Abstract
When Winthrop W. Aldrich arrived at London Airport on 10 February 1953, one bystander quipped: ‘He looks like a British ambassador arriving in the United States.’1 This was an astute observation — Eisenhower could hardly have chosen a more Anglophile figure. For Aldrich, aged 68 when he took up the post, the London Embassy promised an opportunity for glittering social success as a coda to his distinguished banking career. One US newspaper thought his lack of diplomatic experience an asset: ‘Mr. Aldrich should be particularly useful in this post in a day when so many of the chief problems in the relationship between Great Britain and the United States are financial, rather than political, in nature.’2 However, the first Eisenhower administration was to prove a period of exceptional and highly publicised political difficulty between the US and Britain, culminating in the Suez Crisis of 1956, arguably the most serious rupture in Anglo-American relations of the twentieth century. Aldrich, despite his excellent relations with most of the British elite, played only a minor role in the development and resolution of the Suez Crisis and it is hard to avoid the conclusion that his performance as ambassador was, at best, modest.
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Notes
Louis Galambos and Duan Van Ee (eds.), The Papers of Dwight David Eisenhower, Vol. 14. The Presidency: The Middle Way (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), p. 44 (hereafter DDE).
Stephen E. Ambrose, Eisenhower: The President, Vol. 2. 1952–69 (London: Lee Cooper, 1984), p. 50.
Peter Catterall (ed.), The Macmillan Diaries (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), p. 256.
Clare Boothe Luce, ‘The Ambassadorial Issue: Professionals or Amateurs?’ Foreign Affairs, Vol. 36, No. 1 (October 1957), pp. 114–15. Luce pointed out that ambassadors in European capitals were expected to spend lavishly on entertaining in a style that could not be paid for by their salaries and allowances.
Aldrich’s milieu and attitudes were remarkably similar to those of the six ‘wise men’ analysed byWalter Isaacson and Evan Thomas in their book about Acheson, Bohlen, Harriman, Kennan, Lovett and McCloy, the influential US diplomats of the Truman era who, in the authors’ judgement, were the ‘architects of the American century’ (Isaacson and Thomas, The Wise Men, p. 17). Robert Dallek’s biography of Kennedy indicates just how many influential ‘Boston clans’ there were, including the Rockefellers, to whom Aldrich was connected by marriage. Robert Dallek, John F. Kennedy, An Unfinished Life 1917–1963 (London: Penguin Books, 2003), p. 26.
Allen Johnson (ed.), Dictionary of American Biography (New York: Scribner’s, 1964), pp. 151–7.
Thomas Ferguson, ‘History, Politics, Statistics: A Preface to Walter Dean Burnham’s Electoral Archive’, The Journal of the Historical Society, Vol. 7, No. 4 (December 2007), p. 496.
Thomas Ferguson, Golden Rule: The Investment Theory of Party Competition and the Logic of Money-Driven Political Systems (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), pp. 148–54.
Jeffery M. Dorwart, ‘The Roosevelt-Astor Espionage Ring’, New York History, Vol. 62, No. 3 (July 1981), pp. 314–15.
Arthur M. Johnson, Winthrop W. Aldrich: Lawyer, Banker, Diplomat (Boston: Graduate School of Business Adminstration, Harvard University, 1968), pp. 305–6.
Frank Kofsky, Harry S. Truman and the War Scare of 1948 (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1993), p. 44;
Richard N. Smith, Thomas E. Dewey and his Times (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982), pp. 489–90.
Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, Volume 8: Never Despair, 1945–65 (London: Heinemann, 1988), p. 831.
Richard H. Immerman, John Foster Dulles: Piety, Pragmatism, and Power in U.S. Foreign Policy (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999), pp. 147–56. The force of Dulles’s visceral dislike of British ‘colonialism’ is evident in his impassioned denunciation of British and French policy at a National Security Council meeting in Washington on 1 November 1956 — the day after the RAF had begun bombing Egypt at the start of their military campaign to recover control of the Suez Canal. Foreign Relations of the United States, 1955–57 (FRUS), Vol. XVI, Doc. 455, pp. 906–7.
C. L. Sulzberger, A Long Row of Candles, Memoirs and Diaries 1934–54 (New York: Macmillan, 1969), p. 737.
Their mutual loathing of Dulles brought Eden and Aldrich closer together in retirement. The two men visited one another’s homes from time to time and corresponded warmly. Aldrich happily responded to Eden’s request for advice about investments and they both admired Herman Finer’s 1964 book which was highly critical of Dulles’s policy during the Suez Crisis. Avon Papers, AP23/5/5; AP23/5/B; AP23/5/7; AP23/5/7A; University of Birmingham; Herman Finer, Dulles over Suez: The Theory and Practice of his Diplomacy (London: Quadrangle Books, 1964).
D. R. Thorpe, Selwyn Lloyd (London: Jonathan Cape, 1989), pp. 1, 461.
Selwyn Lloyd, Suez 1956: A Personal Account (London: Jonathan Cape, 1978), p. 61.
Robert Rhodes James, Anthony Eden (London: Weidenfeld, 1986), p. 568.
Kevin Ruane, ‘Agonising Reappraisals: Anthony Eden, John Foster Dulles and the Crisis of European Defence, 1953–54’, Diplomacy and Statecraft, Vol. 13, No. 4 (December 2002), pp. 151–85.
Peter G. Boyle (ed.), The Eden-Eisenhower Correspondence 1955–7 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), p. 163.
Israeli Chief of Staff Moshe Dayan recalled Lloyd’s behaviour at the Sèvres meeting. Lloyd was unable to disguise his reluctance at having to participate in the collusion negotiations: ‘His whole demeanour expressed distaste — for the place, the company, the topic’. Moshe Dayan, The Story of my Life (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1976), p. 180. Another of the Israeli delegation thought that Lloyd ‘gave the impression of something stinking hanging permanently under his nose’.
Mordechai Bar-On, David Ben-Gurion and the Sèvres Collusion, in William Roger Louis and Roger Owen (eds.), A Revolutionary Year: 1958 in the Middle East (London: I. B. Tauris, 2002), p. 157. Interestingly, although Lloyd, in his memoirs (Suez: A Personal Account), discusses the Sèvres meeting at some length, he makes no mention of his dinner with Aldrich on 28 October.
Winthrop W. Aldrich, ‘The Suez Crisis, A Footnote to History’, Foreign Affairs, Vol. 45, No. 3 (1967), p. 543.
It was overturned by Fred I. Greenstein, The Hidden-Hand Presidency: Eisenhower as Leader (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982).
The minutes of the first meeting of the British Cabinet’s Egypt Committee on 30 July 1956 make this clear. ‘While our ultimate purpose was to place the Canal under international control, our immediate objective was to bring about the downfall of the present Egyptian Government’ (quoted in David Carlton, Britain and the Suez Crisis [Oxford: Blackwell, 1988], p. 37).
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© 2012 Andrew Boxer
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Boxer, A. (2012). Winthrop Aldrich, 1953–57. In: The Embassy in Grosvenor Square. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137295576_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137295576_7
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