Liberalism at Large

by Alexander Zevin

  The passage to independence for the vast subcontinent of the Raj was a more exclusively British affair, if a grotesquely bungled one, issuing in a point-blank partition between Hindu and Muslim majority areas. Effected without any popular consultation, it created some 12 to 18 million refugees overnight, left at least a million dead, and – in colluding with Nehru’s seizure of Muslim-majority Kashmir – bequeathed a festering conflict between the two successor states of India and Pakistan that has never ended. For the Economist, this was an ‘honourable and dignified conclusion to a chapter of history’, which became the occasion for a stream of self-congratulations over an imperial mission accomplished. ‘The peace and order of the British Raj were 19th century India’s Marshall Plan’, and Nehru was a statesman of the carat of Burke. 95

  Many national movements did not meet the criteria set out by Ward. In Malaya, the biggest earner of dollars in the Empire, the Economist backed the declaration of a state of emergency in 1948, to give colonial authorities extraordinary powers to crush the communist ‘bandits’ attacking rubber plantations and tin mines. This was a struggle of ‘overriding importance’ for the entire East Asian region – and for Washington, the paper hinted, whose ‘modest blessing’ Britain needed to stay the course in this ‘testing point’ for ‘free nations’.96 Iran was another such testing point. Here the nationalization of the Anglo-Persian oil fields at Abadan – then the largest oil refinery in the world and the single biggest British overseas investment – took the Economist by surprise. From March 1951, it counselled a version of gunboat diplomacy straight out of the nineteenth-century paper. ‘One or two naval vessels’ sent to manoeuvre in the Gulf should suffice, since ‘Persians like all Moslem peoples respect power and strength’. But RAF squadrons in Iraq should be reinforced just in case, for ‘the nationalist virus spreads amazingly quickly in the Middle East’.97 The elected prime minister of Iran, a genteel Qajar-descended jurist educated in France and Switzerland, was treated to hysterics. Mohammad Mossadegh was an ‘extreme right-wing nationalist and dictator’, ‘stupid’, ‘surrounded by a gang of criminals, religious fanatics and adventurers’ who had literally cowed Iranians into an assault on the rule of law at gunpoint, the sole beneficiaries of which would be the ‘well-disciplined Communist Party [that] could, without doubt, organise a coup d’état’.98 In fact, it was the CIA and MI6 who would organize a coup to overthrow Mossadegh in 1953, officers restoring the Shah for fear of their communist neighbours to the north, in what the Economist described as an ‘explosion of public feeling’.99

  In Guyana and Kenya, the British response to nationalist challengers was still harsher. But here the Economist wavered over the right mix of liberal reforms and military repression as effective solutions to them. In the small South American colony of Guyana, it hailed a new constitution handed down from London in 1953 as a model of orderly progress towards self-government, and was initially unruffled by the victory of the People’s Progressive Party in the subsequent elections, on a platform to allow unions to set wages with the sugar planters on a nationwide basis. But once London decided (with a shove from the US, whose nationals owned most of the fields and mines) that communism was afoot, it acquiesced to the landing of troops, suspension of the constitution, and arrest of the party’s leaders as the only course available.100 Kenya experienced an actual rebellion from 1952, its Land Freedom Army demanding redistribution of the richest soil in a series of bold executions of white settlers on their highland estates. The paper advocated pitiless repression of ‘Mau Mau terrorists’ and guerrilla fighters, and the imprisonment of ‘extremist’ leaders like Jomo Kenyatta, and swallowed the government’s line on the notorious detention camps it had set up in the colony – that these had ‘rehabilitated’ nearly 80,000 Mau Mau supporters.101 Of course, constitutional and land reforms were also needed to address local grievances, the paper conceded, as it covered the ‘Kenyan emergency’ for the next eight years, aware that the model of City-led colonial development depended partly on what happened there.102 Growth in Kenya – a brisk 3 per cent on average from 1948 to 1960 – might neutralize racial discontent, which the paper saw as a by-product of population growth among the native Africans.103

  The vision uniting these assessments of empire belonged to Ward, who reframed editorial coverage of it to fit the Cold War. In Policy for the West in 1951, drawn partly from her Economist leaders of the year before, she took a civilizational view. If nationalists were prepared to fight communism, independence might be granted them, without loss of power or prestige to Britain, as in India, Pakistan or Ceylon, which all ‘freely decided to remain as Dominions within the fellowship of the Commonwealth’.104 Wherever communists or left nationalists sought self-determination, however, the West should crush them. That meant doubling down in Malaya, Africa, and alongside allies engaged in similar operations. Thus Ward backed American intervention in China on the side of the nationalists as Japanese rule collapsed in 1945, since this left China ‘a potential Greece of the Far East’. While Chinese communism might be less noxious than other varieties, it had to be fought. ‘There cannot be any doubt that Communist victory in China would mean its alignment with the Soviet Union, with the same campaign against all Western influences, political, cultural or economic’.105 France, meanwhile, deserved credit for holding the line against Ho Chi Minh in Indochina, and for evolving a new approach there based on the British model: Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos folded into a commonwealth à la Française in 1949, with a soupçon of home rule for the nationalists, to inoculate them against communism and build up the French puppet regime of Bao Dai.106

  By far the biggest test, however, came with the Korean War in 1950. There Britain had a solemn duty to assist the Americans in blocking communist advance from the north into the south – in what was in effect a civil war in the peninsula, after half a century of Japanese colonization. The Economist was so agitated by the conflict it worried that Britain’s massive rearmament – defence spending rising from 7 to 13 per cent of GDP in two years, with 100,000 British troops dispatched to the Korean peninsula at US behest – was a sign of complacency, ‘ominously reminiscent of 1939–40’.107 Remarkably, four years later in 1954, the Economist discerned a similar plot to overrun Central America from Guatemala, where no motive for modest agrarian reforms could be found besides international communism, despite the fact that one American company, United Fruit, owned 42 per cent of all the land. To stop this, it endorsed the CIA-mounted invasion of Guatemala from Honduras and El Salvador, followed by a coup against the elected leader, dismissing stories that cast ‘President Arbenz in the role of an innocent victim of foreign aggression inspired by Wall Street’ or blamed ‘the greed of the United Fruit Company backed by old-fashioned US imperialism’. Its correspondent was gung-ho about the dictatorship, which would endure for over four decades, killing or disappearing hundreds of thousands: ‘the government, the political parties, the labour unions, and the independent agencies dealing with such matters as social security and land reform had all been so thoroughly infiltrated by Communists that there was no alternative to starting all over again.’108

  In contrast to Crowther, who was prepared to cut back social spending to pay for rearmament as the Cold War intensified, Ward saw butter for natives as the necessary complement to guns.109 Going considerably further than the Economist, in her last book as foreign editor Ward called on Britain and America each to dedicate 15 per cent of their national income to defence, with an annual 3 per cent added on for a colonial Marshall Plan – providing a boost to full employment at home and a form of social democracy abroad, as part of a worldwide Keynesian stimulus.110 At the end of 1950 Ward went abroad to test these theories, overseeing development projects with her Royal Navy officer husband, sending back reports to the Economist from India, Australia and the Gold Coast (where she grew close to Kwame Nkrumah).111 By then Ward was a star, crisscrossing the globe to extol liberal capitalism as a test of ‘faith and freedom’ – and now to far more powerfu
l audiences, US Democrats like Adlai Stevenson, John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson.112

  Donald Tyerman and the Cold War News Room

  Crowther may have moved the extreme centre to the right by 1950–51, but for the rest of the decade the newsroom he built was less narrow. The Economist itself became a field for Cold War conflicts over liberalism, with meeting-room rows, disputed stories and journalist spies who wished to do much more than report news. No one was more active in all this than Crowther, who retired in 1956, but on the condition that he continue to influence editorial policy, while making a great deal more money in the City. Crowther asked Layton, now Baron of Danehill, as chairman of the Economist to make Donald Tyerman the next editor, and to create a new post of managing director just for Crowther. ‘Tyerman is fully capable of taking on the specifically editorial responsibilities, and I would be quite willing to divide my job in the conviction that we could work together intimately and fruitfully.’ Roland Bird, the deputy editor, should be passed over, since ‘to put him in as editor would be to exclude me from the paper far more than I wish or could stand.’113 He told Tyerman that ‘though it is entirely right the new editor should have the full authority of the position, and that his writ alone should run in the paper, I do not propose to disinterest myself in the editorial contents of the paper.’114 Two years later, angling mendaciously for another lucrative billet in the City, Crowther could write to Siegmund Warburg, one of its most powerful merchant bankers, that as the Economist’s ‘non-executive director’, he was a ‘free man’. While it ‘would not be appropriate for me to become a director of a merchant banking house, as some people might think, however mistakenly, that this enabled some special influence to be exerted over the editorial comments of the paper’, this ‘would not apply to a directorship of another company in your group, such as Mercury Securities, since very few people would have the knowledge or the interest to trace a connection between it and the paper.’115

  Donald Tyerman returned to the Economist, where he had started twenty years earlier at the same time as Crowther. Deputy editor during the lean years 1939–44, Tyerman had in effect put out the Economist with Ward, before joining the Times as assistant editor when Crowther returned full time. His popularity among younger writers at the Economist was due in part to a permissive style, which he captured best himself while reminiscing on what it was like to edit the paper during the Blitz. ‘We did it over coffee in the Brettenham House cafe, after 8 Bouverie Street was destroyed in May, 1941. It was a sort of brainstorming. We talked in dozens … then we went back with leaders to write … we thought and felt and argued our way to what to say, Catholic or Marxist or Liberal, or what not.’116 He showed courage to have made it that far: polio had left him paralyzed from the neck down at three, but he eventually recovered control of his limbs, and earned a scholarship to Brasenose, Oxford, where he excelled in modern history. Tyerman always walked with splints, and it is hard to miss, in Crowther’s preference, a desire for physical control over him. Not only did Crowther initially sit in on weekly meetings – until, dominating them to such an embarrassing degree, even he realized the need to stay away – but later was ‘constantly throwing in brilliant ideas from the chairman’s office’. Crowther, ‘the renowned former editor’, wrote another staffer, ‘continued to overshadow his unfortunate successor’.117

  Tyerman was not a pushover, however. At the Economist he would display the same independent streak he had at the Times where he and E. H. Carr wrote fiery leaders in 1944 opposing the British military intervention in Greece which aimed to crush the main resistance movement that had fought the Nazis and restore a pliant monarch at the head of a conservative government in Athens. These articles rocked the coalition government in parliament, infuriated both Churchill and Bevin, and caused a diplomatic spat with Washington.118 At the Economist his tolerance for different, contradictory views was the last hoorah for the kind of popular anti-fascist atmosphere that had inspired these articles on Greece.

  That led to fights with Crowther almost from day one, with crises over the Suez canal, the Cuban Revolution, the defection of Kim Philby and the 1964 election – at which point Tyerman was eased out of the door. Tyerman did make a mark, recruiting talented public school graduates like John Midgley, former Bonn correspondent for the Times, as foreign editor, and Barbara Smith to assist him. He promoted Elizabeth Monroe to Middle East editor; Keith Kyle to political and parliamentary affairs editor in 1957; and the Polish Marxist Daniel Singer, on staff since 1948, to Paris correspondent in 1958. Still, most of the ‘young Turks’ were Crowther’s hires. Many of the arguments that flared within the newsroom turned on liberalism and empire, and just how much anti-communism or the US alliance ought to shape editorial policy in these areas. Under Tyerman, the Economist asked probing questions, and sometimes came up with surprising answers about both. But in each case the dynamic was clear, as was the trend: angry blowback from the managing director’s office, until Tyerman was replaced in 1964.

  Keith Kyle and the American Survey

  Kyle became the Economist’s first full-time Washington correspondent when Crowther poached him from the BBC in 1953. The twenty-eight-year-old producer had impressed Crowther, who interviewed Kyle for a Commonwealth Fellowship. ‘You may have noticed I was being rather hard on you at the interview’, Crowther told him a few days later. ‘That was deliberate, because I wanted you to fail.’ Crowther decided Kyle should go to the US, but for the Economist.119 The first in his family to go to public school and Oxford, where he became a passionate Liberal and member of the Union, Kyle developed a close relationship with his history tutor at Magdalen, A. J. P. Taylor.120 In 1945, Kyle shipped out as a second lieutenant to India – an experience that left him so disillusioned about the white officers and civil servants who ran the British Raj that he strongly defended the move to independence on his return to Oxford at a Liberal-Tory debate in 1948. ‘And what are your credentials for speaking on India?’, challenged a Conservative in the audience. ‘Scindia’s Field Battery, 1st Indian Field’, Kyle replied. As he recalled, ‘from that moment I felt I had the audience in the palm of my hand and, filled with adrenalin, I poured out my convictions on the end of the Empire.’121 ‘I disbelieved in socialism, which I thought high-minded but unreal’, Kyle wrote, describing his politics at the time, ‘but I wanted passionately to ensure the immense let-down of those who had served in the First World War would not happen the second time around.’122

  Until Kyle, the American Survey was edited from London. Margaret Cruikshank, a New Yorker married to the editor of the News Chronicle, was the first editor; she then worked jointly with the half-American Nancy ‘Colonel’ Balfour, a ‘small, squat, animated spinster’ and ‘tetchy, highly intelligent boss’, who collected contemporary British sculpture – Moore, Pope – in her spare time. The American Survey was a shoestring operation: phone calls were a luxury, not to be indulged in for more than a half hour once a month, with stories filed by airmail and short messages sent by telex, ‘a primitive fax machine which spun like a crazy top and gave out strange sounds and odd puffs of smoke’. Kyle used writers rather like himself: on economic policy, Edwin L. Dale Jr.; on constitutional law, Adam Yarmolinsky; on defence, Adam Watson, a war correspondent for the Baltimore Sun. Paul Jacobs, a stringer hired for his perspective as a trade unionist, anti-nuclear and anti-war activist, who later founded Mother Jones, was further to the left.123

  Washington was provincial but exciting. Kyle gained access to some of the most important people in it, such as the CIA director Allen Dulles, whose son – ‘the most right-wing character I had ever met’ – he had known at Oxford. In due course Lyndon Johnson manhandled Kyle while explaining the arcane rules of the Senate. John F. Kennedy, a rising star after the Democratic convention in 1956, asked if the Economist – to which his father Joseph, as US ambassador to London, had given him a lifetime subscription – was dumbing down by introducing line drawings. ‘His temperament was rather more conservative than I
had supposed.’ Kyle was less impressed by other aspects of life in America. Washington, with its unrepresented black majority, was ‘run like a colony, and a fairly primitive one’. In reporting on desegregation and the bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, he was far more impressed by the courage of Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. than the white officials he met – just as in India. McCarthyism was most disturbing of all. Kyle recalled a cocktail party where the Economist was attacked as everything the senator from Wisconsin was against; on his side there was little but contempt for the ‘most notorious abuser of human rights in the name of anti-Communism’.124 While none of this made Kyle an opponent of American foreign policy, it did place him at odds with a relay of rightwing editors in London that Crowther began to appoint at the same time, the first of whom was a shadowy young Australian named Brian Crozier.