Britain was not the only power to try to direct the winds of change abroad, and editorial decisions about gusts outside the empire and commonwealth could be just as contentious where they touched on the Cold War. The historian Hugh Brogan, then a young foreign section writer, recalled ‘vigorous debates on decolonization’ at Monday meetings in the 1960s, one of which he won: should the Economist continue to support the French war in Algeria, after revelations its soldiers there had massacred peaceful protestors? The argument ended in a decision to carry the rebel slogan ‘Vive le FLN!’ on the cover, and Tyerman asking Brogan to write a leader to go with it, ‘Algeria’s Cry’, which declared ‘the 114 Moslem civilians who were killed in Algiers and Oran achieved as much in their deaths as the scores of thousands who have died in the field during the past six years.’156 Independence for the Congo inspired no similarly principled stand, however, in part because Brian Crozier was the correspondent on the spot in Leopoldville: equivocating about the crimes of the departing Belgians, including their role in the assassination of the first prime minister Patrice Lumumba, the paper did grant that his murder at the turn of 1961 – ‘unstable and wildly unsuccessful’ though Lumumba was – dealt a regrettable ‘blow to moderates in the Congo and Africa’. How so? Insofar as it created a ‘potent myth’ in ‘African minds’ associating Lumumba with anti-colonialism, while allowing ‘Mr Khrushchev’ to accuse UN peacekeepers as well as Lumumba’s torturers, President Kasavubu and General Mobutu, of being ‘colonial puppets’.157
The Cuban Revolution was connected and still more consequential – a tipping point. Barbara Smith backed the bearded revolutionaries, tracking them from the hills of the Sierra Maestra all the way to Havana, which they entered on the heels of the fleeing dictator Fulgencio Batista on New Year’s Day 1959. ‘Visiting Cuba soon after Fidel Castro’s revolution was eye-opening’, she wrote, comparing festive scenes there to the US-backed dictatorships through which she had passed. ‘People interviewed in the street actually liked their new young government.’158 US attempts to throttle it by cutting sugar quotas, placing an embargo around the island, then invading it at the Bay of Pigs in 1961, increased her sympathy for the revolution. In the weeks leading up to the missile crisis the next year, the Economist was more worried about Kennedy’s ‘obsession with Cuba’, objecting to bellicose editorials in Time, the New York Herald Tribune and the ‘growth of extremist attitudes towards foreign policy in the United States’.159 After a US spy plane snapped images of a Soviet missile base under construction on the island, on 27 October a leader headed ‘Cyclone Cuba’ urged negotiations at the UN, but still saw the US as the rasher power, forcing a ‘showdown over the shipment of Russian arms to Cuba’.160 The paper praised Kennedy the next week for obtaining a ‘complete Russian retreat’ but also Khrushchev for statesmanship, having secured US agreement not to invade Cuba again – as great a relief to the allies of the one as of the other.161
‘Cyclone Cuba’ so incensed Crowther that he insisted Tyerman have it rewritten. Midgley, its main author, had already tamped down hints from Smith and Alex Campbell, Washington correspondent, that fuzzy photos of the Soviet bases might be fakes. Brian Beedham, the future foreign editor, was tasked with softening its criticism of the US the morning the paper went to press. Crozier fumed, but even his friend Beedham at this point preferred compromise to nuclear war: ‘The attitude of the Economist shocked me. It took the same line as the leftish Guardian, advising scepticism over the US evidence and caution in response. This was not the paper I had joined in the days of Geoffrey Crowther, who, I learned later, had been equally shocked and had let it be known that he would ask the board to replace Donald Tyerman as editor.’162 A similar reaction set in after some light hand-wringing about the coup in Brazil in 1964. A lead article blaming the (elected) President Goulart for his own ouster provoked outrage, since it also criticized the ‘anti-communism’ of his rightwing opponents as ‘a mask for unwillingness even to consider their country’s major problems’. Subscribers in Brazil, shocked at this, pelted angry letters at the Economist for weeks, after which reporting on the new junta was left to a correspondent in Rio enthusiastic at its salutary economic policies.163
Perhaps the final nail for Tyerman was the defection of his soon-to-be infamous correspondent in the Middle East. Kim Philby was the suave former head of counter-espionage for MI6, who had come under suspicion as a Soviet double agent after the Second World War when he tipped off two of his fellow ‘Cambridge Five’ conspirators to flee to Moscow in 1951. He was forced to resign, but cleared for lack of evidence, and the SIS and Foreign Office eased him in 1956 onto the Observer and Economist, where MI6 expected to reactivate him from Beirut. In a testy exchange with Crowther after Philby defected in 1963, Tyerman insisted that the latter had approached the Economist, which took him on only after the Observer (it had unbeknownst to Tyerman gotten a request from the Foreign Office) agreed to share the cost.
What we got from the FO was neither a request to employ him (which we would automatically have jibbed at) nor a permission to employ him (which we would never have asked for) but simply the ‘assurance’ from our various informal personal contacts, when we told them, (a) that there was no ground at all, politically, after his clearance by the Foreign Secretary, why he should not be employed and (b) that, on personal grounds, they were all glad that, after bad times, he was getting the break he deserved.
I have to confess that I have no bad conscience about this. Hindsight now puts the question whether it is worse, both being bad, to employ a man at the FO’s request (which I would never do) or take on the man now ‘admitted’ to be the ‘third man’. Then, of course, he was officially not the third man; his work for us in the first and longer part of his engagement was excellent and, as Elizabeth herself told the Observer on Sunday, properly impartial and judgematical. At the very end, he did flag, as we said in our piece, but for personal not political causes; and, when he went, we had for some time been wondering what to do about him, simply on journalistic grounds.164
From his father’s house in Ajaltoun, Philby had sent back faultlessly anti-communist articles, the sort he thought would rhyme with British upper-class prejudices, on Iran, Iraq, Syria, Egypt and Yemen. When his output flagged, Tyerman sent down Midgley – Philby’s friend from Cambridge, with him in Berlin in Easter 1933 when the Nazis came to power – to encourage him, as well as Barbara Smith; they got drunk instead at hotel bars, Smith chasing a baby fox around Philby’s Beirut flat months before he disappeared in 1963. ‘He was fun in an elusive way’, she said.165 For Crowther, Philby’s exposure was another blow to the Economist’s reputation, further confirmation it had become too leftwing. But that was a misperception – not just because Philby had been the opposite of leftwing as a reporter, but because it was the rightwing Crozier and Moss who would use the Economist as their alibi for collecting and distributing anti-Soviet ‘misinformation’ for the rest of the Cold War. And if they were the most extreme, unethical cases, they were by no means alone. Among the editors with links to British intelligence going back to the war were Donald McLachlan, John Midgley, Elizabeth Monroe and Patrick Honey; by one account, more IRD-listed journalists served on the Economist than on any other London newspaper.166 Still, it stung, not just because Philby had bilked these very agencies for so long, but because his scrapes with danger and bed-hopping were the stuff of real spies, not just storytelling. The goal of replacing Tyerman now shifted into high gear, leaving him just enough time to commit one final sin against the gospel as Crowther had laid it down, when the Economist endorsed Labour in 1964.
Labour, 1964 and All That
The 1959 election had brought the expected verdict, with the Economist asking which politician had done more to redeem the sins of his party – ‘Mr. Macmillan in discarding the false promises of Suez and prestige diplomacy, or Mr. Gaitskell in cutting back to sense the false promises of inflationary socialism?’ The answer was Macmillan, who ‘repaired the transatlantic allianc
e, which Suez broke, and rebuilt those Commonwealth bridges that were torn down’.167 Labour, in contrast, was not to be trusted at home – expansion under it not worth the risk to ‘a vulnerable pound again and rising prices and costs’ and to ‘the flow of credit’, with ‘guns unmasked … against the City and all its works’ – nor abroad, where its vision now seemed blurred by longings for ‘missionary deeds of social and economic growth in the Commonwealth and among the underdeveloped millions of the world’.168 Five years later, what altered this judgment? In 1964 the Economist betrayed almost as little enthusiasm for Labour as for the Conservatives, both culpable of ‘woolliness and timidity’. If Labour was (just) preferable, this was less shocking than Crowther’s angry reaction might indicate. After thirteen years in power, the Tories walked with a limp, stumbling badly in the period leading up to an election widely predicted to go against them.
Macmillan may have touted the level of national prosperity to voters as unprecedented during his second stint in office but, well aware of Britain’s persistent international weakness – growth the lowest among the advanced economies in Europe, exports as a share of the world total in steady decline, the sterling area ineffective as a panacea for either – in 1961 he opened talks to join the European Economic Community in hopes of spurring modernization. The Economist vigorously backed him. When de Gaulle vetoed the application two years later, claiming that Britain wanted to have its cake and eat it – retaining commonwealth preferences while also gaining access to the common market – the paper railed at ‘a new Bonaparte’ plotting his return to ‘the Europe of 1810, self-sufficient, Francocentric, door shut tight against the nation of shopkeepers, back turned upon the New World’. But it also admitted the government’s economic plans now lay in tatters, with no clear alternative for effecting the ‘vast productive reshuffling of resources, the revivalist change in mental attitudes’ of the sort the French, German or Japanese were undergoing.169 When the Profumo scandal struck at just this moment, it shocked the Economist. Not because the Minister of War and Russia’s naval attaché were having an affair with the same lady – ‘its rationalist and nonconformist tradition’ disbarred it from looking into these ‘salacious details’ – but because ‘a Prime Minister of Britain [was] about to be overthrown by a 21-year old trollop’.170 The choice of Scottish aristocrat Sir Alec Douglas-Home to succeed Macmillan did little to reverse the Conservatives’ slide.
Finally, that year Norman Macrae, the paper’s economics editor, published Sunshades in October, an indictment of ‘stop-go economics’ under the Tories that joined a growing body of statistical research, political pamphlets, business and trade-union reports on the same theme. The thinking behind ‘stop-go’ began as a perfectly sane reaction to Labour’s disastrous record from 1945 to 1951, he argued, as excessive demand became a grave economic crisis. The problem was that this continued to terrify economists even after it had ceased to be a problem, once the Conservative Chancellor R. A. Butler had dismantled ‘the ration book economy’, freeing up market forces to set the price of food, interest, raw materials and construction by 1954. Yet the currency and balance of payments crises that supervened were still seen through the same lens, requiring the same corrective as before: demand deflation. Macrae had been as guilty of this as anyone, urging governments to ‘cut down demand very ruthlessly’ if ‘ever external economic events make it necessary’ in his most famous (if often misunderstood) article, ‘Mr Butskell’s Dilemma’ in 1954.171 A decade later, however, he conceded that these periodic cutbacks had had the opposite of their intended effect. Instead of holding down costs per unit of labour and raising exports, restrictive policies had raised costs and reduced efficiency, above all in the new, high-tech industries on which the growth of British trade depended.172 In a typical turn of phrase, Macrae mused that economists clinging to deflation on theoretical grounds as the only way (given full employment) to stop imports from rushing ahead of exports during a boom, were a bit like clever scientists who could prove it is ‘impossible for a bumble-bee to fly, because its wings are too small for its body. As a bumble bee does fly, I have long felt that it is time for that latter theory to be re-examined.’173
In this context Harold Wilson was appealing, all ‘freshness’ and ‘brisk resolution’, whose hymns to the white heat of technology were what ‘a country awaiting its economic miracle’ needed. In its editorial of support for Labour, the Economist acknowledged most of its readers would vote Conservative anyhow, but out of fear, ‘though the riskier choice, Labour – and Mr. Wilson – will be the better choice for voters to make on Thursday’. Macrae recalled that ‘although Crowther and most of the rest of the board did not agree’, a majority of the editors thought ‘post-Gaitskell Labour should come back for a while into being a party of government because another spell of opposition during the 1960s could turn it into an old-time socialist party instead of a new-age responsible social democrat party.’ The hope was Labour might be able to tame the trade unions, heading off wage inflation (the type that worried Macrae) while doing a better job than Conservatives at ‘expanding the national income by all possible means’.174
Labour and the End of the Line
Suez, Cuba, Philby, now Wilson: Crowther was furious and fed up. He refused to even consider the two candidates Tyerman favoured as his successors. Midgley and Macrae were too close to the editorial decisions he hated – on Cuba and Labour, respectively – to get a hearing. The chairman now looked for outsiders, hastily and somewhat unaccountably approaching Roy Jenkins, then a young Labour MP with intellectual chops as the biographer of Attlee, Dilke and Asquith, who favoured dropping public ownership from the party platform, and a policy of wage restraint from trade unions. When the board baulked at hiring even a liberal Labourite, Crowther pushed for Alastair Burnet, a former staff editor from 1958 to 1963, who had left to become a television news anchor on ITN. In his letter of recommendation to the board Crowther underlined two qualities which in his view made Burnet suitable, aside from his great personal charm: ‘he is a liberal in the fairly exact sense of the word, without qualifying for the capital L by having any attachment to the Liberal (or any other) party.’ This was a typical untruth: Burnet may have been liberal, but he was attached to the Conservatives in the exact sense, as member and advisor. Second, in foreign affairs, ‘he is a very firm believer in the policy of the North American Alliance, without any of the leanings towards neutralism which (to my regret) have sometimes been apparent in the Economist in recent years.’175
Tyerman betrayed no bitterness about his treatment, and later denied Crowther ever interfered in his editing. ‘Nothing has made me despair more for human folly than the cries that still go up in this country’, Tyerman wrote in his valedictory, ‘catcalling Americans as a threat to peace when they have become in historic fact its saviour.’ That did not mean, of course, the US was infallible: ‘candid criticism there should be from good (but only good) allies.’ Later, when Crowther died suddenly, a peer of the realm, eulogized in 1972 by the LSE’s Lionel Robbins at Westminster Cathedral, Tyerman recounted his own memories of the man. He stressed in Encounter that Crowther’s friendship for Washington never saw him lapse into a reactive conservatism: ‘never, crudely, a cold warrior’, he ‘admired Dean Acheson’. For him, ‘the great issue in home affairs was not anti-socialism, any more than it was anti-communism abroad. It was positive not negative: liberty.’
The distance the Economist had travelled since Crowther became editor in 1939 on the eve of war was nevertheless extremely striking. By the end of his editorship, Crowther was reduced to ruminations on the special relationship, once telling the New York Times’s Cy Sulzberger, ‘British relations with the United States ought to be as freely candid as Australian with Britain.’176 In 1964 Tyerman simply added that at the same time Britain should seek out ‘the closest dovetailing into Europe’.177 Absent from either reflection was any mention of empire or commonwealth, nor the vision of world power that accompanied these after 1945,
to be built upon foreign investment doled out by the City. Britain might need to accept a subsidiary role in upholding liberalism around the world in the next phases of the Cold War. Not the Economist: here a true partnership was possible, with the paper supplying the best intelligence to the new imperial power across the water, in a struggle to the bitter end with communism.
This eBook is licensed to Karim Mamdani, [email protected] on 12/02/2019
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This eBook is licensed to Karim Mamdani, [email protected] on 12/02/2019
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Liberal Cold Warriors
The appointment of Alastair Burnet was a watershed for the Economist, which began a sharp and permanent turn to the right, and to America, under him. The first ever paid-up Conservative to edit the paper, his tenure was marked by unconditional support for the war in Vietnam, where the US escalated its assault on the North just as he took over in 1964. The changes Burnet heralded were generational: from Bagehot to the younger Crowther, editors had looked to the Liberal Party as their central reference, as the institutionalization of liberalism; from Crowther’s intake after 1938 to Tyerman’s after 1956, most staff – Ward, Kyle, Midgley, Monroe, Smith – were formed by the Second World War, when the ‘extreme centre’ encompassed economic planning, the New Deal was held in high esteem, and Soviet Russia was still an ally, with all the mixture of attitudes that went with this short-lived parenthesis. The Economist since Burnet has been produced for the most part by pure products of the Cold War, without any adult experience of what preceded it. (Deputy editor Norman Macrae was the main exception, chronologically, but with childhood memories of 1930s Moscow that served as a premonition of the same mindset.) More than any single economic point of policy – and even as global capitalism changed dramatically over three decades, with post-war boom fading into long downturn before a neoliberal shock – the political struggle between liberalism and communism structured coverage at the Economist.
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