The Burnet Show
‘Few editors of the Economist have been famous faces’, began the in-house obituary for Burnet, who passed away in 2012. A political reporter for ITN, as editor he continued to cover general elections and the monarchy, and in 1967 began to anchor the News at Ten. His small sleepy eyes sat beneath heaping eyebrows, which furrowed, implored, wheedled, or rose archly, depending on the subject, with the whole crowned by a slick bouffant of hair that greyed over time but never lost altitude. A colleague described him as a proto–Jeremy Paxman, the BBC journalist famous for flustering politicians and pop stars as well as helming patriotic documentaries that celebrate the quirky side of the British character. Burnet was even more reassuring than that; for Americans, something like a cross between Walter Cronkite and Barbara Walters. Like the former, he was portentous enough to call national elections six times from 1964 to 1987, and narrate the moon landing, albeit with less gravity: ‘there it is, the old moon – the one the cow jumped over’. On the other hand, he basked in the warm glow of the royal family, chronicling their weddings, births, funerals and daily rituals in books and television specials, sometimes with embarrassing deference. On hand when Prince Charles wed Diana Spencer, as the latter descended the steps of Westminster Cathedral with a twenty-five-foot train in tow, he exclaimed, ‘If there is any heart that hasn’t been won over by her today, it can kindly surrender now’. Sniffing at flowers on the ninetieth birthday of the Queen Mother, who observed it was a day in a million, Burnet was heard off-camera: ‘She’s made so many days in a million’. Private Eye, the satirical weekly, dubbed him ‘Arslicker Burnet’. The TV show Spitting Image gave him his own puppet. In one segment, ‘in private, in person, incredibly boring, a year in the life of Sir Alastair Burnet’, his likeness prepares for a week of ‘fawning and cringing, if he can fit it into his busy schedule of licking and slurping’, as he clutches a canister of oil and toilet paper roll; in another, Charles and Diana walk up an endless red carpet that turns out to be his tongue.
His interest in what he called ‘plain folk’ notwithstanding, Burnet’s background was standard for an editor: born in Sheffield in 1928 to Scottish parents, his father was an engineer, who nurtured hopes that his son would play cricket for Yorkshire. Burnet went to the Methodist Leys School in Cambridge, then on to Worcester College, Oxford, where he studied history but refused a second-class degree, believing he deserved a first. After a few years at the Glasgow Herald, he began his first stint on the Economist in 1958. Burnet did not take himself too seriously. One of his major impacts on the paper was that it no longer did either. He presided over meetings with a gin and tonic, did impersonations, and commissioned pieces on his favourite sports. Covers portrayed catchy visual-verbal gags, with captions and thought bubbles gently deflating world leaders, like Private Eye for the ruling class. There was Labour’s Harold Wilson dressed as Santa Claus for Christmas in 1967: ‘But I haven’t got the sack’; the Tory leader Edward Heath on his sailboat: ‘So what’s my handicap for 1970?’; around New Year in 1972, Richard Nixon splashing through the surf: ‘Hope I needn’t walk on it this year’. Some even took principled stands. When British passport holders from East Africa of Asian descent were denied entry to Britain in 1968, it pictured a UK passport in a pile of garbage, ‘If that’s what it’s worth’. Circulation rose along with jauntiness: 60 per cent in a decade, to 123,000. ‘He did work hard’, recalled one journalist, ‘and from 6 p.m. to 1 a.m. he left to do TV. His private life suffered, but not the paper.’
Burnet was at the same time an active Conservative, who took on added stature within the party thanks to his editorship. When the National Union of Miners defied the government and went out on strike in February 1974, Burnet was one of those who advised the prime minister of the day, Edward Heath, to call elections, breakfasting with him every morning during the ensuing campaign. The title of his address to the Conservative Political Centre a year later registered his shock at the outcome: the question no longer ‘who governs’ but ‘Is Britain Governable?’ His answer was that of a moderate who thought two steps could save the situation: gathering a coalition to build consensus around sensible reforms, and forcing the trade unions to hold competitive elections, ‘more important than any parliamentary by-election, and more important than most elections for the control of a city or a county’. He ended with a warning to those who favoured a more frontal assault on labour, already gathered at think tanks like the Institute of Economic Affairs or the Centre for Policy Studies, where Thatcher was imbibing much of the neoliberal program she brought to 10 Downing Street four years later:
I believe it would be ruinous for the Conservative Party, in the decisive political battle of this generation, to adopt the policies of the study, to be tempted into an academic view of unemployment … People will accept much more if they can be sure the intention of a government is that real incomes are rising than they will if they suppose that monetarism … is the only formula. We should not suppose that everyone in Britain is converted to the helpful doctrines of Dr. Milton Friedman, or that, even if they read Newsweek, they have ever heard of him.1
Brian Beedham, Robert Moss and Vietnam
The moonlighting of a celebrity editor gave a great deal more freedom to his two deputies – Brian Beedham and Norman Macrae – each equally influential in their domains, both convinced liberal capitalism must fight communism to some final reckoning. How did the Economist represent the battlefields of the US Empire, which took that fight direct to the enemy, and what were the implications for democracy? From 1965 to 1989 the answers were given by the dour, domineering and articulate Brian ‘Bomber’ Beedham, whose author photos show him dressed like a retired US intelligence analyst in a natty sweater layered over a shirt and tie, wearing aviator glasses and a beard. Feared and respected – if never much liked, with two near misses at being editor to show for it – Beedham started out like much of the staff since Crowther: on a scholarship to Oxford in 1952 and then a Commonwealth Fellowship to the US. There he received his first lessons in Atlanticism in 1956, when he called the British military attaché in Washington to enlist for service in the assault on the Suez Canal. The attaché hung up, and the patriotic Beedham deduced two things from an expedition that ended almost as abruptly: London could no longer act abroad without leave from the US, but what it could do was awaken the latter to its responsibilities as the new policeman for the world.
So the next year Beedham instead reenlisted in the Economist, where Brian Crozier, the only other champion of Suez, welcomed him. Crozier left the paper in 1964, but continued to exert pull via Beedham, who also hired Crozier’s twenty-three-year-old protégé Robert Moss as a correspondent in 1970. Crozier had been so impressed on meeting the young Australian the previous year that he had asked Moss to draft the inaugural report for his new Institute for the Study of Conflict (ISC), set up to ‘expose’ détente with the Soviet Union as a fraud and ‘save the Western Alliance’.2 At first glance Moss might have seemed an endearing contrast to his humourless mentor: pudgy face, ruffled beige trench coat, smoking cigars, mixing dry martinis; he ‘liked the smell of cordite in the morning’, he said, doing his best James Bond. Moss continued writing for Crozier’s CIA-funded ISC (which also took money from multinationals like Shell and British Petroleum) and Forum World Features (a kind of Associated Press of ‘misinformation’) during his ten years at the Economist, often using both it and Foreign Report as covers for paid intelligence agency work and the planting of false stories.3
Beedham gave Moss free rein, with striking results. ‘Foreign Report is unique in that it forecast almost to the day the coup d’état in Greece in 1967 and the coup in Chile in 1973’, ran a boastful 1979 blurb for the magazine, described by two investigative journalists as a ‘gossip column of the intelligence world’.4 In 1980 Moss would leave the Economist, taking with him an aura of authority that only the paper could have provided. He became an advisor to Margaret Thatcher, who in her memoirs thanked ‘the editor of
the Economist’s Foreign Report, an expert on security and strategic matters’ for drafting her famous ‘Iron Lady’ speech warning of the ‘Sovietization of Britain’ in 1976. He was also, Thatcher noted warmly, ‘destined to be a bestselling novelist’, with a spy thriller that read just like his journalism for the Economist but with lashings of violence and pornographic sex (which she did not mention).5 Moss suffered a nervous collapse a decade later at the end of the Cold War – today he is a ‘dream shaman’ in upstate New York, advising people on how to visit dead relatives and world leaders in their sleep – and his story captures some of that conflict’s obsessive hold over the paper he and Beedham had such a pivotal hand in editing.
No issue defined their approach more than Vietnam, where in 1954 the US began to take over the role of the defeated French – funding a fragile, repressive client state in the South, while fighting communists there and in the North, to prevent any reunification of the country under Ho Chi Minh. For the staff writer and future historian Hugh Brogan, Economist coverage of the war by the early 1960s was ‘pure CIA propaganda’, which claimed South Vietnam was thriving under Ngo Dinh Diem, its US-installed premier. ‘Rice can be exported once more. Farm taxes are down. Education, sanitation and health have been greatly improved’ and ‘the great mass of the people, neither hungry nor profoundly interested in western concepts of philosophical liberalism and parliamentary democracy, are non-communist.’6 ‘But it’s so nice to have good news for once’, sighed Barbara Cruikshank when Brogan objected to such stories, in particular to their rosy depiction of life in the ‘strategic hamlets’ – concentration camps, rebranded – to which peasants were herded at gunpoint. Perhaps these had ‘defects in practice’, the paper admitted in 1963, but they could be fixed: fencing off farmers from communists (one could not be both, in its view) was the right start, but Americans ought to learn from ‘the French here a decade ago and the British in Malaya’ how imperative it was for white men to keep out of sight. ‘They should provide the material and technical means of winning the war, but leave the fighting to the Vietnamese’, for only ‘they can merge with the population like a fish in water’.7
Articles sounded more like pep talks than dispassionate analyses. For Beedham, the Tet Offensive, launched from the North and across the South in 1968, was ‘an attempt, conducted with brilliant tactical dash, to force a settlement before it is too late’, but doomed to failure. ‘American opinion at home has hardened in support of the war. The statistics are moving against the communists where it matters.’8 Two issues later, there was alarm when the offensive appeared to rattle nerves instead, as ‘Viet Cong’ breached the US Embassy in Saigon, and the death toll for US forces began its climb to 15,000 in a year: ‘Americans would be admitting that they had been beaten by the technique of guerrilla war as applied by a minority of the population of one small Asian country. That would affect the way that men in Moscow make their plans for the future.’9 On the My Lai Massacre in retaliation for Tet, involving the murder of around 500 unarmed children, old men, and women (many of whom were also raped) by US marines: an isolated incident, ‘minor variations on the general fallibility of men at war’, and paeans to Western freedom of the press for bringing it all to light. ‘The bloodiness of this war is undeniable. But it is hard to detect on the American side anything that could be called a policy of atrocity.’10
The Nixon administration’s decision to target Cambodia in 1969 – carpet-bombing it on the same pretext as Laos (where five years of this had rendered large swathes uninhabitable and over a quarter of the population homeless), and then invading it – did give rise to tensions at the Economist … with what result? ‘No one wants to raise the spectre of a second Vietnam’, it began in 1970. ‘But if the new Cambodian government is threatened by a foreign army, as distinct from a local rebellion, Mr. Nixon, whatever his reluctance, will have to consider the consequences of failing to support it.’11 That month, Nixon announced his ‘Cambodian incursion’. The paper even sniped at Henry Kissinger – the chief architect of this scheme as the National Security Advisor – for mulling peace with the North Vietnamese in October 1972 on terms far too lax. It was an extraordinary thing to write about this peace plan, which Hanoi accepted after many concessions and millions dead, only to watch Nixon drop it till after the US election (betting, on a pollster’s tip, this would win him more votes) while ordering the saturation bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong.12 ‘There is no reason a liberal should accept why the two Vietnams ought to be reunited until it has been shown that a majority of the people in both of them, or at least of those in the south, wish it to be so.’ Until this was certain, let the bombs fall where they may.13
Beedham was just as relentless when it came to combatting criticism of the war, which increased as prospects for winning it faded. In Britain, he pressed Wilson’s Labour government for ‘clearer voiced practical support for the American position’.14 Wilson was in fact unwavering, offering not just moral encouragement to Lyndon Johnson, but also training, supplies, signal intelligence and support from bases in Hong Kong and Malaya. If he refused to say so in public, or to accede to pressure for British boots on the ground, this was for fear of splitting Labour, whose left wing urged him to condemn indiscriminate US bombings of civilians in Northern towns and villages in June 1966, in a move that infuriated the Economist.15 ‘If the British want to, they can give up the attempt to influence American policy. They can retire to the sidelines and blow raspberries.’ Instead, they should respect the special relationship, whose rules were simple: Britain must ‘go along with the main aims of American foreign policy in return for the right to nudge the Americans back on course. It is a fair exchange.’16 It was silly to rant about ‘US Imperialism’. ‘How can anyone this side of lunacy suppose that the American troops fighting in the paddy-fields of Vietnam can raise their real gross national product back home by a single cent?’ Americans were the real victims, there for ‘unselfish reasons’; ‘the communists are the force on the move in the area’. Beedham could not fathom how students ‘should be tempted to scream abuse in Grosvenor Square’ at the US Embassy, where huge Vietnam Solidarity Campaign marches converged in 1968.17 And when the Pentagon Papers were published by the New York Times in 1971, he lumped it in with the same sort of student truants. Temporizing about the presidential lies running from Truman to Johnson that the Pentagon Papers revealed, Beedham maintained that these did not alter the merits of the Vietnam War, and in fact necessitated them. ‘There are powerful reasons democratic governments are seldom particularly open with their people on the brink of war.’ The most powerful of these? A ‘liberal intelligentsia’ that ‘prefers not to bring itself to face the possibility of war until it sees the knife at its own throat’ – pacifists, appeasers, the sort of people who had lain supine before the Kaiser and Hitler.18
The idea that it might be justified to lie to citizens now informed not just the content but also the sourcing and editing of foreign news at the Economist. ‘Vietnam just wasn’t debated at Monday meetings’, recalled Johnny Grimond. ‘Beedham simply had too much control, so the invasion of Cambodia might come up, but never the war itself.’19 Nor was this confined to Southeast Asia, just one front in a vaster war, as Beedham explained in a special debate with foreign editors of the Polish weekly Polityka in 1965. ‘If we in the West accept the existence of a line in Europe beyond which there is no poaching, then you must accept a similar line in Asia.’ For ‘if in the name of “wars of national liberation”, you support the use of violence to change the regime in South Vietnam, how can we appeal to other people to refrain from violence in the pursuit of “liberation” elsewhere: Pakistanis over Kashmir, the Austrians over South Tyrol – in the end, maybe, the west Germans over east Germany?’20
Enemies: Suharto to Allende
The Economist applied Beedham’s implacable Cold War logic to cover the entire earth. In Indonesia, the stakes were high, and so was the need for secrecy about Western involvement: in this case, 54,000 Briti
sh troops fighting for Malaysia, a federal entity whose borders London had drawn in 1963, provoking immediate clashes with Jakarta over them. Beedham sought a physical and psychological war to ‘check’ Sukarno – the independent-minded first president of Indonesia, whose grip on power rested in part on the national communist party (PKI) – explaining as much to the Salt Lake Tribune at the height of the ‘Konfrontasi’ in 1964. A guerrilla campaign in the jungles of northern Borneo directed against the former British territories of Sarawak and Sabah was serious, but one that a modest escalation – say, ‘infiltration of British-trained guerrillas into Sumatra’ to ‘remind Sukarno that two can play the guerrilla game’ – could solve, ‘for there are signs President Johnson and Secretary Dean Rusk are as worried as the British about Dr. Sukarno’.21 Beedham, of course, was in the psychological war business himself – writing stories with help from Crozier and the Information Research Department. In 1965, he accused Sukarno ‘of trying to appease the Indonesian communists, even to bequeath the succession to them’. On this pretext, General Suharto ousted Sukarno that year, rounding up and killing half a million communists and suspected communists; the British and Americans supplied a list of names and other assistance to Suharto, as a bloody curtain descended on Indonesian democracy for three decades. For the next thirty years, the paper consistently extolled Suharto and whitewashed his crimes – minimizing student protests against his ‘postponement’ of elections and praising his reform of the army into a ‘fast-moving, police-action force’ in 1968–69, justifying his invasion of East Timor in 1975, legitimizing his Golkar party’s victory in 1987 as ‘relatively peaceful’ and ‘convincing’, and commending his economic management.22
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