Blood, Class and Empire

by Christopher Hitchens

  R. B. McCallum was the young don who became my tutor. He couldn’t have been more sympathetic and understanding. His main criticism of my weekly papers usually was my use of the English language, the parochialism of my language.

  So one of the Senate’s future foreign policy colossi was schooled to manners on a Rhodes. (His later endowment of Fulbright scholarships, holders of which became snobbishly known as “Half-brights,” did much by accident to promote the Rhodes Scholarships to the treasured position of being venerable by comparison.) Yet when he took his stand on Vietnam, he was to find all the “intellectual sophisticates” of the British Foreign Office giving smooth encouragement to his enemies.

  Perhaps unconsciously, Professor Reich replicates in that earlier passage the high ideal of the relationship between a Rhodes Scholar and his severe Oxford “moral tutor.” This relationship was caught nicely, even though in the context of Cambridge and in the relationship with a “supervisor,” by Norman Podhoretz in his extraordinary memoir Making It. Podhoretz simply could not believe that he was at the same college (Clare) where Geoffrey Chaucer had been. Nor could he at first credit the fact that his servant looked upon him as a sort of honorary WASP. As for the “special relationship”:

  The intellectual style of my supervisor, a young don all tweeds and mustache and pipe, was the best possible antidote I could have found to the frenetic pursuit of “brilliance” to which I had become habituated at Columbia. . . . Taciturn, hard-headed, common-sensical, scholarly and as English as empiricism itself, he was not in the least moved by those thrilling leaps of “insight” uninhibited by an excess of knowledge; those pseudo-Germanic syntheses undisturbed by mere detail.

  These are the kinds of influence that no foreign system, even with the elaborate peddling arrangements available to it in Washington, can ever hope to buy. But it is an open question whether or not the influence has been used, or is usable, in the wholesome ways depicted by Professor Reich. Probably no American administration ever acted with such disregard for British advice and interests as did the Kennedy administration. Yet it contained eleven Rhodes Scholars, including Dean Rusk, who helped in the architecture of the Vietnam disaster. As David Halberstam wrote in his anatomy of the intellectual roots of that war: “In a nation so large and so diverse, there are few ways of quantifying intelligence or success or ability, so those few that exist are immediately magnified; titles become particularly important . . . All Rhodes Scholars become brilliant . . . Doors will open more readily, invitations will arrive, the phone will ring.” One can easily imagine Cecil Rhodes as an enthusiastic supporter of the Vietnam War, but where does this leave Professor Reich and his English version of the mission civilisatrice to America?

  It may be found, perhaps, as part of the soft underlay of the Anglo-American literary culture. Robert Penn Warren, America’s first recipient of the English-inspired Poet Laureateship, was a former Rhodes Scholar. A note in the same edition of the American Oxonian heading the news of old boys records that “James H. Billington (New Jersey and Balliol ’50) has succeeded Daniel J, Boorstin (Oklahoma and Balliol ’34), becoming the Nation’s thirteenth Librarian of Congress; so we see one Balliol Rhodes Scholar succeeding another in that distinguished office.” This is much more the tone in which Rhodes Scholars talk, though they do not always underline the obvious quite so crassly.

  They tend to turn up, even so, in areas where the obvious is not neglected. Rhodes Scholars have been very influential in diplomacy—supplying an important prewar and wartime British ambassador to Washington in the shape of Lord Lothian, and an eminent “know your British” deputy chief of mission in London in the shape of Phillip Kaiser during the ticklish bit of the Vietnam War. Carl Albert, Speaker of the House of Representatives, nearly became President on two occasions during the Watergate crisis of the Constitution—the nearest a Rhodes Scholar has attained to the greatest office. Others, according to surveys and breakdowns, choose principally to enter the professions of law and journalism. They turn up at The New York Times and in “serious” East Coast magazines such as Foreign Policy and The Atlantic. Michael Kinsley, a Rhodes Scholar who has edited both Harper’s and The New Republic, was invited to be a guest editor at The Economist in 1988 and thus scored a sort of “special relationship” hat trick. Asked by The Washington Post to describe his motives in leaving Washington for London during an election campaign, he replied cheerfully with the one word “Anglophilia.”

  Meanwhile, Halberstam’s observation has been vindicated by the passage of time. Rhodes Scholarships have become, more than ever, a special certificate in the lottery of a purely American meritocracy. Ivy League colleges—themselves a transplantation of the English ideal—vie for the prestige that attaches to a good record with the Rhodes Selection Committee. Georgetown University rewards its successful Rhodes candidates with $1,000 in credit at Blackwell’s bookshop—midway between Balliol and the Bodleian—and a free tuxedo for Union debates and those all-important formal and club dinners. Harvard, in its 1988 fund-raising letter to alumni, made a special point of stressing that it had sired ten Rhodes Scholars in the preceding twelvemonth.

  Oxford itself, meanwhile, is going bankrupt. Increasingly, it hires out its bosky gardens and gray cloisters to conferences and summer schools where the cachet of an ancient address can levy funds. Its colleges look for American masters and wardens in order to facilitate the flow of donations across the Atlantic. Its dons and syndics make embarrassed visits to the United States to learn about the arcana of direct mail. Addressing the Oxford-Cambridge Dinner in Washington in 1986, Oxford Vice-Chancellor Sir Patrick Neill was awkward about naming the sum his university required. “This amount we need,” he said, “is so staggering that it would be offputting to mention it.” That could have been any British Chancellor of the Exchequer, trying to preserve a civilized atmosphere at Bretton Woods. It calls up J. B. Priestley’s famous invocation of Britain’s uneasy place at the nuclear “top table,” where the old country “still sits, nervously fingering a few remaining chips, like a Treasury official playing with two drunk oil millionaires.” “Offputting,” perhaps, but so is the recognition of the inequality of the “special relationship,” which has transformed Rhodes’s imperial dream, along with many others, into a poor relation’s reverie of staying on terms, of exerting an uplifting influence, while all the while the ancient family name is being parlayed into fast-track resumes and a shiny prospectus.

  The Council on Foreign Relations is another of those British-modeled clubland circles which encourage bonding between aspirants in the worlds of government, diplomacy, the academy, journalism, and finance. Its role is to provide a revolving door through which candidate members of future and present establishments may circulate, and a fish tank of talent from which incoming Presidents and Secretaries of State may select. In their excellent book Imperial Brain Trust, William Mintner and Lawrence Shoup quote Henry Kissinger as telling the Council’s governor, Hamilton Fish Armstrong, “You invented me.” This exaggeration—it was Richard Nixon who invented Mr. Kissinger— is still significant. A glance at the Council’s membership rolls reveals an A list of the American Establishment, with a distinct East Coast bias perhaps but increasingly catholic in its inclusiveness and with regional clones designed to redress the bias of its founding fathers.

  The origins of the Council lie in the “special relationship” and in that part of it which cements British and American military and political objectives. It was on May 30, 1919, in the immediate post-Versailles period, that a group of American and British luminaries met in the Majestic Hotel in Paris to constitute an Anglo-American forum. Its provisional name was the Institute of International Affairs. Moving spirit in the new Institute was Lionel Curtis, a disciple of none other than Cecil Rhodes. Calling on money from the Rhodes Trust, which exemplified the same imperial and Anglo-Saxon precepts as the original Rhodes Scholarships, Curtis was already a veteran of the “Round Table” groups set up in the white British dominions by Lord
Milner and Rhodes himself. Again, one finds Philip Kerr (later British ambassador to Washington under the title of Lord Lothian) as Lionel Curtis’s partner in the scheme for “organic union” of the Anglo-American empire. There was also a United States Round Table group, and a number of the advisers to Colonel Edward House and President Woodrow Wilson had been prominent in it. Among them, unsurprisingly, were Thomas W. Lamont of the J. P. Morgan bank and Whitney H. Shepardson, who became the secretary of the American branch of the Institute of International Affairs.

  The British branch of the IIA, with Lionel Curtis as its secretary, swiftly took on the essential prefix “Royal,” under which title it flourishes to this day. Most outsiders know it by its less cumbersome name of Chatham House, and it is by no means unknown to receive a Foreign Office briefing under what are agreeably known as “Chatham House rules”—the surreptitiously, deep-background culture that informs so much of British public life.

  The American section did not enjoy, at first, such a quick takeoff or such distinguished patronage. Instead, it decided to fuse with a near-moribund New York City dining club called the Council on Foreign Relations and add an “Inc.” to the name as suffix instead of a “Royal” prefix. The honorary president of the Council on Foreign Relations Inc. was Elihu Root, best remembered for his role as administrator of the territories wrested from Spain in 1898, and for good measure an adviser to the Anglophile Andrew Carnegie as well as first president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. His co-president was John W. Davis, Wood-row Wilson’s onetime ambassador to Great Britain and chief counsel to J. P. Morgan and Co. The other names of founding office bearers—Wickersham, Cravath—read like a directory of yesterday’s and today’s Wall Street law firms. By 1922 the Council had begun to publish Foreign Affairs, and it was not long before words like “judicious” and “authoritative” began to be applied to the magazine. Its launching was the brainchild of Edwin F. Gay, a Council figure and the first dean of the Harvard Business School, who had written in 1898: “When I think of the British Empire as our inheritance I think simply of the natural right of succession. That ultimate succession is inevitable.”

  Broadly speaking, the composition and character of the CFR was one of post-Wilsonian internationalism, with a self-conscious emphasis on America’s duty to shoulder a global role. It ranged itself more or less explicitly against the isolationists, and drew strength from the more forward-looking and adventurous element of the business community. Isaiah Bowman, who headed the CFR’s Research Committee during much of the interwar period, postulated an American sphere “whose extent is beyond the Arctic Circle in Alaska, southward to Samoa and east and west from China to the Philippines to Liberia and Tangier.” He added, employing the inevitable standard of comparison, that “if our territorial holdings are not so widely distributed as those of Great Britain, our total economic power and commercial relations are no less extensive.” Bowman, Gay, and others spent much useful time in the Depression years arguing for an American strategy based on free trade and the open door.

  As with most other groups and factions favoring assertive American internationalism, the CFR’s breakthrough moment came during the Second World War, when its War and Peace Study Project became an accessory to the State Department. From an early stage, the CFR influence was exerted on the side of intervention. An ingenious 1940 recommendation to President Roosevelt, for example, urged that he extend the Monroe Doctrine to define Greenland as a part of the American continent, and thereby forestall the Nazis from claiming Danish colonies if they occupied Denmark. At about this time, too, members of the Council created the Century Group, so called because it gathered at the Pall Mall-imitation Century Association, a gentlemen’s club in New York. The members of the Group, who included numerous individuals associated with the War and Peace Study Project, claimed the credit for evolving the “destroyers for bases” agreement that marked the inauguration of Lend-Lease. Certainly it was at their meeting on July 25, 1940, that the idea was first broached. From this quid pro quo beginning, the CFR and its related intellectuals began to consider how American global brokerage might be applied in a more thoroughgoing fashion. Out of these deliberations came the overarching concept of the “Grand Area”—the “Western Hemisphere, British Empire, and Far East” bloc—which was to become the central preoccupation of postwar U.S. foreign policy. Out of these deliberations also emerged the American interpretation of the Atlantic Charter. As early as April 1941, the WPSP proposed a general statement of war aims, anticipating Roosevelt’s own later admonitions to Churchill in these words:

  If war aims are stated which seem to be concerned solely with Anglo-American imperialism, they will offer little to people in the rest of the world, and will be vulnerable to Nazi counter-promises. Such aims would also strengthen the most reactionary elements in the United States and the British Empire. The interests of other peoples should be stressed, not only those of Europe, but also of Asia, Africa and Latin America. This would have a better propaganda effect.

  This might seem to be an early prefiguration of General Patrick Hurley’s “Progressive” and “anticolonial” politics in Iran in 1944-45. If so, the effect seems to have been intentional. In May 1942, CFR president Norman Davis, then secretary of the State Department’s security subcommittee of the Advisory Committee on Postwar Foreign Policy (cumbersome Foggy Bottom titles did not begin with Dulles), said baldly that in all likelihood “the British Empire as it existed in the past will never reappear and that the United States will have to take its place.” Taking a Roman or at least Latin attitude toward the same question was General George V. Strong of the same committee and the same CFR background, who averred that the United States “must cultivate a mental view toward world settlement after this war which will enable us to impose our own terms, amounting perhaps to a pax Americana.”

  In this, yet another evolution from an English-sponsored imperial forum to a full-blown American internationalist think tank, one can also discern the texture of Englishness. The Mintner-Shoup study found that two-thirds of the directors of the CFR were also members of the Century Association and that, no doubt often overlapping, one-fifth were members of the Links Club, the University Club, or the Metropolitan Club, the last of which is in Washington. Seventeen percent of the CFR’s directors also had a male relative who was also a Council member. The names Rockefeller, Fish, McCloy, and others recur with a reassuring predictability. As one member, John Franklin Campbell, wrote shortly before his death about the CFR’s famous premises on East Sixty-eighth Street, the Harold Pratt House:

  If you can walk—or be carried—into the Pratt House, it usually means that you are a partner in an investment bank or law firm with occasional “trouble-shooting” assignments in government. . . the Council is stuffy and clubby and parochial and elitist, but it is a place where old moneybags and young scholars are able to sit down and learn something from each other. It is pompous and pretentious but it still draws men of affairs out of their counting-houses and into dialogue with men of intellect.

  It was in this leather-armchair atmosphere that George Kennan published his famous “containment” essay in Foreign Affairs for July 1947, and that David Rockefeller and Charles Spofford developed a paper, “Reconstruction in Western Europe,” that became the blueprint for the Marshall Plan. The British diplomats and academics and politicians who solicit invitations to the CFR as junior partners can at least reflect that, as with so many other similar American sancta, their ancestors were present at its creation. And of course they can always reciprocate, if they are eminent enough, with the magic words: “See you at Ditchley.”

  At Enstone in Oxfordshire stands an eighteenth-century mansion built in the reign of George I and almost equidistant from the two other great houses of the county, which are Blenheim (birthplace of Winston Churchill and seat of the Dukes of Marlborough) and Heythrop. Its architect was James Gibbs, who also gave us the Senate House in Cambridge, the Radcliffe Camera in Oxford, and the Lon
don church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields. The spires of Oxford are visible from the upper stories when the weather is clement. For many generations, the house was the property of the Dillon-Lee family, relations of the Earl of Rochester and upholders of a strong royalist tradition. On the death of the seventeenth Viscount Dillon in 1932, family indigence led to the sale of the house to Ronald and Nancy Tree.

  Ronald Tree was the acme of Anglo-American gentry, and his memoir, When the Moon Was High, is one of the great testaments of American Anglophilia. His North American side originally hailed from Somerset, England, and had in its genealogy an artillery captain killed in Washington’s service at Valley Forge and a postal official who wrote a description of the Capitol after the British had burned it in the War of 1812. Tree’s father, Arthur, had been sent to Oxford University, where “he rode to hounds more than he read his books, and polo interested him more than Political Science.” Decided on a life of ease in England, he married the daughter of the Chicago tycoon Marshall Field. Young Ronald was born on their estate at Ashorne Hill in Warwickshire in 1897, into a marriage that did not last long because of the defection of his mother to Captain David Beatty, British hero of the Boxer Rising and the Sudan campaign and future hero of Jutland.

  After a period of post-divorce shuttling between England and America, Ronald Tree was sent to Winchester, writing of it later in the exact tones of the nostalgic old boy and hymning “the green of the playing fields . . . the austerity of the scholar’s quadrangle, backing up on one side to the flint and stone walls of the chapel, and the exquisite and rare little medieval chapel in the centre of its cloisters.” Here he formed a friendship with George Cecil, “son of Lord Edward Cecil, the Egyptian administrator whose book, Leisure of an Egyptian Official, is among the gems of British literature. After her husband’s death, his mother married Lord Milner, the great South African administrator.” Tree’s other friend was Bim Tennant, son of Lord Glenconner and author of one of those aching poems, “Home Thoughts from Laventie,” which evoke the spirit of young Englishmen—eventually including himself—who were to be slaughtered in Flanders. Tree also took a part in the First World War after leaving school. He crossed the Atlantic on a liner in the company of Lord Northcliffe, “on his way to the States to begin his propaganda mission to the Americans,” and joined the Naval Air Service. Returning to Europe, he fell in love with Nancy Field, widow of his cousin and niece of Nancy Astor. After the couple decided to make their home in England, the Astors “included us in all their famous political parties at Cliveden and St. James’s Square.” They did not, however, succeed in annexing the Trees to the appeasement-minded politics that characterized these and other soirées. Tree became Joint Master of the Pytchley hounds, the most inbred fox hunt in England. He became a Tory MP for the rural seat of Market Harborough, thus equaling the Astors as an Anglo-American parliamentarian. But he was to become a stout Churchillian on the only issue that mattered, which is why Ditchley Park is so much a part of the fabric of the ‘‘special relationship” to this day.