May 5, 2013

Finest Hour 151, Summer 2011

Page 22

The Special Relationship – “All in the Same Boat”

Neither Britain nor America could replicate their relationship with any other country.

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By Ambassador Raymond Seitz

Raymond Seitz was the first career diplomat in modern history to be Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s (1991-94), which is usually a political appointment. His book, Over Here, should be read by every American in Britain and every Briton in America. This article is excerpted from the First Churchill Lecture, Williamsburg, Virginia, 7 November 1998. It remains so applicable now that it is hard to believe it is thirteen years old.

I am especially pleased to give this first Churchill Lecture in Williamsburg, which takes us back to the English roots of American history. The complicated Anglo-American relationship may actually have started when Queen Elizabeth I commanded Sir Humphrey Gilbert, half-brother of Sir Walter Raleigh, to sail the Atlantic and “seize the heathen and barbarous land.” This is the first recorded reference to Washington, D.C.

I was born in 1940, so my life began almost at the same moment as America’s real birth as a world power. I don’t think these two events were connected. But they coincided, and as a result, most of my years, both personal and professional, fitted snugly within a clearly delineated, historical epoch that ran for exactly fifty years.

For this half-century the United States engaged in a great global struggle, first combating fascism in a hot war and then resisting communism in a cold war. This immense epoch ended in December 1991 when the Soviet Union, with its perverse ideology and corrupt institutions, succumbed to its own spiritual gangrene. The end of the era, in fact, came with a whimper.

But for Americans, it had 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 America, this marked the beginning of World War II: the great defining shock in the history of our country. With a single jolt, the news electrified the national psychology.

For my parents’ generation it was common to ask, “Where were you when you heard about Pearl Harbor?” My family liked getting the where-were-you question because we were actually at Pearl Harbor.

My father was a captain of infantry stationed at Scholfield Barracks. When the attack came, he took his company of young soldiers down to the beaches to dig in and await the land invasion that never came. The rest of the family was hustled into a station wagon and taken into the leafy fields of a pineapple plantation to hide. Of course I remember none of this, but it was so much a part of our family lore that I sometimes think I can see it all.

New Collides with Old

History rarely moves at right angles. But for a new country, which for generations had happily ignored the farflung 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. Throughout its history, millions of people have come to its shores expecting a new life, breaking with the past: a personal act of liberation.

America was not just another place. It was a new world, a planet away from the past where original sin was forgiven and a new Eden bloomed. Americans called places “New England” and “New Hampshire” and lived in cities called “New York” and “New Orleans.” Their politicians have always promised a starting-over newness—the New Freedom, the New Deal, the New Frontier, the New World Order—because they think “new” is better.

American popular culture explains that a new and improved soap is appealing simply because to be new is to be improved, and its music and literature are about change and movin’ on—a new car, a new road, a new town, a new mate, a new life. In fact, it still seems that anything can be made new in America, including its people—eat right, exercise right, cap those teeth and straighten out that nose, tuck up a droop here and vacuum out a bulge there and, with a variety of chemical compounds from Prozac to Viagra, you can shoot up with the Syringe of Youth into a perfect Zen-like state of permanent, forever newness.

But in those fifty years of global struggle, 1941 to 1991, America learned a lot. It learned that while it may be different, it is not unique. It learned, I hope, that the world is as old as the human condition, and it is very much a part of it. It learned that many of the old verities apply to it, just as they do to all others. There are good and bad, right and wrong, the world turns and the sun also rises.

The American fascination with the new is nonetheless a great strength: our search for answers, our willingness to experiment, our ability to regenerate. We 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 our social politics. When Bill Clinton was making his first run for the presidency, his theme song was “Don’t Stop Thinking about Tomorrow,” and I used to mutter to myself, “Don’t stop thinking about yesterday, either.”

This is one purpose of The Churchill Centre—not just the study of the great, jowly bulldog and his many myth-making accomplishments; not just the rotund Anglophilia that rolls around in American discourse; not just the nostalgia for the glory days of wartime collaboration. Churchill, I suspect, would scoff at a lot of that—while using it to advantage. But it seems to me that the goal of the Centre 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.

National Destinies Converging

If someone put that famous question to Sir Winston Churchill—”Where were you when you heard about Pearl Harbor?”—he would say that he was spending a Sunday evening at Chequers, the prime minister’s country home, dining with two Americans, his old friend Averell Harriman and the U.S. ambassador, John Winant. The record of the evening is not exact, but everyone agrees what occurred in substance. On the question of how Churchill got the news, it seems the butler did it.

Churchill had been in a glum mood—the news from the desert war in North Africa was not good—and when he switched on a radio to listen to the BBC nine o’clock bulletin, the report about a Japanese attack was garbled and there was confusion around the table. But the butler, Frank Sawyers, who had been listening to another radio in the pantry, rushed back into the dining room—insofar as any English butler rushes—and confirmed the news.

Churchill leapt from the table and, followed by his two American guests, went to an office and put in a call to President Roosevelt. “What’s this about Japan?” the Prime Minister shouted down the line. “It’s quite true,” Roosevelt replied. “They have attacked us at Pearl Harbor.” And then the President added, “We are all in the same boat now.”

Can you imagine this exchange by transatlantic telephone? Imagine, in those days, the hollow, tinny sound of voices separated by three thousand miles of underwater cable, the rasping static that must have scratched at their simple words, and somewhere along that long line the muffled sound of two national destinies converging.

Churchill later confessed that he was exhilarated by the news of Pearl Harbor when he went to bed that night. He lamented the loss of life, but America was finally in the war. Victory was assured—the war was over and only the manner of its ending was left to be concluded. The United States and the United Kingdom were truly in the same boat. And there they remained, with the water right up to the gunwales, for the next fifty years.

Roosevelt and Churchill

The modern paradigm of the Anglo-American partnership comes down from Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt. In many ways they were the kind of match for each other that only the serendipity of history could produce. Both were patrician with long family histories, and Churchill’s mother was conveniently born in Brooklyn. Both were eloquent and witty in a time before God invented speech-writers. In their political intrigues and public relations, each was as manipulative as the other. And both were warriors.

They did not always agree. After all, one was a dyed-in-the-wool Tory and the other a visionary liberal Democrat. Their world views were distinctly different. Churchill loved the British Empire and understood European history better than any American was likely to do. Roosevelt, for his part, had no intention of fighting a war to preserve British colonialism and thought European history was misbegotten.

Military strategy was a contentious bone between them and they often exasperated each other. If it suited Roosevelt to distance himself from the prime minister when meeting with “Uncle Joe” Stalin, he did so. When it suited Churchill to agree with Stalin on a mathematical carve-up of the Balkans, he did so too.

The danger of looking back at this pair of leaders is the cloud of romance that envelops their memory. Still, these two remarkable people—wrapped in lap rugs on the deck of a battleship in the North Atlantic or watching a desert sunset from a Moroccan tower—cast a spell over Anglo-U.S. relations through all the years that followed.

Coin from the Churchill Mint

This came to be known as the “special relationship,” another durable coin from the Churchill mint. For many years, on both sides of the Atlantic, the phrase carried the reassuring resonance of wartime triumph and captured the spirit of an exceptional alliance between two countries which did not take naturally to alliances. The “special relationship” implied a steady rhythm of cooperation between the United States and United Kingdom that was unaltered by political change in either capital. It was a transatlantic code which promised that things would probably turn out all right in the end, and usually they did.

When I returned to Britain as Ambassador in 1991, I was leery of this catch-phrase, and never used it. I thought it had become a little shopworn and sounded too much like a knee-jerk jingle. The end of the Cold War, I thought, was no time for clichés. Europe was changing fundamentally. So was the bilateral relationship. So was the world.

After all, for those fifty years, the Anglo-American relationship had taken its principal shape from a single strategic fact. Concentrated in the center of Europe, and extending well to the east, stood a large military force controlled by a hostile, totalitarian regime—first Nazi and then Soviet—which wished neither of our countries well. The official Anglo-American relationship wasn’t only about this, but it was largely about this.

And then, suddenly, the Berlin Wall came down, Eastern European nations were liberated, Russian forces streamed back to their Eurasian hinterland, the continent was effectively de-nuclearized, Germany was united and the Soviet empire collapsed in a colossal, shuddering mass. This was a breathtaking epic, and almost entirely peaceful. In fact, I cannot identify another period in modern European history when such sweeping historical forces were let loose across the continent without a precipitating war.

Vertical to Horizontal

The apparent triumph of political democracy and open-market economics—both of which are essentially Anglo-American concepts—was so complete that one enthusiastic observer declared the phenomenon “The End of History,” meaning the ultimate resolution of ideological division. But it also meant that the strategic perspective of the U.S. and Britain was much less likely to overlap.

And, sure enough, today it seems that instead of the vertical political world of the cold war, with a dividing line running from top to bottom, we instead have a horizontal economic world with a division running crosswise like a line of latitude. This is just another way of saying “globalization,” but parts of each society in the world today participate in an international economy and parts of each society really don’t.

The dividing line today has less to do with geography than it does with whether you are citizen of the knowledge-based Information Age and all the technological and computerized wizardry that implies. And it is the effect of economic globalism rather than political ideology which produces the serious tensions in the world today.

You can argue, for example, that someone with a university degree in Seattle has more in common with a well-educated executive in Edinburgh than with many of the below-line individuals in his own country. I recall a recent study which showed that the top 20% in America received almost 50% of the national income, and it was growing; and the bottom 20% received about 5% of the national income, and it was declining. The difference had nothing to do with race or region or religion. The simple dividing line was a university degree—which meant access to the Information Age.

And, therefore, someone without much education in Manchester faces the same limited prospects as his counterpart in, say, Chicago. In fact, there is probably more social alignment between the United States and the United Kingdom today than ever. Much more than before we hold up a social mirror to each other. Such in-or-out parallelism is more or less true around the world. And so the social agendas between the United States and Britain today—and even our political moods—are strikingly similar.

Globalization’s Challenge

I think globalism is a good thing, though its implications are just emerging. Over the last years nations have geometrically enriched themselves through a progressively more liberal free-trading system, financed by an increasingly more fluid capital market. In 1950 international trade was valued at some $70 billion; last year it reached $4 trillion. The value of international financial transactions on any given day is in the neighborhood of $12 trillion, give or take a trillion.

The high-speed, on-line, internetted, gigabyting electronics which lubricates this massive global exchange demonstrates an interconnection in the world economy so fleet and so sensitive that events somewhere in the world have instantaneous ramifications everywhere in the world.

But what globalism lacks is the political framework to understand it. Our international institutions such as NATO or the IMF—both of which were essentially put together by the British and Americans—are looking a little dysfunctional these days. There is no Churchillian concept to pull all this together. In fact, there seems to be a disconnect between the globalization of economic development, on the one hand, and the de-globalization of political leadership on the other.

Moreover, “globalization” often sounds like a euphemism for Americanization. Americans especially need to be careful that too many Microsoft programs, too many Big Macs, too many cruise missiles, too many Sylvester Stallone movies do not lead to a cultural reaction against an international system largely identified with the United States.

For Britain, too, these are confused times. Dean Acheson’s famous statement that Britain had lost an empire but not yet found a role seems much more relevant now than when he said it. Today the question of how Britain fits into this global world presses down on the nation like a heavy political weight, and for the most part, the response is ambivalent.

The country, for many understandable historic reasons and genuine misgivings, cannot bring itself to make the necessary psychological commitment to the grand European enterprise. It can’t quite come up with a credible alternative either. This is probably the most important strategic issue Britain has faced since the end of the Second World War. But in this political twilight zone, the UK sometimes seems to have retired to the psychiatrist’s couch to ask: Who am I? Where am I going? Is God really not an Englishman?

Over the last century, the role of international leadership has increasingly fallen to the United States. For better or worse, the world has become accustomed to American leadership, or put another way around, the world is incapable of serious action without the American catalyst.

Yet American politics seem fractious, petty, unilateralist, self-absorbed, strident and media-obsessed, and the current global financial challenge, for example, coincides with a moment in United States history when the country, at least to outside observers, seems bent on pulling itself apart and squandering its moral energy. The result, I think, is that the federal capital of this remarkable republic has been diminished, and will remain so for a long time.

The Real Special Relationship

When you look around the world today, I think it is safe to say that we do not have the structure nor the vocabulary nor the leadership to describe where we are. Perhaps this is why the political Churchill seems to loom so large today. Less his fullness than our inadequacy.

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 unnational world, and a reconciliation between economic globalism and social responsibility. 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 pop music.

You see it in the big statistics of trade and investment, and in the tiny statistics of transatlantic tourism (six million visitors a year); or transatlantic flights (40,000); or transatlantic telephone calls (three and one-half billion minutes). You see it in the work of The Churchill Centre.

Here is the thick, rich texture of the relationship at its most creative, most energetic, and 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.

Plus Ça Change…

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, private 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 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.

Visiting Tunisia, my wife and I went to a house which Churchill had used as a headquarters. You could almost smell the cigar smoke. More recently we saw, hanging on the wall in a Scottish castle, an oil study of the great man, for the famously evaporated Graham Sutherland portrait, presented to him by Parliament on his 80th birthday but subsequently destroyed because he hated it so.

You simply can’t get away from the man. I often pass Churchill’s statue in Parliament Square, where he leans into the House of Commons and scolds MPs as they emerge. In another statue I saw again just yesterday, Churchill supervises the traffic on Massachusetts Avenue in Washington. A bust of Churchill was recently unveiled in the great French-Canadian city of Quebec.

And on a little pedestrian cross-walk in London, sitting on a park bench, are the bronze figures of Churchill and Roosevelt. Symbolic perhaps of my opening thoughts about Pearl Harbor, it is at the junction of the two Bond Streets: New and Old. It’s a unique sculpture, the only one of them both, the work of Lawrence Holofcener, like Churchill a joint British-American citizen.

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 remembering that day a long time ago when they heard about Pearl Harbor and strapped their nations together in joint harness.

And maybe they’re saying that, even if today the ocean is different, we’re still in the same boat.