Inside the Foreign Office the Foreign Office

HALIFAX • EDEN • BEVIN

by Valentine Lawford

HALIFAX was long and thin. Eden was of more than middling stature and evenly proportioned. Bevin was unhealthily heavy for his height, though he was by no means a short man.

When Halifax moved, he could be graceful and grave and shy simultaneously, like a tall water bird wading in the shallows. Eden moved always with the fluent ease of a river between its banks, almost with a suggestion of bravura. But Bevin had difficulty heaving himself out of a sitting position at all, and when he sat down again his body seemed to swell up around him in great waves, like the ocean seeking its level after an unnatural disturbance.

Architecturally, the upper half of Halifax’s head resembled a dome which, since it rested on rather more than usually jutting ears, appeared illusively to taper toward the apex. It was a fine head, though. When he walked it fell very slightly forward, and as he sat reading at his desk he would cup the weight of it in the palm of his right hand. But the loftiness of the face as a whole could not cause one quite to forget an ever-present questioning look in the eyes, and beneath a long upper lip the line of the mouth itself was expressive less of wit or irony than of a controlled and philosophical melancholy, innate and instinctive rather than acquired. Yet his was by no means the neglected body of a dreamer. His back and legs were magnificently straight, and he looked his best astride a horse. And for one who combined proconsular talents with a reputation for almost medieval saintliness, he seemed always refreshingly human and outdoor, almost impressively untheatrical, in robes.

Eden’s fine eyes with their fringe of dark lashes, his regular head, handsome hair, and well-knit body had caused many to admire and some to envy him for such unashamed good looks. To anyone accustomed to seeing him often and at close range, the popular cartoonists’ version of his appearance never fHailed to come as a shock, so little did the original as one knew it justify the suggestion of immaturity, almost inanity, in the bogus acquaintance and the caricature.

In contrast, Bevin could never have suffered from looking too good or being thought too goodlooking. He was short-necked, his skin was muddy, and his just noticeably strabismic eyes were carelessly set beneath a forehead that would have seemed low indeed if the thick hair — still, at his life’s end, as solid as a coat of silver paint — had not been habitually plastered back above the temples. He had something of a weathered, or molten, nose, as though it had been formed of lava, or by some glacial action, and there was an equally unpremeditated, geological quality about the mouth below, for though it was capable of expressing a whole gamut of human moods, from the blackest ill-humor to the most unexpected and overwhelming sweetness, the lips at no point exactly matched one another, so that one was reminded less of flesh and blood than of some famous feature of the landscape or rock formation, of which people were accustomed to say that it really looked just like a human mouth when you saw it from a distance. But if by all contemporary canons he was frankly ugly, there was nothing remotely ignoble in his ugliness. The massive irregularities of such a head would have improved many a Roman emperor.

Halifax’s clothes were well cut, well cared for (it is tempting to say well preserved, for his black office coat in wartime, with its long vent up the back, had a greenish tinge in sunlight), and even when they were new they were slightly dated, as for some reason befits an Englishman who is fond of horses. Though his suits were sober he was not above brightening them discreetly with a spotted tie or a patterned silk handkerchief half falling from the pocket. And there were the recognizable marks of the squire and the colonel of yeomanry in the forward tilt of the bowler hat and the way he carried his umbrella, less frequently in the crook of his elbow than horizontally in the hand, as if it might have been a riding crop or a woodsman’s tool or a light arm regularly picked up on the hall table from habit. He walked each day through the parks to the Foreign Office, arrivingone particularly wet November morning in a pair of rubber boots a yard high, inside which, in the words of the half-admiring, half-scandalized office keeper whom he had summoned to help him pull them off, “there was only his Lordship’s bare feet.”

Eden wore the sort of clothes that a good tailor would like everyone to wear. In any other profession, they would scarcely have seemed remarkable for a man of his age and kind. Yet such was the relative drabness, or anachronism, of the toilettes of most British politicians of the period that he was constantly referred to not merely as the bestlooking but also as the best-dressed member of the government. He had long since tired of the dubious distinction — if, indeed, he had ever been flattered by it — knowing that the world is inclined to underestimate the intelligence, if not actually the moral worth, of notoriously presentable men and only asking to be judged, as he considered was no more than his due, on his record as a statesman. In a previous decade he had happened to give his name to a particular kind of hat, which in the public imagination still formed as inseparable a part of a familiar political personality as Baldwin’s briar pipe, Chamberlain’s umbrella, or Churchill’s seldom lit cigar. He rarely wore any hat at all in wartime; in those days, if he ever put anything on his head, for instance on a journey, it was more likely than not to be an old soft brown hat, turned down all around in the manner of the 1920s and worn so low at the back that it slightly crumpled his ears. But intent as they were on their own version of history, the cartoonists never gave a sign of noticing this anomaly.

From Bevin’s decent but somber exterior one concluded that, in old age, at least, he regarded clothing as principally functional. His face and the shape of his figure, in any case, made elegance of a conventional kind scarcely desirable.

Many of these superficial differences between Bevin on the one hand and Halifax and Eden on the other were attributable to the historical fact that, until less than half a century ago, certain external characteristics were part of the generally accepted inheritance of the then British working class. Though he lived to play a leading role in remedying this state of affairs, Bevin himself had not been born too late to be forced to accept his share of the old legacy, and more than a trace of it was in his possession until the day he died.

Notoriously, the difference of heritage announced itself to the ear no less than to the eye. Halifax’s tenor voice carried well when he made a speech and was pleasant to listen to, though one was inclined to look far above him as he spoke, a though it had been less from his mouth that one would catch his words than from an echo up in the rafters. Eden’s voice sometimes lacked body, but in debate or argument the strength of his convictions could make it resound. It was like an organ with a varied, but limited, range of stops: now warm and melodious, now querulous, now clipped and quick-dying, even to the extent of sometimes trailing away into little more than the hum of the mechanism. “Mm” or “Ya-as” he would say when something bored him particularly, and those who knew him were aware that he was no longer listening. Bevin’s voice was lower, rougher, grittier than either Halifax’s or Eden’s. When he was very tired it was scarcely more than the sigh of the wind through a grating in the plumbing, and even at its liveliest it might have been ground out of chips of stone.

And as with the voices, so with the hands. Halifax’s writing was neat, personable, slightly pointed and sloping, suavely scholarly and easyrunning, the script of a don or a dean. In particular, one was struck by an unusually pretty way of forming the x at the end of his own name. Eden’s writing was larger, rounder, a little less graceful and rather more careless, though, unlike Halifax, who often ran two of his words together, he almost always kept each word rigorously separate from its fellows. Those who profess to read character from calligraphy might have interpreted Eden’s as denoting a nature at once more impulsive, more sensitive to criticism, and less prone to compromise. But both hands seemed one and the same when set beside Bevin’s, which was so unorthodox as to defy description, just as it defied interpretation by his subordinates and sometimes even by himself. If those who had served at Addis Ababa might occasionally have traced a mild resemblance between his capital letters and what they remembered of written Amharic, the rest of his script resembled nothing known to anybody in the Foreign Office at all, so that it became one of the more important duties of his private secretaries to emendate passages in his minutes and marginal comments before passing them on to the department. As it was often necessary to invoke his help, he was aware of our mystification, but it caused him no embarrassment and he bore us no grudge. On the contrary, an occasional view among the files laid before him of our painstaking annotations and alternative readings never ceased to amuse one whose early circumstances — and it may be also, early inclinations — had been such that he had never learned to write legibly or to hold a pen except most awkwardly, far back between the first and second fingers of his hand.

BY DESCENT and upbringing. Halifax and Eden were North Countrymen, a qualification which, however little it may actually mean today, was once held to denote a greater independence and dourness in the popular character and a correspondingly greater toughness in the upper crust. Bevin was from the West Country, where a tendency on the part of great families to sink into a comfortable decay has been accompanied by a traditional, if by now largely mythical, spirit of adventure among the young of all classes and a more relaxed relationship between rich and poor than is generally to be found elsewhere in England. Even if, as one must suppose from his name, Bevin’s origins lay among the Welsh, his characteristic mixture of slightly ostentatious robustness and underlying sentimentality — elusive and erratic as the latter often proved to be in his political relationships — was surely less Celt than AngloSaxon.

Halifax and Eden had both been educated at classically respectable English establishments. Bevin attended the village school until he was seven, worked then for a while unenthusiastically as a farm hand, and later acquired such erudition as he could from his own reading and from Sunday schools, in the intervals of driving a two-horse delivery cart filled with mineral-water bottles. Since it seemed so normal to them, neither Halifax nor Eden spoke much about his education. Bevin, who was on all occasions more autobiographical, spoke with relish of his. And perhaps one of the very few fatuous things about him was his tendency to assume that because it had been more hardly come by and less conventional, it somehow had a virtue superior to theirs.

In the middle of the previous century, Halifax’s grandfather had been Chancellor of the Exchequer and Secretary of State for India, and he himself, when his turn came, had no notable difficulty at the age of twenty-nine in entering Parliament as representative of a constituency in his native Yorkshire. Likewise, Eden, whose family had played their part in public life for centuries, though he first failed to secure election for a mining district near his home, for times had already changed, succeeded only one year later at Warwick, at the age of twenty-six. Though Bevin had had an inestimably useful period of training for political life as a Trade Union organizer and leader, he had no parliamentary experience until he was almost sixty, and that only after two unsuccessful election campaigns, in 1918 and 1931. From birth, his path was incomparably rougher than that of either of his predecessors, a consideration that clearly cannot detract from their achievements but which may account for certain of his characteristics which it was inconceivable that they should share. Though he had a closer understanding than they of the mentality of the British poor, it was more difficult for him than for them to believe in disinterestedness on the part of others, particularly his own colleagues. He could brook no criticism. Though he always retained a certain slyness, he could hardly ever bring himself, even ostensibly, to abandon a grudge. His prejudices against individuals were probably deeper, and certainly more apparent, than theirs. His political egocentricity was legendary — his disgust and disappointment with the Soviet Union at the end of the war were only slightly less personal than Chamberlain’s with Nazi Germany at its outbreak — and it harmed him in the world and in his own party, more especially, when, growing old and even less circumspect, he came to the summit of his power and found his every action critically weighed by others. But he gloried in his prejudices and flaunted his ego, for without them the chances were that, instead of daring to go in search of the water of life for those whom he characteristically called “my people,”even if they were Germans or Russians or Egyptians, he might still have been working disconsolately on the land in Devon or driving through the lanes of Somerset and Gloucestershire in a two-horse cart or its latter-day mechanical counterpart, bearing nothing more invigorating than table water and fizzy lemonade.

For Halifax, the son of a famous High Churchman, Christianity, far from being a vague stimulus to humanitarian instincts or a salutary moral code, was a living religion that demanded regular and punctilious practice. On his way home in the evening from the Foreign Office to the Dorchester Hotel, it came naturally to him to make a detour to the Grosvenor Chapel, and he was almost notorious as a churchgoer and friend of clergy. In the twentieth century, as in far earlier times, that was something for which a statesman could be made to suffer. Since it was out of the question to throw him to the lions, contemporary antiChristians had to be content to pitch the newspaper accounts of his speeches, defiant witnesses of a faith they did not deign to share, into the nearest wastepaper basket. And cynics and Philistines and the run of his political opponents outside Parliament facilely dismissed the speaker himself as a hypocrite. Perversely, the fact that in public affairs he was not by any means hopelessly otherworldly but practical and understanding and shrewd was counted against him most by those who criticized him for daring to be religious.

Such things being at best a matter of guesswork, one can only guess that Eden’s attitude toward the Church was not unlike that of a great many of his English contemporaries, to whom it went without saying that one remained as loyal to Christianity as to an old and dear friend of one’s childhood, with whom one’s mother had, perhaps naturally, remained in rather closer touch than one had been able to do oneself. He was certainly less interested in religion than Halifax. But his unselfish impulses, his rigid honesty, and his impatience with what he recognized as mean were not exactly unchristian qualities.

Bevin’s mother, the village midwife, had burned with zeal for the Methodist cause. And Bevin in his youth had preached in Methodist and Baptist chapels. But as the years passed, his God had become less and less distinguishable from social reform.

ALL three Foreign Secretaries had a strong sense of their individual duty, coupled with — or it may be, springing from — a healthy belief in their own importance.

To his staff, the moods of a Secretary of State were as the sky to the farmer or the wind to a man in a sailing boat at sea, and clemency from on high, however warmly it may have been welcomed at the time, tends to figure in a private secretary’s memories as rarely and briefly as perfect harvest conditions in a countryman’s conversation or halcyon weather in a seaman’s log. In part, such must be my excuse for impertinently recalling here that Halifax — of whose benevolence I was so often an unworthy, but not by any means an insensitive, object — could on occasion be unexpectedly, almost ferociously, indignant to find, for example, on being sent to a Cabinet meeting at 10 Downing Street that he should have been directed instead to the Prime Minister’s room at the House of Commons. But only in part, for the very act of recalling the all too understandable impatience of an intensely preoccupied statesman over a tiresome, if comparatively trivial, contretemps inevitably leads one to recall his composure in the face of the immeasurably greater disasters and tragedies of those years; a rare, inner impregnability, infinitely worthier to be cherished.

Eden also, as it happened, could overwhelm one with fury over matters great and small. An official car that broke down in Piccadilly, the importunity of a bevy of flashlight photographers, or a secret telephone that refused to scramble sometimes threatened to assume the proportions of a hideous departmental faux pas or a major diplomatic reverse. But his temper spent itself so quickly and was invariably followed by an access of such kindness of heart that, like a dog when his chastisement is over, one was torn between repentance and gratitude.

Bevin’s anger was a duller fire, lasting all the longer for having been so slow to light at all. One surmised too that, unlike his predecessors, he had never been trained to forget and forgive. Yet he was by contrast amazingly patient of lesser errors. And it was almost as though he were naïvely gratified, as much flattered as surprised, to find that he had actually been conveyed to the right place for an international conference at the right time with, miracle of miracles, the right papers in his Foreign Secretary’s box.

Each of the three had his peculiar faculty for friendship. Halifax retained an obstinate loyalty to his colleagues and companions of Yorkshire and Oxford and Indian days, even to the extent of being ready to listen heroically to their views on subjects of which they knew so much less than he and to try to do what he could for them personally as Foreign Secretary, a readiness as rare as it can sometimes be inconvenient in public life. Of the three, he was perhaps the most susceptible to the charm of clever women and undoubtedly the most accomplished conversationalist.

Eden harbored a strong affection for a far narrower circle of friends, almost to a man political associates who had shared his views and stood by him in a famous pre-war emergency. When he returned to power they were not forgotten. But he would scarcely have thought of asking a favor on anyone’s behalf simply because he was a friend. If anything, he was inclined to believe that one who was a friend should be flattered to receive rather less favorable treatment than one who was not. He listened at all times less willingly than Halifax and often avoided conversation — except, most strikingly, with officers and men of the fighting services. For it seemed that even his abiding preoccupation with foreign affairs was not strong enough to resist the inclination of his heart when there was a question of keeping an ambassador waiting while he talked to a pair of wounded Canadians in a corridor of the House of Commons; delaying his return to Whitehall from Normandy to have tea in a farmyard with the Guards Armoured Division, just about to be thrown into an offensive south of Caen; or lengthening an already exhausting, roundabout return route from Moscow to London in order to hobnob for an hour with the men of the Sixtieth in the red mud of an Algerian lane. Here at last was a sign, welcome enough to those who might have been tempted to blame politics for having demanded from him too great a sacrifice of personality, that behind the imposing façade of the dedicated statesman there was still something left of the juvenile captain of far-off, unpolitical days.

If Eden still sometimes liked to see himself as a rifleman become Foreign Secretary, Bevin for his part continued to think of himself by preference not as a Cabinet Minister, a former Minister of Labor, a leader in the counsels of the Labor Party, nor even as a one-time member of the General Council of the Trade Union Congress, but rather as a sort of personification of the rank and file of the Transport and General Workers’ Union. The campaigns in which he had shared, and of which we could perforce know next to nothing (less, indeed, than we knew of Eden’s), were the campaigns of his Union, and his oldest and proudest scars were from wounds that Brother This and Brother That and no one else — not we, but also not Cripps nor Morrison nor even Attlee had seen inflicted and helped to bind. Perhaps he was not a man for strong individual friendships. Certainly the assortment of congenial acquaintances whom he had gathered from outside the Trade Union world (a particular trio consisting of an Italian film producer, Admiral Mountbatten, and a successful timber merchant occurs, I hope not irreverently, to the mind) seemed, at least superficially, too heterogeneous and haphazard, too much like the kind of embarrassed group that a conjurer will sometimes call up at random from the audience to join him on the stage, to be indicative of a personal taste for any particular type of friend.

One could hardly fail to be impressed, in a world where few statesmen of whatever political affiliation dare to be so Whitmanesque, by his animal appetite for the great En Masse, as if it were a physical urge on his part to feel himself one with all men and women who worked hard at a job, above all if they were humble or obscure. He discovered to his joy, on being appointed Foreign Secretary, that since even British diplomatists in the twentieth century mostly worked very hard for their living, he could actually merge himself with them also, for they too were “his people.”

Not that Bevin — any more, for that matter, than Halifax — was in the habit of spending his rare leisure hours with members of the Foreign Office staff, or even his political associates. Halifax might sometimes have to put in a weekend appearance at Chequers. But he would happily escape into the Chilterns for an afternoon alone with Lady Halifax and the Ordnance Survey map for Buckinghamshire, and I doubt whether he was ever anything but relieved to learn on returning that his absence in the hills had coincided with a number of telephone calls from his private secretary in London. Bevin too was elusive at weekends, and a little sleepily incoherent, if still wonderfully polite, when a message from the Foreign Office on a Sunday afternoon caught him napping in his flat, a stone’s throw from High Street, Kensington.

Eden, however, had the strongest objection to being left for any length of time unattended by his private secretary. Even at Chequers — where Churchill, who as Prime Minister enjoyed a far more frequent messenger service, was happy to show him all the most recent telegrams from British representatives abroad, and perhaps too obviously happy, since it enabled him at the same time to show him the suggested replies which, as an enthusiastic amateur Foreign Secretary himself, it was increasingly his habit to scribble in red ink at the bottom of the more interesting messages — Eden would complain that he felt like Robinson Crusoe until his own papers arrived by Foreign Office messenger in the Foreign Secretary’s box. But he had almost a schoolboy’s passion for a weekend at home. He loved his house in Sussex and everything in it and about it, yet never more, as it seemed to me, than when setting out for it, as on some slightly guilty adventure, from the side door of the Foreign Office on a Friday night, or starting back to London early on a Monday morning in a car full of fruit and vegetables and bunches of flowers. In between whiles, he could be Crusoe even there, though on this desert island at least he had the consolation of one of his private secretaries in the role of Man Friday. Occasionally an imaginative, or malicious, guest, relegated to a particular lesser bedroom, might whisper that the place was haunted, but for me it always, perversely, invited laziness and repose. A Degas drawing of a woman sewing, wasp-waisted, pointed elbow raised, an ink and water-color Segonzac seminude, the product of some river picnic on a mud-smelling, tree-shaded, infinitely peaceful summer day, looked down from the walls of the dining room onto salad and cheese and wine. In the breakfronts of the library. Jane Austen, Trollope, Maupassant, and George Moore still valiantly held at bay the vanguard of twentiethcentury realism, Emery Revcs, Virginia Cowles, Eve Curie, and Lord Citrine. The South Downs toward Goodwood described a green arabesque across the drawing-room windows, and a walled garden lay open at the foot of a flight of steps below the lawn. Yet shamefully saddened, impressed against one’s will, it was precisely in these surroundings that one recognized the true statesman’s infinite capacity for self-denial. There was no longer anything of the dilettante about my immensely considerate, yet almost equally preoccupied, host at the end of the dinner table, a man to whom the library was now pre-eminently the place where one sat answering the telephone. For him, even a walk on the Downs was no more than a pretext for a tour of infinitely vaster and less green horizons, and when he picked and offered one an apple from his favorite tree or a fig from the southern, stableyard wall, one had the strong impression that the hospitable gesture, though it was as natural as that of any happy countryman, only momentarily interrupted a political train of thought.

A NOTEWORTHY humility before the incumbent of the first office of state, a growing affection founded upon experience shared, rather than any similarity of mind or supposed similarity of political outlook, marked the relationship of Halifax to his Prime Minister, Chamberlain, And an equally formal respect, complicated — as it were, at once strengthened and loosened by a certain classical background in common and a far older, more intimate friendship, bound Halifax to his Prime Minister, Churchill, however ideally events and influences seemed calculated again and again to divide them.

Of Eden’s relationship to his wartime Prime Minister one hesitates to write at all. The complementary qualities of character and age and mind, the pride and indulgence of the old prophet and the devotion and patience of the chosen successor have been so often and so justly celebrated that further description seems doomed to be as stale and insipid as a retelling of some Bible story or familiar Shakespearean plot. And there is just as little temptation to dwell knowingly on a great man’s lingering delight in power or an heir apparent’s occasional exasperation, unless it be to cite them as proof of the strength rather than the weakness of an association that they failed so signally to disturb. Not, I think, entirely frivolously, I harbored a suspicion that one of Eden’s principal virtues in the eyes of his Prime Minister must have been his ability to read maps, to argue confidently with chiefs of staff, and to take just as passionate an interest as Churchill himself in the day-to-day direction of the world’s most hideously technical war: the logistics and ballistics and statistics, the strategy and surprises and supplies, in short, the very things that filled my own civilian mind with a feeling of hopelessness bordering on nausea, an inferiority complex beyond compare, but which must have formed the most congenial common ground imaginable for a Foreign Secretary who had once so much enjoyed being a rifleman and a Prime Minister who had never quite ceased to be a hussar.

In his Prime Minister, Attlee, Bevin had come at last to recognize the one leading member of the parliamentary Labor Party who, for all his middleclass origins and orthodox education, aroused on his part something approaching affection and genuine respect. For the rest, the peculiar nature of his past relationship to the Labor Party proper and the peculiarities of his own nature prevented him from treating his Cabinet colleagues with the gentle, genial camaraderie that came naturally to Halifax or the breezy good manners with which Eden for his pan was able to cover such impatience as he may sometimes have felt toward those with whom it was his lot to serve.

Halifax was as natural and unashamed and punctilious in courtly as in religious observance. In that, as in so much else, he was an impressive survival from England’s more decorous past, the sort of statesman to whom it was in no way inhibiting to begin a letter “Lord Halifax with his humble duty to Your Majesty” and continue with the writer always in the third person and the august recipient always in the second, as easily as a born musician will compose for more than one instrument at a time or in a different tempo for each hand at the piano. He was an expert with his personal seal and would never have presumed to fasten the back of an envelope addressed to the Sovereign except with sealing wax alone. All of which is not to imply that he was not just as conscious of the importance of the King as the head of a twentieth-century commonwealth as of the beauty of the many mysteries by which British royalty is traditionally surrounded.

Eden too had been brought up to know about such things, but it was less in his nature to delight in ancient forms, however willing he might be to acknowledge their modern uses. Like Halifax, he honored the throne as an institution and had a warm regard for the King as its occupant. But, for him, pre-eminently a constitutional monarch was an essential part of a constitutional system in which people and Parliament also played essential roles.

No doubt there had once been a time when Bevin had looked askance at monarchy the world over. But the years play strange tricks with an Englishman’s theories, and in the matter of his attitude to the British monarchy he was not afraid to let it be known that he himself on the one hand, no less than the monarchy on the other, had been capable over the years of considerable, advantageous adjustment. No one need pretend that he ever became a royalist, nor even that there was the faintest trace of the connoisseur’s hush — corresponding to the use of capitals in writing — when he spoke of the King. But there is no doubt that one of the things that pleased him most in his later years was the ease with which, since becoming a member of His Majesty’s Government, he had been able to establish friendly working relations with “such a very decent man” as King George VI.

Within the Foreign Office, the Foreign Secretary of the day was generally referred to as the Secretary of State, an appellation which at all times carried with it a suggestion of awe and sometimes could strike a note of terror, even though it was customarily enunciated with such rapidity that it actually came close to resembling the abbreviated, written form of S/S. If ever a personal name was used in place of the resounding title or the breathless sibilants, Halifax was referred to as Halifax; by all but the eminent, only facetiously as Edward. Things were different with Eden, either because of his comparative youth, or because of his long familiarity with the Foreign Office, or it may have been partly because he often avoided surnames himself. Although in every room of the Foreign Office people habitually wrote “Mr. Eden” a hundred times a day, and although I now find myself for convenience insolently writing “Eden” — as, indeed, I have written “Halifax” and “Bevin” — again and again in these pages, Anthony was the name by which he was known to many members of the staff among themselves, even if few would have thought of addressing him thus to his face. But whatever the degree of intimacy between Halifax or Eden and the officials of the Foreign Office of their day, there was never a question of any relationship of quite the kind that was later to give rise to the habit of referring to Bevin as “Uncle Ernie.” Naturally, no one used the expression in his presence. If anyone had been so tasteless, he would have been scarcely more responsive, one feels, than Stalin had been to learn — as I believe, from Roosevelt — that to the President of the United States and the British Prime Minister in much of their most important wartime correspondence he was not jocularly “the Bear” nor respectfully “the Marshal” but purely and simply “Uncle Joe.”

WHILE the Foreign Secretary derives some, at least, of his prestige in the world’s eye from the reputation of the department which he personifies, once within the walls of the Foreign Office itself he automatically changes character, ceasing as he goes up in the lift to be the spokesman of the staff or the advocate of a Foreign Office point of view and becoming instead the honest layman among shifty experts, even claiming on occasion to be susceptible to popular claptrap about the evils of secret diplomacy or class prejudice in foreign affairs and other manifestations of public obscurantism at its most implacable. Though this may have applied particularly to Bevin, it was not by any means true of him alone. It might happen that, the very day after he had stoutly defended the honesty and intelligence of his department before an incredulous, almost outraged, audience at a Labor Party conference, he could himself have been found listening with a look of the direst suspicion, like a tribesman at a parley in the tents of another tribe, while some senior member of the Foreign Office hierarchy uncomfortably drew his attention to the many previous occasions when a course of action now proposed by his Secretary of State had proved to be impracticable or irritatingly warned him of the awkward precedents that would be created by some genuinely original plan which he had recently conceived in his bed or his bath or on a train. But Halifax likewise would never allow us to forget that, though he worked in our midst and shared many of our views, he was morally unable to ignore certain traditionally respectable currents of opinion less honored in the Foreign Office than at Oxford or in the House of Lords. We, for our part, might like to imagine that one could fob off the older alumni of the Older University or the more unbalanced members of the Upper Chamber with any sort of argument. But he knew better. And I, for one, have the most painful memories of hours spent, at his insistence, shortly after the outbreak of war trying to adapt a stock reply on war aims to answer an inconceivable diversity of queries from England’s conscience-smitten intellectuals, not to mention drafting a series of uniformly polite but increasingly uninspired replies to the philippics he received each week from a member of Their Lordships’ House who thought nothing of covering three dozen pages of his best writing paper every Sunday with brilliant but excruciatingly perverse argument in favor of an immediate cessation of hostilities on Germany’s conditions and a complete reversal of His Majesty’s Government’s policy to date.

Even Eden, in whose eyes what might have seemed to Halifax our cynicism or impatience with the learned and the noble only indicated that we shared his own realism and common sense, was quite remarkably preoccupied with his and our duty to the House of Commons, as also to the particular stratum of public opinion, irrespective of party, by which he was regarded as the archenemy of pre-war appeasement and the one prominent Conservative known to be devoid of preconceived ideas about Russia.

Still, all in all, it was Bevin’s public that worried us most. A menacing bogy he could make out of them, compared with which the precious peers and semiprecious professors of Halifax and the passionate anti-Munichois of Eden (no more passionate than we, after all, in that) and even the advocates of coexistence with the Soviet Union (for what else could we do but coexist, so long as they would let us?) assumed an air innocuous and innocent and almost pathetically well disposed. Yet even as Bevin listened, squinting a little down his nose, the smoldering stub of a cigarette dangling, against all the laws of nature, from just under his upper lip, one came to know that the scowl was less a sign of disapproval than of a peculiarly personal form of concentration — almost a capacity for painfully smelling his way along a trail — the final outcome of which might well be a decision, reached, it is true, not among us but far away in the night at Phillimore Gardens, W.8, yet embodying some, if not quite all, of the recommendations that his staff had ventured to offer. For, being anything but doctrinaire, he did in fact listen intently, even to us, and if he deplored what he assumed to be our excessively sheltered lives and glossy antecedents, it was more as grounds for pity than as any serious reason for distrust. He was only sorry that such conscientious officials should not have been privileged to share with him the real good fortune of learning about life the rough and not the smooth way.

For a debate in the House of Lords, Halifax would customarily use the brief prepared for him in the Foreign Office, filling it out as he might require with courteous but effective extempore replies to points made by previous speakers. Eden also used his brief, though it was a sign of the greater velocity of life during his term of office that many of the most telling passages in his debating speeches were scribbled in his own hand in the form of notes as he sat on the front bench a few seconds before rising. Bevin sometimes went to the House of Commons carrying a brief, or, if he had forgotten to do so, his private secretaries usually contrived that it should somehow reach his hands. But even if he were still holding it when he rose to speak, he would end by putting it down and forgetting about it; while if, exceptionally, he followed it approximately as he spoke, its text emerged from his lips so gravely transformed that it was all but unrecognizable to its several authors, nervously huddled in the box in the northwest corner of the chamber reserved for the government advisers and vainly straining their ears for the reassuring sound of their meticulously chosen generalizations, equivocations, and evasions.

But when Halifax had to prepare a speech that was near to his heart — his broadcast on the purpose of the war, on November 7, 1939, and the address which he delivered as Chancellor of the University at the Sheldonian Theatre on February 27 of the following year are two notable examples — he worked for long hours in solitude. Thoughts and words were largely his own, for it was almost inconceivable that a contemporary professional bureaucrat should have presumed, even if he had been trained, to frame such an uncontemporary, unbureaucratic sentence as “For in this matter, as indeed in all life, it is finally the spiritual side that counts,”a brave statement for the twentieth century that dominates and sums up the broadcast; or could have adequately expressed the profound inner conflict — so essentially the speaker’s own — over the use of force, the infinitely conscientious resolution of which was one of the themes of the Oxford oration. The most he was apt to demand of a private secretary was, as he put it, to “build the bridges" between one train of thought and the next. And even that could be as awe-inspiring as a commission to span the space between two mountain peaks usually hidden to one’s eye or link a pair of cloud banks in the empyrean.

Eden’s mental atmosphere was less rarefied. For him, even though he was not by nature otherwise gregarious, thought as well as style could be the object of a collective, combined operation, a gathering of private secretaries and political friends that continued in a jovial atmosphere late into the night. Like Halifax, when he opened or closed a debate — as opposed to searching his own and the nation’s conscience — Eden would be satisfied to use verbatim many of the less important passages in the departmental brief. But when a subject interested him particularly, a whole line of argument would be recomposed as he paced from end to end of the smoke-filled Secretary of State’s room, head now down, now up in the air, hands repeating the same short rhythmic gesture, pausing once in a while to ask the world in general, “Isn’t that right?" or simply to say, “Stop me if you don’t agree with this one.”No one present need fear to nod approval or shake his head in doubt: and such is the susceptibility of the young that, for me, those are still, of all the evenings of the war, the most clearly and happily remembered.

Bevin’s technique of speech preparation, like his way of listening crossly to advice and his overnight method of reaching decisions, at first surprised his private secretaries, for it was quite his own. A day or two before he was to make his first speech in the House of Commons as Foreign Secretary, he summoned me to his room in the early afternoon with one of the private secretarial ladies. She was a new girl, Miss Eames. “Come in, Missy,”said Bevin, “and sit down here beside me.”He was puffing with defiant satisfaction at a forbidden cigar. Miss Eames cautiously sat down, drew a pencil from under the elastic band around her shorthand pad, and poised it expectantly. But the slight, natural apprehension that I had already noticed in her eyes changed to a look of examination-hall despair as the Foreign Secretary, gazing quizzically up at the gilded girders on the ceiling, slipped, as it were con sordine, into a rambling, afterluncheon monologue, uninhibited by considerations of grammar or syntax and punctuated less by any recognizable vocal equivalent of commas or semicolons or full stops than by the occasional pauses required for blowing smoke, coughing, removing tobacco leaf from his tongue, or dusting ash from the lapels of his coat. To Miss Eames’s tragic glances I could only reply with an expressionless stare, straight between the eyes, which I hoped might somehow convey more confidence than I felt that she would be able to record what was being said or that I should be able to understand it if she were. And then, at the fifth or sixth page of her shorthand notes, the soliloquy ceased as softly, almost imperceptibly, as it had begun. “All over, Missy,” said the new Secretary of State with a wink. He certainly had a way with the girls that was unusual in any British government department. More like a kindly chiropodist. “And Lawford here.”he added, looking still at her and not at me, “will just turn that into English if he can.”

Whatever one’s opinion of their style — of Halifax’s tendency to let his scruples lead him into overqualification (he was capable of writing, if not actually saying. “I should have thought that one might say that it could reasonably be held that . . .”), of Eden’s occasional descent from admirable simplicity to something not far from bathos, or of Bevin’s complacent verbal obscurity — there could be no denying that all three were remarkably effective in debate on their home ground. Once the particular moment of their intervention had passed, there would always be critics to complain that Halifax’s speeches were excessively sermonious, that Eden might surely have permitted himself to be a little more witty and a little less fair, and that a Foreign Secretary had no right to be quite so enigmatic as Bevin. But even though one scarcely expects posterity to set its young men to study their contributions to Hansard in the heroic days of World War II as the youth of an earlier age was set to study Cicero or Demosthenes, that is at least in part because these speakers themselves believed that oratory for its own sake had no place in the world in which they lived, or, more exactly, that oratory was not required of them personally by their twentiethcentury parliamentary audience. Less artistic, or ambitious, than Churchill, they could have claimed in their own way to know their audience just as well as he.

BEYOND the confines of Parliament or country, in their dealings with foreign governments and foreigners generally, all three had the advantage of a genuine confidence in the purity of contemporary British motives. And all three were mercifully lacking in the sense of accumulated, inherited guilt that has burdened and handicapped so many Western politicians in post-war years. Halifax impressed the non-British as a wonderfully British phenomenon, remote from their own experience, and Eden’s honesty and directness and strength of purpose similarly demanded and obtained foreign respect. Hitler’s unrequited love for the fellow Frontkämpfer may have turned, in the manner of such passions, to still more violent hate, and Mussolini might fly into tantrums. But in the contemporary world such things were ol the order of compliments. And Bevin’s proclaimed interest in the lot of the ordinary people of other lands, almost as though he held a mandate from them, too, no less than his concealed suspicion of the motives of foreign governments earned at least a sort of disconcerted admiration abroad — even, one likes to think, on the part of the rulers of the Soviet Union, whose widely advertised and highly rewarding technique in these two respects so closely resembled that of the Labor Foreign Secretary.

It might perhaps have been expected that, in their official dealings with the Russians, each of the three statesmen would have revealed his capacities most clearly. Yet the act of searching the memory tends less to disclose any startling proof of wisdom or statesmanship, or the lack of such, than merely to recall the unchanging atmosphere of frustration that emanated then, as it emanates now, from every serious encounter of the Western with the Soviet Russian mind. Thus, one remembers Halifax sitting one winter morning, perfectly polite though pained and incredulous, while Maisky, having presumably been instructed to justify the unjustifiable, painstakingly but more than a little shamefacedly explained that the Finns had had to be attacked for their own and everyone else’s good — they were “so obstinate, so bourgeois” — as though, one supposes, it was hoped that the latter qualification at least might find an echo in the mind of a Foreign Secretary who was an aristocrat, as well as in the minds of the oligarchs in the Kremlin.

Of Eden’s period of office, one remembers his determination to place Anglo-Russian relations on a purely practical and, if possible, mutually advantageous basis: but one is bound to remember just as well that it evoked no perceptible, corresponding reaction on the part of the Soviet government until the German invasion of Russia made anything but cooperation with the West suicidal for the Soviet Union, and that even at the time of the Allies’ closest association against a common enemy the friendship of the Soviet government, as distinct from the Russian people, tasted in the mouth like one of those rather overrated, deceptive French dishes known as Cerises Jubilé or Poire Hélène* the hot sauce of their immediate needs only momentarily disguising the icy foundation of their ultimate intentions.

Nor can one fail to recall that, whatever might once have been Bevin’s own desire, his occupancy of the post of Foreign Secretary came at a time when Soviet post-war planning called for a worldwide campaign to undermine the influence of the very country he represented, so that Britain under his guidance found itself forced into a relationship of open political warfare with Russia, compared with which the events of 1939 and 1940 seemed part of some childhood tiff, while Eden at Moscow and Yalta had been engaged in nothing more serious than the sparring of a moderate sort of honeymoon.

This is hardly the place, nor does my own experience qualify me to take seriously the charges once leveled against Halifax of being in some vague way responsible, presumably through religious or social bias, for the Soviet government’s decision to prefer an offensive agreement with Nazi Germany to a defensive agreement with Britain and France in 1939. Nor does it seem to me that even hindsight can make a convincing case for blaming Eden for the humiliating post-war developments in the East consequent on the inevitable physical presence at the war’s end of the troops of Britain’s Soviet ally on the very territory of Poland that we had declared war to redeem. Neither would one choose to dwell on Bevin’s one-time belief — shared, after all, by all his British Socialist contemporaries — that in dealing with the Soviet Union “Left would be better able to speak to Left,” as though the government of Stalin were really very much like Mr. Attlee’s Cabinet of 1945 except that, since it worked in a much colder climate, its members sometimes wore fur hats.

Whatever may have been the duties of a junior secretary in the diplomatic service, they did not entitle me to raise my voice then, and I doubt whether anyone would thank me for doing so now, for such songs have tempted too many inexpert singers already. Apart from all else, moreover, these three statesmen themselves set too good an example, for not once in seven years did one of the three publicly disparage another.

Perhaps it was only healthy, though, that seven years as a private secretary should have provided one with an occasional less obviously edifying experience. For example, to me, at least, it came as a shock to find that such a very large proportion of the letters of condolence written to Halifax when he was transferred from the Foreign Office to Washington in 1940 and of congratulation to Eden on his being appointed in Halifax’s place, no less than the letters of commiseration to Eden when he in turn left the Foreign Office in 1945 and the letters of congratulation to Bevin on succeeding him, were from the selfsame members of the public. It was a lesson in British versatility that I might scarcely have been privileged to learn had it occurred to the writers that in each case their letters would actually be opened, and the replies thereto drafted, by one and the same man.

But perhaps I didn’t need the lesson. For have I not lately found, among the random entries in my own diary, three sentences — separated from one another, alas, by many pages of petty criticism and rare bouquets of faint praise — recording respectively that I should miss Lord and Lady Halifax more than any two people I had ever met (December 30, 1940). that the Foreign Office would be not only a disaster but a desert without Eden (July 26, 1945). and that my sorrow at leaving a man “sensible, human, sympathetic, practical, and fearless” as Bevin outweighed (at least on the afternoon of February 23, 1946) any happiness or advantage that I anticipated from the new life that, as I had been informed that very morning, awaited me in the New World?