Storm Signals : More Undiplomatic Diaries, 1962-1971 (9781551996806) Page 2
30 May 1962.
Went to the Cathedral and heard a full and eloquent sermon, but I can’t abide sermons, even the best of them. Arnold Heeney, my predecessor here, was a pillar of the Cathedral, which is more, I fear, than I shall ever be. He is a thoroughgoing Christian of the Anglican persuasion, and his religion, I am sure, guides him steadily in life. During the sermon I kept thinking of the gospel for the day, which included “Knock and it shall be opened unto you.” Will it be opened for me? Or don’t I knock hard enough? The other day I met a young red-haired Canon of the Cathedral (at any rate, young for a canon) and asked him what was the essential quality for a clergyman, and he won my heart by at once replying “compassion.” Then he added, “That is what I think; others would tell you ‘leadership.’ ”
This is a somnolent Sunday afternoon. Sylvia is asleep in the garden room, Popski asleep in the library, the servants have disappeared to their quarters for a long siesta. Even the birds have gone off the air. It should be a day for reading poetry rather than the prose of T. H. White, author of The Making of the President, 1960, a useful, informative book about the workings of American politics. I am filled up to the throat with its gassy, fluent style. It is the story of an American hero by an American hero-worshipper; “There is no ceremony more splendid than the inauguration of an American President,” etc. etc. It’s all a bit too much to swallow on a hot summer afternoon.
2 June 1962.
Encounter with a leading name-dropper. He began in top form, firing two governors general, the Leader of the Opposition, a French duchess, and John D. Rockefeller across my bows and all but sinking me. Then he began to talk of the Art of Living. I told him that the words meant nothing to me. He admitted modestly that his own understanding of the Art went back to his aristocratic Viennese origins, but he thought I had mastered it, up to a point. “But no,” I insisted, “I shall never understand the Art of Living.” After three cocktails he rather relaxed and I found myself remembering that I had liked him when we were younger, perhaps before he had so completely mastered the Art of Living.
I walked this morning in Dumbarton Oaks Park by the brown, quick-running stream, then into the close, dark woods of the bird sanctuary and on to the grassy path by the big meadow. Talked at the entrance gate with the gardener, a gnarled, ageless troll. “Been working here for twenty-two years,” he told me. “Twenty-seven acres to keep up and not a man or boy to help me.” I remember walking in this park in 1939 on the day before I left Washington for my posting to London, and how I came back that morning to the garden of the house in Georgetown and, biting into a peach at breakfast, fancied that I was biting into the fruit of my future in London … how I would write a masterpiece, meet the famous, have a flat of my own and a mistress to go with it. A bright dream – it all came true, except, of course, the masterpiece.
5 June 1962.
Lunched today with Scotty Reston, the Washington correspondent of the New York Times. He has been a good friend to me since I came here and is wonderful company. He and Walter Lippmann, and in a different way Henry Brandon,4 are a refreshment and a stimulus after diplomatic society. They are also far more important in the political world of Washington than any ambassador. I spoke to Scotty about my unsatisfactory conversation with the President, and by way of consolation he said that in any case the President had not much use for professional diplomats and thinks them a lesser breed of men who are useful if they produce facts or memoranda but do not take the risks or face the decisions of politics. He says that this attitude dates back to the days when the President’s father was Ambassador in London, and to the contemptuous view that old Kennedy took of his diplomatic staff.
9 June 1962.
Went to New York to hear Prince Philip make a speech to the Wildlife Fund, which was really an excuse for me to revisit New York. The city was tricked out in all its best and sending electric impulses of energy into its victims. The women on the streets were as fresh as paint. Girls hipped along the avenue, disdaining the look in the men’s eyes. Old painted shrews from Vienna days and matrons from Wisconsin peered into the windows of Bergdorf Goodman. Husky, helmeted workmen, stripped to the waist, lounged over lunch beneath the girders. Inside the monster buildings, middle-aged time-addicts watched for the elevators with hop-eyed intensity and shifted from foot to foot. In Central Park schoolmarms were lining up squads of kids to look at the elephants and watch the seals dive.
13 June 1962.
Dinner the other night with Susan Mary and Jo Alsop.5 Seeing Susan Mary brings back memories of all the gaieties of the time in Paris when we first met. I delight in her company and feel that among so many acquaintances she is a friend. Jo is an original, a brilliant journalist and talker, but cantankerous. There is a great cult for him in his circle in Washington. The other day someone said to me, “You must come on Thursday. Jo is coming and is in a very good mood.” I felt inclined to answer, “I’d love to come if I am in a good mood.”
I had a note today from Freddy Boland, the Irish Representative at the U.N. and an enlivening friend. How much of the friendships made at that time depended on the shared talk of the U.N.? In that U.N. shop there were friendships formed closer than between most diplomats. Those who served together at the U.N. are like soldiers who served together in the trenches – no matter which side we fought on, we know something of the rough-and-tumble of international politics that other gilt-edged ambassadors do not know. When I left, one of my colleagues said, “Don’t worry about the workload in Washington. Your problem there will be boredom.”
And I am ashamed to say that I am bored, and this despite the office responsibilities and the incessant social life. It is something to do with this place, this beautiful, bland city, after the high-pressure excitement of New York. This mood has been intensified by reading Durrell’s Mountolive, which treats of the fate of an ambassador, of the attrition of human ties to which this profession can lead, and of the airless state in which diplomats learn to breathe. Oddly enough, the ambassador in this book has as a companion a pet dachshund who, like Popski, pees on the Embassy carpet.
I suppose if one yawns one’s way through a summer day it finally finishes. I can hear the swish of the Spanish maid’s broom on the terrace as she sweeps up the dead blossoms fallen from the overspreading acacia tree. The potent smell of box comes in waves from the garden through the still air up to my bedroom window. I have taken off my shirt in this heat and I smell of boxwood as if I were oiled in a bath essence. Damn it, should I take up golf, as the nice New Zealand Ambassador advises? Or hand round the collection plate in the Cathedral with a carnation in my buttonhole? Or shall I end up as that joke figure, a dirty old man?
16 June 1962.
One of the features that emerges from my talks with American officials is their negative attitude towards the Commonwealth. Any reference to its importance in the world falls on deaf ears or elicits an occasional conventionally polite agreement. There are, I think, several reasons for this. The Americans do not like the fact that it includes so many neutralist nations and that it cannot be counted on to support them in an East-West confrontation. There still remains a residual jealousy of it as a hangover of British world leadership. They are now thinking in terms of continental blocs on a global scale, and the Commonwealth cuts across this concept. Or perhaps they simply estimate that it has no future, that its bonds are loosening and will loosen further, that it is a dead duck – or at any rate a dying duck. In terms of Canadian–U.S. relations there may be another consideration at the back of their minds. If the Commonwealth declines or disappears, there will finally be an end to the Canadian balancing act between London and Washington, and we shall inevitably drift further into the American bloc. Certainly London would not raise a finger to prevent this, indeed would view such a development with complete indifference. However, the continued existence of the Commonwealth is important for Canada in other terms – not only because of the advantages of Commonwealth preferences for us but because in its p
resent multiracial form it is partly of our making. We were instrumental in the evolution of Empire into old white Commonwealth, and white Commonwealth into new multiracial Commonwealth. The preference system is perhaps not essential to its continuance but it is an important part of it and a part that is important for Canada. Why should the Americans approve the European Common Market and disapprove of Commonwealth preferences?
19 June 1962.
Henry Brandon of the Sunday Times says that the Canadian government has succeeded in alienating both London and Washington by a mixture of self-righteousness and self-centredness. I think we have got to start looking at developments in the Western world and to try to assess our relationships to them anew. There is no sign of this in the parochial character of our elections. But the United States cannot really be indifferent to the fate of their biggest trading partner and their continental defence partner, so what are their calculations? Are they waiting for us to fall into their laps? Do they discount as mere bluff the anti-Americanism now rampant in Canada and make the calculation that we have got to give in to them in the end, probably hat in hand, and that the rest is posturing?
29 June 1962.
Lunched today with Jim Barco, of the U.S. Mission to the U.N., and the Soviet Ambassador and Madame Dobrynin. Dobrynin skates with skill and ease over the thinnest ice and allows himself a latitude in conversation unlike that of any Soviet ambassador I have ever known. To think that one would live to see the day when Russian and American diplomats gaily joked together about the U-2 incident. Dobrynin is certainly one of the most skilful operators I have encountered in the career. He and I got to know each other when he was in the U.N. Secretariat in New York and are by way of being very friendly. Madame Dobrynin has much smartened up since those days – very cheerful and chatty when she used to be severely silent, and with her hair curled instead of being austerely drawn back from her forehead, her original Soviet-Communist-wife image considerably modified by life in the United States.
30 June 1962. Evening.
Voices and music from a next-door party sounding from behind the screen of heavy-leafed trees bordering the garden. The music plucks at some lost feeling. The women’s voices sound languorous and enticing. It is true, no doubt, that the encounters between people at that party are as forced as at the party I have just left, that most are looking beyond each other’s left ear to sight someone more important to talk to. The laughter in most cases does not contain in its volume one hundredth part of real laughter and is as tasteless as frozen ham, but perhaps it is worth coming to a garden setting under the glassy, unreal light of late evening if two people on the outskirts of the party remember it as the moment when they first met, and carry the memory that it was there that it all started.
4 July 1962.
A cool, overcast national holiday on which we are going out to the country. Tennis for others, and a barbecue. I do not much enjoy these American days in the country. There is so much hanging about, and there are so many children and young-to-middle-aged mothers watching with half an eye that they don’t get into the deep end of the swimming pool. Besides, no one ever goes for a walk.
Mitchell Sharp has come to see me. He has gone into politics and just failed by a small minority to beat the Minister of Finance. He appeared flushed with political excitement. To see a quiet civil servant so transformed is astounding – his discovery of himself as a “national figure” and the inaugurator of new election techniques, etc., is remarkable. But most of all, at the wave of a wand he has become a revelation to himself of his own possibilities. Perhaps I should go into politics!
9 July 1962.
A mixed day. In the morning I went to see George Ball6. He is one of the most intelligent and attractive figures in the State Department, but in negotiation, without being unfriendly, he has shown very little understanding of our position and no disposition to concede anything. In the afternoon, Dick Howland of the Smithsonian Institution came to see me. I was trying to induce him to lend the Hope Diamond from their collection for a Canadian exhibition. We had a very pleasant talk about pictures and people. But he won’t part with the Hope Diamond.
15 July 1962.
A neurotic weekend with the servants: the Spanish-speaking maids, with tears filling their large, dark eyes as they tried to explain their devotion to us and their desire to have more time off; Sylvia and the cook, without a common language, stare at each other in dismay and irritation; Colin, the butler, ex-Royal Navy, is a young Scottish martinet, very bossy with the maids, disliked by Sylvia, most meticulous in looking after my clothes, extremely conscious of his status as a butler, which he seems to think gives him dictatorial power over the rest of the staff. Meanwhile, the chauffeur was drunk again last night. I have seen this coming on. If I had spoken to him day before yesterday, when the first signs were visible, I might have stopped him. But as it was disagreeable, I put it off, as I always do put off disagreeable things. And now, I must get rid of him. I suppose if he had not got drunk tonight he would have done it a month or so later. Tonight he drove us right past our house, up the drive into a restricted area at an American military establishment, and stopped the car outside the front door, having apparently mistaken it for our house. I think he has tried to stop drinking but can’t. Yet Arnold Heeney kept him on for seven years and never allowed it to come to this. Perhaps it is my fault, in the effect I have on him. I drove the chauffeur in New York nearly out of his mind, and now this chap has taken to the bottle. If he is dismissed at his age, what will happen to him? How can I give him a recommendation, a drunken chauffeur? He’s through. Yet he fought in the Dutch Resistance, he’s a real man, he’s responsible, a professional, never had an accident and probably never will. He has sacrificed his life and career. I might do the same tomorrow, though not for the same reason. How can I judge him? I’ll have to discuss it with Harry Stewart at the Embassy and see if something could not be found for him. Damn, damn, damn!
A horde of people are coming to a reception here tomorrow and I am not looking forward to it. It is not that I get bored with other people – it is that I get bored with hearing myself talk to other people.
27 July 1962.
Do the Americans realize that our differences of outlook from them in international affairs make us more valuable to them than if we were mere satellites? I sometimes doubt it. For example, in nuclear matters we are dead against continued tests, so they foolishly accuse us of letting down NATO. Yet now in the anti-test Geneva negotiations we have been able, because of our anti-test attitude, to develop a relationship with the neutral nations which we could never have achieved otherwise, and which has been helpful to NATO. If we had, at U.S. urging, pushed anti-communist protests in the Indo-China Commissions too far and broken out of the Commissions, the whole machinery would have collapsed, and that presumably is not what the United States want. They sometimes give the impression that they do not trust us, but in the long run they do. Why otherwise would they want us in the Organization of American States (which I hope we shall not join)? Now there is a new test case in our policy towards Cuba. Our position is perfectly justifiable, but we have not thought through its implications and simply take the line that as the Cubans have not seized our banks, etc., why should we pull American chestnuts out of the fire? This begs the question as to whether there is a dangerous Communist threat in South America. Sometimes we grudgingly admit this as a possibility. Do we consider what has happened in Cuba as a popular social revolution and not a Russian-inspired Communist takeover? Is our attitude affected by the fact that, like Cuba, we are a neighbour of the United States? It is unthinkable that anything similar to developments in Cuba should occur in Canada, but if it did, should we not regard this as our own business and resent intervention? In general in our dealings with Communist countries we have tended to be against the policies of economic strangulation (even more against military intervention). While we have never spelled out our views, they seemed to amount to the proposition that economic pressure, s
anctions, etc., applied to Communist countries, so far from making them more amenable, make them dig their heels in more deeply. Presumably this is the philosophy behind our trade with China. Of course, our economic interests are the concrete reasons for our policy, but in the background is a philosophical difference as to how best to deal with Communist countries, and our position, though obscurely defined, is basically different from that of the United States.
The more I am involved in diplomatic and political affairs, the more I set store on private feelings. I prefer my loved ones to any political allegiance, and hope I always shall. Henry Brandon talks of his friendship with President Kennedy, with whom he is on easy, almost intimate, terms. I listened with interest and a growing sense of my own lack of contact with the President. Apart from the political strain between him and Diefenbaker, perhaps I am myself out of date – Old Hat in the New Frontier. Washington has always been like this. The “In” people make the “Outs” feel even “Out”-er. It is the same in Ottawa.
12 August 1962. Halifax, N.S.
We have escaped from Washington for a couple of weeks to come down here with Roley7 and Bunny and to see my mother. Today is overcast and claggy, the same weather they have had here all summer. Never a day without the sound of the foghorn. It is Sunday, after lunch. It is impossible to believe that one will ever come to life again, impossible to picture life except as a yawn. I cannot walk again in the dank park among the firs and hemlocks. I can’t go on reading Vanity Fair as I am bogged down among Amelia’s tender tears and rhapsodies and I will not skip to get back to Becky Sharp. Popski is bored too. We should never have brought him here. He is driving me mad this afternoon. I mean that not in the casual conventional sense – there really are moments when I tremble for my sanity and fear that if he does not stop barking something will crack in my skull and I shall start barking myself. Poor little brute, he is terrified of the steep, slippery staircase in this house. It takes all his courage and resolution to launch himself from the top step, as if it was a precipitous ski slope, and then he slithers and crashes to the bottom.