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Partner Troubles. Knowing that their Britannia no longer rules the waves of current history, Winston Churchill and Anthony Eden crossed the Atlantic in December to call the U.S. to the rescue. "Britain and the U.S.," proclaimed Churchill, "are working together and working for the same cause." Privately, he recognized rifts. He felt that the U.S. now treats Britain as a junior partner, as one of a net of European allies; Churchill would not be dealt with as part of a blob. On their side, U.S. officials found Eden and Churchill, after six years in exile, dismayingly out of touch with many of the facts of international life. In that time the U.S. has hardened its position, and perhaps its heart. Eden came to the U.S. full of conventional diplomacy. Was the gap too wide between East & West? Let there be small agreements with the Soviets, and upon them trust might be built. In that way, though still wary of each other, East and West might come to live together in peace, if not in harmony. It was the familiar British formula: adjustments, not solutions.
In the field, there were tensions too. Aggressive U.S. diplomats moved into places like the Middle East ready to admire their British opposites for their easy self-assurance and legacy of experience. But many Americans in the field found British diplomacy flawed by a sparse knowledge of what went on in the streets, and a blindness to the growth of nationalism.
Over & above specific differences hangs a divergence in national viewpoint: the fact that the U.S., by instinct and origin, emotionally responds to colonial peoples' cry for freedom—while its best friend is frankly in the colonial business.
The Impulsive Friend. This week in the House of Commons, Winston Churchill, with all his oratorical skill, and Anthony Eden, with all his practiced adroitness, tried to reassure Parliament that the U.S. is an impulsive friend but a necessary one. They complemented each other, this bold 77-year-old and his loyal lieutenant, who faithfully conceals his occasional dismay at some of Churchill's drums and tramplings. The best twelve years of Anthony Eden's political life have been lived in the shadow of Churchill, and not much grows in the shadow of such an oak.
But some day the oak may no longer be there. Then the model diplomat, capable and correct, must prove how well the British Foreign Office tradition of expertism and caution can adjust to the incautious and wild demands of the second half of the soth century. The answer must wait until Anthony Eden steps out of the oak's shadow.
*A ubiquitous sign in English public lavatories.