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> Two days after Senator Key Pittman issued his statement, he talked to the President, later gave another interview.
This time he said nothing of Britain's hopelessness, suggested that an "understanding" between the U. S. and British Fleets could "localize Hitler in Europe."
Clear Record. Minus his spectacles, with his broad forehead and high-arched Roman nose, Lord Lothian looks like a Roman of some intermediate period a few centuries before Rome's sliding fall. That impression is strengthened by the mildly indulgent character of his bulky frame—a respectable paunch, the lazy slope of his broad shoulders. His family motto is the indulgent apposite Sero sed serio—"Late, but in earnest." A democrat whose ancestral land titles go back to King Harold, a teetotaler and heavy orange-juice drinker who serves excellent wines, a Christian Scientist who was born into a devout Roman Catholic family and who now spends an hour or two a day in religious reading, a bachelor, a good golfer, fair tennis player, a signer after the exercise that he now has no time to get, Lord Lothian is the most popular British Ambassador Washington has seen since the late, great Lord Bryce. If U. S.-British relations should take a wrong turn, it would not be because Britain's Ambassador lived up to the Embassy's recent reputation for unapproachability, swank, disregard of U. S. ways.
The task of an Ambassador is to present well his country's case in the nation to which he is accredited. When Lord Lothian got to Washington, he knew that every move he made would be scrutinized for signs of sinister British propaganda. He also knew that the U. S. reaction to Munich had deepened contemptuous suspicions of British foreign policy with a big section of the U. S. public. An "enthusiastic and cheerful pessimist," he had become convinced in 1937 that war was inevitable unless some adjustment with Hitler was made, thought it likely that France and Britain would lose the first few years of the war unless U. S. aid came swiftly. And as a veteran of 15 U. S. trips, as secretary of the Rhodes Trust that annually sent 32 U. S. students to Oxford, he knew that U. S. help would not come swiftly.
But philosophic Lord Lothian also knew, as a devout man knows his faith, that in the end the way of the dictators was lost. Thirty-five years ago, when he was Philip Kerr, a tall, thin-faced, bookish Oxford graduate of 23, he packed off to South Africa to work under thoughtful Colonial Administrator Lord Milner, who was then pushing reconstruction, reconciling the embittered and defeated Boers. No fire-eater, Lord Milner preached and practiced a philosophy of empire so effectively that his crew of young amateurs* never forgot it, became famed as graduates of "Milner's Kindergarten." Basic premise in the Milner philosophy was that the vast, sprawling Empire, acquired by conquest and accident, with all its staggering differences of race and religion, must be democratized, liberalized; that the self-government of its various units, evolving with differences in degree and in kind, nevertheless stemmed from English constitutional principles.