National Affairs: The Chill Is Off

The presentation of a foreign Ambassador to the President of the U. S. is usually heavy business, ribboned with red-tape, bound by strictest protocol. But one day last week ribbon and tape went out the White House window when a big black limousine, tagged DPL-I, swung around the little pavement-circle before the Executive wing. Out stepped six-foot, rosy-cheeked Philip Henry Kerr (pronounced Carr), Marquess of Lothian, Lord Newbattle, Earl of Lothian, Baron Jedburgh, Earl of Ancrum, Baron Kerr of Nisbet, Baron Long-Newton and Dolphingston, Viscount of Brien, Baron Kerr of Newbattle and Baron Ker. This 57-year-old Christian Scientist, a bachelor, secretary of the Rhodes Trust since 1925. War-time secretary to David Lloyd George, and reputedly a writer of much of the Versailles Treaty, was the new British Ambassador to the U. S.

But no sugar-scoop coat or high hat clothed Lord Lothian. To the confusion of protocol, he wore a black pin-stripe business suit, a loosely knotted dark tie, black bump-toed shoes, glasses with light grey plastic rims, a grey Homburg hat. He pushed open the right-hand door to the Executive offices (the left is always locked), walked over the black-and-white checkered linoleum, around the Philippine red narra table and back to the President’s office. He gave his hat to Pat McKenna, ancient doorguard, and walked in.

Not 20 minutes later but 90 minutes later he walked out—first envoy of a major power thus informally to be received, first thus to stay and chat with Franklin Roosevelt on his first diplomatic call. As he opened the front door to face the batteries of newsreel and flashbulb cameramen, a scrawny, tired black cat strolled casually across his path. He stooped and picked it up, while the newsreelmen went into a delighted frenzy.* The cat, counterpart of the one in London, named “Appeasement,” which haunts No. 10 Downing St., was instantly dubbed “Crisis.”

That was all U. S. newshawks needed to make them realize what a change had been wrought in the huge, spreading $1,000,000 red-and-white Queen Anne palace that houses the British Embassy on Washington’s Massachusetts Avenue.

For towering Sir Ronald Lindsay was cold and haughty as only a really shy person can be. Since 1930 he held no single press conference until the pressure of the approaching visit of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth forced him to undergo what he looked on as a most excruciating ordeal. Newshawks found no news at the British Embassy, were invariably frozen swiftly over the telephone. Last week the chill was off.

Lord Lothian held a press conference the second day after his arrival. Embassy attendants goggled as he sat nonchalantly in a rattan chair on the portico beside the wide formal garden behind the Chancellery, answering reporters’ questions directly if he could, with disarming evasions if he could not.

Newsmen hurried off to take another look at this unconventional British Ambassador’s background. They found that although he now was stepping into his country’s biggest foreign service job. Lord Lothian had never held a diplomatic post before. They also found that he had an unexcelled record of enthusiastic bandwagon-jumping. An original appeaser when appeasement was the fashion, he once proposed restoration to the Reich of its former colonies; said in 1935 after visiting Hitler, “I believe he is sincere.”

During that phase, Lord Lothian believed the German Government was made up of good fellows who would be satisfied with certain revisions of the Versailles Treaty. An outright hater of League of Nations orthodoxy, he reportedly gunned for Captain Anthony Eden, was instrumental in forcing Eden’s resignation from the British Cabinet, although he forcefully denied this. But the aftermath of Munich-time found nimble Lord Lothian advising his friend the Prime Minister to adopt Mr. Eden’s stiffer foreign policy. Then his appointment to succeed Sir Ronald in the U. S. was announced. Already Lothian was on record for at least token payments by the British on their World War I debts to the U. S. Soon thereafter he came upon Union Now, by Clarence K. Streit, former Geneva correspondent of the New York Times. This book advocates a union of all the North Atlantic democracies to abolish tariff barriers, increase trade and present a united peace front strong enough to halt aggression anywhere by mere threat of action.

Lord Lothian, a 15-time visitor to the U. S. immediately became a vociferous Union Nowster, hailing with tongue and pen this U. S. idea as a route to world peace. He also made a gesture to the U. S. press abroad, promising in August to help London correspondents get a permanentpress gallery bloc of chairs in the House of Commons.*The Washington press corps gathered that he was a diplomat who missed few good bets.

Wealthy Lord Lothian has long been regarded as a prime catch by British mamas. Blickling Hall, his chief seat, is one of the great English castles. Situated in Norfolk County, its rambling walls are supposed to contain the ghost of Anne Boleyn, Henry VIII’s second wife, who walks about with her head tucked underneath her arm. But he likes to think of himself as entirely democratic. At his press conference last week he said: “I am always glad to see the press, having started life as a pressman,”†

Of Mr. Hitler’s recent acts: “If that sort of thing goes on, the whole world will become a jungle.”

*Most newsreelers agreed it was the best informal camera break in Washington since J. P. Morgan bounced a midget on his knee at a Senate investigation (TIME, June 12, 1933).

*Last week in London U. S. newsmen were still lining up in the public queues for seats, still mainly depending on carbons from their English colleagues.

†Far from a pressman, Lord Lothian started life as a member of the Inter-Colonial Council, then became secretary of the Transvaal Indigency Commission in South Africa, where he edited The State. Later, in 1919, he edited the quarterly Round Table, a scholarly publication.