Lord Lothian's Job

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Last week an undercurrent of tension rippled the sunny surface of Washington. Outwardly the city was calm. The crowds were in Philadelphia, the political writers were at the Republican National Convention, writing incorrect prophecies. The midsummer tourists wandered before the monuments on the eve of the Fourth of July; the green parks of Washington dozed in the bureaucratic sun; the same great crowds of office workers swarmed from the Government buildings at 4:30 p.m.; the same old familiar groups of spies and gossipers met for cocktails at sundown; New Dealers and newly drafted industrialists were alike caught in traffic jams when sudden summer storms drenched the cab-filled streets.

But at night lighted windows spotted the dark buildings of Washington, like outward and visible signs of the tension within. There was a sense of strain around the White House, where the President issued a proclamation broadening his emergency powers (see p. 9); around the State Department, as rumors of peace moves came from Europe (see p. 25); around the War Department, where the Army's mechanization program was intensified (see p. 19); in the Navy Department, where tight-lipped officers turned aside questions about the movements of the U. S. Fleet.

But nowhere in Washington was the tension more concentrated than in the pinkish-brick British Embassy that stood on its hill below the Naval Observatory. And it was concentrated there on the calm, portly, six-foot figure of the British Ambassador, Philip Henry Kerr (pronounced Karr), Marquess of Lothian, Baron Ker of Newbottle, and holder of five other hereditary titles which, come British victory or British defeat, were not likely to mean much in the future.

Late last summer Lord Lothian arrived in Washington. Last week even professional Anglophobes were compelled to admit that if the U. S. had not understood the British case--and its meaning to the U. S. --it had not been because Lord Lothian had fallen down as an Ambassador. Pacing his littered study in the Embassy he was saying (between transatlantic phone calls and visits to the State Department) what he had said when he arrived: that the prize for which Hitler was contending was command of the sea. The only difference was that he now said it more forcefully, and his eyes behind his plastic-rimmed glasses were more challenging, less genial.

U. S. public opinion, which last year was unwilling to face the savage reality of war, last week was prepared to admit that it had a decisive, selfish, personal interest in what happened to the British Fleet. In its own way it had come to translate into blunt language what Lord Lothian had said indirectly from the start. And signs were accumulating that the world's greatest problem in statecraft--British and U. S. relations--was approaching a critical phase:

> Unpredictable Senator Key Pittman of Nevada, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, handed reporters a statement that advised the British Government to abandon the British Isles to Hitler. Said he: "It is no secret that Great Britain is totally unprepared for defense and that nothing the United States has to give can do more than delay the result. Churchill's statement, 'We will never surrender' and that if any portions of the British Isles are subjugated 'we will fight from the New World with our navy,' if carried out and carried out immediately, will end Hitler's ambition for world conquest. It is to be hoped that this plan will not be too long delayed by futile encouragement to fight on. It is conclusively evident that Congress will not authorize intervention in the European war."

> But if Britain had no encouragement to "fight on," would the British Fleet be reassuringly moved to New World bases? From London, Alfred Duff Cooper's Ministry of Information issued a reply that was like a polite grinding of teeth:

"It would be a poor gesture of thanks to America after the aid given if the British people, with their 45,000,000 population, were calmly to lay down their arms without a fight--in any case, Great Britain is determined to carry the struggle through to a victorious end."

Lord Lothian had already answered Key Pittman. Because it contains a clear statement of the case that is the cornerstone of U. S.-British relations, TIME here reprints the key sentences of Lord Lothian's speech to a Yale alumni luncheon fortnight ago:

"The outcome of this grim struggle will affect you almost as much as it will affect us. For if Hitler gets our fleet, or destroys it, the whole foundation on which the security of both our countries has rested for 120 years will have disappeared. . . . Let me be blunt. . From letters which I receive, and from articles and letters in the press, it is clear that many people in the United States believe that somehow or other, even if Great Britain is invaded and overrun, the British Navy will cross the Atlantic and still be available through Canada or otherwise, as part of your own defensive system. I hope you are not building on that expectation. If you are . . . you have been building on an illusion."

His argument: European bases, such as Gibraltar, are just as essential to Atlantic security as are ships. As long as they remain in the hands of powers that respect the Monroe Doctrine, "no hostile ships, except for a few submarines and raiders, could get into the Atlantic at all." Second: "It is an illusion for people to believe that in the end the British Navy will pass easily to you. We in Britain shall certainly fight to the end to defend our country . . . [but] quite apart from the difficulties that would arise, if you were neutral, of handing over a fleet designed to protect the British Commonwealth to a power which could not use it for that belligerent purpose, there would be little left over for you. ... I am not concerned today to attempt to tell you what you should do in this grave matter. That is your business. But I am concerned that if and when the crisis arises you should not be able to turn on me and say 'Why did you not warn us about these facts? . . .'

> Two days after Senator Key Pittman issued his statement, he talked to the President, later gave another interview.

This time he said nothing of Britain's hopelessness, suggested that an "understanding" between the U. S. and British Fleets could "localize Hitler in Europe."

Clear Record. Minus his spectacles, with his broad forehead and high-arched Roman nose, Lord Lothian looks like a Roman of some intermediate period a few centuries before Rome's sliding fall. That impression is strengthened by the mildly indulgent character of his bulky frame--a respectable paunch, the lazy slope of his broad shoulders. His family motto is the indulgent apposite Sero sed serio--"Late, but in earnest." A democrat whose ancestral land titles go back to King Harold, a teetotaler and heavy orange-juice drinker who serves excellent wines, a Christian Scientist who was born into a devout Roman Catholic family and who now spends an hour or two a day in religious reading, a bachelor, a good golfer, fair tennis player, a signer after the exercise that he now has no time to get, Lord Lothian is the most popular British Ambassador Washington has seen since the late, great Lord Bryce. If U. S.-British relations should take a wrong turn, it would not be because Britain's Ambassador lived up to the Embassy's recent reputation for unapproachability, swank, disregard of U. S. ways.

The task of an Ambassador is to present well his country's case in the nation to which he is accredited. When Lord Lothian got to Washington, he knew that every move he made would be scrutinized for signs of sinister British propaganda. He also knew that the U. S. reaction to Munich had deepened contemptuous suspicions of British foreign policy with a big section of the U. S. public. An "enthusiastic and cheerful pessimist," he had become convinced in 1937 that war was inevitable unless some adjustment with Hitler was made, thought it likely that France and Britain would lose the first few years of the war unless U. S. aid came swiftly. And as a veteran of 15 U. S. trips, as secretary of the Rhodes Trust that annually sent 32 U. S. students to Oxford, he knew that U. S. help would not come swiftly.

But philosophic Lord Lothian also knew, as a devout man knows his faith, that in the end the way of the dictators was lost. Thirty-five years ago, when he was Philip Kerr, a tall, thin-faced, bookish Oxford graduate of 23, he packed off to South Africa to work under thoughtful Colonial Administrator Lord Milner, who was then pushing reconstruction, reconciling the embittered and defeated Boers. No fire-eater, Lord Milner preached and practiced a philosophy of empire so effectively that his crew of young amateurs* never forgot it, became famed as graduates of "Milner's Kindergarten." Basic premise in the Milner philosophy was that the vast, sprawling Empire, acquired by conquest and accident, with all its staggering differences of race and religion, must be democratized, liberalized; that the self-government of its various units, evolving with differences in degree and in kind, nevertheless stemmed from English constitutional principles.

As an Empire reformer Philip Kerr edited the Round Table, a scholarly journal of political philosophy. As Lloyd George's secretary during World War I, he made two secret journeys to Switzerland to try to convince Austrians that further fighting was hopeless. As a peacemaker, he was with Lloyd George at Versailles, played a part in drafting the Versailles Treaty which he has since criticized. As Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for India in the MacDonald Cabinet, he sat in the endless Round-Table Conferences on the Indian Constitution, visited Delhi (where he was greeted with a sign reading "Lothian, go back"), developed an admiration for Gandhi's saintliness when he was living in a mud hut next Gandhi's. As a firm believer in closer U. S.-British trade relations, he resigned from the Cabinet when Liberals split from the Government, over trade policy. As a close friend of Lady Astor's, he was damned as a member of the Cliveden Set during the appeasement crisis, like other members denied that there was such a set.

Business experience popped fitfully in & out of this political career: at 23 he was secretary of the Railway Committee of Central South African Railways; at 53 he was briefly Governor of the National Bank of Scotland. An improvising administrator, he works by fits & starts, grows inert and sluggish unless he has a big job to do.

The political philosophy that this career has hammered out for him is simple. His belief in a final Hitler defeat is no mere Little Englander's faith in muddling through. It comes from his faith that "what force alone constructs has neither permanence nor life." The concept of triumphant conquest he answers with Bacon's epigram: "Rome did not spread upon the world; the world spread upon the Romans." Says he: if the Nazis, the Fascists and the Japanese "had even a glimmering of this profound truth they might become centres of lasting world systems. But it is of their natures that they are blind to the eternal laws. They try to spread upon the world and the world, in due time, will cast them off."

Before he became Ambassador, Lord Lothian freely deduced future U. S. foreign policy on this basis. He told Britishers: the U. S. will never underwrite the British and French Empires, because the U. S. is traditionally opposed to imperialism, or the political control of one people by another. The U. S. attitude is likely to be similar to Britain's after Napoleon:

"We always insisted on standing uncommitted on the side lines of the European conflict, until a menace to our own interests compelled us to intervene. We long ago realized that the best and cheapest way of assuring our own security was to encourage other nations to fight for their own security, and when there was doubt about their ability to do so to assist them with finance and, if necessary, with arms." The U. S. does not aspire to a position of world responsibility and power; its desire is still for isolation without responsibility.

But world responsibility will be forced on it, as it was upon Britain, largely against her will; with U. S. strength, its higher standard of living and its larger measure of freedom, it will not be a question of the U. S. forcing itself upon the world, but of the world forcing itself upon the U. S.

One factor making for U. S. prosperity and political freedom was that in the period of greatest U. S. growth the seas were under democratic control. Although U. S. -British cooperation is suspect in the U. S. because it "obviously operates to the benefit of the British Commonwealth and not so obviously to the benefit of the U. S.," Lord Lothian believes that the issue would be clear when the U. S. understood what control of the sea by totalitarian powers would mean. "Do you suppose for one moment that if Nazi Germany or Communist Russia obtained control of the seas, the world would be any thing like as free as it was during the period of British control?" But Lord Lothian is not sanguine about the possibility of the U. S. acting with any other power. Says he: If the U. S. decides to act, it will be because she feels her vital interests require it, "and she is far more likely to proceed by the method of unilateral declaration of policy, involving no commitment to anybody else, as she did in the case of the Monroe Doctrine, than by any kind of alliance with or pledge to any other country."

Climax. When he arrived in Washington, Lord Lothian threw open the diplomatic windows, beat the dust out of some old customs, hung some diplomatic taboos out on the line in plain sight of the neighbors. He held a press conference after his first visit to the White House as Ambassador, talked freely with reporters, broadened the circle of Embassy guests from the traditional group of highly placed Government officials who are also social, made contacts with New Dealers as well as with old Rhodes Scholars. Except for a little sniping, he has not been criticized as a propagandist, has been mildly criticized 1) because he is reputed to be too often at the State Department and 2) has presented Britain's case in terms that are more effective to intellectuals than to businessmen.

Washington is still a city of strain for any Ambassador, no matter how great his personal success, and last week Lord Lothian was feeling the strain. As knowledge of the extent of the French collapse swept over the diplomatic colony, feeling was summed up in a phrase: "Now there is only one Ally." As Lord Lothian drove to the State Department he passed the Czech Legation, where sad-looking Minister Vladimir Hurban still lives. Next door to it the old Austrian Legation was gone, its Minister now a Georgetown University professor and his wife the local representative of a dress company. The Danish Legation, which moved into the same building, is still open, its Minister refusing to recognize the Government in Copenhagen. Polish Ambassador Count Jerzy Potocki rides in the day coach, has part of his staff live at the Embassy to save rent. The Norwegian Minister still lunches weekly with the Ministers of Finland, Denmark and Sweden, and each fortnight these four are joined by Belgium's Ambassador and the Minister of The Netherlands. French Ambassador Count de Saint-Quentin has nothing to say.

In this city of strain Lord Lothian last week moved less like the last of the Ambassadors, presenting his country's desperate case, than like the spokesman of a cause that will never be homeless as long as the English tongue survives.

*Others: Geoffrey Dawson, editor of the London Times, the late John Buchan (Lord Tweedsmuir, Governor General of Canada), Sir Patrick Duncan, Governor General of Union of South Africa, et al.

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