June 3, 2015

Finest Hour 101, Winter 1998-99

Page 17

From The Churchill Lecture by Ambassador Raymond Seitz

America’s real birth as , a world power started with a bang. On Sunday, December 7th 1941, just a day before my first birthday, Japanese aircraft flew out of the morning sun of the Pacific Ocean and attacked Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. For a new country, which for generations had happily ignored the far-flung troubles of the world, Pearl Harbor marked a shattering of American innocence. After all, this was a country founded on the rejection of the Old and the value of the New. America was a new world, a planet away from the past, where original sin was forgiven and a new Eden bloomed.

But I think in those fifty years of global struggle that began at Pearl Harbor and ended with the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the country did learn a lot. It learned that while America may be different it is not unique. It learned, I hope, that the world is as old as the human condition, and America is much a part of it.

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The American fascination with the new is nonetheless a great strength too—its search for answers, its willingness to experiment, its ability to regenerate. Americans are excited by what lies just over the next hill or just around the next corner. But getting the balance right between the old and the new, between the superficial and the enduring, between the image and the reality, is still a challenge for American politics. I remember when Bill Clinton was making his first run for the presidency in 1992. His theme song was from Fleetwood Mac: “Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow,” and I used to mutter to myself, “But don’t stop thinking about yesterday either.”

Surely this is one purpose of The Churchill Center: not just the study of the great, jowly bulldog and his many myth-making accomplishments, not just the rotund Anglophilia that sometimes rolls around in American discourse, not just nostalgia for the glory days of wartime collaboration. Churchill, I suspect, would scoff at a lot of that—and also use it to advantage. But it seems to me that the important goal of The Center must be to take the experiences and principles of the past, which were so dynamically represented by this supreme figure, and heave those lessons forward into new generations. And certainly an essential lesson for America is an old one: you can’t go it alone.

If I could put a priority item on today’s Anglo-American agenda, this would be it: a fresh focus on national security in an un-national world, and a reconciliation between economic globalism and social responsibility. And it is this type of exercise, I think, that one finds at the heart of Anglo-American relations anyway. What I learned as Ambassador is that today the genuine “special relationship”—the unique part of Anglo-American affairs—really exists outside the official body of government intercourse and well beyond the headlines and photo ops.

You see this in all manner of public policy, from welfare reform to school reform, and from zero-tolerance policing to pension management. You see it in every scholarly pursuit from archaeology to zoology, in every field of science and research, and in every social movement from environmentalism to feminism. You see it in financial regulation and corporate governance and trade union interchange, and you see it at every point along the cultural spectrum from the novel to the symphony and from the movies to rock ‘n’ roll. You see it in the big statistics of trade and investment, and in the tiny statistics of transatlantic tourism (6 million visitors each way last year); or transatlantic flights (41,000 last year); or transatlantic telephone calls (three and a half billion minutes of talk last year). You see it in the work of The Churchill Center and Societies.

Here is the thick, rich texture of the relationship at its most creative, its most energetic, and its most durable. The truly special relationship is this: the United States and the United Kingdom influence each other’s intellectual development like no other two countries. And it is here, I suspect— where the old truth lies—that we will discover answers about our joint future in a changing, global world.

America and Britain share an accumulation of historical concepts given body over generations—human and civil rights, liberty, the common law and the rule of law, forbearance and equity, the manners of property, the basic freedoms, simple dignity. We may practice these imperfectly, but all of them mixed up together mean that we think about things in a similar fashion, and on one issue or another we are as likely as not to arrive at pretty much the same conclusion. This is not always true, but it is often true, and the relationship emerges from the natural repetition of this pattern. One thing is sure: neither nation could possibly replicate this relationship with any other country.

This past spring, my wife and I visited a house in Tunisia which Churchill had used as a headquarters. Not a month ago we saw, hanging on the wall in a Scottish castle, an oil study of the great man—a study for the famously evaporated Graham Sutherland portrait. You simply can’t get away from him. I often pass Churchill’s statue in Parliament Square where he leans into the House of Commons and scolds the MPs as they emerge, and in another statue I saw again just yesterday in Washington, Churchill supervises the traffic on Massachusetts Avenue. A bust of Churchill was recently unveiled in the city of Quebec.

And on a little pedestrian cross-walk in London, where Old Bond Street turns into New Bond Street, there— sitting on a park bench—are the bronze figures of Churchill and Roosevelt. Churchill is sporting a jaunty bow tie and wearing his zippered shoes. Roosevelt is in a rumpled, double-breasted suit and you can see the metal leg braces sticking out beneath his trouser cuffs. They are both looking on the decidedly paunchy side of life. Both are smiling. Churchill is leaning towards Roosevelt to catch a word, and Roosevelt has his left arm slung across the top of the bench. They seem to be enjoying the day and simply shooting the breeze.

They may be talking about where matters stand and how to handle things. They may be doing in someone’s reputation. Or maybe they’re recollecting that day a long time ago when they heard about Pearl Harbor and strapped their nations together in joint purpose. And maybe they’re saying that, even if today the ocean is different, we’re still in the same boat.

A TIME TO SAY THANKS

The telephone rang October 29th: it was the British Ambassador, Sir Christopher Meyer. I was sure he was calling about the upcoming Conference, but the Ambassador had other things on his mind:

I am delighted to confirm that Her Majesty the Queen has been pleased to confer upon you the honorary award of Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (CBE). The award is in recognition of your many years as President of the International Churchill Society and Churchill Centre and the contribution you have made thereby to Anglo-American understanding. It gives me particular pleasure to be able to give you this news shortly before your valedictory conference as ICS President. I expect to receive the insignia of your CBE soon and will then arrange a date for an investiture here in Washington.

To say I was floored would understate the case considerably. But writers are never long lost for words, and by November 3rd I had recovered sufficiently to write the Ambassador, relying for copy on the greatest Commander the British Empire ever had:

Your Excellency: In accepting honorary American citizenship in 1963, Sir Winston wrote to President Kennedy: “In this century of storm and tragedy I contemplate with high satisfaction the constant factor of the interwoven and upward progress of our peoples. Our comradeship and our brotherhood in war were unexampled. We stood together, and because of that fact the free world now stands.” He would surely approve of our more recent combined operations in the pursuit of liberty.

The Churchill Center and Societies strive to assure that Churchill’s concept of a “fraternal relationship” among the English-speaking Peoples survives to be considered, debated and evolved to meet mutual requirements in the next century, as it has in this. That my efforts in this regard should come to the attention of Her Majesty, and that she should see fit to confer upon me the honorary award of Commander of the British Empire, is an honour which can only cause me to redouble those efforts, and to refer again to the great man’s words, when he offered “my solemn and heartfelt thanks for this unique distinction, which will always be proudly remembered by my descendants.”

It remains to thank my friends on the Conference Committee, and John Plumpton in particular, for the alltoo-generous Power-Point presentation “Richard’s Dream” on Friday night, and the beautiful hand-carved cigar box which they produced to mark my thirty years’ involvement in our mutual enterprise. I am grateful beyond imaginings to my wife Barbara, my son Ian, and everyone reading these words, for sustaining that enterprise through their faith and contributions, spiritual and tangible, all these many years; and many of them know there have been moments when it needed sustaining. Writers may only perform if they have an audience, and to paraphrase the Great Man, it was the Churchillians dwelling round the globe who had the lion’s heart; I had the luck to be called upon to give the roar.

When I was a boy I was fascinated by flags and their symbolism. I am probably one of few who know that the Latvian flag represents a warrior holding a stone bandage to his bleeding body. I still feel a thrill at the Stars and Stripes or Union Flag or Maple Leaf, and the National Anthems we sing. In them I see all the forebears who gave us what we have. And, notwithstanding the depression I feel over the decline of moral standards, individual responsibility and political integrity, there is still Churchill’s example, recalled through this enterprise, always ready to inspire the young people we reach and influence through our work.

To clear up any confusion, by “valedictory conference as ICS President” the Ambassador does not refer to any imminent departures. Churchill Conference XV marked the transition from ICS/USA to The Churchill Center. But my colleagues have transitioned me to President of The Churchill Center, and they themselves comprise a fine and able Board of Governors who bring divers skills in critical fields. Meanwhile, and as long as I am required, I will remain editor of Finest Hour.

Kind words are always hard to come by. To the many who have written and spoken so many kind words, my deepest thanks. I can only hope that I may continue to deserve such confidence, and such friends.
Richard M. Langworth