by Roy Jenkins
Yet, in spite of the weaknesses, Crossman was by no means wholly a bad minister. He was vigorous and innovating. It was merely that he was not as good as he ought to have been in relation to his talents. He was always a commentator first and an executant second. He was frequently more interested in the argument than in the result. But his sotto voce remarks made him an irreplaceable companion.
Part of his desire to shock, out of which he never grew, may have stemmed from a persistence of his adolescent bullying. But there was also a much more amiable side to it. He was as natural a teacher as he was a commentator. An aggressively conducted seminar, with himself in the chair, was his idea of paradise. And his early and continuing conviction was that the best way to open closed minds and to keep open minds engaged was to shock them. Of the time when I first met Crossman (fifty-six years ago) I wrote in my autobiography: ‘The visitor [to my parent’s house in South Wales] who most dazzled me was without doubt Richard Crossman. His brand of verve and paradox I found very exciting at sixteen.’ In later life I did not exactly admire him, but I enjoyed his company to an extent matched by that of only three or four other politicians.
Garret FitzGerald
This piece started life as a 1991 Observer review of Garret FitzGerald’s autobiography All In a Life (Macmillan).
I Have Long found Irish politics both fascinating and mystifying. From the Phoenix Park assassination of Lord Frederick Cavendish in 1882 to the Easter Rising in 1916 they provided a crucial and mostly unhelpful background to the careers of my main biographical subjects, Dilke and Asquith. In my second period as Home Secretary (1974-6) terrorism of Irish origin was obtrusive, and I provided a locus classicus for the permanence of the provisional by introducing the Prevention of Terrorism (Temporary Provisions) Act, which is still on the Statute Book nineteen years later.
As President of the European Commission three years later I had dealings with three Taoiseachs, paid a dozen or more visits to Ireland, and leant over backwards, as any British President should have done, to cultivate my Dublin relationships and to encourage and enjoy the Irish pleasure at leap-frogging over Britain’s semi-detachment into the mainstream of full European commitment. I did not find this difficult, for my natural prejudices, such as they are, are much more green than orange. I am a poor unionist, believing intuitively that even Paisley and Haughey are better at dealing with each other than the English are with either.
This does not stem from any condescending view that the Irish should be left to work off their perverse provincialism on each other. Indeed, on the early occasions when I met Garret FitzGerald it was his cosmopolitanism which, together with his charm, most struck me. It was he who made me feel provincial. I remember a day in Strasbourg for the opening by Valéry Giscard d’Estaing of the new European Parliament building, which in fact belonged to the Council of Europe and was merely graciously loaned to the Parliament. FitzGerald, as Irish Foreign Minister, was currently president of the Council of Europe’s ministerial group. After a Strasbourg civic banquet he responded to Mayor Pflimlin’s somewhat florid oratory with an elegance of French diction that matched the style of the eighteenth-century Hôtel de Ville. At the afternoon ceremony, again in French, he was the only speaker who was neither too long (like Giscard) nor too fractured (like me). There, I thought, spoke the Ireland of Joyce and Synge and the Countess Markiewicz.
Nevertheless, the Dublin political and official world is one that is very close-knit and interbred, and FitzGerald was born and brought up at the centre of it, even though his mother was an Ulster Protestant, but one so dedicated to the Nationalist cause that she took the anti-Treaty side in the great Irish split of 1922 and deprecated her husband’s participation in the first government of the Irish Free State under W. T. Cosgrave. Desmond FitzGerald, the husband and father, was half poet and half politician, with a cast of feature and cut of hair somewhat reminiscent of a less forceful Hugh Gaitskell, who as Minister of External Affairs presented the Free State’s application to join the League of Nations in 1923, but who subsequently faded as a leading politician.
He brought up Garret FitzGerald (who was the youngest of a large family) in a large but socially indeterminate house on the southern edge of Dublin, sent him to a good Jesuit school and on to University College, Dublin, which as part of the National University was by the 1940s as much the core of Dublin’s future intellectual and political life as the relatively alien Trinity College, Dublin, was its topographical core. Indeed my impression throughout these memoirs is that UCD was as effective in putting FitzGerald in the middle of a magic circle as ever Eton was in Harold Macmillan’s heyday. It was FitzGerald’s peculiar strength that while he was completely at home within this circle he never allowed himself to be bounded by it or to absorb too much of its values.
His first job was good training for not being narrowly bounded. He joined Aer Lingus and worked out the first schedules of the nascent airline. This gave him a continuing familiarity with timetables which enabled him to confound his Russian hosts on a first visit as Foreign Minister during a logistical discussion of his provincial tour by pointing out that the 4.15 for Baku would just make it possible to catch the 7.30 to Irkutsk. In the interval, however, his twelve years with Aer Lingus had been followed by a sixteen-year abstention from flying. This should not be damagingly attributed to the inside knowledge he has acquired. It was in deference to the dislike for flying machines of his wife, to whose wishes and wisdom he constantly pays deserved regard.
When he became Foreign Minister in 1973 both FitzGeralds had to change their habits. The time when Ernest Bevin could be a sea-travel-only Foreign Secretary was twenty years past, apart from the fact that it would have been particularly irritating for an Irish minister to have to go everywhere through London. The sacrifice was well worthwhile, for FitzGerald’s four years as Foreign Minister stand equal in my view to his two periods (one of nine months, the other of four years) as Taoiseach. In the higher office he tried to lay to rest more of the ghosts of Irish history than anyone for three hundred years, showed imaginative cross-border sympathy, moved the South away from the limitations of a confessional state, and after infinite patience got the limited achievement of the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985. But as Foreign Minister he made Ireland not merely an official but an integral part of the European Community, an honorary member of the somewhat exclusive club of the original six. His conduct of the Irish Presidency, which came within two years of joining, was a model example of triumphing over the limitations of small-power resources to exercise skilled and authoritative diplomacy. This was not the motive, but FitzGerald succeeded in making London look peripheral to Europe, while Dublin was metropolitan.
These two chapters of his life add up to major achievements of statesmanship, not seriously marred by an engaging tactical ineptitude in domestic politics. FitzGerald as Taoiseach was manifestly a goldfish of international class forced to swim in a fairly small bowl. But whereas most people in these circumstances ineffectively bang their fins against the glass, it was his peculiar achievement that he seemed to make the bowl bigger, certainly temporarily for himself and to some extent permanently by his broadening of the horizons of Ireland and his strengthening of its international position.
John Kenneth Galbraith
This was a speech delivered at the eightieth birthday party of Professor Galbraith in the Century Club, New York, on 13 October 1988.
George Ball was ironically eloquent about Kenneth Galbraith’s humility. But I do not think that he has ever emulated the feat of an English friend of mine, an earl, a socialist, the father of a notable brood of writers, who produced a quasi-religious book which was actually entitled Humility, who walked down Piccadilly, looked at the display in Hatchard’s bookshop, went in, sent for the manager, and demanded, ‘Why have you not got my book on Humility in the window?’
Thirty-five years ago last month, on my first visit to the United States, I took a plane from Detroit to Newark. For the first hour it bumped a
great deal as was frequent in those pre-jet days. When the bumping ceased my silent neighbours all suddenly became very loquacious. It turned out they were mostly economists, returning from some gathering of the American Economic Association. The chief among them, or at least the one I remember best, was Seymour Harris, I suppose the most devoted of Keynes’s United States disciples. He invited me to Cambridge for three days and installed me in the Dana-Palmer House. There he performed a function which for me was much more significant than his introduction of Keynes to the American public. He introduced me to Galbraith - and indeed to Schlesinger. Having performed this function, he then fell away rather like the first stage booster in a rocket launch. I am not sure I ever saw him again. But he had transformed my life, or at least its American dimension. For more than half of it John Kenneth Galbraith (and Arthur Schlesinger, his historical adviser and junior by nine years) has been an unfailing source of wit, friendship, vicarious repute, and hospitality to me. I count that 1953 Detroit flight the luckiest journey I have ever made.
At this stage of course Ken was only a semi-fledged sage of the Western world. He had published American Capitalism: the Concept of Countervailing Power, but I think nothing else - between hard backs at least. He was still half thought of as an agricultural economist. Although he might talk of the Office of Price Administration, I think that by far the most important thing that he had done until then was to marry Kitty, thereby demonstrating the concept of countervailing height as well as underpinning his life and enriching ours.
In 1955 came The Great Crash and I took Kitty on to the roof of Milan Cathedral where she was overcome with vertigo and I was very glad that it was her end of the theory of countervailing height and not Ken’s that I had to manoeuvre back between the minarets and gargoyles.
In 1960, soon after The Affluent Society, I took two friends to stay at the Galbraith house in New Fane, Vermont. ‘Well, we have certainly seen the public squalor on the way here,’ one of them said as we bounced up the rough and long dirt road. ‘I only hope we see the private affluence when we arrive.’ So, I suppose, we did, but only up to a point. For while Ken would never dream of not staying at the Carlyle in this city or the Ritz in London, neither he nor Kitty has ever believed in changing their domestic lifestyle to keep up with the royalties. That of course is a tribute to their supreme, unaffected and therefore wholly splendid self-confidence. Thirty Francis Avenue in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is fast qualifying as a house in a time warp. Happily, practically nothing changes. It ought to become a national shrine eventually acquired by Mrs Wrightsman, moved to a new extension of the Metropolitan Museum - and entitled New England Academic Interior, circa 1950.
From that New Fane visit I retain another memory of Ken’s imperturbable self-confidence. He took us to see the beaver dams about half a mile from the house. Suddenly there was a great clanging of wires overhead. ‘That’s my private telephone alarm,’ he said, adding, ‘It will be the Senator’ (and there was no doubt which Senator that meant in that autumn of the Kennedy election), before loping off through the undergrowth. When we got back we asked him what the Senator wanted. ‘No,’ he said, ‘it was the plumber from Brattleboro’, but the Senator will be through soon.’
However, my final proof of the indestructibility of Ken’s self-assurance came nearly a decade later, when he and I ran into a former British Prime Minister. It became apparent to me after about ten seconds of casual conversation that, unbelievable and discreditable though it was, the former Prime Minister did not really know who John Kenneth Galbraith was. It became apparent to Ken a moment or two later. He was in no way disconcerted. As soon as we separated he turned to me and said: ‘Who was that man? I thought he was Alec Home.’ The logic was impeccable. If he did not know Galbraith, he could not be an ex-Prime Minister. The dismissal was complete.
I have left myself no time to talk about the eighteen or so books I haven’t mentioned, including at least three major pieces of innovative socio-academic analysis, or the volumes of autobiography, or the travel books, or such reassuring titles as Annals of an Abiding Liberal, or Ken and Kitty in India, or Ken as an inimitable and iconoclastic lecturer, or Ken stealing the show at a Harvard Commencement Day, or Ken as a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, the jewel in the crown of that junior university, or Ken the television presenter, or Ken the connoisseur of Indian art, or Ken the littérateur, the writer of reviews of Waugh and forewords to Trollope. I stop while my catalogue is still illustrative and not exhaustive: and merely ask you to drink to a man who has put more phrases into the language than the rest of us put together; whose great gifts have always been used in unselfish causes; whose friendship has given us all both pride and pleasure; and whose life if it exceeds the norm as much as do his other qualities, will, I calculate, extend to the age of ninety-seven (after which Kitty can be the Pamela Harriman of the 2008 campaign), so that we all look forward to meeting again for the ninetieth and the ninety-fifth birthdays. In the meantime I give you the toast of Kenneth and Kitty Galbraith.
Valéry Giscard d’Estaing
This miniature is based on a 1991 European review of Giscard’s Le Pouvoir et la Vie, Vol II: L’Affrontement (Cie 12).
This Second volume of President Giscard’s memoirs covers roughly the second half of the seventies - although chronological order is not its strong point - and, therefore, the bulk of his septennat as head of state (and of government) of the French Republic. It is very well written, revealing in a somewhat self-conscious way, like a boy letting off a firework and then standing back to judge the effect before deciding when the next one can be ignited, and wholly compulsive reading.
Giscard’s main objective I would judge to be the straightforward one of writing a good book, even a striking piece of literature, which enables him to express a view of life and himself which has been bottled up within him. But there was probably a subsidiary motive of making himself a less remote and condescending figure to the public, which he had been slowly persuaded was a factor in his shattering 1981 defeat, against the odds at the time, by François Mitterrand: perhaps, put bluntly, simply to make himself more likeable.
Happily this second objective produces no falseness of tone. The Giscard that he presents to the public is the Giscard that he believes he is, and not a bogus creation designed to make people like him because he is so like them. What he brings out to an astonishing extent is his vulnerability, which some might regard as closely allied to vanity. The most striking image from his first volume was that of his having to walk ceremonially and alone across the vast pavé of the Place de la Bastille on his first 14 July as President, and becoming terrified of losing his balance or fainting.
Even this did not prepare me for the revelation that, from 1979 to 1988, he could not bring himself to read a French newspaper or to watch an RTF news bulletin. It was not merely the fear of an attack. He had become neurotic about even a neutral mention of his name. After a time he found that he could keep up with events through the international and foreign press because, as he rather engagingly says, these journals had ceased to be much interested in him.
Equally he tells us that when walking in a street he is tormented by the risk of catching his image reflected in a shop window, for he dislikes both his shape and his baldness. Both of these reactions I find extreme, but not incomprehensible, having always avoided watching myself on television and even being reluctant to read my own printed words. Even so, I find Giscard’s cunicular terror in front of the headlights of Le Figaro or even Antenne II a bit over the odds.
This neurosis, however, neither kills his sense of wit nor prevents his casting an immensely observant and critical eye over those with whom he has direct dealings. I agree with most of his judgements on the statesmen or would-be statesmen who were his contemporaries in office, not least with those on Mrs Thatcher. He may betray a little prejudice when he writes of looking across the table at her ‘with her mouth open because of the British method of pronunciation’, but his analysis of h
er methods of thought is at once penetrating and devastating. ‘When she comes to the end of her own argument those who have not embraced her conclusions are incompetent, or addicted to half-measures or, last but not least, simply lacking in courage.’
I none the less find it surprising that in what was probably Giscard’s last and deadly serious conversation with Jimmy Carter (for it concerned whether the United States would unleash nuclear warfare in order to save France from invasion) he was much struck by the fact that the US president wore long shoes with turned-up toes (winkle-pickers?). Even Giscard’s foreign minister (François-Poncet), to whom presumably he was more used, excited favourable notice for his uncreased socks during an important meeting of disagreement with Giscard. I never realized quite how appropriate a ‘please adjust your dress before arriving’ notice would have been in the Elysée lobby.
The acuteness of observation does, however, produce some memorable descriptions. Brezhnev, arriving for Giscard’s semi-illicit rendezvous (vis-à-vis his Western allies) with him in Warsaw in May 1980, walked with ‘the swaying gait of a tired bear’. And moments of political decision are successfully mingled with irrelevant but convincing images. Thus, when he was deciding on his first Prime Minister: ‘I wait a moment before letting in my next visitor. I go to the window. In sight are little groups waiting on the steps for the opening of the Musée du Louvre. Young women in bright-coloured skirts. A coach has pulled up, beige and white. It must come from The Netherlands. Tourists get heavily out, clinging to a glistening metal banister … My choice is definite. It will be Jacques Chirac.’
