it would speed up the removal of British controls on foreign trade and exchange long before the Bretton Woods agreements could make their effect felt. The administration’s case for the loan had been made to Congress on these grounds, and in his testimony Aldrich presented similar arguments relating to the elimination of the sterling area as a result of the loan.” This testimony of a conservative banker on behalf of a Democratic administration helped ease the loan past the jealous scrutiny of Republican isolationists such as Robert Taft.
On his arrival as ambassador to the Court of St. James’s in 1953, having been a distinguished supporter of Eisenhower’s election campaign and weathered a few awkward questions at his confirmation hearing, Aldrich addressed the Pilgrims’ Society Dinner and the English-Speaking Union. These routine stops for a new envoy were made more pointful by his traceable lineage and his strong defense, on the latter occasion, of American intervention in both world wars. The British, he said in this last connection, had had to wait too long for America to see its own best interests and principles. An enraged editorial from Colonel McCormick’s still isolationist Chicago Tribune greeted this opinion, which it said was “the gospel according to Roosevelt and Wall Street and is vicious nonsense.” But isolationism was no longer the common sense of Middle America, as Eisenhower was to demonstrate.
Aldrich busied himself chiefly in business and industrial circles while in London, and also found time to move the United States ambassador’s official residence from 14 Prince’s Gate to the commanding position it now occupies at Winfield House, Regent’s Park. This home, which had been gifted to the U.S. government by Barbara Hutton some years before, had been a USAF officers’ club during the war and remained in use as such. Aldrich decided that it would make a more fitting home. Thanks to the personal intercession of Sir Winston Churchill, he was able to get a ninety-nine-year lease from the Commissioners of Crown Lands for a rent of five pounds. In return he gave an undertaking that the house would be used only as a diplomatic residence. Mrs. Aldrich and a State Department decorating consultant did the rest, and Winfield House was “warmed” at a dinner dance attended by the new Queen and Prince Philip. As a “special relationship” touch, the Queen herself proposed that the party be held on Washington’s birthday. Aldrich was thus well established in London by the time that Suez had destroyed the composure of his hosts.
There was no need, in the circumstances, to “destabilize” Sir Anthony Eden. His attempt to emulate Churchill in making furious broadcasts and ordering the rash deployment of troops and planes and ships (an attempt perhaps too long meditated during the years he had dwelt in Churchill’s shadow) had in effect discredited itself. Moreover, he was chronically ill in mind and body, having at certain moments almost become the unstable maniac that he had obsessively claimed to detect in the figure of Nasser. Most pundits expected that his long-suffering deputy R. A. Butler would succeed him. But there was another, more serious candidate in the person of Harold Macmillan. The sequence of events revealed in the traffic between Ambassador Aldrich and President Eisenhower is a classic of “special relationship” vernacular.
On November 19, Ambassador Aldrich met with Harold Macmillan, who showed himself willing to sue for peace with Egypt along Eisenhower-Dulles lines because the alternative was an oil crisis and the likely dismissal of the Conservative Party from office. Aldrich telephoned the President personally. “My guess is correct,” he said. “I guessed there was going to be a change. . . . Harold Macmillan is terribly anxious to see you as soon as possible. I’ll spell that out in the message, too.”
Eisenhower thereupon called Herbert Hoover, Jr., Under Secretary of State, and asked him what message might have come from Grosvenor Square. Hoover told him that “the guess is that the Cabinet is completely to be reshuffled, and that Eden’s going out because of sickness.”
Almost at once, Treasury Secretary George Humphrey telephoned. He also had just talked to Aldrich in London. “I want to remind you,” said Eisenhower, “of our discussion about a remote possibility. Aldrich says part of it is coming about. There are a lot of conditions we cannot possibly meet.” Humphrey’s response was to remind the President of the domestic political stakes in Britain. “I hate to have a man stick in there and go to a vote of confidence and get licked. If they throw him out then we have these socialists to lick.”
Humphrey here expressed the usual “apolitical” concerns of the Treasury Department, but he also happened to be a friend of R. A. Butler’s and a believer in the conventional wisdom about Butler’s likely succession. Next day, November 20, 1956, Eisenhower, Hoover, and Humphrey met again. Eisenhower expressed a preference for Macmillan, saying, “He is a fine, straight man and so far as I am concerned the outstanding one of the British I served with during the war.” The question then became one of a “fig leaf’ that Ambassador Aldrich had mentioned in his written message. It was agreed that the United States would not help the British government unless it consented to a withdrawal from Suez, but that if a withdrawal was undertaken, economic and political aid could be forthcoming in generous quantities. Eisenhower proposed that Aldrich be instructed in those terms. “We can simply couch our statement along the lines of ‘on the assumption stated by Macmillan—that is, that they will announce at once an immediate withdrawal—they can be assured of our sympathetic consultation and help.’ Also Macmillan can meet with me on that assumption.”
The difficulty here was that Eden was still Prime Minister. How was one of his deputies to be approached in this unorthodox fashion? Once again Ambassador Aldrich was asked his advice on the telephone. Eisenhower was extremely circumspect:
“We have been getting your messages and I want to make an inquiry. You are dealing with at least one person—maybe two or three—on a very personal basis. Is it possible for you, without embarrassment, to get together the two that you mentioned in one of your messages?”
“Yes, one of them I have just been playing bridge with. Perhaps I can stop him.”
“I’d rather you talk to both together. You know who I mean? One has the same name as my predecessor at the Columbia University presidency. The other one was with me in the war.”
“I know the one with you in the war . . . oh, yes, now I’ve got it.”
“Could you get them informally and say of course we are interested and sympathetic, and as soon as things happen that we anticipate we can furnish a lot of fig leaves?”
“I certainly can say that.”
“Will that be enough to get the boys moving?”
“I think it will be.”
“You see, we don’t want to be in a position of interfering between those two. But we want to have you personally tell them. They are both good friends.”
“Yes, very much so. Have you seen my messages regarding my conversations with them all?”
“Yes, with at least two.”
“That is wonderful. I will do this—tomorrow?”
&nb
sp; “Yes, first thing in the morning.”
“I shall certainly do it. And I will then communicate with you at once. Can do it without the slightest embarrassment.”
The day after this conversation, which contains all the essential “special relationship” subtexts—from the mention of a bridge game to the nudging reference to Eisenhower’s Columbia predecessor, who was named Nicholas Murray Butler—there was another meeting. Secretary Humphrey spoke presciently:
The British are facing a financial crisis within ten days. I think the sequence of events will be this. The British will start out of Suez in a few days. The British will want to come out here a few days later. This will be the time when we must bargain hard with them. Between those dates we must let King Saud, and even Nasser, know that in starting talks with the British, we have not reversed our stand toward them and that we want an understanding with them prior to the British talks. By December 3 our arrangements must be in hand because that is the date of the British financial announcement.
Humphrey was off by only one day. It was on December 4 that Macmillan told the House that Great Britain had had to ask for extra time to pay off the interest on past loans. By then, Sir Anthony Eden had departed for “recuperation” in Jamaica. Aldrich called from London to say that, whatever the motivation might be, “his resignation would no doubt deflect from British government onus for Suez policy, of which he of course was principal architect. Such action would perhaps enable Tory Party to remain at helm in Britain and would mend U.K.’s strained relations with its allies and friends.” This was a succinct expression of the two aims of Washington in the Suez crisis, aims which were successfully consummated by Macmillan’s accession to power shortly afterward. He was to make the restoration of “special relationship” ties his first order of business. As he put it in his feline address to the Pilgrims’ Dinner, given in honor of Ambassador Aldrich’s retirement in January 1957, and referring to the Suez crisis:
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