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Thus last week the Ministers to the King fought a gallant fight to arrest the decline of Britannia, to defend their course and to assert their strength. The battle was in the command of Winston Churchill, Anthony Eden and that grey, inscrutable institution, the Foreign Office. Churchill provided the guiding genius—the audacity, the grand sweep, the long view. Foreign Secretary Eden and his Foreign Office provided the tools—the machinery of persuasion and negotiation, the technicians to run it, the treasure of experience gleaned in decades of leading the world.
Six Elegant Feet. Eden and the Foreign Office are like a mirror and its reflection. In its 170 years (for the Foreign Office as such goes back only to the days of the American Revolution), the "Office" has been a way of international life, and a breeding ground of a particular kind of British character.
From the greying top of his head down to his polished boot tips—a straight drop of six elegant feet—Robert Anthony Eden is the epitome of that character. Now a suave but grey and furrowed 54, the diplomatic "Boy Wonder" of the '30s sits in the red and gilt office of His Majesty's Principal Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs as if it had been fitted to him by a Savile Row tailor.
His working day stretched sometimes to 16 and 17 hours, beginning usually with breakfast and a quick skim of the London Times in bed at 8, followed by a stroll to take the air in nearby St. James's Park. At his Foreign Office desk, his back to a glowing coal fire and a gleaming portrait of George III, he opened & closed a steady stream of red leather dispatch boxes in which the Office has traditionally handed about the cables, reports and memoranda that link Whitehall with the rest of the world. Twirling his horn-rimmed glasses, massaging his eyebrows with fingertips, he studied dispatches, scribbled notes, and conferred with assistants in groups of two or three at a time.
Occasionally, Eden telephoned to No. 10 Downing Street, or bounded across the street to consult Winston Churchill and other Cabinet members personally. One morning he flew over to Paris for urgent talks about French-German quarrels over European rearmament, and hopped back next afternoon. There was business also in the House of Commons, where Eden, the ablest Tory parliamentarian, is also in his element. There he sat languidly, stretching his legs, hands deep in pockets, his head on the back of the bench, and looking for all the world like a Hollywood casting director's conception of a brilliant, handsome, urbane Tory Foreign Secretary.
Certain Sort of Perfection. Anthony Eden has spent much of his life grooming himself to preside with Etonian perfection over the technical machinery of Britain's foreign affairs. The process began before his birth. Windlestone Hall, a handsome, porticoed house in the northern county of Durham, where Eden was born, has been the family seat for four centuries. In the 18th century one Eden was in Parliament, two of his brothers were ambassadors, and a fourth governed Maryland.