Blood, Class and Empire

by Christopher Hitchens

  In the same year that he was elected to the House of Commons, Tree acquired Ditchley and its three thousand acres. His account of the acquisition is almost too charming for words, containing as it does every romantic detail, down to the eccentric servitor, that Hollywood might have mandated. Not since the American family took over the haunted mansion in Oscar Wilde’s story “The Canterville Ghost,” or since Henry Adams took his leave of the old country, has anything been so fitting:

  We were met by an ancient butler, wearing a red wig, designed I believe to conceal his great age. When he found that my wife came from Virginia he fetched a postcard written to him by Lord Dillon in 1870 when, on a visit to America, he had gone down to Virginia to make the acquaintance of his kinsman, General Robert E. Lee.

  (Note that, here, even the convention of British aristocratic kinship with the Confederacy is scrupulously observed.) Tree was captivated by Ditchley at first sight, though conventionally appalled by its traditional state of “no baths, no heating, no lighting.” But he managed to install modern amenities in the barbarous English countryside, as well as “a spacious servants’ hall, a housekeepers’ room, a gun room, and so on.” With the assistance of Edward Hudson, founder and editor of Country Life, he and his spouse also contrived to rescue the garden and terrace from the neglect of the last Lord Dillon. There was even a change of butler. Collins, who had come to Tree from the Life Guards, “became a legendary figure. A man of great judgement, with a tremendous capacity for detail, he would be rung up by people all over England requiring butlers, enquiring if he knew of the right person for the job.”

  However determined Tree may have been to indulge a Wode-housian impression of Englishness, in practice he was no drone. Even during “the phony war” he was active on the other side of the Atlantic, attempting to beef up the British propaganda effort in New York and Washington, and soliciting Winthrop Aldrich to help in the foundation of British War Relief. He also made a side trip to Canada, to see John Buchan in his capacity as Governor-General and to discuss with him his experience as an aide to North-cliffe in the last war and his advice for the next. This, with some observations about the awful influence of Colonel McCormick and his pro-Nazi isolationists in Marshall Field’s Chicago, formed the basis of a report on British war aims and opportunities in America which among other things predicted the election of Roosevelt for a third term.

  Tree was at first ungratefully received for his anti-Nazi activism by the stupid majority in his own party. Having joined the forty-four Conservative MPs who voted against Neville Chamberlain in the crucial vote of confidence, he was at once blackballed, at the instigation of a Tory Whip, on his application to join the Royal Yacht Squadron. But these and other pinpricks from reaction were to be forgotten as events progressed.

  David Bruce, who had been secretary to his own father-in-law, Andrew Mellon, when the latter was American ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, arrived in London to assume command of the American Red Cross. On the same ship came “Wild Bill” Donovan, soon to be the first head of the Office of Strategic Services, dispatched by Roosevelt to report on British morale and readiness. Together, these and other Americans with strong British connections (or strong Anglophile and anti-Fascist predilections, like Edward R. Murrow) undercut the suspiciously defeatist attitudes being marketed by Ambassador Joseph Kennedy.

  In late 1940, Tree was asked by Churchill if he could offer him “ ‘accommodation at Ditchley for certain weekends’—and I can still recall the mystery and poetry with which he invested the phrase—‘when the moon is high.’ ” The Chiefs of Staff were worried that the Nazis might bomb the Prime Ministerial residence at Chequers. It was agreed that on nights of good visibility the great man would put up at Ditchley. Thus began a series of dinners and long evenings at which much “special relationship” spadework was done. In his memoirs, As It Happened, William Paley, founder of CBS, has given us his impressions in the precise tones that still resonate for so many American Anglophiles and devotees of Masterpiece Theatre:

  British hospitality is a special genre, unduplicated anywhere else in the world. Although I had visited England many times before, it was on this wartime trip that I became more conscious than ever before of the understated qualities of the British national character, traditions and sophistication. In some of the most formal, stately country homes and castles, owned by the same families for generations, if not hundreds of years, I came across the most splendid furniture, furnishings and paintings, much of it of museum quality. [Italics mine.]

  “In the best of these houses,” he recalls, “everything was arranged in a sort of casual manner, rich but not ostentatious.” Ditchley, on his account, was the best of these houses—”the most beautiful home I had seen in England.” Of course, the very polish and style Mr. Paley so admired had been made possible at Ditchley by the lavishness of the Marshall Field Chicago retail fortune, which was anything but “understated.”

  It was at Ditchley that the Churchills and the Harrimans, the Salisburys and the Lothians, mixed. It was at Ditchley that Churchill, asked at dinner: “How can we be Allies of the Russians?” replied: “I believe in holding the carnal until the spiritual is free.” Here, too, he first watched Gone with the Wind and pronounced himself “pulverised by the strength of their feelings and emotions.” At Ditchley, Sir John Colville recorded Churchill’s delight at the coming of Lend-Lease, adding that “in view of this Bill it will be more difficult for us to resist the American tendency—which Kingsley Wood lamented to me yesterday—to strip us of everything we possess in payment for what we are about to receive.” At Ditchley, Churchill, explaining the world situation after dinner, said that “Germany had 60 million on whom she could count; the remainder were at least a drag and potentially a danger. The British Empire had more white inhabitants than that, and if the U.S. were with us—as he seemed in this discourse to assume they actively would be—there would be another 120 millions.” Finally, it was at Ditchley that Churchill discussed with Philip Reed, American chairman of the General Electric Company, a joint U.S.-U.K. currency to be put into circulation after the war. Churchill even designed a symbol for this currency, combining the $ and the £, and gave it to Ronald Tree on a postcard.

  Tree kept a visitors’ book at Ditchley, which reads like a roll of honor for the “special relationship” of that period, and which records such details as the visits of David Bruce, future ambassador, with “his secretary, the exquisite Evangeline Bell, whom he was shortly to marry.” And the guest roster today would reflect the same. David Wills, who succeeded to the ownership of the house, gifted it to the Ditchley Foundation, in the words of the official guide, to continue “this tradition of Anglo-American cooperation . . . to become a permanent centre of study and conference to further friendship and understanding between the two peoples.” The house is now administered by the Foreign Office, who enhance the Oxonian atmosphere of the establishment by appointing a “Provost,” who is customarily a retired diplomat. Discreet, well-provendered weekend conferences are organized, at which editors and “policy intellectuals” from both sides of the Atlantic can meet those who know, or have known, the thrill of wielding actual power. Here the pulse and temperature of the “special relationship” are regularly and earnestly monitored. In the first of the “Ditchley Papers,” published in 1963, Provost H. V. Hodson—ex-fellow of All Souls, ex-editor of The Sunday Times— solemnly weighed the problems of perception that impeded better Anglo-American entente. Through British eyes, he wrote, the United States often seemed to pursue “an undiscriminating anti-imperialist policy,” while the Americans in their turn could object that “on the British side the fault seems often to be the opposite one—failure to recognise the realities of the Cold War. “ This statesmanlike evenhandedness is characteristic of the Ditchley style, which has certainly striven to make America less anti-imperialist and Britain more Cold War-conscious. Since, as Hodson also put it, “the balance of nuclear deterrence is the supreme governor of
the Cold War,” much time is expended in Ditchley’s dining rooms and gardens on the problems of deployment and the political risks of neutralism or “moral equivalence.”

  In 1986, Ditchley Park and the Woodrow Wilson Foundation came together to consider the “special relationship” from every conceivable angle. The list of contributors to the conference was in the grand tradition of Ronald Tree’s visitors’ book, with almost all of the twenty-six participants being able to identify themselves with an Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Yale, or Rhodes qualification. Some of the biographies were especially eye-catching, expressing something essential about the effortless assumptions of “special relationship” dining and debating clubs. Here are two contiguous ones, chosen at random from the second half of the alphabetical order:

  WILLIAM D. ROGERS (LLB, Yale) is senior partner in the Washington law firm of Arnold and Porter. He was Deputy Coordinator of the Alliance for Progress, 1961-5, and Henry Kissinger’s Assistant Secretary of State for Latin America and Under Secretary for International Economics until 1977, with a sabbatical at Cambridge, 1982-3. Author of The Twilight Struggle and numerous articles, he is currently preoccupied with the restructuring of the debt of Brazil and Venezuela.

  LORD ST. BRIDES (BA, Oxford), GCMG, CVO, BME, PC, was educated at Bradfield and Balliol. He was British High Commissioner in Pakistan, 1961-6, and in India, 1968-71; Permanent Under Secretary of State, Commonwealth Office, and Privy Councillor, 1968; and British High Commissioner in Australia, 1971-6. Since becoming a Life Peer in 1977, he has been a Visiting Fellow at the Universities of Chicago, Pennsylvania, and Texas at Austin, and also at Harvard and Stanford. He is working on his South Asian memoirs, to be entitled Travelling Hopefully.

  These résumés could scarcely be improved upon, exemplifying as they do the identity of interest, the varying definitions of the white man’s burden, and the Establishment internationalism that underlie the Anglo-American alliance. Here, in a country house that could feature in any American TV series on British gracious living, and with the participants breathing the same air as was once breathed by Churchill, Harriman, and Hopkins, every conceivable definition of the word “class” is brought to bear on the mutually agreeable consideration of diplomacy, defense, and the elaboration of common interests. No other American ally is able to call so effortlessly on a heritage such as this.

  For a final testimony to the power of “scratches on the mind,” let me cite Henry Kissinger in his deceptive book The White House Years:

  The “Special Relationship” is particularly impervious to abstract theories. . . . It reflected the common language and culture of two sister peoples. It owed no little to the superb self-discipline by which Britain succeeded in maintaining political influence after its physical power had waned.

  It was an extraordinary relationship because it rested on no legal claim; it was formalized by no document; it was carried forward by succeeding British governments as if no alternative were conceivable. Britain’s influence was great precisely because it never insisted upon it; the “Special Relationship” demonstrated the value of intangibles.

  Much like Britain’s “unwritten constitution” and “invisible exports,” the relationship, in other words, provided an uncheckable, untestable charter for the freedom of action of an unelected class. There were always those in the United States—Henry Kissinger not the least of them—who looked with vicarious envy on this power untrammeled by legislative or legal restraint, and who themselves had good cause to esteem the value of intangibles.

  [12]

  The Bond of Intelligence

  The “cousinhood” of intelligence gathering and espionage forms one of the most absorbing subtexts of the “special relationship.” It embodies the shared blood and toil of wartime camaraderie, the mutual exchange of secrets (sequestered from all non-Anglo-American eyes), the bonding that results from confronting common enemies, stretching from the Great War to the Cold War. As well as shared language, there is a second order of communication based upon shared codes and ciphers. And there is a special subdivision of fiction, evolved to express the ironies and rivalries that mark the connection between certain addresses in and around Curzon Street in London and certain floors of a complex in Langley, Virginia.

  The ethos of this nasty, hermetic little universe was well captured by Miles Copeland in his indiscreet memoir of CIA life, The Real Spy World:

  The British “station” is almost identical with that of the CIA, except, perhaps, that it is normally smaller, better covered and better integrated into the embassy to which it is assigned. Also it is poorer, its budget normally being about a third of the budget of its American counterpart. For this reason, it is in most parts of the world a primary duty of the British station chief to use his superior prestige and cunning to persuade his CIA colleague to join him in joint Anglo-American operations, for which he supplies the brain and the CIA colleague supplies the funds.

  “Cousinhood” also provides its own illustration of the Graeco-Roman succession, as conceived by the British, and of the relationship between money and brains which this succession is fondly supposed to exemplify. Finally, it shows with what speed and dispatch the United States appropriated yet another area of British preeminence and converted it to new purposes while retaining British cooperation.

  In the first half of the century, British intelligence was principally a machine for involving the United States in war on the British side. The relative underdevelopment of American espionage made this a simple enough task when coordinated with the “right” social and political strata.

  Recall the account given by Admiral Sir William Reginald (“Blinker”) Hall, head of British Naval Intelligence in the First World War. Here is his jaunty recollection of the first sniff of the Zimmermann Telegram:

  I am not likely to forget that Wednesday morning, 17 January 1917. There was the usual docket of papers to be gone through on my arrival at the office, and Claud Serocold and I were still at work on them when at almost half past ten de Grey came in. He seemed excited. “D.I.D. [Director of Intelligence Division],” he began, “d’you want to bring America into the war?” “Yes, my boy,” I replied.

  Blinker, of course, had already played an essential part in making the most of the Lusitania incident and was supposed to be on watch for precisely this sort of contingency. But between January 17 and Woodrow Wilson’s recall of Congress on March 21, 1917, and the United States’ declaration of war on April 6, there was a certain amount of work to be done. First, the British had to get hold of the full text of the telegram, which they had not at first possessed. Second, they had to conceal the fact that they already knew the German imperial codes. Third, they had to present what they uncovered in such a way as to convince President Wilson of a casus belli. These three objectives were not smoothly compatible. First, the code groups in this instance were incomplete. Second, Arthur Zimmermann, as German Foreign Minister, was cabling his ambassador in Washington with nothing much more than a contingency plan. Everything he proposed to Mexico—the infamous suggestion that that country should “reconquer the lost territory in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona”—was to be put to President Carranza only if the United States declared war on Germany. Since Carranza had already had the experience of being invaded by President Wilson, it was not proposed that he invade the United States. (Nor, this time at any rate, did the United States invade Mexico. General Pershing, who had been deep into Mexican territory the previous June, was instead sent to confront the Kaiser.)

  Zimmermann threatened to spoil the fun by confirming the contents of the telegram as soon as he was asked about it, which was in Berlin on March 2, 1917, three weeks before Wilson recalled Congress. But Blinker Hall had got in ahead of him, sending a cable to his subordinates in Washington which used the customary code name of “Aaron” for Woodrow Wilson and which subtly reordered the priorities of the telegram:

  Germany guarantees assistance to Mexico if they will reconquer Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona; als
o proposes alliance with Mexico to make war together. Do not use this till Aaron announces it. Premature disclosure fatal. Full details in possession of Aaron. Alone I did it.

  The men of Room Forty in the British Admiralty showed a shrewd understanding of the psychological as well as the political dimension, invoking the spirit of the Monroe Doctrine as well as America’s uneasy conscience about Mexico. In the Second World War, they were also to make skilled use of their superiority, acquired in decades of playing the “great game” across vast tracts of the globe. The possession of the Ultra Secret and the Enigma Machine, both of them products of British flair and inventiveness (though both admittedly owing a great deal to the courage and sacrifice of certain Poles and Jews), was parlayed into an exceptional initiating influence, by the United Kingdom, over the foundation and direction of the United States intelligence system. This influence in turn was used to make astonishing interventions in American domestic politics.