Diplomacy Between the Wars: Five Diplomats and the Shaping of the Modern World 9780755624973, 9781838601058

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PREFACE

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

1. Lewis Einstein, by Eastman Johnson (Metropolitan Museum of Art), p3 2. Theodore Roosevelt to Mrs David Einstein, 17 February 1903 (University of Wyoming), p12 3. Lewis Einstein (University of Wyoming), p19 4. Tapestry in the American Embassy, Prague (now in the Reception Rooms, U.S. Department of State) (University of Wyoming), p23 5. Mrs Lewis Einstein (University of Wyoming), p31 6. American Embassy, Prague (University of Wyoming), p33 7. Lewis Einstein and Clementine Churchill (University of Wyoming), p39 8. Sir Horace Rumbold (Library of Congress), p53 9. Polish Frontiers (Smogorzewski, Pologne Restaurée), p58 10. Interallied Mission, Poland (Watt, Bitter Glory), p59 11. Rumbold and Family, Constantinople (New Bodleian Library, Oxford), p62 12. Rumbold and Family, Berlin (New Bodleian Library, Oxford), p68 13. Peel Commission Proposal (H.M.S.O.), p85 14. Count Bernstorff (Library of Congress), p92 15. Bernstorff and Wilson (Library of Congress), p100

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16. Caricature of Bernstorff (Library of Congress), p102 17. The ‘Bathing Beauty Photograph’ (The Sketch, October 25, 1916), p106 18. Departure of Bernstorff (U. S. National Archives), p108 19. Sforza to Hull, 30 July 1943 (Library of Congress), p150 20. Treaty of Paris, 18 April 1951 (European Commission), p168 21. Sforza to Kissinger, 29 April 1952 (Archivi Centrale di Stato, Rome), p171 22. Turkish Delegation at Lausanne (Library of Congress), p177 23. Ismet and Curzon at Lausanne (Cambridge University Library), p187 24. Churchill and Ismet at Adana (Library of Congress), p206 25. Roosevelt, Churchill and Inönü at Cairo (Library of Congress), p210

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The author is indebted to the President and Fellows of Wolfson College, Cambridge, for a visiting Fellowship during a portion of the period in which this work was prepared. He is also indebted to his partner, Orbie R. Shively, and his secretary, Jeanette I. Scott, for keeping his office going during his absences. Sir Henry Rumbold read the portions of the manuscript dealing with his grandfather and the late Professor Erdal Inönü read the chapter on his father; I am grateful for their comments, and also for the provision by Professor Inönü of the English typescript of the first volume of his memoirs, and of Turkish publications relating to the commemoration of the 70th anniversary of the Treaty of Lausanne. I am also indebted to numerous manuscript librarians for courtesies while performing research and in some instances for the remote supply of documents. The archives consulted include the American History Center, University of Wyoming (Einstein); the New Bodleian Library, Oxford (Rumbold); the Churchill Archive Centre, Churchill College, Cambridge (Churchill, Knatchbull-Hugessen, Phipps and Vansittart); the Manuscript Collection, Cambridge University Library (Hardinge); the Manuscript Division, Library of Congress (Frankfurter, Hughes, Hull and Steinhardt); the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park (Winant); the Archivio Centrale di Stato, Rome (Sforza); the Library of St. Anthony’s College, Oxford (Boyte); the House of Lords Record Office (Lloyd-George); the Seelye Mudd Library, Princeton University (Dulles) and the Yivo Institute for Jewish Research, New York (Lucien Wolf). Melvin J. Sykes of the Baltimore Bar removed from the manuscript some of its more awkward passages; those remaining are the fault of the stubbornness of the author. A debt is also due to some of those who have gone before. Bernstorff produced two illuminating volumes of memoirs and Einstein one volume. Martin Gilbert is the author of an admirable biography of Rumbold and Reinhard Doerries of a thorough study of Bernstorff’s ambassadorship to the United States. As with his other works, the writer is especially indebted to his wife Anne-Lise Liebmann for her forbearance and patience with this project. George W. Liebmann Baltimore

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PREFACE

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PREFACE

This is a text for our time. It is a celebration of diplomacy and diplomats – of an essentially extinct profession. The period with which it deals is the period surrounding and between the two great world wars. The diplomacy of that period, with its tragic end in 1939 to 1941, is described in two admirable volumes edited by Gordon Craig and Felix Gilbert, which contain short appreciations of portions of the careers of two of our subjects: Ismet Inönü and Sir Horace Rumbold. When Gilbert and Craig’s successors sought to compile a similar volume about the two decades following World War II, they produced an essentially banal discussion of some peripatetic foreign ministers. Momentary on-the-scene visits had taken the place of political reporting; the lengthy and informative dispatches of such as Lewis Einstein and Horace Rumbold, some of them quoted at length in important histories, had been replaced by the cable-ese of the Pentagon Papers. But ‘the crooked timber of humanity’ has not changed; fly-ins and fast rotations are no substitute for long service in place and the local knowledge and knowledge of personal peculiarities that accompanies it. The contemporary reader may ask the point of such a compilation. Were not the twenties and thirties a great train wreck, ending in world war? Indeed they were, but not because of their diplomats. Versailles, Trianon and Sèvres were not the product of expert advice, as Harold Nicolson’s Peacemaking 1919 among a multitude of other works, abundantly makes clear. British and French foreign policy after the rise of Hitler was not made by Vansittart and Coulondre, the permanent heads of their foreign offices, but over their objections. German foreign policy was that of Hitler and Ribbentrop, not of the Bernstorffs, uncle and nephew; Italian policy that of Mussolini’s son-in-law, not of the exiled Count Sforza. Even in that grey period, diplomacy had its successes. The enduring settlement of Lausanne, despite its cruelties, was one of these; it reflected patient work by Rumbold and Inönü, who dampened the passions of their governments. Sforza negotiated a settlement with Yugoslavia which was accepted even by Mussolini, and was replicated after the Second World War. The work of J.D. Craigie in Tokyo and Sir Percy Loraine in Rome has been credited with keeping Japan and Italy out of the war in September 1939, preventing a dispersion of forces that might have proven fatal to Britain. The anguished warnings of Kennan and Bohlen and the less tangible influence of Lewis

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Einstein produced the containment policy and the Marshall Plan in place of policies that might have led to either war or economic collapse. For Turkey, alone among major nations, the last 80 years of the twentieth century were a period of both peace and progress, thanks largely to a wise diplomat; the postwar revival of Italy, its aid to European institutions and its success in keeping domestic differences within manageable limits owes much to Sforza. This is a chronicle of men who were, especially in their later lives, wise, broadly experienced, and humane. Not many of today’s statesmen would be capable of producing works like Sforza’s Makers of Modern Europe or Lewis Einstein’s Tudor Ideals. Inönü was the first, and almost the last, modern ruler with dictatorial power who voluntarily renounced it. Few in today’s American foreign service, where competence in even one foreign language is no longer a requirement for admission, would have the command of four or five languages characteristic of all our subjects, even the selftaught Inönü. The British Empire rested less on military force than on local knowledge; at least two of Britain’s twentieth-century foreign secretaries, Curzon and Eden, spoke Farsi. The multi-volume Documents on British Foreign Relations 1919–39 today can be read not only for information but for pleasure; it even contains a great piece of comic literature, Eric Phipps’ account of Goering’s wedding. Diplomacy, for all our subjects, did not involve name-calling, demonising or the construction of ‘axes of evil’, but rather an effort to appreciate and render explicit one’s own national interest and that of one’s adversary. Inönü was rightly described as a man with no enemies; even those whose overtures and demands he rejected admired and venerated him. Even at the time, he saw Lausanne as a prelude to a reconciliation with Greece. Rumbold, notwithstanding his detestation of the Nazi regime, saw value in the efforts of Phipps and François-Poncet to get it to cool off, though he had no illusions as to their chance of success. Bernstorff appreciated that the Germany of 1914 should have been a satisfied power, and that its navy propelled it into conflict with England. In an age in which technological spying is the principal means of intelligencegathering, it is useful to be reminded that ‘the greatest of Britain’s ambassadors’ relied on wide socialising and a voracious reading of the German provincial press. His accurate and almost unique contemporary understanding of the Soviet starvation of the kulaks was derived from a series of obscure but credible dispatches in a Swiss newspaper. As E.M. Forster once observed, ‘They collect facts and facts and empires of facts. But which of them will rekindle the light within?’ It may be contended that a revived diplomacy is impossible in a democratic age, although Inönü was the servant of a revolution and Sforza had the grudging respect of a wide range of political parties. Their lives, and those of people like Schuman and Acheson, are perhaps an indication that when things get bad enough, even democracies will turn to persons of integrity and learning who kept themselves unsullied and uncorrupted. The exceptional first generation of leaders in post-communist Eastern Europe perhaps attests to this: Arpad Goncz in Hungary; Vaclav Havel in Czechoslovakia, Tadeus Mazowiecki in Poland, Vjlautas Lansbergis in Lithuania, Lennart Meri in Estonia, Simeon Saxe-Coburg in Bulgaria. It is not a waste of time, even in difficult times of excessive passions, to strive to keep alive a tradition of

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learning, humane realism and international understanding in its broadest, unfashionable, sense: an effort to understand competing national and cultural particularities. Works and reflections, like Sforza’s books and Einstein’s, written almost for desk drawers, may then have their hour, and societies that retain some vestige of pluralism may then find the leaders they need. The inspiration for this book is not difficult to identify, given the American nationality of the author and the period in which he is writing, a time when Americans are assured that ‘national greatness’1 is not found in the ‘little platoons’2 of domestic society but in the projection of power abroad. This atmosphere is that decried by George Orwell in 1944 ‘which teaches, either overtly or implicitly, that one should side with the big man against the little man. . . Most of what is now written about foreign policy is simply an embroidery on this theme.’ The United States, notwithstanding its shortage of infantry, is said to be a ‘superpower’ or even a ‘hyperpower’;3 it seemed a good time to write about five men who knew that their nations lived on narrow margins, and who also were exponents of civil government in a militarised age, holding to General De Gaulle’s view that ‘only the civil state, backed up by law, could defend freedom; for an army to run the state was the swiftest route to tyranny.’ The subjects are an American in a nation with a very small army; a Turk whose country was backward, bankrupt and occupied; a Briton at a time of naval mutinies and perceived decline; a German who deemed his nation encircled and its government divided against itself; and an Italian in a war-damaged country with only the beginnings of a national polity. In America, which thinks of itself as a great liner on the international seas, Progress and security may perhaps enable untold millions to live and die without a care, without a pang, without an anxiety. They will have a pleasant passage and plenty of brilliant conversation. They will wonder that men ever believed at all in clanging fights and blazing towns and sinking ships and praying hands, and when they come to the end of their course, they will go their way and the place thereof will know them no more. But it seems unlikely that they will have such a knowledge of the great ocean on which they sail, with its storms and wrecks, its currents and icebergs, its huge waves and mighty winds as those who battled with it for years together in the little craft, which, if they had few other merits, brought those who navigated them full into the presences of time and eternity, their maker and themselves, and forced them to have some definite view of their relations to them and to each other.4 What are the commonalities in these five lives? There are some obvious commonalities of place. Bernstorff and Rumbold served in Cairo; Bernstorff and Einstein in different ways were students of America; all five served in Turkey during or at the end of the First World War; all were concerned with the containment of German power. They were diplomats, of a type that has almost vanished, enjoying the benefits of leisure and reflection; Inönü made his own time for reflection, sitting up alone at night to think things through.

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None of the five were blind careerists. Sforza was the only Italian Ambassador voluntarily to renounce office rather than serve under Mussolini; in Poland, in appealing for Allied aid, in Turkey, by delaying an ultimatum, and in Germany, by the vehemence of his protests to Hitler about persecutions, Rumbold went to the limit of, and indeed beyond, his instructions; Einstein did not over-exploit his connections with the famous and powerful; Inönü defied his patron Atatürk at the time of the Nyon conference and momentarily fell from power, and ultimately voluntarily ended his dictatorship; Bernstorff took ‘comfort in the thought that Bismarck once voiced the desire to see a German who turned down a minister’s post’. All were aware of the corruptions of power, Einstein self-consciously so, as shown by the epigraph of this volume; Sforza and Inönü created party systems in their countries, the latter declaring, ‘What I know about non-democratic regimes is not theoretical. I had authority and at times I used fully all the means available to rulers under such regimes and observed the consequences. Today we either try to develop this country under democracy or we go down the drain.’ Bernstorff declined high appointive office to become a deputy in the Reichstag; Rumbold was at his most scornful in deriding the pretensions of Franz von Papen: ‘Herr von Papen is convinced that in some mysterious way he possesses a popular mandate to govern the country and even to reform the Constitution [and] that the real desire of the country is for authoritative government [and] the limitation of parliamentary influence.’ They shared a full awareness of the destructiveness of war. Bernstorff in his famous interview with Ludendorff urged peace before ‘Germany was at the end of its tether’; Inönü’s central purpose was to prevent Turkey from being dragged into another world war; Einstein was among the first to realise the extent to which modern finance and credit devices made total war both protracted and possible; Rumbold was aware of the fragility of the British military structure in the wake of World War I; Sforza in his letter to King Victor Emmanuel in 1940 forecast that entry into the war would be the ruin of Italy. All viewed with revulsion the institutions of totalitarianism. Rumbold saw novelty in the German concentration camps and official anti-semitism and was also repelled by the needless internment of enemy aliens in England; Sforza stressed the depreciation of human capital wrought by dictatorship: ‘the strength of a city is in its men’; Bernstorff wrote a strikingly eloquent denunciation of anti-semitism in the wake of the assassination of Rathenau; Einstein repeatedly protested against and sought to expose the Armenian genocide. Even Inönü, the servant and leader of a regime with bloody origins, sought to restrain impulses toward capital punishment: ‘In the past, capital punishment meted out to political offenders gave rise to an enmity and rancour among the people that lingered on for years.’ They were aware of the dependence of foreign policy on domestic opinion. Rumbold, in averting the Chanak crisis, declared that: ‘The last thing our country wants is to have another war; the average man does not care a straw whether Eastern Thrace and Adrianople belong to the Greeks or the Turks.’ Bernstorff displayed a masterly sense of American public opinion in its regional aspects and fought the British to a political draw until being undercut by the Zimmermann telegram; Inönü

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was a strong advocate of primary education as necessary to citizenship; Sforza paid tribute to Marshal Diaz’s aid to Italian soldiers: ‘In modern warfare, a great problem of social economics and psychology has superimposed itself on the strategical problem’; Einstein warned against the consequence for democracies of a ‘surcharged atmosphere’ like that of 1914. Each stood for limiting national objectives. Einstein opposed American mandates in Constantinople and Armenia as likely to distract from domestic reforms and to lead to militarism; Rumbold in Turkey shared Bonar Law’s view that Britain, alone, could not be the policeman of the world; Bernstorff understood that, after the first battle of the Marne, the only way out for Germany was through a negotiated peace, and had been sceptical of German aspirations for a surface fleet; Sforza at the end of both wars renounced potential territorial gains in favor of trade advantages; Inönü continued Atatürk’s policy of not seeking to rule over non-Turks. All save Inönü were exponents of free trade; Einstein inveighed against economic isolationism after both world wars and urged American aid for European reconstruction; Rumbold developed an abhorrence of protectionism in Spain; Bernstorff in the wake of World War I urged an arrangement very much like the Schuman Plan and saw Germany’s economic strength as deriving from its emigrants in many nations, not from colonies; Sforza looked for trade in post- World War I Turkey and Yugoslavia and in the wake of World War II negotiated customs unions and supported European unity. Only Inönü, when Turkey was under siege, developed the habits of autarky. None were angels in human form: Bernstorff and Sforza reputedly had adventurous private lives; Inönü indulged a prejudice against foreign merchants; Rumbold’s private expressions were replete with ethnic slurs, though no inter-war politician tried to do more for Jewish refugees; Einstein was too willing to accede to long periods of disengagement. All were willing to use force in defence of vital interests: Rumbold in Poland, Einstein in urging that the Monroe Doctrine be extended to Britain, Inönü in the Cyprus crisis, Bernstorff in the early stages of the war, Sforza in urging that Mussolini be forcibly deposed. But the thread that united all of them was a conviction that the powers of their nations were limited and should be husbanded for vital interests. In advancing their aims, some were more successful than others. Inönü and Sforza could be properly viewed as builders of nations and in Sforza’s case of supra-national institutions; Rumbold fought a series of rear-guard actions for his country, and was successful in Poland in deferring Bolshevik incursions into central Europe and in Turkey in placing post-war relations on a sound footing; many Jewish refugees may have owed their lives to his vehemence, though he was unsuccessful in the Peel Commission’s effort to secure them a haven in Palestine. Einstein was an important influence on American diplomatic doctrine and the Marshall Plan. Only Bernstorff’s career ended in total failure, though he did his best to shorten the first world war and to secure reconciliation and the revision of international institutions necessary for it in the period after World War I. The much-vexed issue presented by Zionism they addressed in different ways. Bernstorff and Sforza, though sympathetic to Jewish settlement in the Near East,

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feared a new nationalism; their fears were not misplaced. Sforza wanted to divert Jewish immigration to Syria, an idea that had no constituency. Rumbold saw a Jewish state as a necessary sanctuary, and an Arab state in Palestine as a necessary assurance against further Jewish expansion; time has not eroded the force of his view. Einstein was less explicit, though declaring that ‘There is no more important question in this [first] war than [the Near East’s] future. It’s the sewer which will make the house clean or befoul it.’ Although Inönü’s regime carried forward some of the discriminatory policies of the Ottoman Empire, Jews living under it, and many living abroad with a slender claim to its protection, were enabled by the regime to survive the war. The battles these five fought are battles long ago, though their echoes are with us still: in Turkish non-intervention and independence, in Italian submergence in Europe, in continued German involvement with Turkey, and in post-war American foreign policy with its usual emphasis on free trade, a policy that Einstein sought to foster. In all their countries save Germany, with its bifurcated government working at crosspurposes, civilians remained in control of foreign policy. The nations which renounced the advice of their professional diplomats had reason to regret having done so, as with Germany during the first world war and after, Italy under the Duce, and Britain and France in the late 1930s. The lessons for our country in all this are obvious, and are here tendered. George W. Liebmann Baltimore

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EPIGRAPH

When I examine my own conception of human excellence, I find that, doubtless owing to early environment, it contains many elements which hitherto have been associated with aristocracy, such as fearlessness, independence of judgment, emancipation from the herd, and leisurely culture. Is it possible to preserve these qualities, and even make them widespread, in an industrial community? And is it possible to dissociate them from the typical aristocratic vices: limitation of sympathy, haughtiness, and cruelty to those outside a charmed circle? Bertrand Russell, quoted in Alistair Cooke, ‘The Lord of Reason’ in A. Cooke, Six Men (New York: Knopf, 1977), 156–57.

Against no life doth the force of vice oppose herself and make so strong a preparation as against the life of a statesman. She assaults with the weapons of power, self-love, ambition, corruption, revenge, and fear. Lewis Einstein, Tudor Ideals (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1921), 75

The United States had developed over two centuries in a wide zone where there were no other states. It lacked the kind of statecraft which Europeans imbibed from life in a multiplicity of states hostile to one another and rarely out of sight or out of mind of their neighbours. The basic instinct of the United States in international affairs was to go it alone. European history was marked by the disasters of doing so. Peter Calvocoressi, World Politics, 1945–2000 (Harlow: Pearson, 2001), 70.

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LEWIS EINSTEIN

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1 LEWIS EINSTEIN

Unlike the other figures we consider here, the American Lewis Einstein never occupied a high place in government and never was a direct actor in major events. He was not a President, a Foreign Minister, or an Ambassador between great powers; the highest office that he held was that of American Ambassador to Czechoslovakia during the 1920s. He was more than a Cassandra; numbering among his friends and acquaintances such large figures as Theodore Roosevelt, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Charles Evans Hughes and Cordell Hull, his intellectual influence affected America’s view of its new global responsibilities, though frequently in ways that were not directly traceable or tangible. Like Carlo Sforza and unlike our other subjects, he left a large and neglected permanent legacy in literary form. His greatest contribution was in fostering recognition of the extent to which American security rested on naval power, its own and that of the British, and of the vital interest of America in British independence. He also had an acute recognition, rare in his time, of the dependence of international politics on economics. He saw that modern financial techniques made protracted wars possible, and saw the dangers for Europe in the protectionism and inflation following the First World War. He helped lay the intellectual foundations for the Marshall Plan, while successfully warning that acceptance of an Armenian mandate would over-extend and militarise the United States. After graduating from Columbia with a master’s degree, he published at the age of 25 a book on the Italian Renaissance in England, which was much-praised and which still repays reading.1 He found the enduring appeal of the Renaissance in the fact that learning was valued ‘as a guide to the conduct of life. Great is eloquence; nothing so much rules the world. Political action is the result of persuasion; his opinion prevails with the people who best knows how to persuade them.’ In the Renaissance, the classics were studied ‘not as an allegorical explanation of Christianity, but from the literary point of view’. The new type of English scholar ‘was to equal his Italian model in learning, while he surpassed him in purity of life’. The view was that ‘one ought not to boast of ancient lineage but prove oneself worthy of it. . . The ideal of universality once aimed at was consciously pursued and attained by the best spirits of the age.’

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DIPLOMACY BETWEEN THE WARS [A] ‘new zeal for education . . . had swept over the English nation and placed side by side with the old feudal distinctions a new field of honor in learning. . . Venice was in many ways what England is to-day; her colonies formed a colonial empire governed by a merchant aristocracy. . . The energy, the vigor, the daring and courage of the Italian Renaissance found itself reflected no less strongly in the history of its merchants and explorers, than in the works of its painters and poets. In commerce, as in the arts and sciences, Italy held up the guiding light for the rest of Europe to follow . . . [Thomas] Cromwell’s aim was to secure peace and order for England by centralizing all power in the crown, and strengthening the hands of the king. As the church alone stood in the way of the absolute rule of the king, the last check that had survived the Wars of the Roses, his unbending efforts and energies were directed to destroying its authority . . . [he was] the first great English disciple of Machiavelli.

In his way of thinking, with democracy ‘went envy of the rich, and an intense conceit accompanied the feeling it possessed of its own infallibility. . . it seemed “a horrible monster of many heads without reason”.’ As for aristocracy, As long as neither nobleman nor commoner overstepped their bounds, so long were both of benefit to the state. If either should do so, the party of the commons would certainly prove the more dangerous on account of their ignorance and inconstancy . . . there were many tyrants . . . a good prince, even though he diminished the power of the commons, preserved them, at the same time from the tyranny of the nobility. The Italian philosophy of history was also imported to England, with its premise that Nothing . . . removed one further from the desire of evil than to see the punishment of the wicked, and history exposed this clearly to the world. History made men wiser both to direct their own actions and to advise others . . . This historical method has fallen into undeserved oblivion. The book led to his appointment to the Diplomatic Service, President Theodore Roosevelt declaring: ‘I would particularly like to put in the public service a man of the tastes indicated by such a book as this.’ The Secretary of State, John Hay, referred to ‘its very great value both as literature and history’, while the Secretary of War, Elihu Root, acknowledged his copy of the work by referring to ‘its direct and lucid style . . . Mr. Hay had already spoken to me of the work in terms of high commendation.’2 TR, though today thought of by many as a blustering imperialist, was, as Henry Kissinger among others has shown,3 a realist in foreign policy. He appreciated America’s indebtedness to the British fleet, and shared the British dread of control by a single power of the European continent. His advocacy of American entry into World War I rested on what proved to be a just estimate of the durability of German militarism, while his role in the Treaty of Portsmouth was founded on a purpose to

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1. Lewis Einstein, by Eastman Johnson (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

prevent the destruction of Russian power in Europe. Einstein’s initial appointment was as Third Secretary in Paris at a salary of $1200 per year;4 his diplomatic career began at the Algeciras Conference in 1906, which he saw as one of the last triumphs of the old diplomacy, and where he met many prominent diplomats, including Carlo Sforza, who became a lifelong friend.

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DIPLOMACY BETWEEN THE WARS No one yet recognized in this negative result that the stage was already being prepared for the excitable mass pressure that has been increasingly and detrimentally exercised in international affairs. In 1906, this pressure could still be kept in some restraint. I was still too inexperienced to understand the immense value of pompous and well-staged negativeness when this serves to allay political passion.5

All of our subjects were patient with leisurely negotiations; for Inönü, perhaps the most skilled diplomat among them, each new discussion was a chance to propagate his government’s point of view and to ensure that its roots in vital interests were understood. Einstein referred with appreciation to a senior Italian delegate who disdainfully observed: ‘They told me there were to be ambassadors here. I see only lawyers.’ In England ‘the advocate is not thought to make the best negotiator.’ Of Germany, he said that it was ‘the only great nation never to feel quite certain of her position and therefore alternating with an uneasy violence between extremes of effacement and of dangerous arrogance.’ In the period 1906 to 1913, Einstein also edited The Humanist’s Library, a series of books from the Renaissance elegantly printed by the Merrymount Press, with introductions by Einstein6 and others. A unifying motif was that set forth in the introduction by J.W. Mackail to Erasmus’ Against War, written in 1908: At the present day, the reactionary wave which has overspread the world has led, both in Europe and America, to a new glorification of war. Peace is on the lips of governments and of individuals, but beneath the smooth surface the same passions, draped as they always have been under fine names, are a menace to progress and to the higher life of mankind. The increase of armaments, the glorification of the military life, the fanaticism which regards organized robbery and murder as a sacred imperial mission, are the fruits of a spirit which has fallen as far below the standard of humanism as it has left behind it the precepts of a still outwardly acknowledged religion. . . At such a time the noble pleading of Erasmus has more than a merely literary or antiquarian interest. For the appeal of humanism still is, as it was then, to the dignity of human nature itself.7 Family Controversy In the period before the war, Einstein had been involved in controversy with his family. In 1904, Einstein had married Helen Ralli, a twice-divorced member of an AngloGreek family who was ten years his senior, leading to violent controversy with his father arising from her age, her prior divorces and the fact that she was not of the Jewish faith. David Einstein, Lewis’ father, died in 1908, leaving an estate of $4 million, a very large sum at that time, derived from various businesses, most notably the Raritan Woolen Mills in New Jersey; he was a descendant of Judah P. Benjamin, Secretary of State of the Confederacy. After his marriage, he wrote his son a letter declaring:

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Your dear mother is prostrated with grief over the degradation you have brought upon yourself. I am grieved to inform you that I have changed my will and that you will not participate in my fortune at my death. If you will dissolve your marriage with Helene, you will be received back into the arms of your broken-hearted father and mother and will have what you should have, share and share alike with your sisters. Do not suppose that any entreaties or threats you may make will influence us. Helene will never be received by your mother and sisters.8 In 1907, Lewis to wrote Helen: ‘What an extraordinary woman my mother is . . . She will worry and fret if I have sufficiently heavy underwear and then she does what she does!’9 The will left by David Einstein at his death in 1908 left Lewis and his two sisters $125,000 each outright. The residue of the estate was divided into three trusts of $1,250,000 each, one for each of his daughters and her descendants, and the third share to his daughter Florence with the right to assign interest or principal to ‘one of his blood’.10 It was later testified that he tried expressly to condition a bequest to Lewis on his divorce, but used the device of an additional trust for his daughter Florence ‘when he was convinced [a direct restriction] would invalidate the will’. The testator declared to his brother-in-law: I am leaving my son $5,000 a year, I don’t want him to be a beggar. And then Florence can and will give him such sums as she thinks proper from time to time if he dissolves his disreputable marriage and shows a sincere penitence.11 Lewis did not find this condition acceptable, and after his father’s death in 1908 negotiated a settlement with the estate under the terms of which he would receive income of $20,000 per year of the $50,000 to 60,000 generated by the additional trust held by Florence. By June 1911, Justice Holmes wrote to him: I am glad that the family matter promises settlement. I feared very much the result of the fight, and deeply regretted that you should have such a cloud always hanging in your mind. So you give me very great pleasure by your news.12 In late 1913, the matter flared up again, when Professor Charles Spingarn of Princeton, the husband of David Einstein’s other daughter, filed a suit (to which Lewis was not a party) asking that the third trust be construed as including a secret agreement that Florence would bequeath the trust equally to the testator’s grandchildren, including the plaintiff’s children. This caused the controversy to be extensively publicised in both the American and British press. Lewis cannot have been delighted with an article declaring that: ‘David Einstein was especially displeased with his son’s marriage because of the danger that it would injure his career in the diplomatic service, as divorced women are not received in some of the European

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courts.’13 Holmes wrote: ‘As a hardened jurist I do smile, though as a friend I sympathise with them, at your complaints at publicity. Remember, my friend, that every good costs something. . . In the particular matter publicity is a safeguard against corruption and arbitrariness.’14 In the final event, Spingarn’s lawsuit was unsuccessful.15 At various times, statements by the solicitors of Lady Waldstein [later Walston] were published in both New York and London making clear that Lewis was not a party to the case.16 The later of the two statements also denied that religion had anything to do with his father’s actions against Helen Ralli. In 1920, Florence exercised her power over her extra third of the trust to give Lewis all of the income, rather than merely $20,000 of it. In 1938, Florence transferred to Lewis one-half the principal of the extra share. This ignited yet another legal controversy when the Internal Revenue Service attempted to tax the 1920 and 1938 dispositions as gifts. Einstein’s lawyers responded that they were part of an estate plan taking effect prior to enactment of any federal estate and gift tax. He prevailed in the Tax Court, and when the government appealed to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, the case was settled. The Tax Court opinion17 is a leading case on estate taxation and is frequently cited to this day. In March 1915, though a Republican, Einstein was recalled to the diplomatic service to become the first Special Representative in Constantinople and then in Sofia; the front-page headline in the New York Times read: Einstein Named to Aid Morgenthau: Wife Because of Whom Father Cut Son’s Inheritance Accompanies Her Husband.18 In 1918, after the vagaries of politics had again led to Einstein’s departure from the Wilson Administration, the journalist Ray Stannard Baker visited Einstein in Italy, and noted in his diary: His wife is very beautiful, still beautiful at 55 years. . . A woman of power and fascination, all black, all white, no smudgy greys, a woman who can hate desperately and love passionately, believing in the beauty of excess, the utter being of life. Her husband’s career, everything, went for her! And probably without regret.19 Einstein’s marriage to Helen Ralli was a strikingly happy one, lasting for 45 years until her death in 1949. His stepdaughter Marguerite, a favourite of Mr. Justice Holmes, married the Marquess of Tweedale and died in 1944; it was to her that Holmes wrote, in his 94th year, one of the most memorable of his letters: I wrote because of the vividness of my feeling for you . . . I write again for the same reason and to say a word about discouragements. I often have quoted what a Russian said to me, it must be near fifty years ago: ‘In our middle class we have many specialists. In our upper class we have civilized men.’ The specialist is more likely to achieve fame, i.e. to be talked about in the newspapers, but

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the civilized man creates a new atmosphere that is one of the greatest gifts to mankind. It would be hard for you to be a specialist in your surroundings, I assume, but you are to me a civilized woman and so you make life better for the world . . . Part of the greatness of a great life I think consists in leaving it unadvertised. A woman with your gifts who does not let her cultivation decay and doesn’t worry over the chances of displaying it, seems to me to be living nobly, and to have a right to be content.20 Turkey and China Before the War Einstein’s next assignment was in pre-war Turkey, where he formed some clear impressions of dictatorial governments: A country like Turkey, notoriously in a hopeless mess, could continue its disorder providing only that the old familiar abuses went on, but it was certain to collapse as soon as any real attempt was made to introduce reforms. . . The importation and use of telephones, of typewriters, and of all electrical machiney was strictly forbidden lest such dangerous modern appliances should be used by conspirators for their plots . . . [The Sultan] connived at thefts in order to attach interests to his person while holding them in his power by the knowledge of their misdeeds . . . Spies and secret accusations are characteristic of all despotisms. In every absolutism the power of individuals rests on the degree of their nearness to the ruler far more than the office that they hold . . . When a despotism loses its vitality, it collapses without any warning . . . Particularly in states where the free expression of opinion is driven underground, members of the [diplomatic] profession are often remarkably badly informed, for they dare not enquire too closely into dangerous matters or frequent men who are under suspicion . . . The leaven of the West at first spreads slowly in Eastern lands. Before it penetrates the masses and gathers momentum, nearly always a reaction takes place which finds its strength in the roots of old religious practices and leads to an easily aroused fanaticism . . . a fury which can become capable of any excess and is then heedless of any consequence.21 These conclusions, also reached by Sforza and strikingly applicable to modern Iran, China and Russia, were reinforced by a period of service in China. He favoured ‘dollar diplomacy’ and the ‘Open Door’ to trade: without the Chinese Revolution, the Wilson Administration, and the Great War, ‘we might perhaps have built the first arch in that great bridge’. This project was seriously embarked upon only in our own time. As in Turkey, with hardly any intermediate class between the gentry and coolies and peasants, the process of disintegration as soon as it begins is rapid – The prophecy which I wrote Secretary Knox – that a revolution would occur within the next two years – turned out to be correct.22

8

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Bernstorff similarly foresaw the collapses in Russia and Turkey which ensued. Sforza likewise recognised that influence in the Orient was not to be obtained by force, and regarded colonialism as doomed in the face of Moslem opinion and Far Eastern nationalism. Further, ‘there were traditions and dangers which could not be disposed of simply by the laws of democracy’, a view not finding favour in today’s Washington. He vehemently opposed political over-commitment by the United States, strongly discouraging U.S. involvement in construction of a Manchurian railroad: An American railroad would have been of little benefit to the the Middle Kingdom, and far more dangerous to the peace of the United States than was ever understood. . . an American forward policy in Manchuria could have exposed us to many unnecessary risks.23 He felt that the United States should not seek commercial advantage over the other Western powers, and should act in concert with Britain, France and Germany. To attempt to dislodge Japan from her position in Southern Manchuria is unfeasible, and all we can hope to do is, by purely diplomatic means to so retard the process of her absorption there as to give China an opportunity to stand on its feet.24 Rumbold too had no problem with Japanese aspirations in Manchuria; it was resistance to these by Stimson and others that embroiled the United States and Britain in conflicts with the Japanese. A Prophecy of War Einstein’s first and greatest claim on public attention derived from an astonishingly prescient essay he composed during the summer or autumn of 1912 while serving in Costa Rica, which constituted an accurate prophecy of the First World War and which was published in the British National Review in January 1913.25 after various American journals, including the Atlantic and the North American Review, had refused it.26 ‘To a nation confronted by internal difficulties, the diversion of an energetic foreign policy appealing to a united patriotism is always a possible alternative’, Einstein observed. It remains an anomaly that modern democratic government has been no more peaceful than former absolutism. Moltke’s prophecy that popular rule enhanced the likelihood of war was correct [in part because of] the critical and often malignant scrutiny to which every government is now exposed from within. George Kennan in his book about the pre-World War I French warmongers27 reached similar conclusions, at variance with those in our time who glibly proclaim that there is an automatic association between democracy and peace.

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He saw no real conflict of interest between Germany and England: ‘Intelligent Germans are the first to recognize that neither their merchants nor their trade suffer in British markets . . . their antagonism presents nothing concrete save rival ambition.’ Bernstorff likewise was of the view that pre-1914 Germany should have regarded itself as a satisfied power. Einstein alluded to the perceived threat to Germany presented by ‘an exposed central continental position and the unhealed wound inflicted on her Western neighbor, as well as French superiority in aviation and artillery and the new British creation of a continental army of six divisions.’ Germany’s success in its war against Denmark in 1870, making possible the construction of the Kiel Canal, was at the root of its threat to the British maritime position. The potential conflict between Germany and England could not be assuaged by colonial adjustments such as the minor ones following upon the Algeciras conference in 1907: ‘The appetite for colonies is fed on what is consumed.’ Against the background of the domestic controversies in Britain over Ulster, suffrage and labour relations, he perceived ‘serious danger lest in an atmosphere as surcharged as is the present – some petty cause of friction, inflaming public opinion, should induce either government to prefer a foreign contest which it might regard as inevitable to domestic humiliation.’ The temptation to use foreign adventures as a distraction from domestic ills was very apparent to Rumbold, who thought in 1939 that the passions Hitler had roused in his own party rendered peace impossible. Sforza similarly took the view that D’Annunzio was the real architect of Mussolini’s foreign policy disasters, while Bernstorff was a critic of the auto-intoxication of the German generals and admirals. Einstein also contested the prevailing assumption that any war between the great powers would be brief. Citing the example of the Russo-Japanese war, he noted that ‘there are distinguished economists who believe that the modern system of credit is peculiarly adapted to facilitate the prolongation of war.’ While America could endure a German defeat, a British setback would have more serious implications: ‘In the Far East . . . the even temporary withdrawal of European influence would leave America face to face with a commensurately more powerful Japan’, a prophecy amply vindicated in 1939 to 1941. Further: There is no reason to suppose that Canada would long continue under the control, however nominal, of a parent state deprived of prestige and authority . . . it is questionable if any American government could long tolerate the embarrassment caused by the extended continuance of hostilities in near waters, also an anticipation of 1939 to 1941. Concluding, he observed that: ‘A disastrous defeat inflicted by an opponent unwilling to use moderation in his victory should incite on the part of America a friendly mediation which in the last extremity might have to be converted into more effective measures’. He urged creation of an American merchant marine, and recognition of the double task of preserving the status quo in the Far East and enforcing the neutrality of the Caribbean. The European balance of power is a political

10

DIPLOMACY BETWEEN THE WARS necessity which can alone sanction in the Western Hemisphere the continuation of an economic development un-handicapped by the burden of extensive armaments.

Today, he would find American economic development ‘handicapped by the burden of extensive armaments’ in the wake of the destruction of the European balance by World War II. This article did not fall on deaf ears. Theodore Roosevelt was a friend of Einstein’s family, which was active in both the textile and newspaper trades in New York and New Jersey; Roosevelt had appointed Einstein to the diplomatic service in 1903 and took an active interest in his transfer to the London embassy in 1905.28 Roosevelt expressed agreement with the article and had expressed somewhat similar views in an address to the Rhode Island Historical Society.29 In 1913, according to Einstein’s book on Roosevelt, he had discussed his articles and the ideas in them with Roosevelt.30 In 1918, Roosevelt wrote a preface for Einstein’s first two National Review articles, which were published by the Columbia University Press under the title A Prophecy of War;31 in his preface Roosevelt observed that they were ‘proof of a prescience in world politics very rare among American statesmen’, and Einstein was ‘a conscientious and high-minded American citizen, who is also a trained and able diplomat’.32 He further foresaw that: After the war Germany will once more begin her campaign to render America the dupe and tool of European militarism by breeding hostility to England . . . Germany, in view of the appalling results of her sordid and brutish soul training for the last forty years cannot be anything but our enemy until the whole moral and political attitude of her people is fundamentally changed.33 Roosevelt, thus, would not have favoured the appeasement policy of enlightened Britons or the fulfilment policy of enlightened Germans in the 1920s. To him, Prussianism was too deeply engrained in Germany; in this view, it perished only in ‘year zero’: 1946. Einstein’s article cast a long shadow. It was later acclaimed as ‘an extraordinary intellectual performance, and a rare instance of correct forecast in the difficult area of international politics’.34 In his American Diplomacy, 1900–1950, a book which came closer than any other to defining American foreign policy doctrine in the last half of the twentieth century, George F. Kennan observed that in that article: Einstein drew attention to the storm clouds gathering over Europe, to the depth of the Anglo- German antagonism, to the danger that war might arise from some relatively insignificant incident, and to the effect that such a war might have on the equilibrium and stability of Europe. He never doubted that we would have to intervene to save England, if the alternative were clearly her destruction. But he warned against the assumption that we would not be affected by any drastic alteration either way in the balance of forces in Europe.

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If Einstein’s point had been accepted, the implications for American policy were clear: You. . . might have seen to it that this country provided itself right then and there with something in the way of an armed establishment, so that our word would carry some weight and be listened to in the councils of the powers. When war broke out, you could have ignored the nonsensical timidities of technical neutrality and used our influence to achieve the earliest possible termination of a war that nobody could really win. Admittedly, if there were any possibility of this, it was in the first months of the war and we would have had to be armed. If this had not succeeded, then you would have had to carry on through the war, exercising what moderating influence you could, avoiding friction with the belligerents on minor matters, holding your power in reserve for the things that really counted. And if you finally had to intervene to save the British from final defeat (which I am quite prepared to accept as a valid ground for intervention), then you could have gone in frankly for the avowed purpose both of doing this and of ending the war as rapidly as possible; you could have refrained from moralistic slogans, refrained from picturing your effort as a crusade, kept open your lines of communication to the enemy, declined to break up his empires and overthrow his political system, avoided commitments to the extremist war aims of your allies, retained your freedom of action, exploited your bargaining power flexibly with a view to bringing its full weight to bear at the crucial moments in order to achieve the termination of hostilities with a minimum prejudice to the future stability of the Continent . . . I fail to see how it could have produced a much worse [future]. As for the notion that public opinion would not support realism, Kennan rejoined: ‘A nation which excuses its own failures by the sacred untouchableness of its own habits can excuse itself into complete disaster . . . the margin in which it is given to us to commit blunders has been dramatically narrowed in the last fifty years.’35 It has since been narrowed further by America’s increased ethnic heterogeneity. Kennan was appreciative enough of Einstein to contribute a preface to Einstein’s memoirs in which he observed: ‘One could search long in the American political literature of the period for anything equal to these documents in maturity of judgment, mastery of material, analytical power, and brilliance of insight’, and credited Einstein with ‘scepticism, realism, and modesty’.36 The articles were called to Kennan’s attention at a conference at Princeton in 1951,37 and were also discussed in a work by Professor Richard Van Alstyne published in 1944.38 Kennan wrote to Francis Biddle in 1952: I was particularly interested in your reference to Mr. Einstein, for I had not known where to get hold of him and had no communication with him. I found his article extremely impressive, and only wish I might have been able to quote more of it.39

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2. Theodore Roosevelt to Mrs David Einstein, 17 February 1903 (University of Wyoming)

In November 1914, Einstein published a second article on ‘The War and American Policy’.40 He deplored the effect of the European alliance system: ‘With alliances as with armaments, the example breeds emulation.’ Treaties precluded individual negotiations. The brittleness of the alliance system was a theme of Rumbold in his book on the outbreak of war in 1914; Bernstorff likewise stressed the degree to which Germany had been dragged in the train of irresponsible Austrian policy. The suppleness in the policies of Salisbury and Bismarck had been rejected. Alliances frequently breed intransigence in the policies of the weaker partner, a lesson which has pertinence in places like Taiwan and Israel. In Germany: People were told they were being attacked; partial truths, denatured from their real significance, were announced to them. If the suppleness of the Bismarck

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tradition had been cast aside, at least its gross misrepresentation of facts had been preserved . . . The war was made to assume the appearance of a great racial conflict. Present prospects point to the war being fought out to the bitterest end. The great liberal wave which had swept over Europe seventy years ago receded when Bismarck introduced the era of force. Einstein, unlike TR, was over-optimistic about the probable consequences of a German defeat: 41 Should she be defeated, it is inconceivable that the anomalous condition under which she has retained a ‘Samurai’ class will not terminate. The new industrial Germany would refuse to accept any longer the inferiority to which they have been relegated by a reactionary Prussian Junkerdom. Deploring Continental militarism, he observed that: ‘In spite of every euphemistic explanation, the years passed with the colours are taxes on their youth.’ If the United States was to avoid such consequences for itself, including ‘the universal service idea which will be introduced in this impending curse of militarism’, it needed to abandon ‘a frequently incompetent diplomacy, recruited and directed rather with a view to political benefits than to larger national objectives. . . We must extend the Monroe Doctrine to England. Such conception may astonish by its novelty.’ Further, ‘in our banking resources we possess a reserve of strength and a diplomatic leverage of great magnitude.’ There was also need for military preparation: ‘A quarter of a million raw volunteers seem little but as an earnest of the future they would be not without significance.’ He invited Roosevelt to contribute a preface for this article, which Roosevelt was not ready to do at that time.42 Three months later, he published a third article , addressing himself to the causes of war.43 A failure to distinguish ‘between an existing and an impending menace’ had misled Germany, driven to war by ‘fear of the future and confidence in the present’, an accurate summary of the impulse to pre-emptive wars and ‘wars of choice’, frequently resting on a sense of inferiority on the part of their authors. Institutional structures could not provide peace: ‘Wherever the sincere desire for peace exists, it may be trusted to find its own channel of expression.’ International institutions with powers of interference were not the answer: ‘Few things are so likely to cause friction between nations as enquiry into matters of purely domestic concern’, a consideration militating against international legal tribunals and criminal courts. Further: ‘Nations conscious and proud of their traditions cannot with impunity be humiliated’, a warning which should have militated against the ‘war guilt’ clause in the Treaty of Versailles. There was need to mitigate the lust of conquest, the haunting fear of aggression, and the philosophical baggage of militarism . . . one may still hope in the gradual elevation of public opinion and the creation of a state of mind which will render more difficult the conditions necessary to the explosion of war.

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This article evoked a response from Roosevelt embracing Einstein’s plea for preparedness: ‘As things are at present it is criminal for a nation to blind itself to actual facts and to fail to prepare to defend itself with its own strength.’44 Upon the outbreak of war, Einstein adhered to his view that America’s interests lay with Britain. At the end of 1914 he wrote a letter to the London Times urging a conciliatory policy by Britain with respect to war contraband seized from American vessels. ‘American opinion is sharp and swift, but not easy to move once formed. It is now about to make up its mind in a lasting manner of the effect on the United States of British sea supremacy.’45 In August 1917, a contributor to war fever, he wrote a letter to the London Times46 giving credence to reports, which Einstein had at second hand from two diplomats, that Kaiser Wilhelm had decided on war at a council held in early July 1914. Later, in his memoirs,47 Einstein conceded that no council had taken place at that time, a revised opinion shared by Sir Horace Rumbold.48 Wartime Turkey and an Armenian Mandate From 1906 to 1909, Einstein served as Second Secretary at Constantinople. He thereafter served first in Peking and then for six months in San José, before being assigned as Special Agent to Constantinople following the outbreak of war in 1914, serving there until September 1915, when he was sent to Sofia to discharge similar functions, most of them involving the protection of allied prisoners of war. He was thus in Constantinople during the period of the Armenian massacre, which he viewed as the product not of an outburst of passion but of a wilful act of policy ‘planned long before but which until then had not been practicable’.49 The real explanation . . . lay in the conviction that an Armenian minority, culturally more advanced than the Turks and enjoying certain international connections, particularly with Russia, could not exist without encroaching on the rigid framework of a purely Turkish racial state, which the Committee of Union and Progress was then aiming to build. The American embassy protested: ‘Mr. Morgenthau repeatedly made representations on the subject to Talaat Pasha, who was himself their principal organizer, and the latter would listen and smile as if he enjoyed the joke when the Ambassador accused him of this crime.’ The Austrians, though disgusted, did nothing. The German Embassy merely prepared a hypocritical paper record of protest to have ready for its later protection. The explanation for this callousness was simple. In the life and death struggle in which the Germans were engaged, many of them felt that nothing counted except victory and that they could not afford the risk of appearing to be censorious of any ally. Yet I have always thought that Berlin deserved the severest blame for taking on this attitude, for they alone might have prevented these massacres. Nor do I think that

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Washington can be entirely absolved from criticism. . . In a few individual instances, the American Ambassador was able to render an assistance which could not have been given in the event of a rupture . . . Yet I should personally have preferred to see our intercourse broken, and to have published the reason to the world, instead of carrying on friendly relations with a government of murderers, as soon as it became plain that we could do nothing to prevent their crime . . . they foresaw that a world divided by war had no time or inclination to concern itself with their crimes, and rightly believed that after the peace nothing would be done.50 He regarded the Gallipoli campaign as a mistake in its conception: ‘The Turks were the only Central Power who, left to themselves, could not have been dangerous.’ A greater Western effort at Salonika might have driven Bulgaria out of the war and left Serbia in it.51 Rumbold and Sforza likewise saw no threat to the Western powers in a stronger Turkey In 1917, Einstein published a paper on the Armenian massacres in the Contemporary Review. Writing of the German Ambassador, Wagenheim, he observed: The success of the Ambassador’s efforts was great enough to cause his admirers to discern in him the next Chancellor. But the price . . . included the blood of some six hundred thousand murdered Armenians. In all this war of horrors, it must remain the crowning horror. Nothing has equalled the silently planned destruction of a race.52 As with the Holocaust, the ‘fog of war’ was a necessary cloak for the worst atrocities. He also published a book on his most recent Turkish experience: It appears an obligation to cast what light one can on German action in Turkey and the revolting crime of the Armenian massacres. If this journal can help in any small degree to fix attention on the sufferings of the Armenian community and the reparation due, it will not have been written in vain.53 In November 1918, he addressed himself to ‘The Turkish Problem’ in an article in the British Westminster Gazette.54 He urged that: ‘So long as Turks are left to rule over non-Moslems no conceivable guarantee can be satisfactory.’ There should be separate Arab and Zionist states, as promised by the British. ‘A free Armenia under Western protection is a debt of honour owed by the Allies.’ Constantinople should not be separated from the rest of Turkey, which should be placed under Western supervision through revival and expansion of the powers of the earlier Council on Ottoman Debt. Ismet and the Turks would have nothing to do with such a design, and there was a slow squeezing out of the non-Turkish minorities. The nationalism of Atatürk and Ismet was unusual in not resting on the excitation of hatred against the states to which the minorities were sent; both fostered and foresaw a rapprochement and indeed alliance with Greece.

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In 1919 and 1920, Einstein wrote two articles in the American Nation magazine opposing proposals for American mandates over Constantinople and Armenia. As to Constantinople, it was unclear whether we would be protecting the Turks, the Greeks, the Moslems or the Christians. The same reasons will prevent us from withdrawing in 50 or 100 years as now induce us to accept the mandate . . . We shall in self-defense have to become the leading military power in the Near East . . . hostages of any power able to cut our lines of communication across the Mediterranean. We would be required to ‘devise religious policies . . . alien to our experience’. Constantinople was not a mere seaport, but effectively would include ‘a vast colonial empire embracing Asia Minor’. This involvement ‘must surely lead to the development of a military imperialism . . . divert[ing] American national enterprise into the bypaths of distant adventure’. As for Armenia, the Wilson administration’s zeal for a mandate came too late: it had not broken diplomatic relations with Turkey or declared war on it when this might have done some good. While the Armenians should not be returned to Turkish rule, any new state would have conflicts with the Kurds. Here also American troops would be at the mercy of naval powers. Conflict with Russia was likely, as well as ‘the diversion of economic resources which could better be employed in the Western Hemisphere [not in] a new and greater Philippines in a land so inaccessible to ourselves and so accessible to our enemies’. Political responsibility should therefore be avoided, though ‘we can supply them with economic and educational assistance, we can help to finance their loans, we can allow a legion of American volunteers to be recruited for service in Armenia.’55 In late 1919, he reiterated in the New York Times the proposition that: The essence of the democratic spirit is little favorable to the assertion of one man over another necessary to make the successful administrator of an alien race. We have no wide colonial experience. We fortunately possess no particular traditions of class domination. This fact is still not faced by exponents of a ‘forward-leaning’ American policy. He also referred to the spasmodic nature of our politics, warning against ‘a larger San Domingo, where some later Bryan may seek to appoint his deserving henchmen’.56 These warnings were influential and successful. An American Military Commission rendering its report in October purported not to make a recommendation, but set out the arguments against a mandate in eloquent terms: ‘Burdens that might be assumed on the appeal of such sentiment would have to be carried for not less than a generation under circumstances so trying that we might easily forfeit the faith of the world.’ The Commission referred also to other foreign and domestic obligations, the potential involvement of Russia, which shortly became an actuality, continuing until our own time, and the vulnerability to other naval powers. Costs were

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estimated at $275 million for the first year and $756 million over five years.57 After President Wilson proposed that America accept a mandate over Armenia in May 1920, Secretary of War Newton Baker cautioned that this would require an initial complement of 27,000 troops, and that a Bolshevik force of 55,000 to 60,000 troops had recently entered Northern Armenia.58 A programme of food relief led by Herbert Hoover concluded in July 1920; in April Hoover had opposed American acceptance of the mandate, which was rejected by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on May 27 and by vote of the full Senate by 52–23 on June 1.59 In the 1920 Republican campaign textbook, Einstein had declared: ‘The most certain way to keep a daily casualty list in our newspapers would be to accept an American mandate for Armenia.’60 He was less successful in his extraordinarily prescient proposal for what would have amounted to a Marshall Plan in aid of post-World War I Europe. Some little comment is needed when the franc is worth 10 cents and the lira 8, when the mark stands at one-seventh its former value and the Austrian crown at less than one-twentieth. If we are shortsighted enough to allow such conditions to continue, our trade must soon suffer from a rate of exchange which has already reconciled commercially the enemies of yesterday . . . if some of the weaker states go under and in sheer despair turn Bolshevist, far greater effort will eventually be necessary to set them on their feet again. Credits and raw materials are the obvious remedy – some form of government assistance will probably be necessary. . . One cannot expect a reconciliation at Washington. But one can expect the President to appoint a nonpartisan commission to consider the best ways and means of extending aid to Europe . . . Let it meet quickly and make its recommendations quickly. There is no time to lose.61 A Mirror in the Past In 1921, he published Tudor Ideals, written during the period of enforced idleness following the completion of his mission in Sofia. He had been encouraged in this course by Justice Holmes: If nothing more immediate turns up, tasks that seem remote and unreal are ultimate contributions and sometimes better than more immediate ones . . . So unless some other chance offers I say make yourself tackle the XVIth century and go at your old studies.62 The book discloses much about its author’s view of contemporary problems and the roots of his view that America and Britain were not dissimilar societies with common interests: The great war has marked the end of an epoch . . . the decay of an old world structure crumbling on its foundations and dragging down in its ruins many

18

DIPLOMACY BETWEEN THE WARS of the adornments and amenities of life . . . our era presents a curious resemblance to the [Tudor] age. Its setting is different; its direction is opposite, but in many respects it is not unlike.

The Tudor Age marked the birth of the individual as a personality and not merely as the tool of an organization, religious or civil . . . The discovery of the world offered a goal to adventurers of the body; the discovery of antiquity to adventurers of the mind.63 In that era, ‘fresh wealth and fresh misery long kept down the finer assertions of the spirit.’ The power of the monarchy waxed: In an unsettled and rapidly shifting age an accepted institution which represents force, law and order always offers a rallying point . . . Other standards which might have served as correctives have been crushed . . . veneration for the crown alone survived . . . all flattered the King.64 The lives of states as of individuals is oftener determined by the sudden emotional reactions to danger than by the continuous response to normal needs. In such an era, ‘An established position is rarely conducive to favoring the initial energy necessary to profit from novel conditions . . . Men of humble origins brought up in a more rigid discipline succeeded better in later life.’65 Such an era was not conducive to official honesty.66 All were equal in their subservience to the crown. ‘The seeds of England’s greatness sprang from a soil infested with rank weeds.’67 The frontiers across the water meant that ‘a new world without ownership was open to whoever dared. . . the margin of failure was [not] reduced to the conventional and orderly proportions of more stable times’; these opportunities fostered ‘arrogance in prosperity, fortitude in disaster’.68 With the use of the printing press, the isolation of communities came to an end. The idea of an aristocracy remained unchanged, but its political power became absorbed by the throne. . . [England] preserved the form of class distinction without narrowness and allowed the free passage from one level to the other of whoever showed the necessary qualifications. . .the vigor again given to the aristocracy was due to this infusion in what was henceforth to become a class and not a caste69 . . . the prestige of the land survived from former times to attract the rich from the cities.70 [T]he ‘countryside stole a march on the city [due to] the lack of important industry until a comparatively late period. . .[this] sacrificed existence of the [city] in much that concerns the more durable pleasures of life.’71 All this generated ‘a practical

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3. Lewis Einstein (University of Wyoming)

outlook of life which disregards theory, and a peculiar talent for compromise that is its result’. ‘Pure philosophy was foreign to the British nature – [it is] the product of a nation in repose.’72

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DIPLOMACY BETWEEN THE WARS As for education, in this society: It is virtue and not the descent of birth but of conditions that makes gentlemen . . . the nobility were to act as the nation’s leaders and by their example make their rule welcome. . . a citadel of prestige, not of power . . . [They] hastened the preparation of youth and made life begin earlier. . . preparation bore in mind high station in life and nearly always service to the state as an ultimate goal73 . . . the reflective mind harked back to antiquity because only there could it find the satisfaction of its desire for reason, order, and clarity . . . fitting men for the professions and not for the pursuit of arts and sciences . . . the builders’ art alone survived as a practical necessity.74

For those left out of the nobility, The career of arms attracted adventurers of every kind . . . Shakespeare pointed to America as the land of promise and located in the Bermudas the hope of the New World, the land where there were neither rich nor poor, nor rulers nor ruled.75 The destruction of the monasteries fostered a ‘desire to grapple with the problem of relief nationally instead of locally’. The example of Henry VIII put an end to arranged marriages founded only on material interest.76 Maritime enterprise could only develop when assisted by centralized resources such as the feudal structure of society never possessed. . . The greatness of England was due more than is commonly suspected to the rough balance preserved between the revived class conservatism nursing tradition at home and daring individualism finding its opportunity overseas . . . dis-associating herself from the tension of Continental politics and venturing into distant enterprise where all the nation could find its share.77 He quoted Captain John Smith: What so truly suits with honour and honesty as the discovery of things, creating and peopling countries, informing the ignorant, reforming things unjust, and to gain our mother country [a way] to find employment for those that are idle because they know not what to do.78 He was no enthusiast, and displayed a tragic approach to politics: ‘Against no life doth the force of vice oppose herself and make so strong a preparation as against the life of a statesman. She assaults with the weapons of power, self-love, ambition, corruption, revenge, and fear.’79 A review in The Times Literary Supplement deplored incomplete references but lauded Einstein as ‘a scholar-diplomat in many respects himself after the Tudor

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humanist type’. Holmes observed: ‘It is a hard business to deal with impalpables as he does.’80 Wilbur Cross in the Yale Review alluded to its 40-odd brief sketches of ideals as ‘novel in conception . . . somewhat in the style of the little essays in fashion toward the close of the Renaissance’. He found the sketches uneven, but particularly praised ‘the account of the rise of public opinion in the time of Henry the Eighth’.81 Holmes observed to Laski: ‘He is not documented as you are. His faults of style are obvious – he repeats phrases and ideas.’82 Laski found him ‘stronger on the cultural than the political aspect . . . divorces the political side from the religious too much [doesn’t] emphasize enough the growing importance of puritanism.’83 The Harding Campaign and Czechoslovakia In 1920, Einstein played an active role in the Harding campaign, writing some of the foreign-policy portions of the Republican campaign book charging that the Wilson administration ‘by an insistent meddlesomeness alienat[ed] from America the gratitude of Europe’, and condemning also its ‘destruction of the career service and use of executive agents’ in foreign policy.84 Wilson’s view of the League as a magic panacea and the atmosphere of political hysteria fostered first by the Creel Committee and then by the Palmer raids made little appeal to Einstein. He wrote Holmes that: It is a matter of intense satisfaction for me to get back into any kind of ‘functioning’ concerned with my own land and to feel other ties here than those of sentiment. After these years of homeless depression abroad I have felt that pure beauty and even the utmost devotion a man can have are insufficient substitutes for natural roots.85 He was appointed Minister to Czechoslovakia under Charles Evans Hughes, whom he unequivocally admired, praising intellectual vitality . . . so practical that it bordered on opportunism and so authoritative that it left his listeners without an argument. . . These were the days when Secretary Hughes was not unsuccessfully striving to rescue a shipwrecked continent with a diplomacy that turned politics into economics and tried to give Europe the respite of a few years’ prosperity. The Dawes Plan was largely Hughes’s achievement, and I felt proud to serve under a chief who never hesitated to provide a clear direction and would always breathe his commanding personality into the conduct of foreign policy.86 Hughes, of course, was also the dominant spirit in the Washington disarmament conference, though several of its agreements disadvantaged Britain and the United States when resistance to Japanese expansion in China generated new conflicts. Much of Einstein’s work in Czechoslovakia was mundane, involving the negotiation of

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extradition and trade agreements and the like, 87 giving credence to a later commentator’s observation that: His was not one of the names attached to pact or parley.88 He was nonetheless appreciated by Hughes: He said that you were not only the most accomplished but one of the most efficient and useful as well as popular of our foreign representatives and lamented the loss to the service . . . He contrasted your reports with the run of those received.89 Hughes’ deputy, Joseph Grew, similarly observed ‘Lewis Einstein, Minister in Czechoslovakia, could say in two pages what others said in fifteen, leaving the reader quite groggy.’90 Hughes’ formal correspondence with Einstein is of limited interest, save for a letter in which Hughes warned against incautious references to the Hague Tribunal in an arbitration treaty: ‘We have steadily refused in this country to permit the Supreme Court to become a political agency and I feel we must take a similar attitude with respect to the Permanent Court of International Justice.’91 In this period, Harold Laski nonetheless felt that scholarship was Einstein’s true vocation: ‘I was charmed by the interest he retained in what ought to have been his life’s work.’ Holmes agreed.92 Later, Laski referred to Allen’s Political Thought in the Sixteenth Century as ‘the book I like to think Lewis Einstein would have written if he had not given up to the State Department what was meant for scholarship’.93 In 1930, he was unceremoniously replaced by a former colleague of President Hoover in the wartime Food Administration. By then, he had ‘virtually made up my mind to retire unless I obtained a more important post’; Holmes viewed his departure as his own decision.94 In 1927, he had sought the Turkish appointment and declined the Athens embassy, considering that it was not a promotion; in 1929 he was considered for Buenos Aires or Santiago but was not appointed.95 In 1929, he addressed a memorandum to Undersecretary of State Cotton noting that, in part because many American ambassadors were political appointees, little was asked of American diplomats: [T]he agent in the field has not, to my knowledge, been expected to realize that the importance of his dispatches is less with regard to the domestic affairs of the country to which he is accredited, especially when that state is not a Great Power, than of its relation to the balances, forces and brakes, which make up the European system.96 He did not feel kindly toward Hoover: His zeal in advocating the preservation of natural resources did not extend to the human ones that were at his disposal. . . [he] utiliz[ed] diplomatic posts as

4. Tapestry in the American Embassy, Prague (now in the Reception Rooms, U.S. Department of State) (University of Wyoming)

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DIPLOMACY BETWEEN THE WARS a hidden subsidy for administration politics. My successor at Prague [Ratshevsky] obtained his training for world affairs by running a taxi company.97

Einstein had supported Hoover in the 1928 election, contributing an article on Hoover to the Fortnightly Review which declared his own premises as to domestic policy: Equality, in his mind, as in that of most Americans is no mere mechanical pattern to be applied to everyone irrespective of their qualifications but the equality of opportunity for all to rise to the highest eminence in accordance with their merits . . . the state should apply itself to the stimulation of knowledge, foster opportunity for all, and undertake only such works as are beyond the initiative of the individual or group. Its duty is to prevent the economic domination of the few over the many, but also to interfere as little as possible with commerce.98 A similar distaste for socialism was declared by Bernstorff in proclaiming his political position in Weimar Germany; in matters domestic, Rumbold was likewise a high Tory, and radical redistribution was not part of Inönü’s programme. Einstein’s Czech experience led him to consider that: In Central Europe social consequences of the 1914–18 war had been quite as significant as the political. . . Spoliation in a revolution is usually a quick act of violence committed during the heat of disorder. With a slow and methodical people like the Czechs, something resembling it went on for years during a period of perfect tranquility as a deliberate legalized process. As in the post-Soviet Union ‘the undistributed parts [of large estates] were usually sold, on highly favorable terms, to friends of the Agrarian Party.’ The effect of expanded education was paradoxical: After they had lived together peacefully for centuries, one result of popular education was to produce a political agitation of flamboyant nationalism among Czechs and Germans, till both regarded each other as strangers and hereditary enemies . . . this over-exuberant nationalism was fostered by politicians who found its expression considerably to their advantage even when it became a nuisance. In the Succession States ‘ancient grievances have been carefully nursed for generations without there being enough memories to share in common, or enough sense of national pride shared by minorities, which in Western lands brings citizens of different origin together.’ Rumbold similarly noted that increased anti-semitism was one effect of the collapse of the more tolerant old empires. By contrast, Inönü and Sforza did not mourn their passing. Defining his own role, Einstein observed that: ‘The diplomats were really the only solvent among different castes who had never

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before mixed.’99 ‘Their learning was still too new to have acquired the easy graces and amenities of life that were more current in nations that had preserved the vestiges of an aristocratic state.’ He considered that his diplomatic accomplishments in Prague were my work leading up to the Czechoslovak debt settlement . . . my continuous successful protection of American business interests, many dispatches foretelling political events, and conferences with Dr Benes which contributed to the removal of his previous objections to the Kellogg Pact and made possible the final adoption of the latter only after the inclusion of the Little Entente.100 On departing from Prague, after issuance of a State Department press release, which he resented, crediting him only with ‘strengthening cultural relations’,101 Einstein settled in London, a decision which undoubtedly hurt his chances of a further diplomatic career: For family reason [it] seemed at that time to be a more convenient place than Washington. The American who lives outside his country is regarded with some unflattering oversimplification as being an expatriate, yet it seems to me that expatriation can be of the mind or the body or both, and the one test to be applied of whether or not it is reprehensible depends on inner feelings and on outward performance far more than on the mere physical circumstances of residence.102 When he had made a similar decision in 1920, Justice Holmes had advised him thus: I am inclined to be glad that you cannot gratify your wish to come back here. Sentimentally it is natural, but I fear that you would find that you missed the amenities of Europe more than you realize. You have lived abroad so long that you must have become shaped to expectations and demands that would not be satisfied here . . . I am on your wife’s side. Expatriation is a misfortune; but a scholar and thinker is his own home, and the opportunities for your work are better in Europe than here . . . your material is more nearly at hand where you are, and I incline to believe that you will get more out of life if you stay there.103 Laski in this period found him a little out at ends, too rich to need to find anything and too strange, without a routine, to want to pin himself down. [H]e ought to be persuaded into embarking on a big book and ought not be allowed to lose touch with America . . . [it] would do him a world of good to be asked to give half a dozen lectures at Princeton or Harvard or Chicago.104

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DIPLOMACY BETWEEN THE WARS My one fear for him is dilettantism . . . the distractions of great luxury and social eminence.105

Just after leaving for Prague, Einstein was admonished by Justice Holmes: I am worried at your idleness. You must get a pièce de résistance to work on. If it merely gives you a regular occupation, good, if it results in a magnum opus, best. Laski . . . suggested a course of lectures over here . . . That seems to me good as far as it goes, but I should like to see you committed to a longer, more laborious, and more ambitious task. And again, three weeks later: ‘ I do not reiterate my exhortations but I insist on them. You are too much of a man to be able to afford to be idle except as a vacation.’106 A Scholarly Interlude In this period between posts, Einstein also contributed a monograph on Lewis Cass to a series on American Secretaries of State.107 Though nominally about Cass, the study was really a study of President Buchanan, who was effectively his own Secretary of State. Einstein found Buchanan’s unenviable reputation ‘not altogether deserved’. Buchanan was ‘conscientious, industrious, and devoted to the public interest’, not ‘a weakling and a vacillating tool in the hands of Southern conspirators. His faults lay rather in the opposite direction.’ He refrained from using foreign affairs to distract from domestic controversies in deference to ‘his own high sense of duty’. This distaste for superfluous foreign adventures was shared by Rumbold in Turkey, Sforza in Turkey and Yugoslavia, Bernstorff in the Caucasus, and Inönü in the Balkans and Mosul. ‘Buchanan anticipated the danger of foreign intervention in Mexico before anyone else had foreseen it.’ His solicitude for the equal rights of the nations of the world in regard to interoceanic routes was also a tribute to the liberalism of the age . . . inter-oceanic routes . . . in a period when a transcontinental railroad was still a very distant hope, seemed of greater importance than they afterwards became. By vesting in the United States territorial and commercial rights which we were bound to defend, Buchanan hoped to have found a way to prevent any European government from attempting to acquire control over Mexico. He obtained ‘the practical withdrawal of Great Britain from Central America’ except in Belize. His attitude at Fort Sumter was prompted by his antecedents, his personal ideas, and his environment, but also by the entirely inadequate military means at his disposal . . . [He] felt it impossible to risk a collision of arms in the harbor of Charleston and thereby

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defeat the hopes he almost alone then cherished for a final and peaceful triumph of the Constitution and the Union. Einstein’s Assessment of TR Einstein’s first, adequately nationalistic response to Holmes’ exhortations was a slender book on Theodore Roosevelt, Roosevelt: His Mind in Action, published in September 1930. Einstein had warm feelings about Roosevelt: ‘He expected to be reelected President [in 1920] and would have been but for his untimely death. He had sent me word that he wanted me with him.’108 Much of what is said of Roosevelt reflects his own views: He felt among British friends a more congenial atmosphere and environment than he had ever experienced among the people of his own standing in New York . . . his personality even when respected was regarded by his New York friends as wayward and eccentric. In England, he found greater consideration for individuality. . . The country has been slow to recognize the viciousness of doling out offices high or low as rewards for political service in money or kind. He quoted Roosevelt as declaring I never can like and never will like to be intimate with that enormous proportion of sentient beings who are respectable but dull . . . I will work with them or for them, but for pleasure and instruction I go elsewhere. The great prizes in America do not go to men living away from their roots . . . soil in American politics means life amid surroundings with which one has been identified for years, often to incur only jealousy, defeat, and disillusion. . . In the National Government . . . the smallest place was difficult to obtain so long as he lacked the support of the New York organization . . . it has galled the pride of many a man in American political life to beg for office. I believe in a strong executive . . . and that it is not well that the strong executive should be a perpetual executive. . . The press in the United States occupies something of the position of an irresponsible parliament which offers an intermediary between the Administration and the public. Power in American political life is still too personal, and there hardly exists, as in the countries of Western Europe, a strong, half-anonymous bureaucracy, seated amid deep-grown respect, with venerable traditions behind it, which is able to restrain executive appointments. Roosevelt had begun preaching unhyphenated Americanism . . . Roosevelt pointed out that Americanism rests neither on ancestry nor creed, but lies in the meaning of the spirit. . . His words will live after many of the half-baked

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DIPLOMACY BETWEEN THE WARS assumptions, made in the name of Science, to fit the fashions of the day, shall have been forgotten.

This hostility to eugenics and racialism was shared by Bernstorff, as shown by his eloquent denunciation of German anti-semitism on the assassination of Rathenau; by Rumbold, who vehemently protested the Nazi persecutions; and by Sforza. Even Inönü, whose government was not over-kind to its minorities, viewed the feeling against them as having been rooted in religion, and thought that the secularisation of the state would help to dissolve old animosities. The different course followed in contemporary Israel can scarcely be said to have proved him to be wrong. Finally, and more sombrely, Einstein observed: ‘The harsh reactions of power in American democracy tend so completely to exclude those who do not partake of its favors.’109 Although Einstein credited Roosevelt with bringing America into the world, and did not criticise his role in the acquisition of the Philippines and Panama, he also lauded Roosevelt’s restraint in foreign policy: He wrote to Spring-Rice about the situation in the Far East that it would be well-nigh impossible even if it were not undesirable for the United States to engage with another country ‘to carry out any policy save one which had become part of the inherited tradition of the country like the Monroe Doctrine’. It would be necessary to reckon with defeat in Congress.110 This recognition of the dependence of foreign policy on public opinion was shared by Rumbold in his cautions against a war with Turkey in 1922. Einstein also praised Roosevelt for leaving unpublicised his efforts before the Algeciras Conference to defuse the Moroccan crisis precipitated by the incautious actions of Germany, and suggested that had TR been president, the outbreak of World War I would at least have been delayed by an American call for a conference.111 Holmes wrote of the book: ‘Your estimate and appreciation seem to me wisely and delicately formed. Perhaps you make rather a greater and more interesting figure of Roosevelt than he seems to me, but not more so than I can understand another thinking him.’112 Laski felt that: ‘TR was out of touch with America after 1912 and that his war activities in the Wilson era were simply mischievous.’113 An unsigned review in The Times Literary Supplement was less kind. It agreed with Einstein that Roosevelt ‘was totally unlike the rest of his countrymen either in their education, their occupation or their ideas’ and also agreed that ‘in 1918 Roosevelt recognized that contemporary America was no longer the America he had known’, but found it ‘difficult to see any adequate justification for [the book]’.114 The Early Thirties In January 1931, Einstein wrote to President Nicholas Murray Butler of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace urging that the endowment sponsor an inter-

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national conference under private American auspices to consider international debt relief, the limitation of tariffs and dumping, and agricultural reforms, including greater industrial use of agricultural products; he renewed the last suggestion in a letter to Assistant Secretary of State Raymond Moley, who was soon to leave the new Roosevelt administration, in May 1933, Neither of these suggestions produced a favourable result.115 In May 1933, Einstein had a meeting with Secretary of State Cordell Hull, a partisan of free trade whose views corresponded to those of Einstein; Hull encouraged Einstein to send him periodic memoranda about foreign affairs. In the first of these, in July 1933, Einstein suggested that he might be designated to survey the smaller countries of Central Europe as a representative attached to the Disarmament Commission, and that Attorney General Cummings, an Einstein friend, was making this suggestion to the President. Nothing came of this suggestion. A sombre memorandum a few days later was more fertile. In it, Einstein foresaw a still greater curtailment of international trade due to even more economic nationalism as well as to restrictions in production, followed perhaps later by vast destruction of wealth in Europe caused by possible civil or foreign wars. . . It is manifestly questionable if any economic measures of an international character which American opinion might be willing to consider would be sufficient to stem the nationalistic torrent which rushes today through every land, or that we can do more, as you have suggested, than to announce our willingness under certain conditions to negotiate trade agreements along reciprocal lines . . . as international trade provides the most profitable fringe for any ultimate recovery it cannot even now be neglected. The trade treaties negotiated by Hull to the accompaniment of general ridicule, together with the Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act of 1934, provided the basis of worldwide recovery after World War II. Einstein urged that the President maintain his prestige by not allowing the powers of economic dictatorship given him by the NRA legislation to be confused with political dictatorship, foreseeing that his influence might have to be thrown into the scales ‘when Germany has completed those military preparations she is now actively pursuing’.116 In 1933, he also wrote a memorandum which was implicitly critical of Stimson’s opposition to Japanese expansion in China, prophetically declaring, ‘We should not make ourselves needlessly unfriendly to Japan, recognizing that she has to have an outlet for her surplus population and that the mainland may distract her from the Philippines and Hawaii.’117 He returned to this theme in a memorandum to Hull in November 1934: ‘[Stimson’s] harvest has produced little that is helpful to the United States but it has borne much acid fruit in Japan which, to my regret, is now being served you.’ Einstein noted that he had expressed the same view in an article published in 1915.118 Beginning in 1932, at a time when Winston Churchill among others still had kind things to say about Hitler, Einstein published the first in a long series of articles warning of German designs in Central Europe. Most of these articles were published

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in fortnightly and quarterly reviews, characterised by Einstein as ‘a suitable literary cemetery where the dead are soon forgotten’.119 The first such article was written in early 1932 while Bruning was still in power in Germany. Disarmament, he cautioned, must rest on German conviction that only by peaceful means can the treaties be modified and that violence will lead to disaster . . . Mr. Hoover can promote disarmament only if he is prepared to . . . announce that if ever the necessity arises we propose to decide for ourselves who is the future aggressor and take measures accordingly. [A]ny attempt we make to cut down the regular military establishments, while taking [no] notice of irregular ones, encourages the irresponsible elements in Germany. The more successful our effort, the greater will be this danger and the more we shall unconsciously take sides and aid those who now arm in the dark. Einstein, like Rumbold, was very well informed as to Germany’s secret rearmament: In a disarmed Germany there are believed to be today more than four million men who have received a complete military instruction. French experts are convinced that except for heavy artillery – for tanks can be made out of tractors – there exists sufficient equipment to put a million men immediately in the field . . . future war was being prepared in its chemical laboratories, which were heavily subsidized by the German government. The National Socialist ‘Nazis’ are today the second and perhaps already the largest political party in Germany working in close alliance with the Steel Helmets . . . The party policy is to establish friendly relations with the police and army by personal contact and obtain the control of the Reichswehr and the Ministry of the Interior.120 The next article, in September 1932, was precipitated by a German note delivered by the Papen government claiming an equal right to armaments. The German note on armaments – in spite of its moderate tone – is an historic event of great significance . . . Whatever concessions France has made like the Rhineland evacuation and the abandonment of reparations have led only to fresh demands behind which they can hear Nazi shrieks and the alarming declarations of Gen. Von Schleicher. In the present state of Europe can a greater incentive to war be imagined than a disarmed France?121 He saw any renewed competition in armaments as an inducement to the sort of preventive war considered by Bismarck in 1875 against a resurgent France and by Joffre in 1912 against a growing Germany. Just such a project was proposed by Marshal Pilsudski to the French in 1933 and again in 1935.

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5. Mrs Lewis Einstein (University of Wyoming)

In July 1933, he urged the three great democracies to cooperate at the forthcoming World Economic Conference, a project torpedoed by the Roosevelt administration, which did not wanted to be inhibited by economic orthodoxy in pursuing a reflationist economic policy.

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DIPLOMACY BETWEEN THE WARS The further growth of economic nationalism must also work to the advantage of systems of government based on a radical departure from the democratic principles associated with these three nations – the material prosperity of the three great western democracies has in the past been intimately bound up with the prevalence of liberal ideals.122

The United States did not fully turn to this view until the Ford administration. In November 1933, he wrote James McDonald, the League Commissioner for Refugees, to urge that aid to German refugees not be organised on sectarian lines, since this would ‘subscribe by implication to the Nazi contention that the Jews are a separate nationality’.123 In December 1933, in another letter to The Times, an exercise characterised by Einstein as ‘a good old English custom’,124 he set forth his clearest warning against the consequences of appeasement of Hitler’s Germany, and urged in terms a containment policy like that later successfully applied to the Soviet Union: criticising a letter of Lord Rennell urging concessions to Germany, he declared: ‘No statesman yet has dared to tread this path or start on a trail which leads not only through Polish territory on the Vistula but across British territory in Africa.’ Rumbold similarly foresaw that German demands on Poland would lead to war. Lord Rennell alludes to a series of issues which in themselves hardly constitute a menace of war. If by these he means the Eastern frontiers, his optimism is greater than my own. Today for the first time a party is in power whose avowed and unalterable goal is the unification of the German race. Such a programme, even piecemeal, cannot be attained without war. If Germany is able to separate England from France or Warsaw from Paris, sooner or later she can expect to deal singly with her neighbors. Should she fail in this, as in existing circumstances, the risk [of war] would be too great for her, peace can probably be maintained and thereby allow the sobering force of economics perhaps to wear down the more alarming manifestations of a turbulent nationalism.125 Even on leaving his post, Rumbold entertained a slight hope that the Hitler regime might become more moderate if suitably contained, the thought underlying American policy toward the Soviet Union after World War II. In December 1933, Einstein published an article on ‘The Cult of Force’ in the North American Review: Dictatorship . . . has to intimidate and terrify its enemies so that these will be too frightened to resist while the indifferent will join its ranks and even simulate its enthusiasm for self-protection. . . A generous optimism blinds Liberals in democratic states to the other half of mankind which runs back toward those primeval gods whose cult is force and whose worship calls for blood. . . the necessity to find jobs for followers also imposes heavy uneconomic burdens on the rest of the population. . . dictatorship can never admit failure

6. American Embassy, Prague (University of Wyoming)

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DIPLOMACY BETWEEN THE WARS of any kind and until it crumbles its facade continues to the very last to give the impression of great strength.

Rumbold similarly stressed the dependence of the Nazi regime on the production of further triumphs. Einstein observed: In the competition of rival political systems, the comparative prosperity of nations is the dominant factor which in the end must win support for one method or the other and those who still keep faith in liberal ideas will have to pin their hope in this belief. This was not a prophecy of the downfall of Naziism, but fits well that of Communism.126 Divided Loyalties In late 1933, Einstein published Divided Loyalties, one of his major works and one in part inspired by his own Anglophilia. He summarised its theme: The virtual expulsion of nearly 100,000 loyalists who left the United States in an ultimate emigration comparable to that of the Huguenots in France was a crime which since has been expiated in other ways although little more than a small fraction of the American people has ever been aware either of the enormity of the offense, the stupidity of the act, or of its real consequences upon their own national future. . . the rapid decay in taste and cultivation that marked American literature during the 19th century [due to] the disappearance of a conservative and educated class who might have helped to oppose their higher state of refinement to the crude influence of the frontier. Without this, the North American continent might today have been one country. [Independence] had already been secured before the persecution was at its worst. Their ill treatment was merely due to an unrestrained mob hysteria, common enough in all countries in times of war and of civil strife, which displayed its savage vindictiveness against the shattered survivors of the Tory party, blamed for having helped the English prolong the struggle and the vivid remembrance of whose former power mistakenly still seemed a threat to the new nation. Hatred against the loyalists doubtless also was deliberately fostered by those who, assuming the shield of patriotism, benefitted by plunder taken from their fellow citizens.127 In some measure, this described the spirit leading to the population exchanges provided for at Lausanne; in his speech presenting them to the Turkish Grand National Assembly, Inönü apologetically observed that the ethnic passions roused by recent history rendered them necessary. H.I. Brock, reviewing the book for the New York Times, noted the grace of its portraits of expatriate artists, observed: ‘Historical research is only an examination

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task for our author, and his real interest is in art, or, what is not the precisely the same thing, in writing about art.’128 Laski by way of contrast, ‘found the first part enchanting, after that I thought it somewhat tailed off.’129 An anonymous reviewer in The Times Literary Supplement found the work ‘of very great interest’.130 Henry Steele Commager in the New Republic found it to be a work of substance and merit, built largely on documentary sources, accurate, impartial, and intelligent. It presents no full length portraits, no well-developed interpretation, no mass of new material, but it reveals by indirection rather than by argument an intellectual atmosphere in which there were tolerance, magnanimity, humor, elegance, and immoral charm, and a cultivated respect for individuality.131 Writing of the book to Holmes, Einstein said: I thought I might discover some general law on the subject of patriotism and loyalty, but I think your adage that no generalization is worth a damn the right one . . . of unity of thought I find none and everyone had his own experience.132 It has given me an interest in default of anything more active to do, and in default of the latter I suppose I had better settle down to historical writing for the rest of my days, though what I do hardly seems important when one lives on a volcano . . . One finds ideas for every taste, but somehow or other the surface of resistance against the backing of force appears to me to have considerably weakened. There are no longer the same structural bulkheads and the education of some huge aggregate to a single idea seems to me peculiarly dangerous.133 Hitler in Power In December 1933, he wrote to the London Times to comment on the attempted murder of Dollfuss and the murders of Lessing and a Romanian Prime Minister by Nazi agents. ‘[O]live branches proffered in Paris and Warsaw are only the mask behind which a subsidized agitation plans to secure for Germany the control over those smaller states which lie between her Eastern border and the Black Sea.’134 In January 1934, in an article in The Spectator, he discussed the threats to Austria and Czechoslovakia: They are unmistakably forging an ideal military state. A totalitarian state like the Nazi cannot admit two separate Teutonic centres. . . [Hitler’s] enemies in Germany have always thrown his Austrian citizenship in his face. . . [his] appeal to hatred as a political instrument is far more Austrian than German. Nazi propaganda has vastly improved on its Bolshevik model . . . how long can a small and greatly divided country suffering from terrible poverty be expected to hold out against a determined and unscrupulous neighbour able to bore from

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DIPLOMACY BETWEEN THE WARS within? With Hitler in Vienna [Czechoslovakia] would find herself surrounded on three sides by Germans . . . Vienna led by strong German hands must mean also the eventual German control of the whole Danube basin, for today there are neither Romanoffs nor Hapsburgs to restrain within reasonable limits a power which like the Third International utilizes a subsidized propaganda to find its supporters in every state.135

In May, in a long memorandum on the Austrian situation, he told Hull that: [A] Nazi Vienna means the eventual control of the entire Danube Basin with sixty million people who inhabit six states greatly divided among themselves, separated from without and torn from within by age long dissensions, and five of which contain important German minorities.136 Sforza’s early effort while Foreign Minister in 1921 to produce solidarity among the successor states had failed. In June 1934, Einstein met with Roosevelt, Hull having arranged the meeting. Like many of Roosevelt’s interlocutors, he reported that ‘he was so charming that I could hardly do more than listen.’ Einstein expressed the wish ‘to serve as an observer without salary . . . He expressed a general inclination to utilize me without being more specific.’ He told Felix Frankfurter: The surest road to peace now lies in arming. We must trust to the economic burden to break the camel’s back, for Germany is in a vicious circle when every step toward recovery is a step toward rearming which brings nearer the eventual collapse. I only hope it will not be that of Samson in the temple of the Philistines. Winter privations might bring the German masses to their senses: [E]ven so, they may be explained away as a world conspiracy jealous of German heroism . . . I only hope we will continue to say as little as possible but keep watch and above all do nothing to facilitate the Third Reich’s recovery, for unless their internal system breaks down I see little prospect of future peace. But I thought the President a little too sanguine in expecting this too soon.137 In June 1934, he urged Hull to sponsor a Presidential announcement ‘that a refusal to accept mediation in a moment of strained relations would throw the onus of aggression on the offending state’;138 in September, Sumner Welles suggested that he test opinion by publishing the proposal himself.139 He also reported to Hull former Chancellor Bruning’s warning to Britain to arm as much as possible.140 In July 1934, following the ‘night of the long knives’, he noted ‘the influence of the [German] General Staff is conservative and [it is] unwilling to embark on any military adventure unless certain of success.’141 In September 1934 he warned Hull of the irresponsibility of Poland, particularly in its attitude toward Czechoslovakia:

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‘The Pilsudski regime almost more than other dictatorships rests on a group of adventurous men brought up before the war in a school of underground conspiracy.’142 In October, he noted that: ‘Italians like the Germans see their paramount problem in finding outlets for their overpopulation the growth of which they still encourage by government support and which may one day discover its solution in the havoc of a general destruction’,143 an accurate prophecy, the Italian birth rate now being the lowest in Europe. At the end of 1934, Einstein urged Western rearmament: With the growing influence assumed today in Germany by the conservative militarism of the General Staff, even Herr Hitler would be unlikely to take steps of a nature to cause a conflict until such time as his military advisers were once more convinced of their superiority against any probable coalition. Nations who desire peace during the next few years, apart from any question of foreign policy, might do worse than consider how far a new German conviction regarding the mathematical certainty of victory is likely to be affected by the degree of their own preparedness.144 Both Rumbold and Inönü were likewise apostles of military preparedness. In January 1935, Einstein noted that if Hitler acquired Austria, the divisions in the Central European states would in due course make him master of Europe.145 In February 1935 he told Hull: ‘I have been following with admiring sympathy your commercial negotiations as a voice of sanity in a mad world.’146 In March, he reported: The [British] Foreign Office in the persons of Vansittart, of Phipps, the present British Ambassador in Berlin and of Horace Rumbold the late Ambassador, is far more anti-Nazi. Rumbold lately described Goering and Goebbels to me as “gangsters” and I think there is no doubt that the Foreign Office regards the Hitler regime as a permanent menace to peace . . . the most certain means to keep Germany from war is to build a bloc around her in which Russia would be included.147 By April, after the failure of Sir John Simon’s proposal for an Eastern Locarno by which Germany and the Western powers would have guaranteed the Polish and Czech frontiers, Einstein was more optimistic, feeling that the British, French and Soviets were all alarmed and that the Nazi regime could not endure ‘without some substantial victory or that with all its audacity it will dare by itself to challenge a fairly united continent.’148 In May, he nonetheless emphasised that: ‘It needs an excess of optimism to believe that a powerful Germany will be satisfied to remain indefinitely in their present frontiers but they dare not yet risk expansion.’149 By June, he was concerned that Italy’s Abyssinian adventure would cause her to ‘be compelled to relax her vigilance on the Brenner’, endangering Austria, and was alarmed at the mistrust between Britain and France resulting from the Anglo-German naval treaty.150 In September, he reported to Hull Sforza’s observation: ‘He compared the Abyssinian to

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Napoleon the Third’s Mexican adventure and foretells that, even if successful, it will be disastrous for Italy.’151 By November, he noted a fatal breach between Britain and Italy, and ‘the firm intention to make the control of the Mediterranean a primary objective of British naval policy’.152 In December, he noted that the Hoare-Laval proposal derived from the perceived vulnerability of the British fleet to Italian air power.153 By February 1936, he noted the defeatism in France in regard to anticipated German demands on the Rhineland: ‘There are French diplomats who, wisely in my opinion, favour “selling” the abrogation of this clause before the moment arrives when the German will tear it up.’154 This was not one of his happier observations. The French faced a cruel dilemna, being all too aware of Germany’s secret rearmament and of the fact that her mobilisation potential was such that in the First World War it required the aid of Russia, Britain and America to subdue Germany. In February, he noted the significance of a new British re-armament programme.155 He was surprisingly sanguine about the re-occupation of the Rhineland, noting that one beneficial result was an unequivocal British guarantee to both Belgium and France,156 a guarantee that was honoured in 1940 and again in 1944, even though Britain could have made a separate peace. In May 1936, following the re-occupation of the Rhineland and before the Anschluss, he sombrely warned that: ‘The result can hardly be doubtful when one side is rich, hesitant, lethargic and weak, whereas the other, after having organized its power to a maximum for a definite purpose waits only for an opportune moment before initiating action.’157 In July 1936, he described Duff Cooper’s declaration: ‘I affirm that not only our frontiers but our very ideals are in mortal danger’ as ‘a milestone’ akin to Lincoln’s ‘House Divided’ speech.158 In October, after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, he was ‘far from persuaded that the Revolution in that country is a straightforward fight between Fascism and communism’. He lauded the American administration for giving foreign exchange relief to France: It must be galling to the dictators that the money in the world should remain so largely in the hands of the very democracies they profess to despise . . . I don’t think the possibility can be excluded, however remote it may seem, that if France should later become a military dictatorship, not impossibly subordinated to German control, we would soon be made disagreeably aware of this change in every region of the world. I should like to recall a passage from a long-forgotten article written by one of your predecessors, Richard Olney, which appeared in the Atlantic Monthly 36 years ago (March 1900, p. 298): if a career like that of Napoleon were ever again to approach or even threaten repetition not merely sentiment and sympathy but the strongest consideration of self-preservation and self-defense might drive us to take sides. In October 1936, he predicted that the British would not defend Czechoslovakia even if the French wished to do so, and noted the deterioration of the French position produced by the Belgian declaration of neutrality.159 In February 1937 he denounced those

7. Lewis Einstein and Clementine Churchill (University of Wyoming)

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DIPLOMACY BETWEEN THE WARS seeking to smear a very bourgeois Czechoslovakia with the ink of Bolshevism . . . Czechoslovakia is not only rich in itself but is a corridor which outflanks Poland and leads to the Ukraine . . . it is difficult to see what else stands in the path of a federated Nazi empire which in breadth would far exceed that of Napoleon.160

In July 1937, Einstein reported on a conversation with Dr Karl Goerdeler, who was still in the good graces of the Nazi regime: ‘He thinks if London and Paris are firm, there will be no war. The German General Staff does not want one and the German military preparations he thought were still a colossal bluff.’ In April 1938, he pointed out that a new Anglo-Italian agreement was Mussolini’s reaction to the Anschluss.161 In May, discussing Czechoslovakia, Einstein noted that the Germans would undoubtedly press for German quotas in government bureaucracies, providing a built-in fifth column.162 On May 27, he expressed the view that Czech neutralisation would be meaningless. [T]he status carries some weight for countries which, like Belgium and Switzerland, are surrounded by powerful neighbors which more or less balance each other . . . Neutralization would be a step toward absorption and surrender . . . If the Czech capital falls, it is plain that England will find no other allies in Eastern Europe . . . a Czechoslovak association has been formed this week to help by an educational campaign to bring out the vital interests of England in preserving [Czech] independence. . . The association begins with Lord Lytton as President, and among other members of the committee are Lord Cecil and the Duchess of Atholl. I was asked to join but declined on the ground that it would not be proper for an American to belong to a committee formed to influence British policy . . . I shall however attend the meetings as an observer.163 Under date of 15 May, Einstein sent Hull a copy of Paul Einzig’s Bloodless Invasion, noting that trade devices similar to those employed by the Germans in the Balkans were also being used in Latin America.164 On July 28, he observed that: ‘Any real settlement except on terms which would leave the Czechs at the mercy of the Reich is the last thing that Hitler wants.’165 In a post-mortem on the crisis on October 7, he faulted the failure of the British to mobilise their fleet and the French their army, blamed George Bonnet for French defeatism, and declared: ‘The road to the Black Sea and to Constantinople is now open to Hitler and a blockade can no longer be efficacious . . . We may soon be left as the last champions of democracy.’166 On November 4, he noted that except for the addition of Sir John Anderson there were no significant British cabinet changes; ‘Such plans as are afoot appear to concern the production of material far more than they do the training of men . . . She stands today half prepared in a defensive position facing a precarious and dangerous future.’167 On December 15, he presciently asked ‘is Mussolini able to induce Hitler to restrict or to delay his presumed Eastern plan where he would have to face a

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coalition alone, in favor of support in the Mediterranean? On the answer to this may depend the peace of Europe and perhaps our own.’168 In May 1939, he wrote to Hull: ‘It is possible that [Hitler] has the conviction of victory for a war this year. I find it harder to believe that he will have this in 1940.’169 This estimate coincided perfectly with that of Rumbold. On June 27, he stated that: ‘Great Britain ought to show resolution in a way that has not yet been made sufficiently clear for war would be an even greater tragedy if Hitler stumbled into it by any misreading of England’s real intentions.’170 On July 31 he noted that the General Staff had been told to be prepared for war by August 15, and that Hitler had declared that the September Nazi congress was to be a ‘peace congress’.171 On December 5, after the outbreak of war, he correctly predicted that: ‘If some reverse should occur in the spring, there would be an explosion which will cause the downfall of several ministers and probably result in a speeding-up of the present leisurely processes.’172 Beginning in March 1939, Einstein published over the next two years a series of articles and reviews in History, the journal of the British Historical Association. His reflections on the Munich Agreement, published in March 1939, align him with its critics. He pointed out that French failure to resist the annexation of the Rhineland had given rise to the detachment of Belgium from French defence plans (which ultimately had fatal results in 1940). Chamberlain in his view assumed the powers of a dictator, without consulting nation, parliament, or even his cabinet . . . Hitler today is the master of Europe. The cornfields of the Danube Valley and the control of the oil wells of Roumania will allow him to defy any blockade. Concluding, he noted: ‘The future of civilization rests on the cooperation of the English-speaking nations.’173 In February 1940, he enthusiastically greeted an American mission to England led by Sumner Welles: ‘This war will decide whether the slavery of whites is to be Hitler’s contribution to a barbarous world and if men and women are to become his permanent chattels.’174 Later in the year, reviewing a book of documents on Britain and the independence of Latin America, he returned to a theme he had sounded before the First World War: ‘Latin American independence owed more to Canning’s skillful diplomacy than to Monroe’s famous message. His policy was frankly one of trade advantages, but this selfish motive was also associated with political disinterestedness.’175 He also wrote two other reviews. In one, he declared: ‘Today it is President Roosevelt and Secretary Hull who are the upholders of the great tradition of Palmerston and Gladstone.’176 In a second, a review of the French revolution diaries of Gouverneur Morris, he observed that: ‘Reason is the last thing to be expected in a revolution, least of all in one which prided itself in being an Age of Reason’, admiring Morris’s ‘cold detachment while he looked out at the mob from a window high above the street’.177 In this period, he had the ear of Secretary Hull who ‘asked me to write to him. I did so regularly until the outbreak of war, and repeatedly he was kind enough to inform me that he had circulated my letters among his associates.’178

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Nonetheless, he found this activity to be sterile: ‘No cries of wolf seemed able to accomplish anything.’179 Three reviews of books on contemporary history published in 1940 sounded similar concerns: ‘We are witnessing a very rapid recession in the standard of what has commonly been called civilization.’180 Commenting on a book on pre-fascist Italy, he recalled ‘the words of Cavour that the worst [parliamentary] Chamber is preferable to the best Ante-Chamber’. Sforza expressed similar views. The Italians he charged with ‘submitting out of sheer Pacificism to the revolutionary violence of a loud shouting minority’. As for pre-fascist foreign policy: ‘A far-sighted policy would have shown itself conciliatory in the Adriatic and more insistent in securing colonial outlets’,181 favourite themes of the exiled Sforza. On the Rhineland crisis, he noted ‘the British responsibility for the French failure to act’.182 Reviewing A.J.P. Taylor’s book on the Habsburg monarchy, he noted that it ‘made for order and discipline which spread elements of civilization among uncouth peasants until they gradually emerged from illiterate obscurity to demand their rights’. He saw its downfall in a ‘divide and conquer’ policy toward ethnic groups: This policy of carefully fostered hatred was one of the principal causes which led in the end to the destruction of the Empire. And Hitler who from his earlier Austrian upbringing imbibed the corrosive acid of hatred has transplanted this to the Reich. In March 1941, he sent a letter to Secretary Hull urging the establishment of American radio stations in Britain and on Crete, to be known as ‘Freedom Stations’ and to broadcast to Germany, Italy and the Near East, an idea taken up after the war.183 He responded to a letter from Lord Davies about Anglo-American confederation with the observation that this ‘should begin rather as a common law marriage rather than by a Church ceremony’; proposals for world citizenship similarly are ‘bad for the cause of unity dividing hearts and minds at a time when the Government’s principal anxiety is for the state of public morale’.184 Sforza similarly favoured a stepby-step approach to international cooperation. The Post-war World In January 1942 Einstein, who had been given a desk at the American Embassy in London, began sending a series of short memoranda to Ambassador John Winant, a less appreciative correspondent than Hull, who had acknowledged each Einstein memorandum with a short personal note. The first of these, on January 7, dealt with post-war Poland and Czechoslovakia, and foresaw the post-war expulsions of Germans from these countries: After the example of wholesale expulsions given by Hitler, there will unquestionably be strong pressure by the Poles to evict the Germans from East

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Prussia. . . in order to gain sea front and do away with the ‘Corridor’. There will be further demands to extend Polish domination over that part of the industrial region in Silesia which they failed to obtain after 1918. Such accretions of territory will help to provide Poland with a suitable Western frontier, even if it contains the seed of future war. As for Sudeten Czechoslovakia: There may be similar deserts after this war which will have to be repopulated . . . Two consequences can be expected from the destruction of the Nazis. The first is the immediate socialization of industry, banking and transport. Indeed this will have become easier after the wholesale spoliation by the Nazis who . . . concentrated [wealth] under their complete control. The second change will be the partition, either as small holdings or more likely as collective farms, of the great landed estates in Germany and Hungary.185 Later in the month, writing of a proposed Czech-Yugoslav pact, Einstein saw even further: President Benes˘ preaches Yugoslav unity to Croats and Serbs at a time when the latter are incensed at what they regard as the disloyalty of so many Croats, who preferred German to Serb domination. It was due to the treachery of certain Croat generals that Yugoslav resistance collapsed so quickly, and many of the worst atrocities lately committed against the Serbs have been carried out by Croat ‘Oustachia’. This recollection, among people who never forget anything, may not provide the most satisfactory basis for the future Yugoslav unity.186 In January he urged ‘a considerable circumspection and elasticity in dealing with the de Gaulle movement. It is necessary to separate its wholly commendable military side from other activities, civilian and colonial.’187 Further: If German defeat will inevitably be followed by Red rule at Bucharest, Budapest, and Sofia, there is no reason why this must also happen at Warsaw, Prague, Belgrade or Athens. These four countries, with their legitimate governments acting in their London exile, constitute breakwaters against the rush of Bolshevismism.188 On February 8, 1942, he urged that the United States immediately endeavour to settle European frontier questions with the Russians: Whatever may be the difficulties this presents or the reluctance of trying to cook the goose before it is killed, these terms will be incomparably harder to secure later . . . If agreement should not be reached before the war is over . . . there will then be prolonged chaos and anarchy in Europe. Once having accepted a plan, [Moscow] would be unlikely to repudiate it. Terms agreed on

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A later elaboration of these memoranda noted that: ‘Moscow prefers to have as her future neighbors a belt of small countries who would remain in a semi-dependent condition to form a security zone around her.’ [Russia] no longer needs to foster Communism which it dropped even against Finland after the recent war. . . Nothing could help international Communism more than for the Anglo Saxon countries to betray their fear of Bolshevism and in this way thrust Russia back to assume again her old role of protector for a cause in which her interest has greatly diminished but which she could not easily desert if it were attacked by the Western Democracies. [For the Russians] Central Europe must not again be allowed to fall under German influence; it must not be the cause for prolonged disorder; and it must not become too enmeshed in the capitalist economy of the Western Democracies. We can perhaps better understand the special concern felt by Moscow for Central Europe if we remember British interests in the Low Countries or our own in the Caribbean region. . . Unlike American relations with Great Britain which can be largely implied and need not be too specific, those with the Soviet ought to be plainly stated and in simple terms which do not lead to future controversy.190 In 1947, Sumner Welles wrote of this memorandum: ‘Many of the gravest obstacles which the United States now confronts could have been avoided had those views prevailed.’191 In May 1942, he again urged conversations ‘accustoming the Russians to work with their Western allies in other matters than the actual conduct of the war’, an approach not taken up by the post-war United States, with its fondness for economic boycotts.192 In June, he noted that General Sikorski had erred in declining to discuss frontiers with Stalin while Stalin was willing to leave Lvov to Poland, an opportunity which Einstein thought had passed, accurately forecasting that the Soviets would ‘offer the Poles Eastern Prussia in compensation for the Eastern Polish territories they will be asked to cede’.193 In 1943, he began to think about post-war problems: ‘Everyone knows that Hitler’s collapse will be followed by a period of chaos and disorder . . . Americans will probably have to garrison many parts of the world for years to come.’ He doubted the wisdom of a revived League of Nations as a device to end isolationism: ‘The superstructure of any world state . . . would be too easy a target to shoot at. The conference at Casablanca marks one more step along the road which leads to world responsibilities.’194 In the fluid period immediately following the end of the Second World War, Einstein published a number of articles in the British periodical The Fortnightly summarising propositions that he had urged on Secretary Hull in private correspondence and on Foreign Secretary Eden through the intermediary of Ambassador John Winant.195 He had been given a desk but no formal position in the

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American Embassy during the war and had composed ‘dozens of memoranda . . . evolved out of past experience and my consciousness’, finding that the ‘Embassy was so overstaffed that there was even less opportunity than before of doing anything’. When his efforts to evoke a direct response from Winant proved unavailing, he divided his time between pig-farming in the countryside and part-time work in a factory at which some of his friends contributed to the war effort.196 In September 1945, he still saw scope for agreement with the Soviet Union: ‘Her interests, like our own, are to prevent a resurgence of German militarism.’ Like the historian John Lukacs, he saw Stalin as a realist: ‘If, for instance, in place of Marshal Stalin, a Romanoff Czar ruled in the Kremlin, the risk to peace would be much greater.’ In the months following the war, he credited the Russians with not breaking pacts nor have they introduced Soviet institutions in the territories they occupy. They have repeatedly displayed a willingness in different countries to work with men of any party. In the hour of victory Russia wishes to be assured that Central Europe will not later be used against her. Moscow may also fear that the Western democracies will later alter their present policies toward the Reich. He urged American assistance for the economic restoration of Central Europe. He noted that any Russian government would foster pan-Slavism and its own military security. Communism, however, was ‘a more serviceable weapon of offense than any that was ever found in the arsenal of the Czars’. This was so because of the capable leadership and discipline of the Communist parties, their good reputation resulting from the Resistance, and the fact that the war led to impoverishment, disillusionment, the levelling of classes, the control of private enterprise and expansion of the role of the state. ‘If normal conditions of life are not restored, abnormal ones will then take their place.’ Because of the expulsion of the Sudeten population, he saw an irrevocable breach between Czechoslovakia and Germany. ‘Austria occupies a special position which with Western assistance may allow her to preserve her Western character.’ The Croats and Slovenes ‘feel strongly that their culture belongs to the West’. The essay helped lay the intellectual foundation for the Marshall Plan. Einstein thought it ‘not unlikely that Russia will welcome American relief in the Danube Valley even if this means keeping an opening to the West’. This of course did not transpire, although multiparty politics survived for a time in Hungary, Poland and even in East Germany. The origins of the Cold War have been debated by many; some find them in the Potsdam and post-Potsdam movements toward the division of Germany; the decision to allow occupying powers to take reparations out of their own zones; the establishment of paramilitary forces in the Russian zone; the currency reform; and unification of the Western zones. Einstein’s essay was nonetheless prescient on many issues, whether or not it defines a road not taken. In July 1946, Einstein addressed himself to Anglo-American relations. He cautioned against a formal pre-1914 style alliance: ‘If a pact of alliance is ever placed in the shop

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window, sooner or later it will be soiled there, and can never again recover its early freshness.’ He expressed concern lest ‘any of the three Great powers be tempted to make use of German manpower for their armies and swallow the baits dangled by the Germans in order to divide them’. German rearmament did not take place in the West until the rejection by the French National Assembly of the European Defence Community, and the ensuing adoption with Anglo-American agreement of the Brussels Treaty and of NATO.197 He was not deeply concerned by the possibility of a Communist takeover in Italy: The vast majority of the Italians dislike Communism. The Italians are rightly proud of their ancient civilization and are as sceptical of innovations, particularly when promoted by their own government, as they are tolerant of other opinions . . . there will be no revolution, but even if there is, it will take place as if it were in the family.198 In two other less specific essays, Einstein noted that: ‘The world has already suffered terribly at the hands of the dictators from the breakdown in the faith of the given word and of the liberal tradition which was once the boast of Western civilization.’199 Human tragedies enacted on too vast a scale tend in fact to diminish sympathy. Politicians in America are still expected to conform at least outwardly to certain rather negative requirements of a domestic nature, but even the ideal of a Christian gentleman no longer carries as much weight as it did in the nineteenth century. As for science: ‘A terrible monster has been let loose which no one as yet knows how to curb or to keep under control . . . scientists must not only be specialists but must act also as citizens.’200 In 1946, he published a short book on Historical Change in the Current Problems series edited for Cambridge University Press by Ernest Barker. ‘The Western world’, he observed, ‘failed to understand how much of Bolshevism sprang from deep roots embedded in the Russian soil . . .an ignorant peasantry, long used to a ruthless exercise of authority.’ Similarly, there was an unwillingness to recognize that the German idea of greatness was associated with military force, that German efforts were concentrated on reviving that force, and that the purposes which this resurrection had in view could only be attained by war . . . the first consequence of defeat was to destroy or to weaken both the dynastic and the federal elements that until then had formed the top structure of the Reich and which if they had been preserved would have stood as an obstacle to the Nazi bid for power. The more drastic the innovations of a revolution, ‘the more drastic the methods that will be needed for their enforcement . . . a new educational propaganda . . . conducted

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on a . . . gigantic scale.’ Defeated ideas are frequently revived, but ‘will hardly survive a second defeat.’ Most enduring changes are brought about by ‘a political middle class which in all civilized communities has always taken a great part in the shaping of changes . . . too startling a change may lead to reactions that will defeat the original purpose,’ an insight with pertinence to contemprary Iran, and perhaps China as well. Before this war there were not many individuals in any democratic country who held deep political convictions, and still fewer who were ready to make any great sacrifices for their own lukewarm beliefs or expected that such things could ever be asked of them. Far more were ready to obey authority and were prepared to accept in its success the proof that what is must be right. The violent changes which were rapidly carried out in the totalitarian states have to be judged against this background of indifference, opportunism, cynicism, and fear. The British ‘recogniz[e] instinctively that living forces are superior to abstract principles . . . enabl[ing] the British to alter their outlook in order to adjust it to the necessities of the moment’. The success of America ‘is based in confidence in human nature and a belief in the freedom of man in free surroundings . . . American history during the last century to a great extent is economic history.’ [In politics] the holder of power who neglects to exercise his authority . . . will soon be superseded . . . inertia on the part of a leader will always be unforgivable. . . [H]istory is something more than the story of the monster labelled Economic Man. In wartime and during periods of crisis, the authoritarian direction of . . . changes is usually toward the Right even when measures are proposed by the Left and suggested seemingly in the people’s interest. Drastic changes which take place in peace time often come from the Left as a result of mass pressure. Dictators must express a desire for order and the sanctity of the family. This meets with the approval of . . . those who . . . do not understand that there may be a graver danger in relying on the use of illegal force than in the perils which they try to avoid. John Lukacs has also recently adverted to rightists who ‘hate liberalism more than they love liberty’. Einstein saw in the post-war period a new faith. . . vague and inchoate. . . [having] more to do with life than it has with law or with political power . . . a modern version of the Stoic faith [that] proclaims that the problems of mankind can best be worked out by free men, under free institutions, who have the wish and the will to help their neighbours . . . a faith in self-denial and in mutual aid. The degradation of standards of political behaviour, exemplified by the assassinations

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of Dollfuss and of King Alexander, ‘the one plotted in Germany, the other in Italy’, lead to a moral chaos which usually coincides with much corruption and disorder before it leads to violence and ends in disaster. A credulity in strange panaceas will at such times take the place of faith; monstrous beliefs are entertained, and brutal force will increasingly be substituted for law and authority. Nationalism has become an instrument of change that has served to poison the intellectual ties which once bound together the Christian world. It is fortunate . . . that in the Western democracies, political reasoning should still be based on the generous assumptions of eighteenth-century philosophers who regarded man as inherently good by nature and looked forward to making him better by education. Whether this statement could be made today is questionable, in an age characterised by glib talk about “the clash of civilizations.” He recognised that his post-war optimism was that of a period ‘when the brutal experience of war has been felt alike by victors and vanquished’; today’s vehement nationalists have little or no experience of war, though its memory preserves pacific policies in Germany, Italy and Turkey. Einstein placed no faith in a ‘perfect design [for peace] and the design itself may be less important than many today believe’. What was needed was ‘a lasting framework for peace based on principles sufficiently universal in their application, but also sufficiently elastic to reconcile the use of force with the practice of a civilization that is always on the march.’201 In 1955, during the British repression of a Greek revolt on Cyprus, he wrote to The Economist pointing out that: [C}yprus was secured by Disraeli in order to enable England to carry out its guarantee of Turkey. Would it not be possible for NATO to be given control of Cypriot defence and thereby help to solve the question in a manner that would be acceptable to British imperial needs and Hellenic pride?202 In the final event, the British granted Cypriot independence, reserving sovereign bases repeatedly used in British and American interests; the excesses of the Greek colonels resulted in Turkish intervention and a partition of the island that still persists. In 1956, he sharply criticised anti-colonial posturing by the State Department under John Foster Dulles which ‘accepts the possible closing of our Moroccan bases – and is prepared to accept the end of our alliance with France. But the first consequence of this would be for France to find in Russia what she might lose in America . . . the real victor of a campaign against colonialism would be the Kremlin. Could any diplomacy be more inept?’203 His view was that of Gregor Dallas:

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For the first decade after Potsdam, Truman and then Eisenhower formed a peculiar alliance with the Soviets on this one issue: to oust the British from the Middle East. The ‘anticolonialist’ Americans were equally determined to get the French out of North Africa. These policies not only failed to win favor among the Arabs but also ran counter to the American project of containment. It was a fatal flaw in American strategic and political thought – already apparent during the Second World War – which haunts America’s position in the Middle East to this day . . . The over-extension of American forces began to look alarming.204 In 1958, he criticised the over-militarised nature of American foreign policy as framed in the Gaither and Rockefeller reports in terms which still resonate: Although Russia has less to offer other nations than we, the Soviets profess to have more to give and the support that Moscow enjoys today in Asia and increasingly in Africa is a tribute to the skill of a diplomacy that is superior to our own. Their propaganda is no empty threat as we like to believe but a powerful weapon that we would do well to reckon with in a contest that has become far wider than one of armaments.205 In his later years, he devoted himself to his memoirs, published just after his death in 1967. The sardonic A.J.P. Taylor, noting Einstein’s role in fostering American recognition of dependence on British naval power, observed: ‘Einstein was among the first to formulate it clearly in print. He is therefore entitled to the credit for having involved the United States in two world wars.’ After noting the threat of pre-WorldWar-I German naval power, Taylor observed: ‘It is more difficult to understand what misfortunes could have followed for the U.S. from Hitler’s victories. However, fortunately for those of us who disliked Hitler and the Germans, Einstein’s argument retained its enchantment.’ Taylor viewed Einstein as one of the last survivors of a more leisurely diplomatic world: Its practitioners, having nothing better to do, observe what is going on around them. Unlike journalists, they do not work to a deadline nor need they convince an editor that the events they observe are interesting or important. Later, by the curious American practice, they find themselves unemployed halfway through their career.206 Einstein also published two volumes of verses, and a handbook on the Italian pictures in the National Gallery of Art at Washington. His house in Great Cumberland Street in London was destroyed during the later stages of the war, and after the war he moved to Paris; Helen died in Florence in 1949. His English obituary noted that his friends ‘were consoled when he built up in his apartment in the Rue Boissiere very much the same sort of stimulating social circle, and found a second wife in Mrs Lippincott, formerly Miss Camilla Hare’ in 1959. The editor of his letters to Holmes

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credits him in this informal way with ‘contribut[ing] significantly to the improvement of Franco-American relations during a difficult and agitated period of transition’.207 He was not possessive, and many museums benefited by his gifts. His love of beautiful things and his ability to surround himself with them never obscured his sense of values, and to the end he cherished a platonic hope for a perfect state where there would be no injustice and no cruelty.208 In 1964, he prepared a preface for the publication of the Holmes-Einstein correspondence209 which constitutes one of the best appreciations of Holmes and almost certainly the most vivid portrayal of Holmes’s wife. It also contains passages reflecting his own ideals: Whoever has served America has known the sudden growth of a feeling within the heart which acts almost at once to reduce in scale every local value before the immensely expanded horizon of the nation . . . Perhaps he came nearer to being a great Roman stoic, for he was not religious in any orthodox sense. He did not believe in personal survival nor did he find it desirable. In his creed he attached a kind of religious meaning to his own agnosticism, regarding this in the light of proper humility before the great mystery which could never be fathomed. The assumption that eternal truth had been established seemed to him to imply a kind of arrogance, and arrogance was the only sin he could never forgive. His own lack of belief was very far from being a mere negation. It carried with it the thought that life was in itself an end, but that real life must always wrestle in a struggle either of the mind or of the body, for nothing that one came by easily was ever worth having. No man despised materialism more, and he felt little sympathy for any future world that was ‘cut up into five acre lots and having no man upon it who was not well fed and well housed’ unless this future world was also prepared to understand ‘the divine folly of honor . . . the senseless passion for knowledge’ and the pursuit of ideals that could never be achieved but which made life worth living.210 It is not clear whether the conclusion of his poem on Machiavelli at S. Andrea in Perossino reflected Einstein’s hopes for his own legacy: Dejected by preferment always spurned Little he guessed reward would come from men Who living denied honors which he yearned Yet after death gave fame unto his pen.211

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2 SIR HORACE RUMBOLD

Sir Horace Rumbold was the son of a diplomat of the same name, a diplomat who had a markedly cosmopolitan upbringing, personality and background. Although Rumbold’s mother was an American, Caroline Harrington, the daughter of George Harrington, once American Minister to Switzerland, his father saw to it that he received a completely English education, culminating at Eton, which Rumbold attended for two years before joining the Foreign Office as an attaché after cramming to pass the examinations, which he managed to accomplish with some ease. Rumbold’s early start was in some measure due to his father’s difficult financial circumstances. In 1908, James Dunlap Smith of the India Office received a far-fetched appeal from the senior Rumbold, based on losses which his father had purportedly sustained 85 years earlier in 1823 when a company in India was forced into bankruptcy by the government: The same old pitiable story and I had to be quite frank with him. Then he broke down and made a miserable ad misericordiae appeal as his sons were costing him so much money. I’m afraid the interview did neither of us any good. I have never before seen a Baronet, a GCB and an ex-Ambassador cry because he couldn’t pay his bills, and I hope never to have a similar experience!1 Rumbold’s first posting was at Cairo in 1891 under Lord Cromer, from whom he gained a belief in being ‘punctiliously punctual’; thereafter he was assigned at Tehran, which he feared would ‘some day fall an easy prey to the Russians’, the government ‘hurrying to decay’; to Vienna, Madrid and Munich; to Tokyo in 1909 and to Berlin in 1913, where he was chargé d’affaires at the outbreak of war in August 1914. He served as Minister to Switzerland in 1916 to 1919; Minister to Poland in 1919 to 1920; Ambassador to Turkey, 1920 to 1924; to Spain, 1924 to 1928; and then to Germany, until his enforced retirement in 1933.2 Throughout his career he made his own way, without a patron in high places in London, solely on the strength of an increasingly lustrous reputation for clear-sightedness, energy and probity.3 While in Vienna, he voiced annoyance at the anti-British tone of the newspapers, many under Jewish ownership, which he found ironic since ‘Jews . . . have peculiar

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reason to speak well of England where there is almost total absence of anti-Semitism.’4 Returning to Cairo in 1900, he wrote his first serious report, urging introduction of a metric system and decimal currency to stimulate British trade and competitiveness.5 He admired but did not like Cromer: ‘He is a great man – the greatest we have – and I shall not serve under his like again. He has the defects of greatness. Gratitude is not one of his strong points.’6 His next post was Madrid, where he formed the conviction that ‘protection is . . . the invention of the devil.’7 On being assigned to Munich briefly in 1909, he concluded ‘We shall never be on good terms with Germany as long as this fleet question exists . . . I asked who is going to attack their commerce. He had no answer to this . . . [A] fresh large programme will be clearly meant against us.’8 Bernstorff shared the view that Germany’s naval aspirations were the only issue dividing her from England; before they began, Lord Salisbury’s foreign policy leaned toward Germany. Rumbold is best remembered for his strikingly lucid reporting on Hitler’s acquisition of power and his prophecy that Hitler would be ready for a war in the East by 1939 or 1940, and for his vehement protest against the persecution of Jews in his only meeting with Hitler. But three other episodes in his career were equally notable: his advice to the Polish government to circumvent Lloyd-George’s refusal to intervene to prevent the fall of Warsaw by appealing to the French and British jointly at the Spa Conference, resulting in effective French intervention; his deliberate failure to carry out instructions that an ultimatum be delivered to the Turks in 1922, for which he received the thanks of the British cabinet; and his role as effective leader of the Peel Commission in 1937 in recommending that the Jews in Palestine be given an independent state as a sanctuary and that the Palestinian Arabs be given a state of their own as a guarantee against further Jewish incursions. Warnings in Japan Rumbold first came to notice during his assignment in Japan after 1909. He had sought the assignment. During the Russo-Japanese War he declared: ‘I admire the Japs in proportion as I despise their enemies.’9 At that time, he considered that Britain’s defensive alliance with Japan might draw it into a war with Russia, but he did not fear the outcome: ‘We should wipe out the wretched remnant of their fleet. They would dash themselves against a stone wall . . . in the attempt to get to India and they would complete their financial ruin and the ruin of their prestige.’10 His view of the Czarist regime was succinctly stated: ‘It would be difficult to find a more utterly rotten country.’11 He did not share fears of a ‘yellow peril’: ‘it is a good cry for the Germans and other Continental nations, but it is not a serious danger.’12 Even in 1904, Almaric Fitzroy of the Privy Council noted: He shares with me a dislike to the gush about Japan which is current just now and is meeting with a ready response in drawing rooms and music halls and other rendez-vous of the unreflecting. He goes further and condemns the

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8. Sir Horace Rumbold (Library of Congress)

Japanese treaty which, if Japan is defeated will, he believes, be invoked to bring us to her assistance. Of course, he realizes that we should not accept such a construction of our treaty obligations, but the result will in his opinion be to

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In 1909, Rumbold, like Einstein, had no problem with Japan’s expansionist ambitions in Manchuria.14 He vigorously opposed a new Japanese tariff discriminating against Britain, a supposed ally: ‘Sentiment plays no part with these people after a certain point is passed. They are the Jews of the Far East and will have their pound of flesh.’15 By 1910, he was opposed to more than a five-year renewal of the Japanese alliance ‘which would bring us to 1920. Events move too quickly nowadays for long-term alliances.’16 This view as to the perils of an alliance system was shared with Einstein. Inönü blamed Talaat for allowing Turkey to be dragged into World War I against her interests because of an alliance with Germany. He opposed renewal of the Japanese treaty of 1902 with Britain which strengthened Japan’s position in the Russo-Japanese war. ‘I am inclined to think,’ he wrote to his father, ‘that it has now served its purpose, and that the Japanese are getting far more out of it than we are.’17 Further, ‘the recent annexation of Corea ha[s] rudely shaken the belief of third parties in Japanese assurances. These people appear to go on the principle that “circumstances alter cases” whenever they are confronted with awkward treaty stipulations’.18 Even more prophetically, he warned in 1911 that ‘Japan is “on the make”, just as Germany is.’19 The very argument used in our country in favour of the alliance, i.e. that we are able to withdraw our ships from the Far East to Home Waters is, to my mind, an argument against the Alliance, for we ought not to neglect our interests in the Far East, which are enormous. We ought to keep a strong fleet out here, alliance or no alliance.20 In April 1911, he joined the Ambassador in remonstrating against renewal of the alliance, but was overruled. He declared that he guided himself in sending dispatches by a principle enunciated by Lord Cromer while he was in Cairo: ‘If it is necessary to send a telegram, make the telegram full and intelligible, it is more economical in the long run.’21 The Coming of War After Tokyo, he refused offers of embassies in Guatemala and Peru.22 He would have accepted Chile, but instead was disappointed to be assigned as counsellor in Berlin, where he arrived in December 1913. When the final war crisis broke out with delivery of an Austrian note to Serbia on July 23, 1914, Rumbold was chargé d’affaires. He was called the next day to visit the French Ambassador, who alleged that the German Ambassador at Vienna had egged on the Austrian government. That afternoon, Rumbold expressed to the Russian chargé: ‘I hoped that the Russian government would not be too much influenced by the pan-Slavists.’23 He reflected

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on the failure of German diplomacy under Bismarck’s successors: ‘The whole of Bismarck’s endeavours had been directed to prevent Germany from being caught in a vice between Russia and France.’24 He deplored the assassination, but observed: ‘I have also little patience with the Austrians & Russians. The former were always d-d fools, the latter untrustworthy barbarians.’25 Of the last three days of the crisis, he wrote to his wife on August 2: ‘We know nothing and the government haven’t given us a line . . . The whole thing is to me a gigantic nightmare and I wonder if I am living in a sane world.’26 On August 3, the Ambassador presented Britain’s demand that the Germans cancel any steps they had taken to infringe Belgian neutrality. The Chancellor had just spoken to the Reichstag, and the German Foreign Secretary responded that: ‘It was a matter of life and death to the Germans to advance on France through Belgium.’ 27 At the end of August, Rumbold blamed the crisis on two officials, the German Ambassador at Vienna, who encouraged the Austrians, and an Austrian under-secretary, Forgach, who drafted an impossible ultimatum.28 Neither the [German] Chancellor nor the Heads of the Foreign Office really wished for war and . . . the same might be said of the Emperor . . . We know that the military authorities had been urging the German Government to issue a decree of mobilization at least five days before it actually appeared . . . the German Government, helped on by the military, drifted into the situation in which it found itself . . . Another fact is that the Germans never thought that we would really come in against them. Rumbold had advised Sir Edward Grey of the probable terms of the Austrian ultimatum on July 24; the German foreign secretary Jagow had been similarly advised. The diplomatic historian Sidney Fay accused both Jagow and Grey of lying about their ‘foreknowledge of the probable terms of the ultimatum. This kind of diplomatic lying, unfortunately, was not the monopoly of any one country, but was indulged in all too freely by Foreign Secretaries and Ambassadors everywhere in July 1914.’29 Rumbold was detached enough to recognise that Grey had never given a clear warning of Britain’s intervention; most historians consider that this was because the project of intervention lacked the support of the Cabinet until a hypothetical situation became actual. Rumbold’s overall conclusion was stated in 1930: I still feel that the [Germans] are really more responsible than anyone else for the war. If a man has the misfortune to be in business with a very stupid partner, it must obviously be his aim to protect himself and his partner against the latter’s follies . . . She never tried to bring any pressure to bear on Austria until the catastrophe could not be avoided and it was too late.30 Once the war had started, unlike Bernstorff, he did not favour a compromise peace, writing in 1916 that the British were bound to win and in 1918 that the Germans were hopelessly under the control of their military31 ‘and their arrogance is as great

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as ever . . . how can you ever admit such a race into the Society of Nations?’ This view was also that of TR. In August 1917, he urged that: Everything should be subordinated to the task of keeping Switzerland independent of wheat supplies from the Central Empires. I long ago imagined that we must write off Russia as a bad debt and consider that the Americans had taken the place of the Russians. I am sure we shall gain by the exchange as half a million well-organized Americans with powerful artillery are worth more than twice that number of Russians.32 In March 1918 he saw ‘no chance of securing a decent ending to the war unless and until we kill and put out of action another million or so Germans.’ From December 1916 to March 1919 as Minister to Switzerland, he was charged with responsibility for exploring peace feelers on the part of the Austrian and Turkish governments, which fell by the wayside with the apparent revival of German fortunes after the Brest-Litovsk treaty and the withdrawal of Russia from the war. 33 In April 1918, he indicated that he expected no immediate Austrian overtures, but ‘if the German offensive fails we shall have the Austrians begging for peace . . . even a race of serfs like the Boche may turn.’34 At one point, he refused three British parliamentarians passports to Switzerland to explore a German peace feeler. 35 It was said that: More important than any Ambassador in 1917 and 1918 was the Minister in Berne, Horace Rumbold. He was sent there in 1916 in place of an indifferent predecessor to collect information about the enemy states and to report upon and deal with peace feelers from them, the majority of which throughout the war were put forward in Switzerland. His superiors in the Foreign Office had no criticism to make of him.36 In June 1918, he observed that ‘the men and officers are sacrificing themselves in heaps to repair the omissions of the Allied staffs and intelligence services.’37 In September 1917, he reported that another of our subjects, Count Bernstorff, had been sent to Constantinople to keep him away from Berlin, where the new Foreign Minister, Kuhlmann, saw him as a potential rival.38 Poland and Bolshevism On being assigned as Minister to Poland in 1919, Rumbold urged that: Everything should be done to assist [Poland] to resist a Bolshevist offensive . . . If the Polish barrier to Bolshevism goes, the barrier will be shifted much further west and an opportunity will be given to latent Bolshevism in CzechoSlovakia to join hands with Russian Bolshevism, thereby creating a very serious state of things for Central Europe and the Western Powers.39

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‘The business of Poland is to get as strong as possible before their two great neighbors recover their strength’40 He urged the provision of greatcoats and boots for the Poles, whose morale was beginning to crack. ‘The Polish army is the only army on which the Bolshevists have made no impression.’41 British aid would provide a lever ‘to check any imperialist tendancies’ on the part of the Poles; he was acutely conscious of these, reporting on a grandiose scheme of Pilsudski to confederate Poland, the Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania. In December, he advised the Foreign Office that aid being sent to the White Russians would be put to better use by the Poles.42 Three days later, Lloyd-George and Clémenceau agreed.43 He was cognisant of the burdens which his recommendations imposed: The democracies of the world will not stand the crushing burdens of armaments . . . it is a thousand pities that America should hesitate in the way she is doing. The result of her attitude is to throw the burden of keeping the peace of the world on to the British Empire. This gives us a position such as we have never had before in the history of the world. I hope we shall be equal to the occasion.44 On January 17, 1920, Rumbold advised Curzon that the situation had reached a critical stage. He urged that Poland be allowed to administer the Free City of Danzig: ‘Unless the Poles begin to administer, how can they learn, and who is to be the judge of the moment at which they may be supposed to have attained sufficient training and sagacity.’45 On January 27, Lloyd-George, in one of his famous unprepared interventions, advised the Poles to make an equitable peace, though declaring that if they did so and their efforts were rejected by the Bolsheviks, ‘Great Britain would feel bound to assist Poland to the best of its power.’46 Rumbold viewed the conflict between Poles and Bolsheviks as [A] competition in rottenness.47 Russia has not proved to be an ideal country. All our old illusions have been gradually shattered . . . [it is ] so far behind our own standard of civilization that it is difficult for us any longer to regard them as equals in the political culture. Rumbold was thus unalarmed by Polish geographical ambitions, believing that the Poles would agree to plebiscites or the erection of new states.48 ‘Their situation is in fact comparable with that of a man inhabiting a house in which a dangerous snake or person with overtly infectious disease occupies a room next to his.’49 He repeatedly urged that Western assistance be provided: ‘I believe that with moral and ever so little material support from the Allies we can hearten the Poles.’50 On June 2, 1920, he forwarded a report by Sir Stuart Samuel on anti-Jewish pogroms in Poland, which had prejudiced the Polish government in the eyes of the Western powers, concluding that: The present-day hardships of the Jews are as much as anything due to the strong nationalist feelings everywhere aroused by the Great War, and this

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9. Polish Frontiers (Smogorzewski, Pologne Restaurée)

perhaps inevitable conflict with national prejudice may prove even worse than the former oppression by absolute Governments . . . It is giving the Jews very little real assistance to single out as is sometimes done, for reprobation and protest, the country where they have perhaps suffered least.51 On July 9, 1920, a Polish emissary, Grabski, met with Lloyd-George, Curzon, Millerand and Foch at Spa, having been preceded by a Rumbold telegram of July 7 reciting Poland’s willingness to abandon an expansionist policy in return for support by the Allies. Lloyd-George declared that: ‘Great Britain was prepared to consider

10. Interallied Mission, Poland (Watt, Bitter Glory)

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what steps it could take to press Russia to make peace, and if Russia refused, what help she could give Poland to preserve her independence.’52 This undertaking was confirmed at a second meeting on the following day, at which Count Sforza was also present53 On July 10, Rumbold was ‘anxiously awaiting some indication from Spa as to the help the Allies can give Poland’.54 On July 11, Rumbold reported to his daughter that: I found a telegram from Curzon that enabled me to take control of the situation and I may say that I have been – in a way – running this country ever since . . . there were two days of utter demoralization . . . The present moment therefore is as critical as any within the last six years.55 On July 17, he reported to his mother that: We are all-powerful here though as unpopular as ever. We are the only people who count for we are the only people who have pledged ourselves to do anything for the Poles. The French have played a poor role, the Italians are nowhere.56 On July 19, Lloyd George instructed him, in view of Soviet proposals, to ask the Poles to seek an immediate armistice. 57 At Rumbold’s suggestion, the Poles appealed to the Allies in conference at Spa.58 Rumbold’s suggestion was that: ‘The French might send some colonial troops . . . we might send some aviators and take steps to see that the munitions now held up by the Czechs and Italians get through to Poland.’ In the final event, the British and French sent a military mission accompanied by a large number of French officers (one of whom was the young Charles de Gaulle) led by General Weygand; the only tangible British assistance Lloyd-George would permit was the unloading of supplies by the British Navy at Danzig. On July 24, Rumbold reported that: ‘Inclusion in it of General Weygand has greatly encouraged the Poles. I think the latter realize fully that if they are saved from disaster, they will owe their salvation to the action of His Majesty’s Government.’59 On August 4 and 6, Rumbold transmitted warnings from Lord D’Abernon about Soviet bad faith in the armistice negotiations;60 on August 7, Lloyd-George told Rumbold to urge the Poles to accept a Soviet proposed armistice under the terms of which the Allies would give Poland no further aid; Lloyd George had advised the Soviets that he required an immediate confirmation of the armistice since he was about to meet with the French to discuss measures which would be taken if the Poles accepted the armistice and the Soviets did not observe it.61 On August 5, Rumbold had written to his wife: ‘The Entente has been flouted by the Bolsheviks, has eaten more dirt than is good for anybody, and ought to declare war.’62 On August 9, Lloyd George gave Rumbold what he wanted: a commitment of Allied material aid if Poland agreed to defend the line of the Vistula and accept Western advice in so doing.63 ‘This communication from the West was cordially received by Polish

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ministers.’64 On the following day the Soviet armistice proposals which Lloyd-George had failed to reject arrived: Rumbold keeps a cool head under these circumstances and must have had a disagreeable task in making his communication to the Polish government. He has fortunately an excellent personal position here, and is regarded by the Poles as a sincere friend to their country. It may be that the net result of this episode may not be unfavourable. For the proposed armistice terms are so humiliating that they are in themselves sufficient to prove that safety is only to be found in fighting to the last.65 By mid-August, the Russians had been held back, the maximum point of their advance being seven miles from Warsaw; all the ambassadors with the exception of the Papal Nuncio (Achille Ratti, later Pope Pius XI) and the Italian Ambassador had retired to Posen. The continued presence in Warsaw of the Italian envoy was ascribed by some to Count Sforza’s desire to establish by back-handed means relations with the Bolsheviks. On August 17, Lloyd-George enraged both the Poles and the French by urging the Poles to accept the Bolshevik peace terms without telling the French; Rumbold noted that: ‘Jusserand’s indignation was genuine and legitimate.’66 On the same day, Rumbold wrote to his wife: ‘I don’t know which I dislike the most, Poles, Bolsheviks or Lloyd-George.’67 On August 28, noting that Lloyd-George had cast the burdens on the French, he observed: ‘In the present case it seems to me that I have the confidence of the Foreign Office but not the Prime Minister. The man here must take considerable responsibility involving great risks.’68 He considered that as a result of the ultimate Polish victory at the gates of Warsaw that: The flood of barbarism which threatened to overwhelm Europe had been turned back. It is a repetition of the defeat of the Turks under the walls of Vienna [by a Polish, Austrian and German army under the command of the King of Poland] in 1683.69 The historian Norman Davies characterised the result in only slightly less apocalyptic terms: ‘Poland’s independence was secured and with it the Versailles settlement. [The Soviets] were forced to retreat from internationalism. Soviet Russia had no option but to turn itself into the base for what Stalin was soon to call “Socialism in one country”.’70 On September 1, the joint military mission rendered its report, stating that the ‘unloading of arms proved to be the one practical measure of assistance given by the British authorities to Poland during the crisis, and its effect on the Polish morale was good.’71 Rumbold later wrote to General Radcliffe, one of the British members ‘I can assure you that the Special Mission cheered me up a lot.’ He also observed that: ‘Weygand undoubtedly saved the situation for the Poles.’72 Radcliffe reported to the Chief of the Imperial General Staff that: ‘Rumbold’s ripe experience added to his great personal prestige with the Polish authorities was invaluable and

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11. Rumbold and Family, Constantinople (New Bodleian Library, Oxford)

contributed greatly to such success as the mission may be able to claim.’73 According to Martin Gilbert: On August 26 [1920] the French newspaper Le Temps reported that the Bolsheviks deeply resented Rumbold’s refusal to be flustered when the battle of Warsaw was at its height, believing that by his calmness he had contributed to a stiffening of Polish morale.74

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Rumbold commented: ‘I am far more pleased at having enraged the Bolsheviks than about anything that has happened recently.’75 When he visited the front, Sir Horace was enjoying every moment of his outing, it being the first time he had been under fire, and I believe he even enjoyed the last four minutes when I had to turn my large car around in a very narrow road.76 Lord D’Abernon, Rumbold’s predecessor as Ambassador to Berlin, published a book describing the conflict at Warsaw as The Eighteenth Decisive Battle of the World . . . Rumbold was an old friend of Hankey, the Cabinet Secretary, who described him as ‘a tower of strength’ in the Polish crisis.77 He considered that the settlement with the Bolsheviks left Poland in possession of too much Ukranian land, and that the Polish corridor in the West would also cause difficulties: ‘Both Germany and Russia will count again some day’, his final dispatch prophetically cautioned, ‘and possibly become a serious menace to Poland.’ This prophecy, also made by Sforza, was confirmed: A.J.P. Taylor was to write: ‘The territories which [Poland] wrongfully acquired in 1921 made her reject an alliance with Russia.’78 Henry Kissinger noted that they ‘sharpened antagonism’.79 Like Sforza, Rumbold found Pilsudski to be ‘almost an anachronism in the twentieth century’.80 The New Turkey His next assignment, at Constantinople, he assertedly owed to Nevile Henderson, later one of his successors at Berlin, who suggested Rumbold to Lord D’Abernon for the appointment in Turkey; D’Abernon ‘had greatly appreciated Rumbold’s sound common sense during his own visit to Poland.’ 81 Rumbold sought information widely, telling Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson that: ‘[He] was lamentably ignorant of the Turkish and Greek situation. The Foreign Office and Curzon are hopeless. They have not even got maps.’82 Anthony Ryan, the Dragoman (a combination of interpreter and First Secretary) who served with Rumbold declared that he exemplified ‘solid qualities rather than brilliancy. It could be said of him that he saw little further than the end of his nose, but saw exactly what was at the end of it.’83 The most significant episode in Rumbold’s long career was his action in 1922, in accord with the British commander at Constantinople, General Harington, in refraining from delivering a British ultimatum to Kemal’s Turks requiring their immediate withdrawal from positions that they held near the Straits. On September 13, Rumbold had warned Curzon, the Foreign Secretary, that Kemal could not be successfully bluffed. He acknowledged to Curzon on September 17 that in their hour of triumph at Smyrna, the Kemalists had massacred many Armenians.84 On the same day, Churchill had issued a statement to the press: ‘Adequate force must be available to guard the freedom of the Straits and to defend the deep water line between Europe and Asia against a violent and hostile Turkish aggression.’ 85

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Rumbold had cautioned that naval power could not be used by itself without precipitating a massacre at Constantinople.86 The French commander, General Pele on September 18 entered into direct negotiation with Kemal without advising the British; by September 20, both the French and the Italians had withdrawn their troops. Rumbold during this period refused a hasty invitation by the French politician Franklin-Bouillon to go to the French Embassy for an explanation of French views, insisting on his attendance at the British Embassy.87 Explaining his action to Lancelot Oliphant for the Foreign Office in a communication on September 26, Rumbold declared: Brock [the British naval commander], Harington and I have throughout had in mind the absolute necessity of avoiding any action which might lead to war. We feel the last thing our country wants is to have another war and that the average man does not care a straw whether Eastern Thrace and Adrianople belong to the Greeks or the Turks. In my view, both are absolute barbarians and have recently proved it. We imagine our country would fight for the freedom of the Straits, but for nothing else.88 Before taking up his post, Rumbold had been advised by Lord Reading of Moslem resentment of the bombardment of Samsun by the Greeks.89 On September 28, the British cabinet authorised the evacuation of Constantinople, but directed Harington to hold Chanak. No response having been received to an offer of talks transmitted to Kemal on September 23, on September 29 the cabinet instructed Harington, over Curzon’s objections, the only other dissenters being Baldwin and Griffith-Boscawen, to deliver an ultimatum to the Turks requiring their withdrawal from the neutral zone around Chanak, an act referred to by Harold Nicolson as a ‘superb gesture of unwisdom’.90 Rumbold and Harington agreed among themselves not to deliver the ultimatum. These two shared Curzon’s opinion that an ultimatum was, at that point, gratuitous and premature. They both took upon themselves the responsibility of ignoring their instructions. For this act of prudence, they were subsequently thanked by the Cabinet. And in fact they saved us from a war which, as events proved, would have been wholly unnecessary.91 On September 30, the Cabinet minutes recorded, there was anger that: Sir Horace Rumbold and General Harington should apparently contemplate a meeting between the General and Mutapha Kemal at Mudania while the Turkish Nationalists, in defiance of several remonstrances and warnings, were still actively violating the essential condition laid down in the Paris note. The attitude of Rumbold and Harington involved ‘a danger to peace’ which they ‘did not seem to realize’.92

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The implications of Lloyd George’s order that an ultimatum be sent, an order sent without concurrence of the Dominion premiers save for a half-hearted agreement by New Zealand, led very quickly to the break-up of the Coalition government. On October 7, Bonar Law, the Conservative leader, published a letter in the London Times urging that the Turks could be kept from Constantinople and Thrace only with cooperation from the French, Italians and Americans; that Britain alone, ‘the leading Mohammedan power’, should not ‘show any hostility or unfairness to the Turks . . . We cannot alone act as the policeman of the world. The financial and social condition of this country makes that impossible. It seems to me therefore that our duty is to say plainly to our French allies that the position in Constantinople and the Straits is as essential a part of the Peace settlement as the arrangement with Germany and that if they are not prepared to support us there we shall not be able to bear the burden alone. We shall have no alternative except to imitate the Government of the United States and to restrict our attention to the safeguarding of the more immediate interests of the Empire.’93 On October 8, negotiations with the Turks began, the Turks being represented by Ismet rather than Atatürk, after Rumbold had restrained Admiral Brock from clearing the Bosphorus of Turkish vessels: ‘Nationalist troops who crossed the neutral zone yesterday may have been genuinely unaware of its limits.’ The Mudania negotiations left the Allies in possession of Constantinople, Chanak and Gallipoli pending a treaty of peace and also provided for interim arrangements in Eastern Thrace. Rumbold was first deputy to Curzon and then the leading British negotiator at the Lausanne Conference to conclude a revised peace treaty with Turkey, which began at the end of the next month. A Turkish commentator, contrasting him with Curzon, referred to ‘the moderate Rumbold’.94 According to the American diplomat Joseph Grew, he was preceded by a ‘pronounced anti-Turkish reputation in Constantinople’. Grew reproached him for ‘lacking forcefulness’ as a member of the committee on minorities.95 He found Ismet an exasperating negotiator: ‘He is afflicted with a dreadful cough and his deafness, added to his limited intelligence, makes it a work of almost superhuman difficulty to get him to understand any argument at all . . . He is between the hammer and the anvil.’ He once noticed that Ismet’s hand ‘ is quite damp . . . The whole Turkish delegation are afraid of the noose whichever way matters go here. The real villains of the peace are at Angora.’96 Rumbold was aided in this assessment by the fruits of a British intelligence operation.97 Rumbold considered that ‘agreement by discussion however slow is the only procedure possible today.’98 Patient and courteous, which Curzon was not, he did much to ease the path of the negotiations during the second phase and he managed to maintain the unity of the allies to the end . . . he attempted to suggest compromises which might satify the more moderate element at Ankara.99 He was reproached by Grew for not seeking his advice: ‘He missed much that might have been of value to him.’100 Rumbold commented: ‘I think that Grew, the solitary American observer, really means to be helpful, but the Americans have a funny way of being helpful.’101 In May, Rumbold observed: ‘The desperate keenness of Ismet to

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get peace is to my mind the best guarantee of our success.’102 A regatta was held under the windows of the meeting-room at Lausanne; Rumbold found it ‘extremely trying to have to carry on conversations so labourious and important to the accompaniment of merry-go-rounds, shooting practice, and the clash of varied music’.103 After the final bargaining session in July 1923, Rumbold wrote: ‘Ismet seemed incapable of understanding the simplest point and the extraction of a concession from him was like pulling out an old molar.’104 The final agreement provided for Turkish rule over a portion of Eastern Thrace, a massive transfer of populations between Greece and Turkey, an end to the capitulations, and the payment of Western debts, but in currencies, not in gold. Nevile Henderson correctly prophesied that it would ‘give the mentality of the Turks a new turn’; it rendered them a satisfied power and gave rise to their neutrality during World War II. A Foreign Office official noted that: ‘We have more than regained at Constantinople, Mudania, and Lausanne the prestige in Turkey that the defeat of the Greeks cost us.’105 Rumbold had achieved at least the minimum objectives defined for him by Curzon: Greek retention of Western Thrace and the freedom and demilitarisation of the Straits, valuable as a check on the Soviet Union.106 At the signing, Rumbold, according to Grew, ‘showed his wild enthusiasm by a contraction of the facial muscles which amounted almost to a smile’; he also was detected wearing ‘a grey top hat to give the proceedings a bit of tone’.107 Notwithstanding his performance at Lausanne, Curzon as Foreign Secretary then sent him to Spain, ‘since he is not alert enough for Berlin’.108 Rumbold, with his usual perceptiveness, sensed he was not a favourite of Curzon, writing to Percy Loraine: ‘You are one of his favourites and he has very few. He is a difficult man to please and apt to be rather sweeping in his wholesale condemnation of the higher ranks of our service.’109 As Ambassador to Spain from 1924 to 1928, Rumbold rejected Spanish proposals that Gibraltar be exchanged for Ceuta: ‘It had a great sentimental value for us . . . I could not conceive any British government embarking on the fresh responsibilities which the acquisition of Ceuta would involve.’110 In 1925, Rumbold mediated a dispute between Greece and Bulgaria on behalf of the League of Nations.111 Berlin Before Hitler In 1928, he expressed preference for Berlin over Washington as his next posting, and became Ambassador to Germany in August 1928. Harold Nicolson, in greeting the Rumbolds, found them ‘so appallingly English that it is almost funny . . . One can’t help liking them. But from a distance. And rather coldly.’112 Later, meeting them at a railroad station, Nicolson noted: ‘Rumbie, Mrs. Rumbie, Miss Rumbie & Master Rumbie nebst Valet Rumbie all got out of the train in a row & each one clasping a novel by John Galsworthy, I never saw anything look so English & solid & decent.’113 Rumbold began with a restrained view of British power: ‘It is not now sensible to imagine that we have the power of enforcing the observance of any but our most vital requirements.’114 In November 1928, he thought a putsch unlikely:

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The fascist movement in Italy and the directory movement in Spain were rendered possible only by a pre-existing condition of social and political disintegration [and] by the absence of any organized opposition. Neither of these two conditions is present in Germany and it would require some serious and improbable accident to the political machine to create the conditions necessary for any “march on Berlin.”115 At the end of 1928, he predicted that after the Rhineland and reparations questions were settled, ‘Polish Upper Silesia will probably become to Germany what the AlsaceLorraine provinces were to France after 1870.’116 Rumbold admired Stresemann, and thought that if he and Hindenburg survived for five years, ‘the reparations problem presumably will have been settled, the Rhineland evacuated, and Germany have definitely turned the corner.’117 He regarded Stresemann’s death in 1929 as ‘really rather a disaster’. The Germans ‘have lost their greatest asset’; he ‘dragged an unwilling party . . . in the wake of a Socialist government’.118 ‘The danger is that, given the German character, self-confidence may degenerate into arrogance. We shall see.’119 He was not starry-eyed about disarmament; in December 1929 he declared: It is to be hoped that the maintenance of the discriminatory clause will in future and for many years secure that Germany shall not be able to arm . . . to such an extent as shall tempt her to weigh the dangers of offensive warfare . . . [it should be] sufficiently operative as to severely hamper her during the first weeks of a campaign.120 In January 1929, he remarked on German military maps, showing an indefinite Eastern border: ‘There were two spirits alive in Germany today. In the future, as before the war, the instincts of Germany might again be controlled by a powerful and unscrupulous military clique.’121 In February 1929, he wrote of hotheads [who] believe that it may one day be possible to make a coup d’etat and to reverse the Socialist legislation of the last ten years . . . I much doubt whether the President would assume the role they expect of him and I should think it certain that they would immediately be paralysed by the action of the trades unions. In March 1929, he was still not concerned about Hitler: The Reichswehr are well-housed, well-paid and well-fed; their officers are comfortably off and not overworked. The traditions of the German army do not include sedition . . . To establish a dictatorship one person is indispensable, namely a dictator. There is no candidate in sight and there is certainly no Mussolini in Germany nor is there anyone who can claim to be popular with the whole of the Nationalist party.

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12. Rumbold and Family, Berlin (New Bodleian Library, Oxford)

There could be an ‘economic dictatorship’ led by someone like General von Seeckt with the consent of the Reichstag.122 By June 1929, he still thought of Seeckt as a successor if something happened to Stresemann and Hindenburg; Seeckt later went

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into politics but proved to be a poor speaker. By 1930, he was convinced that: ‘The revival of nationalism has come to stay . . . it must result in the prosecution of a more forward foreign policy by Germany in the future.’ Commenting on early Nazi gains in Munich, he observed: ‘Among the more sober party orchestras, they have the magnetic attraction of a jazz band.’123 In February 1930, he noted that: ‘While the Polish question is not an actual issue for the moment . . . I have not met a single German of any authority who is content to accept Germany’s present Eastern frontiers as definitive.’124 On July 30, he noted that evacuation of the Rhineland produced ‘little gratitude for favours received’; by August 29, he complained of a ‘snowball of revision’. In September, he predicted that the Nazis would increase their representation to between 50 and 60 seats; in the event, they got more than 100;125 he also noted Seeckt’s failure as a public speaker. The Nazi entry into the Reichstag ‘might have been staged by a music-hall Mussolini’.126 On December 2, he appealed for support of the Hoover debt moratorium, stating of Bruning: ‘It would be a misfortune for the country if he had to go.’ In January 1931 he took the view that: ‘The Hitler movement is largely an economic movement and is due in great measure to discontent with economic conditions . . . Germany is definitely out to obtain a revision of her frontiers.’ 127 In 1931, he urged the Foreign Office not to oppose the Bruning government’s attempt at a customs union with Austria, believing that with Bruning and Briand in power ‘the Disarmament Conference should lead to a real and substantial reduction of armaments in Europe.’ 128 He feared that undermining Bruning would aid Hitler who ‘thundered against materialism, slack manners and morals. Like an American revivalist, he worked 10,000 young people up to indescribable ecstasies of excitement.’ Nonetheless, he said on September 25: ‘It would not be fair to tar the bulk of the population with the Nazi or Stahlhelm brush.’129 Again, on October 16, 1931, he praised Bruning and Muller, after cautioning that: ‘It has been common knowledge for many years past that Germany will try for a revision of her Eastern frontiers at as early a date as possible.’ On December 15, he expressed the view that General Groener would take over if Bruning were defeated: ‘The sedulously propagated idea that Hitler is Bruning’s inevitable successor and “the man of tomorrow” is as much the result of mass suggestion and of a psychological state as anything else.’130 He thought that Bruning was ‘a hundred yards from the winning post’ when he was replaced,131 a view not shared by critics of his economic policies.132 He staunchly refused to meet with Hitler while he was in opposition: ‘I won’t see Hitler, and I won’t let any member of my staff see Hitler.’133 (Later on, he refused to allow a British visitor to be taken to see an internment camp: ‘He realized that their one idea would be to collect rapidly some sham internees, well fed, etc. And then photograph him tasting some of their excellent soup with them.’) 134 In December 1931, he observed that there is ‘at least an even chance that if the governments of the big countries fail to show a sense of realities at the forthcoming Reparations and Disarmament conferences there will be a Dämmerung of this old Europe’.135

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DIPLOMACY BETWEEN THE WARS Although his initial reaction to Von Papen was favourable,136 it changed rapidly: Herr Von Papen is convinced that in some mysterious way he possesses a popular mandate to govern the country and even to reform the Constitution [and] that the real desire of the country is for authoritative government, the limitation of parliamentary influence, and the reform of the institutions set up at Weimar.

It is a mark of Von Papen’s stupidity that he took this as a compliment.137 He regarded Papen as of ‘second-rate ability’, and in July 1932 cut loose more vehemently: A lightweight gentleman rider in his youth, he displayed the characteristics which might have been expected from him when he took office. Not only did he take every political fence at a gallop, but he seemed to go out of his way to find fences which were not in his course – incessant challenge to the political parties, the Federal States. Papen also, astonishingly, took comfort from Rumbold’s observation, after Papen had lost the support of all political parties, that: ‘Persons wishing to support the Papen government, and they are in increasing numbers, will not know how to vote.’138 In January 1932 he detected ‘a new spirit in the German people, greatly stimulated by the Hitler movement. The Hitler slogan was “Germany awake” which implied the words “and assert yourself”.’ The Customs Union was the first manifestation of this.139 In February 1932, he was struck by the behaviour of the Nazis in the Reichstag: ‘The thought that the destinies of the country might be entrusted to such people is rather depressing. [But] we are far from that yet.’140 He still thought that if there was a coalition in Prussia, ‘the Centre Party would draw Hitler’s teeth.’141 Writing of the 1932 presidential election between Hitler and Hindenburg, Rumbold noted Jewish support of Hindenburg: ‘Their intelligence and their wealth was employed against the Nationalist Socialist, and their friends abroad, and especially in America, came generously to their help.’ Rumbold noted that Hitler relied on the fact that ‘all the youth of the country – or much of it – is on his side’. This was, in his view, a good reason for raising the voting age to 25: ‘Youths and maidens of 20 aren’t really mature.’ An uncritical faith in democracy was not a characteristic of any of our five subjects. Rumbold’s reflections on British politics were inspired by this: Baldwin by giving the vote to ignorant and irresponsible flappers has only made matters worse. So at the next elections the fate of England and the Empire will largely depend on immature youths and females who have no stake in the country and are receptive to unscrupulous demagogues and windbags.142 Churchill was the only member of the Baldwin cabinet to oppose the change.

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In February 1932, Nevile Henderson wrote to him: ‘Is a Hitler government coming? It appears to me that it must in the end – though I can’t see much good resulting therefrom.’143 In May 1932 Rumbold still thought that Hitler would not gain majority support unless ‘the Disarmament and Reparation Conferences are a washout, and other unpleasant things happen to Germany’. At this time he was prepared, in principle, to concede Germany’s claim to equal status for disarmament purposes.144 The young John Kennedy similarly regarded the failure of the Disarmament Conference as a watershed: ‘[Success] ‘would have strengthened German moderates at home immeasurably . . . [failure] really doomed peace in our time.’145 The British note was less receptive: In view of Germany’s economic difficulties the initiation of acute controversy in the political field at this moment must be accounted unwise. And in view of the concessions so recently granted to Germany by her creditors, it must be accounted particularly untimely.146 With the fall of Bruning over his proposal to settle the unemployed in East Prussia, ‘for the first time the German government seems to have broken with the tradition that foreign affairs are and have been the prime consideration for Germany.’147 In June 1932, the new Papen government relaxed the ban on political uniforms, resulting in Rumbold’s view in ‘the revival of daily brawls, which always end in the death or wounding of some of the participants . . . the French may be chary of agreeing to an appreciable reduction in their army when they see the illicit armies tolerated by the German Government.’ 148 Bernstorff shared this abhorrence of political violence, calling in his letter on the death of Rathenau for a pledge ‘to carry on the war of politics with intellectual weapons and the voting-paper alone’. ‘The change of government,’ Rumbold wrote, ‘ has caused the Nationalist and jingo element in the Foreign Office here to throw off the mask.’149 Hindenberg, Rumbold declared on June 4, ‘was very badly advised when he subordinated foreign to purely internal and indeed parochial interests’, the reference being to Bruning’s downfall over a scheme to colonise some of the unemployed in East Prussia. Rumbold in this period ‘had no illusions as to the evil and dangerous character of the [Nazi] movement and of its leader’.150 He ‘had not from the beginning entertained the slightest doubt as to the character of the German chancellor, or the road he intended to pursue.’151 Halifax, by contrast, while Foreign Secretary admitted to his friend Dr. Don, the Dean of Westminster, that he had never read Mein Kampf.152 Elsewhere, Rumbold had referred to ‘Wehrgeist, the precious heritage of Frederician Prussia.’153 Papen’s successor, General von Schleicher, he viewed as an ‘ambitious man who no doubt hoped some day to be chancellor, but he did not wish that day to come too soon’. He viewed the Schleicher regime as ‘a cabinet of mutual deception. Herr von Papen thinks he has scored off General von Schleicher and Hitler; General von Schleicher thinks he has scored off Hitler, and Hitler for his part believes he has scored off both.’154 In May 1932, he recognised that Schleicher ‘has possibilities of

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intrigue’.155 In July 1932, after the declaration of a state of emergency and the supersession of the social-democrat-controlled Prussian police, Rumbold noted that calm had descended, after two weekends in which political riots had resulted in 30 deaths and 200 to 300 injuries. ‘The proceedings of the Papen government give one the impression of being the work of amateurs . . . some say that the manner in which the Prussian government has been sidetracked will increase the Social Democratic vote.’156 Other motives than solely consideration for law and order impelled them to act . . . They may elect to depart more and more from the Constitution until they have established a dictatorship from which even a National Socialist majority could not oust them.157 There are warnings in this precedent, recalled by Justice Jackson and others in curtailing federal criminal jurisdiction in the United States: ‘Evil men are not given power; they take it over from better men to whom it had been entrusted.’158 Upon Von Papen’s fall in November 1932, he observed that: ‘Unemployment is a problem which cannot be successfully solved by methods to which the left parties in this country are so strongly opposed. Some measure of cooperation with the Left seems indispensable.’159 On December 7, he welcomed the accession of Schleicher. His knowledge of politics was too extensive to permit him to sympathise with such notions as super-party government or government against the will of the people . . . The spectacle of a man of intelligence dealing with such an intricate problem as the present political situation in Germany cannot fail to be stimulating.160 In December 1932, the Allies, together with the United States, conceded to the Schleicher government the promise of equal treatment in disarmament that they had withheld from Bruning.161 On January 25, 1933, when the Schleicher government was tottering and Papen was scheming on behalf of a coalition including the Nazis, Rumbold expressed ‘the wonder of an observer that the destinies of this country should have been, even for a short time, in charge of such a lightweight’, after describing a conversation in which ‘Papen revealed himself in his true colours, namely as a convinced Monarchist and a partisan of government by authoritative methods, i.e. by force and without a Parliament.’162 Today, even in English-speaking countries, there is a greater prevalence of politicians who are ‘lightweights’ in this sense; who view parliamentary concurrence as an obstacle, not a source of strength, a mistake which the German generals made during World War I163 and which Churchill never made. On January 28, Rumbold also reported on a developing scandal involving subsidies to President Hindenburg’s friends in East Prussia, ascribing the refusal for Hindenburg to cooperate in Schleicher’s request for a dissolution to this cause.164

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Hitler in Power On January 30, in two dispatches, Rumbold reported on Hindenburg’s failure to grant Schleicher a decree of dissolution, the threatened use of which would have brought the Nationalists and Nazis to heel because of their fear of the results of another election. Rumbold accurately observed that from a constitutional point of view, the fate of the government would depend upon the Centre party By 7 February 1933, when the Nazis had been in the government for about a week, it was obvious to Rumbold that the conservatives in the government would not be able to control them. If the press law is rigorously applied it might easily stifle the opposition press . . . the government may find means of deterring electors, such as communists and social democrats from going to the poll . . . they will undoubtedly ‘make’ the elections as far as possible . . . Hitler will recover at Hugenberg’s expense the ground he lost in November. Hitler . . . no longer conceals his sympathy for the Right. Rumbold characterised the coming election as a ‘torchlight election’ at which Hitler would benefit from the legitimacy of being in office and from control of the broadcast media, which he had already begun to misuse.165 In another dispatch on the same day, Rumbold described the dissolution obtained in Prussia. There the power to dissolve was vested in a committee of three members, one of them the President of the State Council, Konrad Adenauer, a Centre party representative and later post-war Prime Minister. After the Committee refused to dissolve, Hindenburg granted a decree setting aside a Supreme Court decision recognising its powers, and by replacing the Social Democrat Braun with the ever-helpful Von Papen secured a majority on it.166 On February 24, Rumbold commented to Neurath about a circular issued by Goering to the police telling them to shoot first and enquire afterwards: ‘This order should compare favourably with those issued during the reign of the Emperor Alexander III. In present circumstances there is one law for the Nazis and Nationalists and another for all the other parties.’167 The same dispatch noted that all communist deputies and officials had been arrested, that Bruning had been denied access to the radio, and that the social democratic press had been suspended for a fortnight: Hitler, Papen and Hugenberg confine their energies for the moment to the destruction of popular liberties and the abolition of representative government in this country . . . .the forces of reaction are ruling this country with an irresponsibility and a frivolous disregard for all decent feeling that is unprecedented in its history . . . ousting hundreds of Prussian and Reich officials from their posts for no other crime than the holding of political views to which they are constitutionally entitled. A caution against political purges of a civil service. Respect for bureaucratic con-

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servatism was an attribute shared by all our subjects; we may recall Einstein’s writing on Tudor state-building and Sforza’s reluctance to carry epuration of fascists beyond the most prominent officials; Inönü’s party was and remains the party of the heirs to the Ottoman bureaucracy. On the eve of the next election, March 5, there were rumours ‘that a massacre of the Jews. and the leading Marxist politicians might take place’, leading to a protest by Rumbold to the German Foreign Office.168 On March 1, Vansittart minuted on a Rumbold dispatch of February 22: Either the wild men will overcome the intelligentsia (and the Communists). Then another European war will be within measurable distance. Or else they will fail . . . Then there will be worse political chaos from which the Communists are more likely to emerge in strength than the intelligentsia. The senile President at least is unlikely to do anything to put [the Nazis] out.169 On March 7, Rumbold reported on the election, stressing the failure of the Right to obtain a two-thirds majority either in the nation or in Prussia170 In March, Rumbold wrote to Geoffrey Knox, the former British Commissioner in the Saar: ‘No man can appeal year in and year out to the emotions and passions of immature and ignorant youths without raising a kind of Frankenstein . . . a movement like that unless it is constantly stoked up like a fire is apt to die down.’ Hitler benefited from a ‘favourable concatenation of circumstances. There is the American crisis, which puts America out of action for the moment, while in France a left government is in power.’171 On March 15, Rumbold described the complete destruction of state autonomy: ‘The ease with which one-half the population of the country were suddenly deprived of the right of speech, the right to read and, one might almost say, the right to think, is decidedly instructive.’172 On March 21, Rumbold described a ceremony at Potsdam, featuring the Reich Commissioners who had displaced the state executives: ‘The spirit of Weimar had yielded to the spirit of Potsdam.’173 Rumbold ascribed the passage of the Enabling Bill to physical intimidation of the leaders of the Centre Party; the bargain giving rise to the Concordat was not yet publicly visible. On March 28, a lengthy dispatch discussed the background of anti-semitism and the systematic removal of Jews from the public services,174 supplemented by another on April 5.175 On March 29, he reported: These people are mad. They announce a boycott of everything Jewish as from April 1st . . . Nothing is more remarkable than the way in which the Centre have come to heel and the Social Democrats have collapsed. There is no apparent sign of resistance anywhere. All this confirms the general belief that the German only respects force and expects kicks . . . I now feel that we are getting back to the pre-war atmosphere and mentality.176 On April 10, he noted to Lady Oxford that: ‘Doctors are nervous of attending Nazi victims.’177

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On April 11, he described the scene when the enabling law was adopted with ‘a row of Nazis evidently prepared to seize and remove at a moment’s notice any member of the Social Democratic party who said anything objectionable . . . Herr Wels [the SD leader] made his speech in a cringing and deprecatory manner.’ (Wels’s speech for all its defeatism nonetheless was not without eloquence: ‘You can take our lives and our freedom, but you cannot take our honour. We are defenceless but not honourless.’) Rumbold wrote of ‘a mean spirit of revenge, brutality amounting in many cases to bestiality, and complete ruthlessness . . . Hitler and Goering’s efforts will be concentrated on creating a Wehrstaat.’178 Two days later, he noted ‘the establishment of concentration camps on a wholesale scale . . . a new departure in civilized countries.’179 By April 26, in Rumbold’s view, the Nazi consolidation of power was complete: ‘Sooner or later, especially if the President dies, the Reichswehr may be expected to throw in their lot with the present regime.’ On April 26, Rumbold sent the British government a long dispatch, colloquially referred to as the ‘Mein Kampf dispatch’, outlining his view of Hitler’s plans: Man is a fighting animal . . . the fighting capacity of a race depends on its purity . . . The Jewish race, owing to its universality, is of necessity pacifist and internationalist . . . The ultimate aim of education is to produce a German who can be converted with a minimum of training into a soldier . . . Someone has aptly said that nationalism is the illegitimate offspring of patriotism by inferiority complex. Nor was this all. Rumbold also predicted that: They may be expected to lull the outer world into a sense of security . . . Goebbels [is] a man of infinite resource and invention . . . Germany’s lost provinces can be regained . . . only by force of arms . . . Germany must not repeat the mistake of fighting all of her enemies at once . . . .the new Germany must look for expansion to Russia and especially to the Baltic States . . . it will be much easier in the future to observe secrecy in the factories and workshops . . . they have to lull their adversaries into such a state of coma that they will allow themselves to be engaged one by one.180 The dispatch was circulated to the Cabinet, including MacDonald and Chamberlain,181 together with an emphatic minute by Vansittart: The present regime in Germany will on past and present form, loose off another European war just so soon as it feels strong enough. Their only fear is that they may be attacked before they are ready. Meanwhile it will endeavour to cog and lull us so as better to eat the artichoke leaf by leaf. This is crude; but we are considering very crude people, who have few ideas in their noodles but brute force, militarism, and hot air to these ends . . . the end being war for Hitler’s fighting man. This crude barbarism which denies all liberty may of course

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DIPLOMACY BETWEEN THE WARS change its idea. I don’t believe that it will. Men are not likely to change their ideas when they enjoy a complete monopoly of power and are surrounded by nothing but yes-men [an insight lost on those who deprecate the separation of powers]. The conclusion is that if we wish to avoid the disaster for which Hitlerism is working (in the first of the “Old Adam” series three years ago I described it as “ridiculously dangerous”) we must keep as close as possible to the United States, to France, and if possible to Italy, and bring the last two together. Meanwhile, let us be deceived by no professions of German harmlessness. We have had our lesson, and this dispatch is another.182

It was still classified as secret in 1936, when the second-ranking permanent official in the Foreign Office, Ralph Wigram, made a copy available to Winston Churchill with an admonition to quote only from the quotations from Mein Kampf,183 of which Rumbold said: ‘He [Hitler] would probably be glad to suppress every copy extant today.’ Later in a letter to the appeaser Lord Londonderry, Rumbold decried the ‘lamentably poor translation [of Mein Kampf] . . . the passages calculated to antagonize us have been omitted.’184 Because of copyright problems, an unexpurgated translation of Mein Kampf was not published in English until 1939.185 On May 11, 1933, Rumbold had his first and only formal meeting with Hitler, and protested against the Jewish persecutions, which Rumbold said had ‘forfeited’ British sympathy for Germany.186 Timothy Breen, the British Embassy press attaché, said of Rumbold: ‘I do not remember to have seen him in a temper until his first interview with Hitler. He came back with a very red face.’187 Philip Conwell-Evans reported that: ‘It was rumoured that the Chancellor, Hitler, shrinking before Rumbold’s vigorous protests against the persecution of the Jews, took refuge in hysterical bawling with his hair falling over his eyebrows.’188 In a dispatch to the Foreign Office describing the meeting, Rumbold said that Hitler ‘is a fanatic on the subject. Herr Hitler is himself responsible for the anti-Jewish policy of the German government.’ Asked about the conscription of labour and the three daily hours of military training given to conscripts, Hitler rejoined: ‘I could not allow so much human material to run to seed and become demoralized.’ Elsewhere, Hitler’s reaction to Rumbold was described as one of ‘hysterical frenzy’.189 Rumbold gave a copy of his protest to Foreign Minister Von Neurath, at Hitler’s request, leading to a temporary moderation in the government’s anti-Semitic rhetoric. The German memorandum of this meeting, at which only Hitler, Rumbold and Foreign Minister Neurath were present, relates that Rumbold declared that: A great deal of interest had been shown even for the revisionist aspirations, especially for the question of the Polish corridor. Now that has all vanished again. The reason for this was found in the English concept of the freedom of the individual and consideration for foreign races. Hitler is said to have declared that ‘his fight was only against communism’. The Ambassador then complained that on May 1 at Templehof he had seen uniformed

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young men ‘equivalent in number to about eight army corps . . . Germany had a reserve army ready for commitment at any time.’ Hitler denied there was a reserve army or that there had been such large numbers at the event. ‘The Ambassador then read a telegram from someone which admonished Germany didactically and pharasaically to be calm and patient. The Chancellor said that he would answer these statements personally in writing and therefore asked for a copy from the Ambassador.’190 Vansittart minuted on another Rumbold dispatch of May 10: On this view, there are three possibilities in the future of Germany. One collapse of Hitler through economic failure, followed by either a military dictatorship (which might well be short-lived) or Bolshevism. Two: success of Hitler, followed by a European war in four or five years’ time. Three: a preventive war on Germany, before Germany is strong enough to attack anyone else, as she will be if Hitler succeeds. This would undoubtedly rally the country to Hitler as Sir H. Rumbold says, but would at present rally it in vain – which he does not say. And if the rally were in vain the consequences might well slide off into either of those described under one. These are singularly uninviting alternatives. Four days later, Vansittart added: I don’t think [Bolshevism] probable. I have also always thought that the national character as a whole and its strong middle class were a complete safeguard. I never believed in any Communist danger even when there were 6 or 7 million Communist voters. Reactions are sometimes sharp and unreasoning – especially in times of chaos – and there have been migrations between Naziism and Communism in the past . . . The odds however are the important point – in the event of failure, i.e. economic failure which is more than possible, even if it is not assisted from outside.191 On May 30, Rumbold predicted: ‘I doubt if he will risk complications with the outer world for a long-time to come.’ Hitler, in his table-talk during the war, paid tribute to Rumbold in characteristic terms: ‘The apparition of Sir Rumbold, the Ambassador of Great Britain, wrapped permanently in the haze of intoxication. This latter was succeeded by a complete thug, Sir Phipps. In this gallery of valorous diplomats it is Sir Henderson, the last of the British Ambassadors, who left the most favourable impression on me.’192 On June 28, three days before his departure, Rumbold wrote: ‘Many of us here feel as if we were living in a lunatic asylum.’193 His last dispatch, on June 30, concluded: The persons directing the policy of the Hitler Government are not normal . . . fanatics, hooligans and eccentrics have got the upper hand and there is certainly an element of hysteria in the policy and actions of the Hitler regime . . . All

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DIPLOMACY BETWEEN THE WARS three are notorious pathological cases, Hitler and Goering as a result of wounds and hardship in the war, Goebbels as a result of a physical defect and neglect in childhood. Goebbels . . . a demagogue of the worst type. His speeches are often positively criminal . . . patience for eight years then the “foreign political activity” of the Hitler regime will begin . . . So long as the Reichswehr and the police stood aside, the opponents of the present regime are powerless against Hitler’s storm troops.194

Earlier, he had reached similar conclusions about Schacht and Ludendorff.195 Robert Vansittart of the Foreign Office summarised his German dispatches by saying: ‘Little escaped him and his warnings were clearer than those we got later. They began in that silken fashion that disturbs no weekends; they even made initial allowance, but they gathered volume. By April’s end he had alarmed himself and given time might have frightened the cabinet had he not passed the age limit . . . Rumbold’s last dispatch would have been more helpful had it not ended in an escape clause grasped by faineance; “not that there is any hostility to Great Britain on the German side”, thus weakening impact in his last stride.’ On this, Vansittart minuted: We cannot take the same detached and highbrow view of Hitlerism as we can of Bolshevism or Fascism precisely because these are not really and vitally dangerous to us and Hitlerism is exceedingly dangerous. Fascism has never presented the least danger to this country and Russia has been too incompetent a country to be really dangerous even under Bolshevism. But Germany is an exceedingly competent country and she is visibly being prepared for external aggression. I do not think that anything but evil and danger to the rest of the world can come out of Hitlerism whichever way the dice fall in Germany.196 This ability to distinguish between evanescent threats of criminal gangs and those backed by powerful states has not been evident in the conduct of the so-called ‘war on terror’. Vansittart wrote, with some exaggeration: ‘Rumbold came home and was forgotten until newspapers noticed his death.’197 His memoranda outlived his tenure in Berlin; the Cabinet Secretary, Hankey, on October 24, 1933, circulated to the cabinet a paper including excerpts from Rumbold’s Mein Kampf memorandum and his descriptions of the SS and SA, along with Rumbold’s summary statement that ‘since Hitler’s advent nationalism has become exacerbated into militarism.’198 Earlier in the same month Hankey, Vansittart and Warren Fisher had composed a joint cabinet memorandum of their own, citing Rumbold and sounding his themes.199 Nevile Henderson, Rumbold’s disastrous successor in Berlin after the intervening tenure of Eric Phipps, paid generous tribute to his performance as Ambassador, referring to him as ‘that sterling and typical Britisher . . . It is not often that we put round pegs into round holes, and if by chance we do, we always seem to remove them as soon as possible . . . he was only 64 when he was retired . . . the rule whereby no diplomat should get a new post after he is sixty is excellent in principle but it should be very elastic in practice . . . Someone, I think it was Disraeli said that the British

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Empire would eventually fall “because Buggins is a good fellow and it is his turn next”.’200 This turned out to be more than a figure of speech. The regulations that did in Rumbold were not only the age limit on new appointments but a provision in the Regulations for Diplomatic Service that: ‘The durations of the appointments of Heads of Missions shall not exceed, though it may be less than, five years.’201 Rumbold did not ask for a prolongation although the Ambassador in Paris, Tyrrell, had received one; ‘It would have been somewhat humiliating to be turned down, besides which I have had a very good innings and have nothing to complain of.’202 This reticence reflected his personal code; several years earlier, he had remarked: ‘It is curious how few men who have played a big part in this world know how to retire from political life with dignity.’203 On March 11, Rumbold informed his mother that he was advised by Simon that he would not be prolonged or given a new post.204 Although Phipps, unlike Henderson, was an anti-appeaser, his dispatches were said to be characterised by ‘Too much wit and not enough warning’.205 Another noted appeaser, Samuel Hoare, contrasted Henderson with ‘Horace Rumbold, whose imperturbable manner and appearance gave all the greater weight to his solid advice. What [Henderson] lacked was a very necessary measure of British phlegm.’206 In early 1934, in an editorial on ‘Loss of Ambassadors’, The Times acclaimed Rumbold’s tenure in Berlin as ‘beyond praise’.207 Prior to his departure from Berlin, he wrote to Phipps: I spend several hours a day reading the press, reports, etc and I sometimes get a kind of indigestion from that sort of literature. I leave Berlin with a sense of depression or rather deception . . . the work on which I have been engaged for the last four or five years is, so to speak, on the scrapheap . . . The Hitler government managed to scrap all this within a fortnight. You may be able to bring a more detached attitude of mind to bear on German events . . . if events develop normally here in the sense of Hitler evolving along much the same lines as Fascism in Italy, you will no doubt succeed in time in repeating with Hitler Graham’s success with Mussolini. Hitler is only too anxious to stand well with England . . . François-Poncet is a live wire and is always interesting to talk to. He came here thinking he could achieve lightning results but he was speedily undeceived and is a wiser and perhaps slightly sadder man. The Nuncio [Pacelli, later Pope Pius XII] and I are on particularly good terms . . . [he] is more the priest than the statesman, but he is shrewd.208 Rumbold in all his postings made maximum and exemplary use of ‘open intelligence’ and in his negotiations at Lausanne of secret intelligence also. Later Warnings After retirement, he visited Ceylon for six months, staying at the inherited tea plantation that was his chief source of income. He was awarded the Grand Cross of

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the Order of the Bath, but to his disappointment was not offered a peerage, so that he might have spoken in the House of Lords: I can’t help feeling that the way in which this honour has been offered to me is rather curious and looks as if the powers that be were not altogether sure of themselves. But, being so far away, I can do nothing about the matter.209 He continued to sound warnings to his former colleagues in the Foreign Office. In June 1934, he reported on a meeting with former Chancellor Bruning, in which Bruning expressed the view that: The men who are supporting the Hitler movement, i.e. men between the ages of 23 and 33 are not normal. Their nerves have gone as a result of the privations to which they and their mothers were exposed during the war and they are unduly emotional.210 In June 1934 after the ‘night of the long knives’, Bruning wrote to him: ‘Just the [Marburg] speech [of Von Papen} without an agreed action of the President and the army to follow it immediately was a terrible blunder.’211 In July, his reaction to the Hoare-Laval Pact, with its ‘corridor for camels’ was to declare that: ‘[He] had never before felt so disturbed and humiliated.212 When these so-called peace proposals come to be illustrated in map form they will certainly arouse increased criticism and hostility.’213 In this, he parted with Vansittart, who saw the proposals as a way to bind Italy to France and England, and their failure as leading to the loss of both Abyssinia and Austria, and who was concerned about the unpreparedness and vulnerability of the British fleet; Einstein regarded the proposal as the product of the same cause: naval weakness in the Mediterranean. In this period, Rumbold advised Anthony Eden that: The unreliability of the Italians is historical and is increased in the present day by their being in the grip of a man responsible only to himself and subject to rushes of blood to the head. If he wants to stand well with us, he should give proof of his good intentions by liquidating his Spanish adventure . . . there is a race between the gangster or aggressive states and the big democracies in the sense that the former are trying and will try to get away with as much as they can before the democracies are strong enough to call a halt.214 Refugees and Palestine In October 1935 he was named by Anthony Eden to serve on a League of Nations Committee on Refugees, which issued a report on 3 January 1936 urging governments to cooperate in resettlement of the German refugees, who by then numbered more than 100,000; urged that they be protected in the nations to which they fled; and urged that they become citizens of the countries in which they settled, thus causing their children

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to be ‘spared the hardships of exile’.215 The neglect by both the refugees and British government of this advice resulted in the temporary internment of many refugees as enemy aliens on the outbreak of World War II. In June 1936, Rumbold warned Geoffrey Dawson of The Times, a supporter of appeasement, that: ‘Germans have a streak of brutality which is quite absent in the ordinary Englishman. Once he embarks [in Central or Eastern Europe] war is, to my mind, a dead certainty.’216 In December 1936, he joined in a fund-raising appeal for distressed civilians in Spain.217 In 1936, at the age of 67, Rumbold was named Vice Chairman of the Royal Commission on Palestine. He had been considered for the chairmanship, but it was felt that a Royal Commission should be presided over by a Peer, so that Lord Peel was appointed. In recommending him, William Ormsby-Gore, the Colonial Secretary, described him as ‘much the wisest and sanest of our former Ambassadors . . . the sort of man who is never rattled and will calm down the somewhat emotional and excitable character of witnesses and others after the tension created by the disturbances in Palestine’.218 A young diplomat who knew him at this time observed that: ‘His bland and impassive face gave the unwary an impression almost of stupidity.’ It was said that his dossier at the Quai d’Orsay began “malgré son air idiot”.’ Harold Nicolson observed of him: He would listen unimpressed and unresponsive and some brilliant conversationalist would pause in his discourse wondering whether the Ambassador really understood. Sir Horace always understood. He understood not merely what was being said and why it was being said but what relation even the most gifted sentence bore to reality.219 In November 1939, Nicolson noted that Rumbold sat impassively through a forecast that Hitler, Italy and Spain planned an air and sea offensive that would bring Britain to its knees by July 1940: ‘Horace Rumbold listens to all this with a glassy stare and his mouth half-open. When Steed has finished, he drops his eyeglass suddenly. “Bilge,” he says.’220 Elsewhere, Nicolson referred to the Rumbolds as ‘so perfect of their kind, and there are many worse kinds’; ‘a dear old thing, old Rumbie’; and ‘not the sort of person who would like to take Cyril out in a punt’; Lady Rumbold was ‘in every respect the perfect Ambassadress, dignified, unassuming, and infinitely kind’. When Nicolson retired, Rumbold publicly declared that the Foreign Office should have been able to keep him ‘had they possessed more imagination’, while observing to Nicolson that ‘being an Ambassador was anyway rather a bore, but that being a minister was hell’.221 ‘The irritating behaviour or characteristics of each party,’ Rumbold observed, ‘act as a check on any bias one might have in favour of Arabs or Jews.’222 In the course of the Commission’s hearings, Rumbold sharply interrogated Winston Churchill, who had been Colonial Secretary under Balfour, giving rise to outspoken testimony whose publication Churchill later suppressed: Rumbold: Is it not unjust to Palestinian Arabs? Churchill: The injustice is when those who lived in the country leave it to be

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Under the influence of one of its members, Professor Reginald Coupland, the Commission drifted toward partition as a solution; at the time Palestine contained by estimate in mid- 1936 940,000 Arabs and 370,000 Jews, 134,000 of whom had arrived since Hitler came to power. The 1931 census had shown 759,000 Moslems, 284,000 Jews and 91,000 Christians. The ultimate report recommended partition, with the Jews to receive most of the North, the Arabs to receive most of what is now the West Bank and the Negev, and the British to retain Jerusalem, Bethlehem, the port of Jaffa, and a corridor and railroad connecting them. In addition, Haifa, Acre, Tiberias and Safad in the Jewish area were to be under British administration for an indeterminate time because of their large Arab populations; Jaffa in the British area was to be part of the Arab state, with a joint port at Jaffa/Tel Aviv, and Aqaba was to remain British notwithstanding the inclusion of the Negev in the Arab state. A critic, Viscount Samuel, described the scheme as ‘a Saar, a Polish corridor, and half a dozen Danzigs and Memels into a country the size of Wales’. The Commission’s report, however, was a strikingly eloquent document, generous in recognising the case for a Jewish state:224 We cannot accept the view that the Mandatory, having facilitated the establishment of the National Home, would be justified in shutting its doors. Its economic life depends to a large extent, as we have shown, on further immigration; and a large amount of capital has been invested in it on the assumption that immigration would continue . . . the situation in Palestine is such that immigration must be reviewed and decided upon all considerations and not on economic considerations only. As a Report, it is to this day lauded even by Israel’s strongest sympathisers, acclaimed as a ‘lucid and impressive document’ by Conor Cruise O’ Brien225 and by Walter Laqueur as ‘an excellent, most competent and, on the whole, fair report, which to this day is perhaps the most reliable assessment of the situation in the 1930s, a model of precision’.226 Rumbold came to favour partition in principle, but was not happy about the scheme of partition set out in the report containing such glaring defects and features that I had to decide whether to split the Commission. I was disgusted at the way this particular scheme had been worked out behind my back. This was due to Coupland, an intriguing

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little professor. Peel – never a strong chairman – seemed to have abdicated any little authority he possessed, probably because cancer had got its grip on him, and I got no support from him. So I decided to sacrifice my convictions for the sake of getting unanimity. As I foresaw at the time, the critics of our report promptly fastened on the objectionable features of our scheme (not principle) of partition, such as the corridor from Jerusalem to Jaffa and the placing of 225,000 Arabs in the Jewish state as well as the compulsory exchange of populations. The fact-finding or technical commission will have to modify these objectionable features. I told Ormsby-Gore the foregoing – of course very confidentially.227 The partition scheme was encouraged by Leo Amery.228 The scheme was opposed by the Arabs; it was supported by some parliamentarians, including Anthony Eden, by then a back-bencher. The Jews were divided, the proposal gained the support of Weizmann, who favoured grasping it with both hands, but was opposed by Viscount Samuel, the former British Governor of Palestine, and Rabbi Stephen Wise, a leading American Zionist, and Justice Louis Brandeis,229 who Weizmann deemed ‘too old and too rigidly legalistic to be capable of change’.230 The 20th Zionist Congress voted 299 to 160 for a compromise resolution, supported by David Ben Gurion, ‘declar[ing] that the scheme of partition put forth by the Royal Commission is unacceptable [and] empowering the Executive to enter into negotiations with a view to ascertaining the precise terms of His Majesty’s Government for the proposed establishment of a Jewish state’.231 The less than farsighted Golda Meir opposed the plan, later conceding: ‘We were wrong, and BenGurion, in his greater wisdom, arguing that any state was better than none, was right.’232 In supporting the Peel proposal, Weizmann wisely declared: ‘It was not an ideal solution, but there was no ideal solution to any problem in the world – the temporary mandates should not be more than 2–3 years – a bold stroke of policy which might and [he] thought would lead to better times.’ From the standpoint of the Jews, the Report conferred one huge benefit, pointed out by Rumbold in a speech on it: it created a Jewish state ‘whose citizens will be able to admit as many Jews into it as they themselves believe can be absorbed’. Rumbold was also well aware of the pressures giving rise to the need for a sanctuary, referring not only to Hitler’s persecutions but to two less recognised causes: ‘drastic restrictions on immigration into the United States’, and economic pressures on Jews in Poland, whose Foreign Minister had declared that Poland had one million too many Jews.233 When the recommendations were debated in Parliament, they were supported by Amery, who pointed out that the Jews ‘would have their own flag, their own citizenship, their own defence forces, their own customs tariff, and they would be able to regulate immigration in their own interests’. Churchill conceded that the Report was a ‘magnificently written state document’; but an amendment sponsored by Churchill would have required further study and reference to the League Mandates Commission ‘in accordance with the policy’ of the Report; this was then further diluted by an amendment sponsored by Lloyd-George substituting the words ‘taking

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into full account’.234 The decisive opposition to the scheme was that voiced by Viscount Samuel, a Jew and a former Governor General of Palestine, in the House of Lords.235 Those sympathising with the Jews wanted the Negev and the Jewish quarter of Jerusalem for the Jewish state, a time limit for the British mandate over the mixed towns, and guarantees for the use of the power plants and potash concession on the Dead Sea. Those sympathising with the Arabs pointed out that the Jewish state outlined in the report contained 225,000 Arabs and only 258,000 Jews, and suggested that the northern Galilee and Acre be given to the Arabs. The Government showed weakness in accepting the amendments; the speech by Lord Dufferin presenting the Report to the Lords was also considered weak. Lord Reading, a Jew and former Lord Chief Justice, did not win the plaudits of history for a declaration that he preferred ‘justice delayed to injustice accelerated’; he conceded that: ‘In Palestine lies the only hope for the future of a great many suffering Jews to whose fate we cannot be indifferent without earning the obloquy not only of our own people but of the whole of civilized mankind.’ The government issued a White Paper accepting the Commission’s recommendations in principle, while prohibiting land transactions inconsistent with the scheme and limiting Jewish immigration during a transitional period.236 Ensuing riots led to disenchantment with partition on the part of the government, which hinted that the Commission appointed to draw boundaries should bury the scheme,237 and gave it a frame of reference requiring the minimisation of minorities within each state and the creation of economically self-supporting states.238 A Palestine Partition Commission, appointed on the Peel Commission’s recommendations, then declined either to endorse the report or to propose alternatives, finding that the Arab state would not be economically self-supporting.239 The plan favoured by most of the commissioners would have provided for an even smaller Jewish state than that proposed in the Peel report by continuing a mandate over portions of north Galilee with a predominantly Arab population; in a concession to the Jews, most of the Negev, including a port on the Mediterranean, would have been preserved as a mandate and opened to Jewish immigration instead of being included in the Arab state, and there would also be an additional small Jewish enclave south of Tel Aviv. In December 1937, the British government, faced by mounting violence, decided to retain the mandate and reject the Peel recommendations,240 leading Rumbold to declare that: ‘All of us wasted 10 months of our time.’ By February 1939, Rumbold believe[d] that the government will have to take refuge in some form of cantonisation. I feel very disgusted with the whole business and all the more so as I heard – less than a fortnight ago – from the best source of a gross act of disloyalty on the part of one of the members of the Royal Commission – before we left Jerusalem.241 This was almost certainly a reference to Coupland’s meeting with Weizmann in January 1937.242 By March 1939, he noted that with ‘the cowardice and folly of the

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government in the Palestine question . . . the cup is full. With few exceptions, the government are a wretched pack.’243 In May 1939, the government issued its notorious White Paper, under the pressure of a looming war, requiring Arab support, burying proposals for federal and cantonal solutions as well as partition, limiting Jewish immigration to 50,000 over a five-year period, and prohibiting it thereafter.244 John Martin, a junior diplomat attached to the Commission, pointed out that despite Rumbold’s view, the Peel Commission was not a total waste of time: the Peel Commission bequeathed to the future two legacies. First, there was the concept of partition which in one shape or another continued to find supporters and was of course an essential feature of the plan accepted by the UN in 1947. Second, although the Commission were not creators of the idea of a Judenstaat, they brought to the forefront with emphasis and authority the concept of the National Home as an independent sovereign state. It was not without reason that Weizmann exclaimed ‘Today we have laid the foundations of the Jewish State’.245 In May 1939, the British White Paper designed to conciliate the Arabs in anticipation of the outbreak of war limited Jewish immigration. A letter to the London Times signed by Rumbold and the other surviving Peel Commissioners urged a federal solution with territorial rather than numerical limits on Jewish immigration: ‘A unitary state coupled with the cessation of immigration does not . . . eliminate the fear of domination, it only transfers it from Arab minds to Jewish.’ The letter also suggested extending the federal plan into Jordan and perhaps even Syria.246 This scheme was belatedly supported by Viscount Samuel and by The Times: ‘The stock financial argument against partition is untenable if its expense is regarded as insurance against further costly strife in the Holy Land.’247 In the summer of 1939 Rumbold agreed to serve as British Chairman of the Coordinating Foundation, which was set up in an effort to comply with a suggestion by Hitler for the ransoming of Jews held in Germany. On 1 August, the new body met; on 8 August, Rumbold persuaded former Belgian Prime Minister Paul Van Zeeland to be its chairman. The project foundered with the outbreak of war,248 when it was brought to nought; it contemplated emigration ‘into countries to be declared suitable by an International Commission’; a rather thorough report issued by the British government in May 1939 had found areas of British Guiana suitable for settlement and had recommended an experimental colony of 5,000 people.249 Munich and After In June 1937, Rumbold was considered for appointment as Director of the British Council, along with De La Warr, the Foreign Office assertedly favouring them as a means of asserting Foreign Office control over the Council; in the final event, the appointment went to the articulate imperialist Lord Lloyd.250 In November 1937,

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when the Foreign Minister, Lord Halifax, went to visit Hitler, Rumbold sent him a copy of Stephen Roberts’ The House that Hitler Built, containing what Rumbold felt was an ‘admirable’ character sketch of Hitler.251 In March 1938, Rumbold’s Mein Kampf dispatch was sent to Chamberlain’s adviser Sir Horace Wilson, by Sir Maurice Hankey, former head of the civil service.252 In April 1938, Rumbold took the unusual step of writing a letter to the London Times correcting a false claim by Henderson that his was the first visit by a British diplomat to Hamburg since the war. Rumbold explained to his son: ‘Henderson will probably be annoyed but I don’t care two hoots for him. Halifax now knows my views about Ribbentrop, Henderson, the German demand for the colonies, etc.’253 During the Munich negotiations, Rumbold predicted: ‘The next victims will be the Lithuanians (Memel) and then the Poles . . . In fact we will never have peace until the Nazi regime crashes, either as a result of an unsuccessful war for Germany, or an internal revolution in that country.’254 ‘A settlement in Czechoslovakia will only be a temporary one for when Czechoslovakia is completely “abgeriegelt” from France on land by the fortifications being constructed on Germany’s Western frontier the Germans will probably fall on the Czechs.’255 On September 6, Rumbold was still hopeful that Hitler’s bluff would be called: ‘Germany isn’t as strong in relation to the rest of Europe as she was in 1914 . . . the Czechs have a very fine and splendidly equipped army.’256 On June 7, 1938, an aide to Eden noted that Eden had ‘been staying in the same house as Rumbold who was most outspoken in his criticism of the government’s handling of Spain and Germany’; three days later, Eden gave a much-publicised speech at Leamington Spa seeking to dispel optimism and calling for national unity and a more robust foreign policy.257 By September 21, Rumbold was less sanguine: We must face the fact that Hitler is now practically the Dictator of Europe and can do what he likes. There is nobody to stop him. I infer that thanks to Baldwin and Chamberlain and their predecessors we are far from ready to repel a German air attack . . . But I have not got this from a direct source; it is the only way I can explain Chamberlain’s policy.258 Munich left him ‘profoundly humiliated and depressed . . . it will be a bad and only temporary peace. I doubt whether Chamberlain and the government yet realize the nature of the man with whom they are dealing and his ultimate ambitions.’259 On October 2, Lady Rumbold noted: ‘If five years ago more attention had been paid to Daddy’s warning last dispatch from Berlin they would have been more prepared in their armaments. He feels it quite dreadfully and is in a very despondent mood.’260 On October 5, Rumbold wrote: ‘All we can do now is to speed up armaments and make ourselves immensely strong. We shall then be able to talk with the enemy in the gate.’261 In February 1939 Rumbold, while vacationing in the south of France, had a round of golf with another of our protaganists, Lewis Einstein, before a luncheon with Einstein and his wife, their conversation being unrecorded.262

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On the night after the German occupation of the rump of Czechoslovakia, 16 March, 1939, Rumbold dined at Grillions Club with Churchill and others. On the following day, he sent a six-page handwritten letter to Churchill.263 He predicted that: ‘The northern gangster will go for Memel next and his fellow brigand in the south will try for Albania.’ He suggested that the British withdraw their Ambassador at Berlin as the Americans had done. ‘It was some relief to my feelings to pour out my bitterness to you.’ Memel was seized on March 23, Albania on April 7. Churchill responded on 19 March: ‘It seems to me that Hitler will not stop short of the Black Sea unless arrested by the threat of a general war, or by actual hostilities.’ 264 On 28 March, Rumbold predicted to Halifax that if checked, Hitler might ‘well risk a gambler’s throw and provoke a general war’. He had told Halifax that the ‘Poles are quite right to require binding promises of support from us before definitively going into opposition to Germany’. On 6 April, he reported to his son that he had told Halifax that the new policy of guarantees ‘was the only possible one’, but that Hitler’s economic difficulties and his perception that the West was getting stronger might nonetheless cause him to plunge into war.265 On July 1, he commended Halifax for warning Hitler, but predicted this would have no effect.266 By 21 August, he regarded war as inevitable: ‘It is very difficult for [Hitler] to draw back as he would lose so much prestige in the party.’267 Sforza likewise commented on the difficult position of dictators who cannot readily quell the passions they raised: democratic war leaders have the same problem. In April 1939, commenting on Munich, Rumbold expressed the view that: ‘The Russians would certainly have done something to help [the Czechs] from the start. The Germans thought that the Czechs unaided could hold out for some weeks; the Czechs themselves said for six months. How stupid of Poles, Czechs, and Slovaks not to have come together years ago in a strong federation or alliance. Hitler’s paranoia was rapidly getting worse.’268 After the Stalin-Hitler pact and the attack on Poland, Rumbold observed: ‘I shouldn’t be in the least surprised to see a combination of the 3 Dictators Stalin, Hitler and Mussolini against the Democracies, Japan might join in and I wouldn’t bank too strongly on Turkey.’269 Rumbold had been appointed to preside over a Black List Committee for the Board of Economic Warfare,270 and in addition sought to organise German refugees to oppose the Hitler regime as a member of a small committee, including among its members Harold Nicolson, Wickham Steed, Duff Cooper and R.W. SetonWatson.271 ‘It is a great satisfaction to be actively helping to ruin German trade.’272 The refugee committee ‘was in a state of suspended animation, these political émigrés are in a difficult position’.273 The Foreign Office had urged a go-slow approach, leading Rumbold to reflect bitterly in August 1940, when controversy had been caused by the detention of thousands of enemy aliens, many of them Jewish refugees, that: ‘If the work of our committee had not been blocked last autumn and winter all this damnable scandal and a good many suicides might have been avoided.’ 274 On September 28, 1939, he accurately predicted that: ‘The

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Russians will eventually, sooner rather than later – seize or proclaim a protectorate over the Baltic States and take Besserabia from Rumania.’ The refugee committee sought to enlist disenchanted ex-Nazis like Otto Strasser and Hermann Rauschning, whose book Rumbold considered to be ‘the best book that has been written on National Socialism.’275 In March 1940, he wrote to his successor in Berlin, Neville Henderson, commenting on the latter’s book Failure of a Mission and observing: ‘If Baldwin had resigned on the question of rearmament the resignation of a Government with such an overwhelming majority would have produced an immense effect.’276 In December 1940 consideration was given to sending Rumbold to Washington as Ambassador. Churchill named Halifax instead, a move which served to remove from the country the most prominent potential advocate of a negotiated peace with Hitler.277 Rumbold was taken ill with heart trouble in April 1941 and resigned from the Black List Committee; he died on May 24, 1941.278 Horace Rumbold was described by Anthony Eden as ‘the greatest of our Ambassadors in my experience’.279 and by Harold Nicolson as ‘the perfect diplomatist’; Nicolson’s condolence letter observed: ‘In his presence all mean things seemed to shrivel and all decent things to expand – no two people could have given such an example as you and he.’ His successor, Eric Phipps observed: ‘He never sought those limelight effects that momentarily flatter but ultimately consume the reputation of a public servant.’280 The letter that meant most to his family was that from former Chancellor Bruning: ‘I am sure that if he could have remained longer at his post as British Ambassador in Berlin the whole trend of politics would have been different and many of the terrible events through which the world is passing could have been avoided.’281 The memorial service at St. Mary’s Westminster six days after his death was without eulogies; the readings were Psalm 15 and Revelation 21, 1–7; as at Churchill’s funeral, ‘Fight the good fight’ was the closing hymn, preceded by what may be the only hymn in the Anglican hymnal composed by a fellow British Ambassador, Cecil Spring-Rice: I vow to thee, my country, all earthly things above Entire and whole and perfect, the service of my love The love that asks no question, the love that stands the test That lays upon the altar the dearest and the best The love that never falters, the love that pays the price The love that makes undaunted the final sacrifice His widow died in 1952; his son, who was active in the Oxford Union,282 served in the India Office 283 and later in the Washington Embassy, where Isaiah Berlin regarded him as ‘much the most intelligent of my colleagues’,284 as private secretary to Eden and Macmillan (1954–55), British Minister in Paris (1960–63), and Ambassador to Thailand (1965–67) and to Austria (1967–70).285 He ended his career in 1970, concluding 121 years of diplomatic service by three generations of Rumbolds.286

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3 COUNT JOHANN BERNSTORFF

Count Johann Bernstorff was born at the Prussian Legation in London in 1862, and spent his first ten years in that formative environment. The journalist Frank Harris on meeting him noted that: He looked more English than German. His clothes were English and wonder of wonders he spoke English with hardly a trace of accent or hesitancy – careless, good English, like his clothes. His courtesy too was English, a little off-hand but tinged with a certain sincerity.1 Because his older brother, himself a diplomat, was temporarily out of favour with Bismarck, he was unable to enter the diplomatic service immediately after completion of his education at Ratzeburg in Holstein, and therefore spent nine years as a garde officer in the First Garde Field Artillery Regiment. His colonel was not fond of him, and nominated him as his regiment’s representative in the diplomatic service; he accepted: ‘The army in time of peace offers but a poor career.’2 His father Albrecht Von Bernstorff, who managed always to remain on good terms with Bismarck, had been Prussian Ambassador to Britain, and was a former Prime Minister of Prussia. Johann Bernstorff was married to Jeanne Luckemayer, the daughter of a New York silk merchant of German descent, in 1887, after becoming engaged at Hampton Court. She inherited approximately half of $2.5 million from her father’s estate, which was seized by the American Alien Property Custodian in 1917 and returned to her in 1921. When Bernstorff’s brother and Bismarck were reconciled, he entered the diplomatic service in 1890 at the age of 28 as an attaché in Constantinople, becoming a secretary in Belgrade in 1892, in Dresden in 1894 and in St. Petersburg in 1896. He was then counsellor at Munich in 1898 and at London in 1903. While he was in London, he became a favourite of the Kaiser, who found the Ambassador’s reports dull, and relied on Bernstorff’s reports for news of society. 3 His first independent appointment was as consul general in Cairo in 1906; from there he was appointed Ambassador at Washington in 1908, not without opposition, but by reason of the Kaiser’s view that he was ‘more capable and popular than “Specki” [Speck von Sternberg, Bernstorff’s predecessor at Washington]’. Both Bernstorff and Speck represented departures from the rule making service as a minister a prerquisite

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to an ambassadorship.4 He served there until the outbreak of war with the United States in 1917. Bernstorff’s claim on history is that of a Cassandra. He clearly saw the flaws of Wilhelmine society and the error of German naval expansion. He did his utmost to keep America out of the First World War and to foster a negotiated peace in a war that Germany could not win. In his less well-known career after the war, he tried as a member of the Reichstag to help build a democratic parliamentary system, helped foster a Jewish home in Palestine by supporting the Zionist movement (but not its nationalist pretensions), and as German delegate to the Preparatory Disarmament Conference sought peaceful revision of the disarmament and reparations provisions of the Versailles treaty, as a way of drawing the teeth of a destructive German nationalism. Early Career In Constantinople, he found the Sultan to be ‘one of the ablest diplomatists, and worst rulers, of the age . . . Old and decaying empires are apt to collapse when the hand of reform is laid upon them’,5 a view he shared with Lewis Einstein. He considered that Bismarck would have maintained the Re-insurance Treaty with Russia, and, if it failed, would have turned to England, a course which German naval development rendered impossible. In his general view, in 1914, ‘the French lust for revenge, and Pan-Slav expansion, had combined to precipitate war.’6 ‘Only a naval agreement could have prevented the World War.’7 This is not a fashionable view in Britain and America even today, although the late George Kennan wrote two books reflecting it, the first on the mistakes of Bismarck’s successors8 and the second on the pre-war French and Russian warmongers.9 Rumbold also regarded the German naval programme as the principal obstacle to peace. Bernstorff excused German aggression on the basis that: If we had known how strong we were, we should have smiled and waited for the attack. But no German knew the strength of Germany, and even the wisest heads got frightened. We are all moralists; we all feared that that the sudden growth of wealth and luxury had demoralized us and so were eager to prove ourselves and test our manhood.10 This statement confirms the accuracy of Rumbold’s characterisation of nationalism: patriotism plus inferiority complex. During his tenure at St. Petersburg, he witnessed the coronation of Czar Nicholas II, whom he regarded as ‘the colossus with the feet of clay’. When a thousand people were trampled to death in an accident on the coronation day, ‘the fact that the whole Court attended the ball at the French Embassy on the same evening’ showed its ‘callousness towards the sufferings of the people’.11 He observed that: Among other horrors and abortions, the World War was responsible for the introduction of propaganda . . . if the goods are poor, the firm and its advertisement will break down together . . . the best political propaganda,

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14. Count Bernstorff (Library of Congress)

equipped with wireless and every modern method, cannot transform a mistaken policy into a successful one.12 He found Cairo to be ‘one of the pleasantest posts I have ever had. The climate is ideal in winter . . . there is always blue sky in Cairo, and the colours of the sunset are such as have to be seen to be believed.’13 Rumbold also fondly remembered his early days

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in Cairo. He served during a period of rapprochement between Germany and Turkey, leading Lord Cromer to complain on his retirement as the de facto viceroy of Egypt: ‘This land of Egypt . . . owed him everything and at the first opportunity they took sides against him with the Turks.’14 In a controversial dispatch read and vigorously annotated by the Kaiser and written while Bernstorff was Councillor in London in 1904, he urged the Kaiser to encourage a royal visit to Germany by Edward VII: ‘It is surprising to note the extent to which, in political matters, our “practical Englishmen” are dominated by phrases.’ He urged gestures to make them ‘believe that the Germans had put off their desire for conquest and had become peaceful individuals. In exchange, we could afford to build a few more battleships, especially if they were not given too much publicity.’ Even the most rabid pan-German if he consults his intelligence [The E.[mperor] They have none! That is the great misfortune] must wish to conciliate British opinion. The object is now within our reach without the necessity of any political services to the Britons. If we then have to fight England for the sake of our power and expansion [The E.[mperor]:Necessary it is not] every hour by which the struggle is postponed is a gain for us. The might of the German people is continually increasing, whilst no one can live with his eyes open amongst the island people without realising that they have already reached their highest point [The E.[mperor]: Splendidly written]. This document, published after the First World War, made an indelible impression on Robert Vansittart, the passionately anti-German permanent head of the British Foreign Office in the 1930s, until he was ‘kicked upstairs’ by Chamberlain.15 In 1903, however, Bernstorff warned his government of British resentment of the German naval programme.16 His gifts as a propagandist were amply displayed in London, where he carried on an active correspondence with several editors, including Lucien Wolf of the Graphic, his articles being published without signature as from ‘A Correspondent’. Occasionally, he overplayed his hand, as with a proposed article on the Agadir crisis which led Wolf to protest that: It is quite a different matter when I am asked to put forward as English what is really a German opinion, and this is all the more inadmissible when, as in the present case, the opinion relates not to a question in which Germany is directly interested but to the relations of Great Britain with a third power.17 After the outbreak of war in 1914, Wolf sent the correspondence to the Foreign Office as showing that the Germans ‘intrigued against the “Entente” and through their official representatives in London, sought to mislead the British press.’18 In 1914, King George V is said to have declared that there were two German diplomats whom he would not accept as Ambassador, Kiderlen-Wachter and Bernstorff, who was ‘an intrigant and had an undistinguished American wife’.19

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The Washington he found was one which anticipated the conditions that now generally prevail in diplomacy. No one will be found to believe that politics can now be carried on in drawing rooms, at any rate not in drawing rooms where elegance plays any part . . . purely social relations proved worthless during the War because the so-called “Four Hundred” departed in a body into the enemy camp.20 The Chancellor at the time, Bethmann-Hellweg, ‘was not a statesman of herculean strength, and only such a one could have broken down the German system of military predominance’.21 General de Gaulle’s assessment of Bethmann was the same: ‘A character abased, a heart made vile, refused to serve with courage a mind that remained lucid.’22 Bernstorff’s first years as Ambassador were easier. On his arrival in 1908, Theodore Roosevelt wrote to the Kaiser that: ‘I was much pleased with your new Ambassador. He is evidently an able man.’23 Interviewed in 1911 after LloydGeorge’s provocative ‘Mansion House’ speech, which Churchill in his World Crisis said ‘brought us to the very verge of war’. Bernstorff declared that: ‘Germans of all classes are convinced that England’s hostility to Germany is deep-seated and irremovable.’ He claimed that while he was dining with Kaiser Wilhelm the Kaiser declared that: ‘The speech was as provocative an affront to German honour as was the telegram of Napoleon III which precipitated the Franco-German war . . . Germany will not consent to permanent acknowledgement of British naval supremacy.’ In an interview with one of Northcliffe’s reporters Bernstorff described the powers as ‘two bulldogs which were perpetually barking at each other and would continue to bark until one of them flew at the other’s throat’.24 In 1911, Bernstorff observed: No one believed England would be true to the [Anglo-Japanese] alliance if put to the test by an American-Japanese conflict . . . In the last ten years England has given in to the US with such zealous servility that they do not count on any British power of resistance. People are asking themselves if this British servility is a paying proposition. In my humble opinion, it is not. Its main object – that of ranging the US against Germany – will not be attained for a very long time, and probably never . . . England will have to continue following in America’s train and become Japan’s enemy instead of her ally.25 The editors of a volume of World War I documents noted that: ‘The World War utterly falsified this prediction.’ However, the Second World War validated it. Bernstorff was awarded honorary degrees by numerous American universities. The University of Chicago in 1911 acclaimed him as ‘truly skilled in civic matters and no less versed and adroit in reconciling affairs of state, servant of enduring peace between two related nations’, while Brown University lauded him as one ‘who by chivalrous

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courtesy and skilful administration is hastening the time of the parliament of man, the federation of the world’. Both degrees were revoked in 1918, the Brown trustees declaring that Bernstorff had been guilty of a ‘quality of conduct dishonourable alike in a gentleman and a diplomat’. Writing of the American dispute with Mexico in 1914, Bernstorff observed: The acceptance of mediation by the A.B.C. [Argentina, Brazil, Chile] has greatly diminished American prestige . . . For us it is always advantageous if South America plucks up courage and obtains greater freedom of action, though we can pretty well write off the countries to the North of the Panama Canal.26 Wartime Ambassador and Propagandist Following the German setbacks at the First Battle of the Marne, he sought mediation of the war by Wilson using two German-American bankers, James Speyer and Oscar Straus, as intermediaries, leading the American Ambassador in London, the Anglophile Walter Hines Page, to complain that: ‘German diplomacy always worked underground and approached its negotiations in a way that would make the other side appear as taking the initiative.’27 Page indicated to House that: ‘The Allies can’t and won’t accept any peace except on the condition that German militarism be uprooted.’28 The French Ambassador Jusserand answered that: ‘France would accept the status quo when Germany to re-establish it gave back their lives to the dead.’29 During his service at Washington, he was credited in July 1915 with ‘amazing candour and not less amazing charm . . . he interests himself in everything from baseball to metaphysics’, fences, and had a ‘pleasing physical exterior though past 50’, although, thanks to the Lusitania crisis, ‘the smile on the sensitive lips is pensive now’.30 During this period Whitney Warren, an American architect living in Paris, complained to the British Ambassador to France that: ‘Bernstorff has it all his own way with the news agencies.’31 Lord Northcliffe denounced the British Ambassador in Washington, Cecil Spring-Rice, for not emulating Bernstorff.32 Countess Clara Chambrun, whose husband was in the French Embassy, lamented that: The relative treatment of Reich and Republic in the newspapers was exemplified in their attitude towards the respective envoys of each. The one seldom took a step without having the full honours of first-page publicity. When he talked to German bowlers, brewers or musicians in Chicago, Milwaukee or St. Louis, columns of laudatory comment were consecrated to this ‘beau geste’ throughout the entire land, whereas the only time I remember seeing really fine headlines concerning our chief [Jusserand], the caption read: FRENCH AMBASSADOR STEALS A DOG.33 The British Admiral Lord Fisher exclaimed ‘What a splendid system of lying the German Ambassador at Washington has to influence American opinion.’34 Page

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complained to House that the British ‘think that Bernstorff has the State Department afraid of him and that the pacifists dominate opinion – the pacificists at any price’.35 The British Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, virtuously abstained from replying in kind: ‘We should not appear in any way to emulate what has been described as “the orgy of second-rate publicity” in which the Germans have indulged.’36 The British Ambassador to the United States, Cecil Spring-Rice, for his part declared: ‘We have been content to leave Bernstorff and his satellites unanswered. Americans like to do their thinking for themselves, and the less we try to help them, the better. The determining factor is no doubt the attack on Belgium.’37 Spring-Rice later ruefully observed: ‘If I had done one-thousandth the part of what Bernstorff has done, I should have been given my passports long ago.’38 Lord Devlin later noted: The British had every advantage in the battle of propaganda because of the common language and the more appealing case. In the long and disheartening fight, Bernstorff never wavered ‘If it had not been for his patience, good sense and untiring effort, we should now be at war with Germany,’ House wrote in October 1915 and again in April 1916: ‘Bernstorff keeps his temper and his courage and it is impossible not to admire these qualities in him.’ ‘His methods,’ Devlin justly wrote, ‘were those of the not too scrupulous business negotiator; he was wily beyond the call of diplomatic duty; concealment, bluff, a little deception here and there were for him permissible to his end . . . he was utterly convinced that if America came into the war, it meant defeat for the Fatherland.’ The British historian John Wheeler-Bennett wrote that on the side of the Central Powers, only Bernstorff, Tsar Ferdinand of Bulgaria and General von Seeckt ‘had a clear and precise appreciation of the political aspects of the war’.39 In a letter written in August 1916, disclosed in the London Times after the war as a result of the capture of some of Von Papen’s papers at Nazareth while he was Ambassador at Constantinople, Bernstorff recommended against the recall of a Herr von Igel, Von Papen’s anointed successor in a German espionage and sabotage office in New York. Recall would stir up a lawsuit against Von Igel in which the embassy had asserted diplomatic privilege, and would also interfere with his conduct of various munitions orders and lawsuits and his connection with Indian and Irish revolutionaries.40 In 1920, Bernstorff published his memoirs of his wartime service, accompanied by shrewd insights into American society and policy.41 He declared himself to be ‘an avowed supporter of the Western policy: a liberal development of Unification and Parliamentary Government, as also in an attitude of consistent friendliness towards England and the United States’. This might have given rise to moderation of Germany’s economic development on the French and Japanese pattern.42 ‘German naval construction . . . certainly made our relationship with England very much worse.’ The Reinsurance Treaty was ‘a makeshift, which merely deferred the inevitable choice which

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had to be made between Russia and Austria-Hungary’. The Germans had hoped that Austria ‘would experience a political renaissance’ if it successfully chastised Serbia. ‘The mistake our Government made was to consent to Austria-Hungary’s making so daring an experiment, at a moment of such critical tension.’ This also was Rumbold’s view. To his mind: Russia and France, relying on England’s help, wanted to risk a war . . . When the German Government saw this, they tried, like a driver of a car about to collide with another vehicle, to jam on all brakes, and to drive backward. But it was then too late. Bernstorff for his part declared: The Wilhelmian Age perished owing to the fact that no definite objects were either selected or pursued in good time, and, above all, because . . . two systems in the Government of the country were constantly at variance with each other and mutually destructive. He considered that in the United States ‘owing to the almost perfect autarchy existing there, grave economic problems never really arise’. Because of the lack of knowledge of foreign languages in the United States, ‘the Americans unconsciously borrow their thoughts and ideas from England.’43 Germany should have explicitly recognised the Monroe Doctrine, an American ‘article of faith’. The German government failed to recognise that: ‘German prosperity was based to a great extent on the Germans overseas, a more precious source of wealth than many a foreign possession belonging to other powers.’ 44 Americans did not appreciate German militarism: ‘The German people, owing to their tragic history, are compelled to cultivate and to uphold the martial spirit of their ancestors.’ ‘[The German-Americans] retained in their new home all the failings and virtues of the German people . . . they showed less interest and less understanding in regard to political questions than the rest of America [and] did not exercise the political influence which would have been only in keeping with their numerical superiority.’45 ‘Wilson was pacifistic . . . Bryan an honest visionary and fanatic.’ Germany’s acceptance of the arbitration treaty he proposed ‘would most probably have facilitated the negotiations about the U-boat campaign’. Public opinion in the United States was regional, and was divided among New England, New York, Middle Atlantic states, and Southern, Midwest, Western, and Pacific states. The United States is the land of propaganda par excellence; the press communicates statements by Washington officials without naming the high officials from which it has emanated, and in this way they naturally act as megaphones

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This certainly has not changed. German propaganda expenses in the United States were dwarfed by the money later spent by the Creel Bureau to ‘cement enthusiasm for the war’. Americans are not influenced by arguments but by skilfully deployed facts: ‘It is quite incredible what the American public will swallow in the way of lies if they are only repeated often enough and properly served up . . . It all turns on which side gets the news in first. ’ He distanced himself from the sabotage activities of the military attaché Franz von Papen: ‘In all these matters, I can, of course, speak only for myself, military matters being entirely out of my province.’47 ‘It cannot, however, be denied that [Von Papen and Boy-Ed] were, in fact, compromised by their relation with . . . guilty parties.’ Von Papen acknowledged transmitting funds for sabotage activities in Canada, a belligerent, though this was not activity permitted to a diplomat accredited to a neutral.48 Bernstorff’s own role under these pressures exceeded that allowed to an ambassador to a neutral state; correspondence from him seeking approval of spending for subversive activities written in January 1917 was published in September after the declaration of war, the Wilson administration ‘knowing and keeping a quiet face until they were ready to tell’.49 Bernstorff had been supplied by Germany with a large fund, most of which was used or attempted to be used for purchase of munitions, but which was also used for various forms of propaganda among the German, Irish and Indian communities in America.50 Papen denied involvement in sabotage efforts in the United States: ‘Illegal methods to prevent arms shipments [were] viewed with greater favor in Germany than by Bernstorff and myself.’51 When the recall of Papen and Boy-Ed was demanded by the American government, Bernstorff, with characteristic audacity, at once put the question whether I was in any way compromised by the acts attributed to these two gentlemen, I stated that if the American Government was of the opinion that I had been compromised by these dealings, I would at once request my government to recall me. Lansing rejoined: ‘You are in no way included in this episode, and we should look upon it with extreme regret were you to leave us, because you are at present entrusted with these important negotiations.’52 Bernstorff requested the recall to Germany of Von Rintelen, an especially reckless German organiser of sabotage.53 Papen accurately asserted that when a US Senate Committee investigated sabotage after the war, ‘no question of the participation of any member of the German Embassy staff ever arose.’54 The Zimmermann telegram was disclosed only after Germany had announced its fatal decision in favour of resumed submarine warfare; its threat in any case was contingent on the outbreak of war with the United States. Elimination of the British blockade through American mediation was never to be expected: ‘“Brittania rules the waves” was, and ever must be the guiding principle of all her policy while her worldempire endures.’

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The famous Notice published by the German Embassy on the day of the sailing of the Lusitania was delayed in its publication ‘by one of those fatal coincidences beloved by history’.55 ‘We, accustomed as we have been to daily reports of battles and casualties, were little impressed by the destruction of a solitary passenger ship.’ Bernstorff prudently failed to appear at a New York benefit for the German Red Cross on the night following the Lusitania sinking.56 ‘Germanism in America may be said to have been absolutely killed by the Lusitania incident.’ It was clear, and Bernstorff warned his government, that relations would be ruptured if there were a recurrence. ‘It might perhaps have been better if the United States had actually gone to war at this moment. Her military pressure, and our consequent defeat would have come two years earlier, before the German people had been demoralised and exhausted by four years of war and blockade.’ The Lusitania episode was his moment of glory; without waiting for instructions from Berlin, he asked to see the President. I heard later, among other things, when I was at Manila, that on this very day, June 2nd, all preparations had been made for breaking off relations, and for the inevitable resulting war. As a result of my interview, however, they were cancelled. I went back, found President Wilson alone and told him I had forgotten one thing – to speak as a private individual. Then I showed him my whole thought: that America was the trustee of humanity; that by insisting on this word “illegal” he would throw away the power to make peace, the sacred power of putting an end to the senseless waste of war, the dreadful butchery. I begged him as man to man to pause and weigh everything before he gave up his high position as arbiter of the warring nations.57 Measures were taken to defuse the controversy, but it was clear to Bernstorff that it could not be permitted to recur. Wilson could not indefinitely resist American public opinion: We had no means of bringing pressure to bear on America, whereas from her point of view war with Germany would be a comparatively simple affair, which would involve no vital risks for her, but would on the contrary greatly benefit her from an industrial point of view, besides gratifying the jingoes, by giving them an opportunity of making use of their long-desired Army, Navy and commercial fleet. The remarkable nature of Bernstorff’s diplomatic achievement is made clear by the fact that the Germans were sufficiently unrepentant for the Lusitania to allow a commemorative medal of its sinking to be struck, leading a British commentator to discern in the sinking ‘a deliberate act of policy . . . to paralyse all American trade with the Allies by an unexampled act of inhuman intimidation’.58

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15. Bernstorff and Wilson (Library of Congress)

Thereafter, Bernstorff successfully conciliated the Arabic episode, which involved less loss of life, authorising the Secretary of State to release his note stating a change in German policy precluding the sinking of merchant ships without warning. Although the Wilhelmstrasse had authorised the note, it had not authorised its public release, which Bernstorff considered was necessary to save the situation. ‘Had the whole American Press entirely refused to accept our official explanations, nothing

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further could have been done with the Government.’59 Spring-Rice despairingly noted that: ‘Confronted with a threat such as Bernstorff publicly made the other day, that if he is sent away, there will be war in three days, the United States people are perfectly prepared to yield almost anything.’60 Similarly, ‘Germany intervened after the sinking of the Persia with a wholly unexpected apology and a guarantee for the future.’61 After the enforced recall of Von Papen and Boy-Ed, Colonel House entreated him to remain: ‘You are the one tie that still binds us to Germany. If that tie should break, war would be inevitable.’62 His government compelled ‘alternation of defiance and submission . . . which served no diplomatic object and merely betrayed infirmity of purpose’. ‘In general terms’, he observed, the development of democracy in America amounts to this, that the electors vest unlimited rights in one man for a short time, and after that they re-elect or replace him according to whether he has won or lost their confidence. Thus arises a sort of temporary autocracy which combines the advantages of a monarchy and democracy. Whether this historically developed system really coincides with our idea of formal democracy is another question. This has not lost its accuracy as a description of the American system. The American government lost through hesitation many an opportunity of keeping out of the war. There could be no doubt that the United States could, as a neutral power, have brought about a better peace than they have done as the decisive combatant power . . . I always regarded American mediation as the only possible way out of the war. The German decision to resume submarine warfare was particularly indefensible since ‘submarine construction was never carried on with full vigour after 1916.’63 In his Memoirs, he pointed out that both Lord Grey and Keynes conceded that without further American funds and manpower, the Entente would have been compelled to accept a compromise peace.64 As for the 1916 election, Bernstorff reported to his government: ‘Mr Hughes has made no permanent impression as a speaker, whereas Roosevelt blew the war trumpet in his usual bombastic fashion. If Hughes should be defeated, he can thank Roosevelt. The average American is, and remains, a pacifist.’65 ‘All American pacifists belonged to the Democratic camp, all militarists belonged to the Republican party.’ Bernstorff was said by Lloyd-George to incline toward Wilson ‘because Bernstorff is a good deal cleverer than some of his colleagues in the Wilhelmstrasse and he also feels that he is safer with Wilson because he knows what to expect’.66 In a moving declaration of his diplomat’s faith, shared also at key moments by Rumbold, Sforza and Inönü, he declared: ‘He who practises politics in the interest of

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16. Caricature of Bernstorff (Library of Congress)

his native country must be ready at any moment to plunge like Curtius into the abyss, in order to save his nation . . . in a few years, if not sooner, the German people would surely have realised that “Peace without Victory” constituted a victory for Germany.’ On 26 December 1916, after the American election, and after German successes in fighting in Romania, the German government communicated its response to an

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offer of mediation transmitted by President Wilson on December 18. The response purportedly accepted Wilson’s offer, but failed to transmit Germany’s own peace terms. The reason for this failure was set forth in a cable of the same day from Zimmermann to Bernstorff: The intervention of the President, even in the form of a ‘clearing house’, would be detrimental to our interests, and is therefore to be prevented. We must create the basis for future conclusion of peace through direct negotiation with our enemies, unless we are to risk being cheated.67 In this period, Prince Max of Baden, later briefly Chancellor, lamented: Bernstorff can do great things if the German Chancellor comes to his aid. The two bugbears of British policy, the embargo and American toleration of the intensified submarine war might become realities if after a temperate German declaration of war aims, the Allies were to repudiate peace with their usual brutality. We might quite well be able to declare the intensified submarine war without America breaking off diplomatic relations, provided, that is, a time limit is set to it – a pledge that as soon as Britain returns with her blockade within the bounds of international law hitherto in force, the intensification of the submarine war shall cease.68 Edward Grey, British Foreign Secretary, agreed: ‘Germany missed a great opportunity of peace. If she had accepted the Wilson policy and was ready to agree to a conference, the Allies could not have refused.’69 On January 7, Bernstorff was instructed only to stall. On January 15, he did so by making offers to House, unauthorised by his government, of a nonaggression pact, negotiations looking toward a League of Nations, the restoration of Serbia and Belgium, and the independence of Poland and Lithuania, leading House to declare ‘If a false step is not taken, the end [of the war] is in sight.’ In the meantime, however, Bethmann-Hellweg had been overruled and the German government had decided on unrestricted submarine warfare. On January 23 Bernstorff asked Berlin: Would it perhaps be possible, before opening the unrestricted U-boat war, to state the peace terms which we should have submitted at the Peace Conference which we proposed, and to add that in view of our enemies’ insolent rejection of our scheme, we could no longer abide by these moderate terms. And then we might hint that, as victors, we should demand an independent Ireland? All this was unavailing.70 On January 31, in response to another peace initiative by Wilson, the German government finally communicated its terms, but accompanied them with a statement that it no longer felt bound by them since they had been rejected by the Entente. The terms refused to accept the status quo in the West, but sought concessions in Belgium

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and Upper Alsace. Most important, they were accompanied by notification of the resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare, leading Wilson to break diplomatic relations with Germany in reply. Thus Bernsdorff was obliged to carry ‘in the one hand, a palm of peace; in the other, a torpedo’. Bernstorff attempted to sugar-coat the communication by adding a post-script: My government will terminate the submarine blockade as soon as it is evident that the efforts of the President will lead to a peace acceptable to Germany. I was in such a hurry to give you the above most important news namely that the blockade will be terminated if a conference can be brought about on reasonable terms.71 The American Ambassador to France later observed: ‘No diplomat endeavoured to render a higher service to his country then when at this critical time he warned his government in the most solemn manner of the consequences of its fatal note of January 31.’72 He told the journalist Frank Harris that after his last interview: ‘Wilson met him in the kindest way and promised to give him time. He kept his promise; it was a month before he declared that “a state of war existed between Germany and the United States”. It was not until 6 April that he declared war on Germany; he had given Bernstorff more than two months.’73 Bernstorff sent ‘agitated telegrams begging for a postponement . . . if we accept Wilson’s proposal and plans come to grief on the obstinacy of our opponents, it will become very difficult for the President to enter the war against us even if we begin unrestricted submarine war . . . what is in question therefore is only a postponement of short duration.’74 Bernstorff was met with the argument that 21 of the 200 U-boats were already at their stations and could not be recalled, though the President could have been told that they were dispatched before he made his offer and would be recalled at the earliest opportunity. ‘With Jagow gone and Bethmann weakening, his influence at home had waned.’75 Something of a legend surrounded Bernstorff’s departure; the film Wilson depicted an angry interview with the disillusioned President, leading Churchill to say when the film was shown during the war: ‘I think that is very near the truth. I believe he did talk to Bernstorff very much like that.’76 On February 10, five days before Bernstorff’s enforced departure, the Dutch Minister called on House to propose a conference of neutrals at Washington. ‘I have a notion,’ House said to Spring-Rice, ‘that this plan was suggested by Bernstorff than whom he has no closer friend in the diplomatic corps.’77 Similarly, the Swiss Minister said in this period that Germany would negotiate if its blockade was not broken – and confessed to acting at the instigation of Bernstorff.78 The German government rejected a suggestion by Bernstorff that neutral shipping be left undisturbed for a month and on 18 March rejected a request by Wilson that American shipping to Britain be left undisturbed in the absence of a special declaration. When Bernstorff departed, he stated his conviction that the German government would take no aggressive action and would leave the initiative in testing the new policy to the United States, and also hinted that the USA might send one ship a week as far as Falmouth by prearrangement with the

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German authorities without having it sunk, 79 provided it was adorned with alternating white and red vertical stripes three yards wide with a red and white checkered flag on each mast.80 The rejection of the last request, and the publication of the fatuous Zimmermann telegram, directly gave rise to the American declaration of war two-and-a-half months later on 6 April 1917.81 A British sympathiser who knew Bernstorff reported to Foreign Secretary Balfour in July that: For Zimmermann’s faux pas over Japan and Mexico he had about an equal amount of contempt and almost of rage. He told me one day that every man in the German Foreign Office was a damned fool and made a damnder fool of himself every time he got the opportunity.82 In the meantime, Bernstorff’s private life had occasioned him more than slight embarrassment. He had been alone in Washington from the summer of 1914 until the fall of 1916, his wife having remained in Germany. The American Secret Service had recordings of telephone conversations with at least one woman,83 while an agent of British intelligence while being entertained for the weekend on Long Island was shown a snapshot collection by one of his fellow guests including one which showed the German plenipotentiary in generous mood, with both arms encompassing the waists of bathing nymphs in ravishing if strictly rationed costume . . . Within twenty-four hours Ambassador Bakmetieff at the Russian Embassy was displaying an enlarged copy of that picture on the mantel-shelf of his private office, for all the diplomatic corps of Washington to smile at . . . I am told that it was the publication of this picture which caused the Emperor to decline to receive his Ambassador on his return in April 1917.84 When the picture was shown by a British secret service agent to the son of the American Ambassador to Britain in October 1916, the latter observed that it ‘would damage his career in any puritanical country’.85 The Countess, at least, appeared tolerant of his peccadilloes; Frank Harris related an interview with Bernstorff in 1916: ‘“What do you like best in life, Count Bernstorff,” I asked. “Beauty,” he replied, with a laughing glance at his wife. “Indeed yes,” cried Countess Bernstorff, mocking, “he tells a story of blonde and brunette that culminates in admiration of Titian red.” . . . His views on morals are as undetermined as on religion. “I try to play fair,” he says, “and get what I want while causing as little trouble or pain to others as possible but – I’m very lenient especially towards sins of the flesh when the temptation is great and the results unimportant.”’86 Assessing his performance, the later permanent secretary of the British Foreign Office, Robert Vansittart, observed: In February, the Administration had nerved itself to expel Bernstorff, an expert in gilding bad cases. He was better liked than Spring-Rice, who refused to

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17. The ‘Bathing Beauty Photograph’ (The Sketch, October 25, 1916)

flatter and as in Persia snuffled about with disdain for dunderheads. [SpringRice] could not resist sending epigrams on their rounds, and further blotted his copy-book by intimacy with Republicans.87

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Another British commentator acknowledged that Bernstorff had served his country at Washington with great ability and candour, under tremendous difficulties, had consistently repeated that she would declare war and that her resources were inexhaustible. The peril seemed to him so vast that he put Germany’s only hope in the acceptance of a peace mediated by Wilson. This no doubt was impossible, given the state of public opinion at home, of which he was very imperfectly informed.88 Lord Devlin later observed: ‘Germany has not produced many notable envoys and the Count ranks as one of the few.’89 On his departure, Colonel House wrote to him: It is too sad that your government should have declared the unrestricted U-boat war at a moment when we were so near to peace. The day will come when people in Germany will see how much you have done for your country in America.90 Once the rupture of diplomatic relations took place on 3 February, thereafter being approved by the Senate by a vote of 78 to 5, nothing except abandonment of the U-boat campaign could have prevented war. No one who is familiar with the United States can believe that it would ever have been possible to drive the United States into a war once a peace conference had been assembled. He harshly judged Wilson’s performance at the Versailles Conference, charging him with ‘obstinate dogmatism and an inclination for solitary work – foreign affairs can only be mastered in actual practice.’ His departure from the United States was like that of no other diplomat in history. ‘Negotiations with Britain for safe conduct, his farewell reception in the Red Parlour of the Embassy, his last words to the press, his departure from Union Station, his embarkation with a party totalling 200 persons and a last-minute two-day delay before sailing were all chronicled in detail.’91 His return to Berlin was delayed, the British holding a neutral ship for 12 days for inspection in Nova Scotia, an action said to have been prompted by fear that Bernstorff might persuade the German government to reverse its policy, thus preventing American entry into the war. Return to Germany When Bernstorff arrived, Bethmann-Hellweg suggested that he go to a peace conference sponsored by Social Democrats in Stockholm, which might provide an occasion for mediation by the Kerensky government and others, however the Kaiser refused to receive him or sanction his designation. The reasons assigned for this were that the Kaiser suspected him to be responsible for the leak of the Zimmermann telegram and was displeased by Bernstorff’s recommendation that Germany accept the

18. Departure of Bernstorff (U. S. National Archives)

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designation of Gerard as Ambassador to Berlin. Bernstorff attributed the Kaiser’s attitude to ‘the usual whisperings that characterized the Wilhelminian epoch’. He took the bull by the horns by seeking and obtaining, but only after a delay of seven weeks, a meeting with Ludendorff, described by Bernstorff as follows, in a much-quoted passage: General Ludendorff received me with the following words: ‘In America you wanted to make peace. You evidently thought we were at the end of our tether.’ I replied: ‘No, I did not think that; but I wanted to make peace before we came to the end of our tether.’92 Reflecting on these events, Bernstorff observed: ‘The unhappy Monarch unfortunately never once realised that the “Democrats” were his best friends. The Imperial Power could, in the long run, only be upheld, if it found both its support and its counterweight in a strong democracy.’ General de Gaulle likewise ascribed Germany’s defeat ‘to the influence of Nietzsche’s theories of the elite and the superman’. While admiring the German militarists’ ‘audacity, . . . spirit of enterprise, . . . will to succeed, . . . vigour in handling resources’, he ascribed their failure to ‘the characteristic taste for immoderate undertakings, the passion to expand their personal power at any cost, the contempt for the limits marked out by human experience, common sense and the law’.93 Similar insights were shared by Inönü, in his remarkable meditations on his own dictatorship and by Sforza in his reflections on the effects of despotism on national character. It is said that in April, Colonel Hoffmann, an intimate friend of Ludendorff, declared to a high-ranking diplomat that ‘things could not go on as they were and what would he say to Lichnowsky or Bernstorff’ as Chancellor.94 In his Memoirs, he summed up his view of the War: ‘The words punishment, reward and revenge have no place in politics. Such motives only lead to fresh injustices . . . anyone who does not recognise the moral reprehensibility of the English blockade loses the right to pronounce judgment on the moral justification of the UBoat war.’95 There are numerous verdicts on the First World War; in the light of recent events, that of Corelli Barnett seems as good as any: A war of irrationality paved the way for a peace of irrationality. The prewar balance of power in Europe (how good a balance it was is proved by the stalemate of the war) has in fact been replaced by arrangements that left Germany relatively stronger in potential not weaker. [Because of] the uncaging of the little man, statesmen found their freedom to strike realistic bargains hampered by the mysterious expectations of electorates at home . . . the influence of ignorance and unreason in the higher conduct of affairs, national and international, is a less agreeable and more dangerous product of the great war.96 On his return to Germany, Bernstorff’s candidature for Chancellor in succession to Bethmann-Hellweg was supported by the Reichstag, as well as by Bethmann and the influential industrialist Albert Ballin;97 the Kaiser was prepared to appoint him if the

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Generals acceded, which they refused to do, since he had ‘acquired the reputation of desiring to make peace and to reform the Reich’.98 His old nemesis Captain Boy-Ed wrote to the Chief of the Admiralty Staff: While acknowledging Bernstorff’s many good qualities, I personally think him inadequate for the work-intensive, versatile and responsible post of an Imperial Chancellor. He is among other things too superficial and lacks adroitness in public speaking. The navy should be the last to desire him, since he belongs to those who see the cause of the world war in the existence of the German fleet.99 Valentini proposed Count Bernstorff but the Kaiser naturally raised objections and was prepared to accept Bernstorff only if Hindenburg approved. Valentini refused to discuss Bernstorff with Hindenburg and when Von Lyncker, chief of the military cabinet, was asked to undertake the mission, he too immediately and indignantly rejected Bernstorff.100 Had Bulow become Chancellor, Bernstorff would have been Foreign Minister; the Kaiser likewise refused to approve the candidacies of Bulow and Hertling, on July 13, 1917, settling instead on Michaelis, an obscure Food Ministry official and Ludendorff’s candidate, as Bethmann’s successor.101 Much in Bernstorff’s view could have been saved even then by the making of moderate peace agreements at Brest-Litovsk and Bucharest, a liberal domestic policy, and strengthening of the Turkish and Bulgarian fronts rather than a last throw in the West.102 Ambassador in Turkey With the advent of Michaelis as Chancellor and Kuhlmann as Foreign Minister, Bernstorff was sent as Ambassador to Constantinople ‘to wring concessions from the Turks with the object of bringing about peace . . . the Monarch . . . seized the opportunity of making certain remarks about my democratic views, without, however, withholding his signature from my credentials.’103 Unlike Einstein, he admired the Grand Vizier, Talaat Pasha, crediting him with a delightful blend of scepticism and gentle cynicism, which increased the charm of that attractive personality. When I kept on pestering him about the Armenian question, he once said with a smile: “What on earth do you want? The question is settled, there are no more Armenians”, a reply which, while admitting his own complicity in the crime, hinted that the European accounts of it might be exaggerated.104 He regarded Talaat as ‘a statesman . . . in the truest sense of the word. There was not a sign of the parvenu in his behaviour or ideas . . . and his political conceptions were unencumbered by any pettiness.’105 Later:

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He told me to call him as a witness on my behalf, if I were censured in any way concerning the Armenian question, he would gladly testify that I had repeatedly warned him to treat the Armenians more leniently.106 His complicity in the Armenian crime he atoned for by his death [by assassination] . . . The statesmen of other lands have often been equally guilty in not opposing and rebuking the prejudices of their fellow citizens.107 While in Constantinople, he was required to entertain the Kaiser on a state visit; the latter complained of the number of guests from the German colony at an embassy tea party, unfortunately never grasp[ing] the truth that the German Imperial regime must be democratic or perish.108 My idea was to transform Turkey into a German Egypt. The conditions for this were a negotiated peace, and a subsequent period of quiet work inspired by affection for the Turkish people.109 His efforts were undermined by concessions in Berlin to the Turks: We should help the Turks in every direction, but demand in return that the country shall be entirely under our economic control. This programme is the only one that meets the interests of both countries, as Turkey can never mend her fortunes on her own account.110 After the war, our economic situation will be extraordinarily unpleasant . . . it seems necessary to take raw materials where we can find them. The supply in this country is certainly small, but the devil will eat flies in an extremity.111 We could secure the exploitation of the petroleum and the coal, and the contracts for the construction of the necessary railways, our industry would have a profitable field of activity in compensation for its very restricted opportunities abroad after the War.112 In fact, partly because of the ‘bloodless invasion’ carried out by Hjalmar Schacht and celebrated by Paul Einzig, Germany retained in the late 1930s a nearly one-half share in Turkish trade., though in 1931 she accounted for only 11per cent of Turkish exports and 21per cent of imports.113 He urged the Turks to acquiesce in the creation of a Jewish National Home in competition with the Balfour Declaration, but was constantly met with the argument that the Arabs would destroy the Jews. In October, 1917, he obtained assurances from the Grand Vizier that Jews in the Ottoman Empire would not be harmed.114 A Zionist leader was to observe: ‘We would have suffered irreparable harm had the mighty hand of the German government not protected us in the hour of danger.’115 Earlier, in October 1914, Bernstorff had called the attention of the German Foreign Office to the bad effect on American opinion of persecution of Jews in Palestine. 116 This concern was again expressed in January and July 1915.117 In this way, Bernstorff

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rendered a considerable service to Zionism: ‘In a judenrein Palestine the later development of a national home would have been very unlikely.’118 He was instrumental in securing the evacuation of Jerusalem by Turkish forces to avoid damage to that city in December 1917; this had no significant impact on the Turkish phase of the war, which continued until September 1918, though it produced dramatic photographs of the British under Allenby entering Jerusalem.119 He constantly protested against Turkish chauvinism: ‘Armenians, Jews, or Greeks, the folly is the same. The country will be depopulated, partly from nationalist and partly from selfish motives.’120 In February 1918, he gave tentative backing to a scheme for a kingdom surrounding Jerusalem to be headed by a German Catholic prince under the nominal suzerainty of the Sultan, with each sect to administer its own holy places. ‘The kingdom of Jerusalem would awaken quite different historical associations from Mr Balfour’s Anglo-American Jewish state, which after all could never attain the glory of the kingdom of David or Solomon.’121 Germany was in no position to impose such a design, which undoubtedly would have been spurned by the Zionists. In addition to coming to the aid of Jews, he also assisted Greeks. In December 1917 Marshal Liman Von Sanders alerted . . . Bernstorff about an order by war minister Enver who wanted ‘the deportation of virtually all Greeks to inland areas’. Enver had prepared a list of five categories for the deportation order. The German Foreign Office supported the efforts of Sanders and Ambassador Bernstorff and let it be known that it ‘advised strongly against the deportations’.122 He urged a policy of political support of the Turks in exchange for economic concessions outside the political sphere, but warned against political arrangements in the Caucasus that would embroil Germany in conflicts with Russia and Turkey, ambitions that were still being pursued as late as July 1918: ‘This is really a typical case of what Bismarck called playing Pericles outside the political sphere which God has assigned to us.’123 Lewis Einstein, as we have seen, gave his government similar warnings; Sforza orchestrated the Italian withdrawal from Antalya, and Rumbold that of the British from Constantinople. He thought that it was much more important to retain the integrity of the Quadruple Alliance and the painstakingly negotiated peace with Russia than to play around with the unreliable Caucasians, who might themselves become easy prey to revolution. To lose the tested Turkish ally – whose defection in a separate peace with Britain he also considered a possibility – in favour of the Caucasus meant sitting down between two chairs – Germany had no business whatever in the Caucasus.124 On 1 October 1918, having been informed of the German decision to ask President Wilson to arrange a peace conference, he spoke to Talaat, seeking assent to a joint German-Turkish approach to Wilson by 4 p.m. that day. Talaat obtained the resignation of the Turkish cabinet and responded affirmatively subject to two

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reservations: 1) that Wilson’s promise of autonomous development of non-Turkish areas meant autonomy, not independence, and 2) that Turkish possession of Istanbul would be safeguarded. The offer was rejected by Rumbold in Geneva on 27 October in accordance with his instructions to engage in no peace discussions before an armistice.125 Germany and the Peace Conference Bernstorff returned to Germany in late October 1918, after Kuhlmann had been obliged by the military to resign as Foreign Minister, and after the ensuing military collapse. He had been asked to return by the new Chancellor, Prince Max of Baden, to whom he had sent a telegram urging him to abandon the U-Boat war immediately. ‘It was our duty to save the monarchy, because there was no other way of securing for the German nation an organized and appropriate representation.’126 A note from Wilson made it clear that the Kaiser’s abdication was essential. Prince Max refused to so inform the Kaiser, declaring: ‘As heir to the throne of Baden and as a German Prince I can’t do such a thing’, whereupon Bernstorff then responded: ‘In that case, you should not have become Chancellor.’ ‘I did not want to abandon Prince Max, but like Archimedes I had no locus standi from which I could lift anything, much less a world, off its hinges.’127 ‘The revolution could only have been avoided by a timely abdication by the Kaiser . . . When he did so, on November 9th, it was too late to prevent the revolution.’ In the absence of a command from the Kaiser, Prince Max was unwilling to proclaim himself Vice-Regent.128 A.J.P. Taylor has written of this period: [t]he revolutionary movements demanded the overthrow of the Emperor as a symbol that the war was ended; and the Allies would end the war only with the symbolical overthrow of the Emperor. And as the High Command also desired the end of the war, it too demanded the Emperor’s abdication. Practically the only group to attempt to preserve the monarchy, if not the monarch, were the liberal and Social Democrat ministers, the men of principle.129 In the turbulent days that followed, considered that Bernstorff: ‘The duty of all officials was to remain at their posts, to restore order as soon as possible, and not to give way to force until we had achieved this object.’ He stayed on in the Foreign Ministry ‘which I should not have done, for in the Germany of those days it was not possible to engage in politics from a purely civil service position’.130 In 1919, following the collapse of Germany, he was offered the post of Foreign Secretary by President Ebert, which he declined.131 He presided over the staff in the foreign office known as the Paxkonferenze, which prepared documents and studies for the German delegation at Versailles, and which included up to 40 civil servants and up to 160 participants at meetings. ‘The thoroughness of this preparatory work was as extraordinary as its futility was pitiful.’132 ‘Whoever reads their countless

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memoranda on each clause and their final enormously comprehensive note of May 24 cannot but be amazed at their tireless energy and the magnitude of their achievement.’133 ‘Our intention was to stage the affair on a large scale, like the Geneva Disarmament Conference, with speeches and replies . . . [Clémenceau’s] is the main responsibility for the crazy world in which we now live.’ He declared at the time: ‘If I have to go to Versailles, I shall not take a delegation, I shall merely take one privy councillor.’134 On his declinating the Foreign Ministry, he observed: ‘Now I shall recuperate until the next crisis, and I take comfort in the thought that Bismarck once voiced the desire to see a German who turned down a minister’s post.’135 When the Foreign Minister, Brockdorff-Rantzau, bridled at signing the peace treaty, Bernsdorff issued a press statement on 30 May denying that he was more disposed to do so: ‘It is obvious that no German could be found who would set his name to a document that amounts to a sentence of death on his country.’ 136 In fact, Bernstorff felt the treaty had to be signed, with or without the further concessions which this statement sought to obtain, since: ‘The French would have invaded Germany with just as much pleasure as they did a few years later, when they illegally occupied the Ruhr.’137 Later he wrote: ‘A rejection of the Treaty would only have been possible if the German nation from the Adige to the Belt had been at one in the resolve to dedicate itself, if need were, to destruction . . . But so heroic a mood did not prevail.’ It seems unfair to Bernstorff to use this flight of rhetoric as evidence that ‘Wagnerian and Hitlerian trends of thought [were] manifested in the minds of the most respectable of Germans.’138 He was at this point offered the Foreign Ministry by Ebert and declined it on three grounds: first, his party favoured rejection of the treaty, and he would therefore have no body of support in the Reichstag; second, he had publicly supported Rantzau and could not change his position; third, he had been demonised before American and British public opinion, which would reduce his powers of persuasion.139 Lord Hardinge, the second in command at the British Foreign Office, later acknowledged that the British government would have protested Bernstorff’s appointment; in 1920 a memorandum by Crewe in the British Foreign Office noted that it would have disapproved of the appointment of Bernstorff, Brockdorff-Rantzau or Frederick Rosen as foreign minister: ‘These are the most notorious agents of the government in organizing outrages in neutral countries directed against the Allies – evidence that foreign policy remains inspired by all the ideas that brought about the war.’140 Bernstorff resigned from the diplomatic service in 1919, after writing and publishing his memoirs of his service in Washington. He was on the list of 830 alleged German war criminals arraigned under the provisions of Article 228 of the Treaty of Versailles as having been ‘accused of having committed acts in violation of the laws and customs of war’ on 1 November 1919, and was called by the Independent Socialists to testify before a committee of the National Assembly at the disastrous hearings in which Hindenburg propagated the ‘stab in the back’ legend.141 ‘Ludendorff behaved with special belligerence toward [Bernstorff]. The latter answered Ludendorff in a calm and therefore less effective manner.’142 ‘The General

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bellowed like a bull and the Ambassador remained icily unmoved.’ 143 He was, a reviewer noted, a ‘pioneer in the movement in support of the League of Nations in Germany . . . to bring Germany into the League144 . . . in which he succeeded’.145 In this memoir, he credited himself with preventing American entry into the war after the sinking of the Lusitania in April 1915, but conceded that: ‘If America had entered the war two years earlier it would have been a shorter war and better for all concerned.’146 He took some satisfaction in reprinting a letter written to him by the later Nazi Ernst Hanfstaengl in 1920, lauding the marvellous diplomatic possibilities presented in 1917 by the combination of ‘Kerensky plus Wilson plus Bernstorff’.147 A reviewer, declaring his book the ‘most interesting’ of the German war memoirs, questioned his statement that Wilson told him that he would have immediately named Hughes Secretary of State had Hughes won the 1916 election so there would be continuity in American policy.148 Another more jaundiced commentator charged him with ‘passing the responsibility round the circle like the injured innocents of Thomas Nast’s famous cartoon “Twas Him”. Count Bernstorff joins the “I told you so” school with Tirpitz, Ludendorff, Erzburger and others.’149 In similar vein, Christian Gauss called it ‘a further and exceedingly interesting addition to that large library of self-justification now appearing in Germany . . . differ[ing] only on a point of good taste’.150 It was noted that: ‘He does not hide his thought behind dense and complicated entanglements of language, but sets it forth in clear, short, crisp sentences.’151 Another reviewer found the book ‘wonderfully frank. Whether this frankness arises from an honest openness of mind or from an utter absence of ability to realize his own obliquity is a question for each reader to solve for himself.’152 Another observed: ‘His attempt to gauge American character is on the whole happy . . . There is no rancour in his judgments. There is no attempt to add piquancy to the narrative by gossip.’153 Norman Hapgood observed that though not a thinker like Norman Angell and Bertrand Russell, he is intelligent to a high degree, exact, fearless, without cheap pride, living in a much more real atmosphere than most of the German war statesmen. He has . . . a good mind that functions without interference from his prejudices or his passions.154 Another reviewer commented on his admiration for Colonel House and his slurs on Theodore Roosevelt and Ambassador Gerard.155 Post-war Politics In 1920, Bernstorff wrote an article for the Neue Frei Presse of Vienna on ‘The New Diplomacy’, foreseeing ‘a coming battle between the new diplomacy and the old imperialism’. No country could now aspire to imperial rule, an insight denied today to some Americans and not familiar in the 1920s: Even England’s experience in ruling subject nations will not enable it to found

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and maintain a world empire and a world civilisation, like that of Rome . . . The material interests and the national character of the peoples of the earth are too discordant for this. Sforza emphatically shared this judgment. He saw as an example for German foreign policy the ‘unhappy and powerful propaganda of Bolshevism at a time Russia was helpless . . . The struggle to realise an ideal league of nations defines the field of activity for a vigorous German foreign policy.’ He erroneously prophesied that: ‘If the fever of nationalism shall seize our people again, the Entente will not be so stupid as to let it regain its strength.’156 He nonetheless recognised this as a real danger. But for the naval imperialists, Germany would have been viewed as a status quo power before World War I. ‘Today unhappily the situation is very different. There are many desirable things which a victorious war might secure for us.’ The appropriate course for Germany was to demand of the League that ‘national self-determination shall be applied to us’. In April 1921, he wrote on ‘Harding and Germany’ in more sombre mood. The Entente had ‘converted the League into a tool’; at Versailles, Wilson had ‘fall[en] under the influence of European statesmen far abler than he’. ‘Americans do not take the slightest interest in our political affairs, but only in our business recovery and in conditions which appeal to their humanitarian sentiment.’ Anticipating the Marshall Plan by 25 years, he observed . . . ‘[they] may be moved by their own interests eventually to take the leadership in measures for establishing the world’s business prosperity.’ Until then, the only course for Germany was to ‘fulfil the obligations we have already assumed . . . I see no road of escape from the present impasse.’157 ‘The alpha and omega of public policy today is to put into practice the idea that the whole globe has become an indivisible economic unit.’ His reaction to the occupation of the Ruhr was emphasis on divisions between the allies; Germany was fortunate that only the French and Belgians invaded.158 He entered politics, and after one unsuccessful effort to secure election to the Reichstag from Düsseldorf was successful almost immediately thereafter as a member of the Democratic Party in his native Schleswig-Holstein in 1921, serving until 1928, when he returned to his estate on Lake Stornberg. He was instrumental in forming a Democratic Club on Victoria Strasse in Berlin.159 In his first abortive campaign, in an anticipation of the post World War II Schuman Plan, he urged his constituents to think of an association between the Rhenish-Westphalian industrial area with the North French and Lorraine iron and coal fields, which would be spontaneously joined by the Belgian and Luxembourg industrial areas, The reconstruction of Europe would thereby receive so tremendous a stimulus that all remaining obstacles could be easily overcome.160 Among his colleagues in the party, which represented ‘such liberal thought as was to be found at Weimar’ were Conrad Haussmann, Friedrich Naumann, Bernhard Denburg, Wilhelm Self, Theodor Wolff, Theodor Heuss and, for a time, Hjalmar Schacht.161

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He regretted and sought to bridge the division between the Democrats and Stresemann’s People’s Party, and felt the Democrats displayed ‘rather too much tendency to theorise, and too little will to power, which is the quintessence of high politics’. Stresemann, as has been said, ‘was the leader of a liberal capitalist remnant, estranged from the working-class parties by his capitalism, estranged from the middle-class parties by his liberalism’.162 He declared his premises: We need a large middle-class party as well as a conservative and a socialist party. As it is, according to all my views, I belong to the former. I am not suited to be a November-socialist; I would degrade myself as an opportunist there. I do not believe in socialism. What has made England great? The free initiative of the individual. What has destroyed us? The opportunism that bowed to every authority. Social the Democratic Party must be and become, but to put the authoritarian state of the workers in place of the authoritarian state of the military, that I cannot see; not to mention that the other powers will hardly assist us if we do not develop from a socialist to a democratic state.163 In June 1928, he joined Friedricke Meineke and others in signing a manifesto urging a union of the two parties.164 [The Democrats] missed all chances of founding what was eminently desirable – a great centre party, by their understandable but not very intelligent tactics toward Stresemann and his colleagues . . . intellectual talent is by nature individualist and could not produce intellectual unity much less political unity in a form that would appeal to the nation . . . The tragedy of the liberal intelligentsia in Germany is the completeness of its intellectuality – and its ineffectiveness. Stresemann, unlike the Democrats (then called Progressives), had been a supporter of the High Command and an opponent of the Peace Resolution during the war; this division continued.165 Indeed, as Henry Kissinger has pointed out: As late as 1917, Stresemann had advocated vast conquests in both the East and the West, as well as the annexation of French and British colonial possessions in Asia and Africa. 166 He had also supported unrestricted submarine warfare, the calamitous decision which brought America into the war. His aims, as revealed by his posthumously published diaries, were the traditional aims of German policy, particularly as respects revision of the Polish frontier, though his methods were moderate ones.167 The difficulty for the Democrats was that described by A.J.P. Taylor: A working-class, even if politically minded, cannot of itself maintain a political system; every worker has to be at his bench or loom . . . The administrators,

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the professional men, the moulders of opinion must hold the system together; and in the Weimar Republic these men continued to come from the “national” classes who saw in the republic only the symbol of their defeat. What hope was there for a middle-class republic which the middle class almost unitedly opposed? [T]he Democrats . . . could devise a perfect system of voting by proportional representation, they could not devise any method of winning votes for themselves.168 Bernstorff admired Walther Rathenau, but thought that the Treaty of Rapallo was a mistake, because of the suspicion it aroused in the West. He also differed from Rathenau in his attitude toward the League of Nations, regarded by Rathenau as a playground for worn-out statesmen and by Bernstorff as a vehicle for revision of the Versailles Treaty. After Rathenau’s assassination in 1922, he wrote an eloquent denunciation of German anti-semitism in the Frankfurter Zeitung for 3 September 1922, describing it as the philosophy of people wanting in humanity, who attach more importance to deprecating the peculiarities of others than to developing their own personalities to the highest attainable point . . . We ought to pledge ourselves at Rathenau’s grave that for the future we will carry on the war of politics with intellectual weapons and the voting-paper alone. Let us hope in the German Republic there will be only one rivalry between Christians and Jews, and that will be for the credit of rendering the greatest services to the Fatherland.169 Rathenau, in his view, would have prevented the invasion of the Ruhr. In the deliberations on the Weimar Constitution, he opposed express inclusion of an authorisation for military conscription: ‘Nothing should be done that might annoy the Allies.’ In the event, language was adopted referring in general terms to ‘service to the state’.170 His reaction to the occupation of the Ruhr was to express gratification that the British had not joined in it.171 He considered that the Presidential election of 1925 was the death warrant of the Republic. He supported an independent, Otto Gessler, in the first ballot, whose candidacy failed because the Social Democrats insisted on presenting their own candidate, Wilhelm Marx. Bernstorff opposed Marx on the second ballot: The Left should not have put up such an avowed clerical, especially in educational matters . . . we are the people of the Thirty Years War, and the German needs a very light rein in ecclesiastical matters if he is not to grow refractory . . . Hindenburg would not have won the election if the ‘furor Protestanticus’ had not been mobilised against Marx.172 The Democrats were weakened by their anti-clericalism in much the same way as Sforza’s Action Party in post-World War II Italy.

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In 1923, he reviewed the memoirs of Walter Hines Page, the strongly pro-British American Ambassador in London during World War I, observing that: ‘Historical truth is never spoken so plainly as from the mouth of a man who resents it’, the truth in question being that Wilson would have acted for a compromise peace and was prevented from doing so by the resumption of submarine warfare. (The eminent British judge Patrick Devlin later noted: ‘When Page died, they put up a tablet, unveiled by Grey, in Westminster Abbey, to “the friend of Britain in her direst need.” This ought not to happen to an ambassador.’173) Page failed to foresee that ‘America would be unable to control the mad intoxication of victory in Europe, universal poverty is gradually developing into universal pauperism.’ He decried the ‘black occupation’ of the Ruhr imposed by ‘French militarists’ with the aid of colonial troops, and asked: ‘Is French militarism to repeat the proceeding and perhaps compel America to step in a second time to save the world?’174 In his Memoirs, he noted the little-remembered fact that ‘in his last public speech [Wilson] stated that France, by her invasion of the Ruhr, had reduced the Versailles Treaty to a scrap of paper.’175 A commentator noted that he was ‘not a born politician’ and that his view of the ‘crass materialism’ of the Wilhelmine era was one of ‘contempt and abhorrence’.176 In 1923, he published an article in the American quarterly Foreign Affairs, urging American participation in an international loan to Germany, noting that ‘victory was won in the war solely by the United States’, and observing that if the reparations question was not settled, ‘the franc will go the way of the mark.’177 A.J.P. Taylor wrote of the early twenties in Germany: The inflation which raged at an ever-advancing pace until the end of 1923 was solely due to the failure to balance revenue and expenditure. The saving, investing middle class, everywhere the pillar of stability and predictability, was utterly destroyed, and Germany thus deprived of her solid, cautious keel . . . The inflation more than any other single factor doomed the republic; its cause was not the policy of the Allies but the failure to impose direct taxes on the rich.178 This has cautionary lessons. In 1925, Bernstoff’s enemies in Germany sought to capitalise on the impression created by the famous ‘bathing beauty’ photograph by circulating an affidavit executed in 1925 by a woman named Mena Reiss (née Edwards) alleging that Papen and Bernstorff had jointly attended a brothel in New York.179 By 1926, the recovery of his reputation in the United States was such that Colonel Edward House wrote: You are the one man in Germany who occupied a great office during the War who had an understanding of the situation not only during the war but later during the trying period of reconstruction. If Germany had followed your counsels, a different story might have been written today. He served in the Reichstag until 1928. He had been a member of the International

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Federation of League of Nations Societies throughout the 1920s, and was cheered in a meeting at Aberystwyth in Wales in 1926 after an abusive heckler was removed. After The Times editorialised that ‘It is intolerable that Count Bernstorff should appear publicly in this country as an ardent humanitarian’,180 a letter in his defence was published by Professor Gilbert Murray, President of the League of Nations Union.181 When he became President of the German League of Nations Union on the resignation of Matthias Erzburger in the early 1920, there was disillusionment with the League in Germany; it was said that in Count Bernstorff the group had found ‘a respectable if uninspiring leader’.182 Bernstorff held to the view that: ‘By entering the League we shall secure equality of rights with all nations. Only through such equality and reciprocity will it be possible to establish the world economic system.’183 ‘The attempt was not made, by entering the League of Nations, to prevent the French invasion and solve the Reparations question . . . It is difficult today to grasp that the inflation in its worst manifestations might have been spared us by this means.’184 His support of the League was no departure from his realism: it was ‘a sort of mirror in which we may see the reflection of the momentary balance of political forces . . . to be regarded only as a means and not as an end in itself’.185 A similar instrumental non-Wilsonian view of international institutions was shared by Einstein, Sforza and Inönü in their various writings. The Americans who deride the United Nations, in ignorance of Roosevelt’s view of the great powers as ‘the four policemen’,186 likewise fail to grasp this vision. ‘Only there [in the League], by way of example, could the German government successfully press for the rights of German minority groups in other countries.’187 He was finally successful after many pitfalls – resentment by the League of the Locarno Conference, German trade disputes with Poland – in securing Germany’s admission to the League in 1926. To the extent that his and Stresemann’s design was flawed, the flaw was that identified by A.J.P. Taylor: Stresemann acted in democratic sincerity; all the same he did German democracy a dis-service, inescapable, but nonetheless mortal. Stresemann’s republic, like Bismarck’s empire, was kept going by foreign success; and as those who came after Bismarck discovered, the dose of success has constantly to be increased. To base the republic on foreign success was to try to outbid the ‘national’ parties; the republic was committed to gaining more by negotiation than the “national” parties could achieve by violence, an absurd and impossible task.188 Zionism At the request of the German Foreign Ministry, Bernstorff became Chairman of the German Pro-Palestina Committee in 1926 in support of Jewish colonisation efforts in Palestine. There are people who fear that a new nationalism may arise out of this movement . . . if there were any question of creation of a new nationalism . . . I

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would not be standing here to defend it . . . it is necessary that the two populations who are settling and have settled in Palestine should come to terms.189 As chairman, he presided over or attended meetings in June and November 1927 and 1928, February 1929 and February 1930; among his collaborators were Max Weber, Werner Sombart, Albert Einstein, Konrad Adenauer, Gustav Noske, Matthias Erzberger, former Chancellor Heinrich Muller, Thomas Mann and Philip Scheidemann; in November 1927, he invited and welcomed Chaim Weizmann.190 At the meeting in 1930, attended by more than 1,500 persons, Bernstorff, presiding, declared that: The government and German public opinion were backing the pro-Palestine movement. He also revealed that the late Imperial government had instructed the German Ambassador in Turkey during the war to influence the Turks in favour of a Jewish national home in Palestine; . . . the assumption of the Palestine mandate by England was in no way diminishing the rights of Jewish settlers of other countries but that the high cultural achievement in Palestine was serving all humanity.191 His views on Zionism, in many ways prophetic, had been expressed while he was Ambassador to Turkey: Every nation which has a home will soon want to found a State. That is why Zionism meets with active opposition here, because the Turks and the Arabs foresee that if Zionism is successful, they will ultimately be driven out of Palestine . . . It seems to me very questionable whether a quarter of all the Jews in the world would really go to Palestine, but if this should happen, there would certainly be no room there for any other nationality. Such a plan may perhaps be acceptable to Mr Wilson, because his first concern is to gain the votes of the three million American Jews at the next election. But England cannot really want to carry through such a plan, because she intends to found an Anglo-Arab empire and Turkey can want it still less . . . If matters should be carried through as quickly as this, the Jews would have to found a national army, to protect themselves from pogroms.192 Bernstorff favoured Jewish immigration without a political background. This he viewed as being in Germany’s interest by preventing an influx of Eastern European Jews into her own society and by promoting Turkey’s economy. The Preparatory Disarmament Conference After the death of Stresemann in 1929, in Bernstorff’s view, ‘there was no other man with the spiritual force to bring together the German middle class.’193 Bernstorff became head of the German delegation to the preparatory disarmament conference at

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Geneva, which deliberated from 1925 to 1930, in ‘long public sessions, [with] slow advances, and frequent interruptions’ and which produced a draft convention that Bernstorff was able to endorse, albeit with numerous reservations. ‘[He] had continually to demand that the German restrictions be applied to the other powers who had never the slightest intention of accepting them.’194 A British commentator described this as a ‘difficult task, performed . . . with dignity and a certain stiff courtesy through which, however, the bitterness of a Germany deprived of her beloved army was often allowed to appear’.195 He retired because of ill health in 1931, and therefore did not participate in the plenary disarmament conference, which came to an end with the withdrawal of Hitler’s Germany in 1934. The Preparatory Conference arose from the preamble to the fifth section of the Versailles Treaty, which stated that the disarmament imposed on Germany was to be a precursor to general disarmament. In 1927, Bernstorff proposed that the convention limit raw material as well as manpower, observing that: ‘Germany attached especial importance to the limitation of ammunition.’ The French observed that inspecting matériel in reserve ‘would entail virtually a house-to-house search’, and were supported in this objection, founded in part on Germany’s industrial superiority, by the Belgians, Romanians and Yugoslavs, who claimed to have ‘practically only their bodies with which to defend their country.’ Bernstorff observed that this was ‘a striking picture of what was really the position of Germany today’, and insisted on noting the proposal as a reservation. The American delegate Hugh Gibson suggested ‘full publicity’ as a possible substitute,196 a proposal adopted by the Conference in 1929 over Bernstorff’s protest.197 In 1927, Bernstorff proposed that other states reduce their armaments to the German level: The condition of disarmament will have to be such that no state will be powerful enough to prevail by force in a contest with the League; at the same time, each state will have to maintain sufficient forces to enable the League of Nations by a combination of the forces of the various countries, to enforce the common will.198 In January 1928, Bernstorff lent his support to a ‘League for the Regeneration of the Reich’ under the leadership of former Chancellor Hans Luther. Supporters of the League covered a wide political spectrum, including industrialists like Krupp, Siemens and Thyssen; former Chancellor Keno; several prominent burgomasters; and some social democrats. The main object of the League was the enhancement of the power of the central government vis-à-vis the German states and municipalities, particularly as to financial questions. The League was in part a response to pressure from the Reparations Administrator, Parker Gilbert, who had criticised the extent of borrowing by German states and municipalities. The Democrats, the party to which Bernstorff belonged, were said to favour the proposal ‘in order that if they become the government their powers may be the more absolute’; the Nationalists were less interested in expanding the power of the Reich than in expanding that of the Reich President.199 Stresemann told Horace Rumbold in 1929 that ‘he did not think that the Lutherbund would be able to achieve much.’200

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In March 1928, Bernstorff proposed that publicity be given to the quantity of all armaments: ‘It became clear that the States which were less disposed toward disarmament, were equally averse to publicity.’201 In April 1929, Bernstorff made a far-sighted suggestion to the Preparatory Disarmament Conference, ‘that the use of aircraft without pilots, directed by wireless or other means, and the launching of bombs or weapons of any sort (bacteria are regarded as weapons in this connection) from aeroplanes should be prohibited’. He warned that ‘aircraft were in a position to inflict injury far outside the actual war zone, and thus they could threaten directly the civil population.’ Adoption of the proposal would cause the bomber to disappear and aircraft to be limited to defensive uses. The Japanese, ironically in view of their later fate, urged the importance of ‘special circumstances’ which required further study. The French urged that aerial bombardment had defensive uses; the American that the day for prohibition of bombers had not arrived. Among the major powers, Bernstorff was supported only by Litvinov of Russia, who urged a parallel to the prohibition of chemical weapons; he was also supported by China, Holland and Sweden, but opposed by Greece, Belgium, Italy and Canada. The British delegate urged that bombers were legitimate armaments, and that bombardment had been used in the Great War even though prohibited by the Hague Convention of 1907. ‘It was decided, however, to emphasize the point that non-acceptance by the Commission of the German proposal did not mean the authorization of the aerial bombing of civilians.’202 On December 20, Bernstorff proposed the prohibition of certain kinds of armaments, for the most part those interdicted by the Versailles treaty, but received the support only of his usual companion, Litvinov. Earlier, he had sought to have the disarmament conference convene on a certain date in November 1931, but only the Soviet Union, Italy and Bulgaria supported him. Bernstorff relied on the numerous reservations expressed by the Germans in accepting the final report.203 In November 1930, near the end of the Preparatory Conference, Bernstorff noted that the Convention’s limitation of land armaments consisted of little more than a chapter heading. He vehemently objected to British and French proposals that would have maintained in effect the limitations on land armaments in the Versailles and other treaties. He supported instead a Bulgarian proposal which would have left the effectiveness of prior treaty obligations to the final conference; this proposal failed, gaining the support only of two other former Central Powers, Bulgaria and Turkey, together with Italy and the Soviet Union. He indicated he could not recommend that his country accept a convention that did not embody the principle of parity. Lord Cecil urged that parity was a matter for the full conference, and that the Draft Convention contained manpower limitations by limiting the number of annual classes that could be simultaneously called, declaring Bernstorff’s statement to be ‘absolutely devoid of foundation’. Cecil, it was said had always endeavoured in his fight for reduction to give no such encouragement to German ambitions as could later be used to justify her rearmament; he would not admit that the work of the Commission had been useless or that

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Bernstorff was entitled to speak as the champion of virtue and pacificism against the militarism of France.204 The Times report went on: ‘Count Bernstorff, who usually speaks in French, replied to this in English. The vehemence of his reaction was said to have been spurred on by angry manifestations at home – the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Reichstag adopted a Nazi motion asking for his immediate recall to Berlin’205 All the German disillusionment and weary waiting for 12 years and all the personal disappointment at the failure of the five years’ work were vibrant in Count Bernstorff’s denunciation.206 “Never in my life”, he said, “have I been carried away by passion or prejudice.” He asked whether it was devoid of foundation that naval and air matérial had been limited and not land matérial . . . all land armaments and trained reserves had been left out of the Convention. The failure to limit reserves was thus unacceptable to Bernstorff, who had proposed to limit the size of annual contingents and the period of conscript service. Bernstorff similarly considered that budgetary restrictions discriminated against nations like Germany with professional armies.207 Germany, a commentator observed ‘was asked to associate herself with what amounted to maintain, much more than to do away with, the existing inequalities’. But she was prejudiced by her not-so-clandestine rearmament. ‘Had she shown a less dubious, more persistent or more convincing desire by her example . . . the draft Convention would no doubt have been very different.’208 Bernstorff rang the changes on ‘discrimination’ against Germany, but discrimination in some form was a vital interest of a France that had lost the American and British guarantees that Versailles and the League were to have given her, and which were necessary to neutralise Germany’s greater population.209 Rumbold took this view initially, but was willing to concede parity to save Bruning. Bernstorff did not participate in the Final Disarmament Conference in 1932 except by way of an earlier address to the Council of the League, reiterating objections based on lack of parity. In late 1932, the Allies conceded to the Papen government the parity they had denied to Müller and Bruning. In his Memoirs, he observed that: ‘In the six years during which I dealt with disarmament at Geneva I became more and more inclined to the conviction that France would in no case disarm, whatever we might say or do . . . I thenceforward regarded it as my sole duty to put myself in the right and my adversary in the wrong.’210 In 1928, Bernstorff had a meeting with Hindenburg, one of his principal adversaries during his tenure in Washington. ‘As I was taking my leave, he said: “Do you believe in disarmament?” To which I replied: “Not in my lifetime.” The old gentleman laughed and closed the interview with the words “Then I shan’t see it either.”’211 The work of the conference’s military commission nonetheless convinced him that ‘disarmament is technically possible and therefore practicable.’212 His performance had its critics: Alexander Cadogan of the British Foreign Office observed that ‘he is too apt to say that everything will be quite

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easy and pleasant, but when the moment comes he does not always contribute to that result’, while Brigadier Temperly of the British delegation charged him with ‘obscure and apparently aimless manoeuvres’.213 Another commentator, J.W. WheelerBennett, noted the changed political climate in Germany: He dared not give German consent to even a draft agreement which did not give Germany equality; he was placed in the most unenviable position. History of the past twelve years offered the fate which overtook Erzburger in the Black Forest and Rathenau in the suburbs of Berlin as examples of the penalty meted out to those suspected of bartering away Germany’s honour, and apart from this personal threat there was the added danger that acceptance of an unsatisfactory Convention might provide the excuse for an attempted Nazi coup d’etat. These considerations resulted in the adoption by the German delegation of an obstructive policy of endless caveats and reservations.214 At the final meeting of the Preparatory Commission, Bernstorff reiterated his view that: ‘The peoples of the world . . . would not fail to observe that in this complex instrument the will to disarm was absent. The Disarmament Conference offered to them the last possibility of realising the final aim of disarmament. The world has waited five years, and no appreciable result has been achieved.’215 The Chairman of the Preparatory Conference later wrote of the French: They believed, rightly as we now know – that the Germans had already made some preparations for secret re-armament and they feared that, whatever the Treaty said, they would continue that action; whereas the French and British would honourably fulfill their obligations to limit or reduce their arms.216 The apologia of the Germans was later set forth by their last Ambassador to Britain before the War: Equity in respect of armaments was refused. So was disarmament. An appeal to Article 19 [of the Versailles Treaty] providing for revision of treaty terms no longer compatible with existing circumstances was proscribed. It was Chamberlain’s tragedy that he came to power too late to carry out his policies.217 A commentator observed: The Draft Convention as adopted by the Preparatory Commission had done little to implement the pledges of the Covenant and the Treaties of Peace and had convinced Germany and particularly the young and growing Nazi party of the intention of the Allied powers not to fulfil them . . . In 1930, the spirit of Herr Stresemann’s policy was still visible, in 1932 it had vanished. Seven years had seen no progress toward meeting the German claim for equality of status.218

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In fact the claim for formal equality of status was granted in December 1932, a month before Hitler’s accession to power. Bernstorff’s labours in the cause of disarmament earned for him widespread recognition. Reviewing his memoirs, the London Times observed in 1936: ‘Count Bernstorff fought bravely in the cause of disarmament at Geneva and elsewhere and his work in the Disarmament Conference itself will not soon be forgotten . . . the best wishes of his friends of all nationalities accompany him into his retirement.’219 The 1930 Preparatory Convention substituted the principle of limitation by control of expenditure for limitation by publicity and accepted limitation of the period of service and of total effectives, as well as agreeing to a permanent disarmament commission.220 The clearest epitaph on the Preparatory Conference was pronounced by George F. Kennan: Armaments were a symptom rather than a cause, primarily the reflection of international differences and only secondarily the source of them. I know of no sound reason why, even in 1925, anyone should have supposed that there was any likelihood that general disarmament could be brought about by multilateral agreement among a group of European powers whose mutual political differences and suspicions had been by no means resolved.221 Evening Hours Aware of the gathering political storm clouds, Bernstorff retired with his wife to Switzerland in 1932 after liquidating his German property,222 and published his Memoirs in 1935, dedicated to ‘My Dear Brave Wife Who Has Courageously Borne With Me All The Disappointments of Life’. In 1932, he gave his 3,000-volume library to the Students’ International Union in Geneva, an organisation which until 1938 sponsored summer courses for American students of international relations.223 His wife feared for his life on his visits to Berlin; the racist Nazi supporter Houston Stewart Chamberlain published two series of photographs of supposedly different racial types under the title Das Eine und das Andere Deutschland, declaring that: ‘The physiognomies alone are sufficient to prove that it concerns two so different kinds of people as if they were born on two different planets.’ Chamberlain’s heroes included Hindenburg, Falkenheyn, Groener, Ludendorff, Mackensen, Richtoven, von Spee, Tirpitz and Zeppelin; Bernstorff was included in the photo gallery of villains, along with Müller, Bethmann-Hellweg, Demburg, Erzberger, Zimmermann, von Jagow, Helfferich, von Hertling, Hilferding, Lichnowsky, David, Wolf, Scheidemann, Kuhlmann and Hahn. His Memoirs were well received, though the translation was a less than happy one.224 He alluded in his forward to his ‘age, ill-health, and disgust with politics’. He related that: ‘When I was Counsellor of Embassy in London from 1902 to 1906 there was no one at the Embassy who was not convinced that war between Germany and England was inevitable if the German naval programme was maintained.’ Germany

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had failed to profit from Napoleon’s reflection on St. Helena: ‘You must either fight England or share the trade of the world with her; only the second alternative is today possible.’ Colonel House for his part had cautioned in May of 1914: Whenever England consents, France and Russia will close in on Germany and Austria. England does not want Germany wholly crushed, for she would then have to reckon alone with her ancient enemy, Russia: but if Germany insists upon an ever-increasing navy, then England would have no choice. He noted the paradox that: ‘Nationalism is, historically, a democratic invention, though the contemporary version of it is strongly inclined toward dictatorship’; this lesson has not yet been learned by Americans. It is urged against the diplomat ‘that he tends to be a man without a county, but that is contrary to my experience. He is merely detached from the material side of life, insofar as he owes his allegiance not to any definite place or living people, but to the ideal, which is everywhere’; this cosmopolitan outlook he shared with the expatriate Lewis Einstein and the exile Sforza. He recalled as a young man being asked by the Crown Prince to dance with the neglected daughter of the Jewish banker Bleichroder at a court ball. ‘The Crown Prince [Frederick] was well aware that I, like him, regarded anti-Semitism as a stain on the escutcheon of German culture.’225 Wilson had not betrayed Germany over the Fourteen Points.’We had to lay down our arms because the Supreme Army Command insisted that we should do so . . . and then we invoked Wilson’s help, with an appeal to the Fourteen Points.’226 One reviewer said that: ‘The Memoirs suffer from the congenital dullness of all writers whose training is in diplomacy.’227 Oswald Villard in the Nation found the phrasing ‘stilted and teutonic’.228 He suffered a stroke in April 1938; his wife came briefly to the United States in February 1939 for the purpose of reclaiming the American citizenship she had surrendered on her marriage 52 years earlier.229 ‘My own country is where I belong. All of my friends similarly placed have been doing the same thing.’230 He died in Geneva in October 1939 of heart disease At his request, he being a freethinker, he was buried in the Geneva cemetery after a private ceremony without flowers. For his last five years, he lived almost as a recluse, devoting himself to his Memoirs, his garden and a few old friends.231 ‘He professe[d] himself a cynic and unbeliever: ‘I know this world,’ he says, ‘and don’t trouble about any other.’ He frankly dislikes churches and doubts whether their influence is good or bad. ‘I think the man a fool who denies himself any good thing in this life unless for health’s sake or some dominant reason.’ But he believes in humanity, in the slow development of man in time, and hopes that our growth is towards the Good and the Beautiful.232 This credo resembled that of Lewis Einstein as disclosed in his eulogy of Justice Holmes.

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Two years later, his wife came to the United States ‘to die’, destroying Bernstorff’s papers rather than leaving them in Switzerland, where their discovery in the event of an invasion might have compromised Bernstorff’s correspondents in Germany,233 accompanied by a maid and two Scotch terriers and declaring of Germany: ‘I never want to see that country again’ and ‘It will be a long time before it will be possible to live there’, noting that there were many pro-Nazi Swiss and many German visitors to Switzerland.234 ‘If I did not think that the British would win the war, I would commit suicide. They must win.’235 Her funeral was in Washington; she was buried in New York. Bernstorff was survived by an estranged son, Gunther Bernstorff, who was involved in a series of sex scandals in the later stages of the First World War and who lived in South America after being disciplined by the German army, and by a daughter, Alexandra (1888–1971), whose first husband, a Frenchman, died in the First World War, and who then married Prince Johannes Löwenstein-WertheimRosenberg, who died at Newport, RI, in 1956. She is survived by a daughter, Marie Sophie Caecilie, born in 1922, Bernstorff’s granddaughter, who is a Sister of the Order of the Sacred Heart of Jesus in Padua.236 His nephew, Albrecht Bernstorff, who was Counsellor to the German Embassy in London at the time of Hitler’s coming to power and with whom Bernstorff actively corresponded, was recalled in 1933 and withdrew from the Foreign Office; he was ‘very bitter against Neurath, who he says did him in more than the Nazis’.237 He protested against the Jewish persecutions and was confined in a concentration camp at the start of the war, and later was executed in the aftermath of the 20 July plot. He had declared in a manual he had prepared for German Rhodes Scholars: ‘In England . . . any man is free to think what he likes. That is a frame of mind which we should seek to imitate if we are to preserve all the things which Germany has acquired in the last decades.’ In an obituary of Albrecht, Harold Nicolson wrote: ‘With fine courage he defended those principles even in disaster. They cost him his life.’238 A plaque to Albrecht’s memory was erected in the German Embassy in London in 1961.239

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4 COUNT CARLO SFORZA

Carlo Sforza was born in 1872, the son of a scholar and archivist at Turin. He served in the Italian diplomatic service from 1896 to 1905 in Cairo (where his service overlapped that of both Bernstorff and Rumbold), Paris and Bucharest, at Algeciras in 1906, where he became a friend of Lewis Einstein, in Constantinople in 1908 to 1909, as minister in China (1911 to 1915), as minister to Serbia (1915 to 1918), as High Commissioner in Turkey (1918 to 1919) and Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs in the Nitti administration (1919 to 1920). As Under-Secretary, he dissuaded the Prime Minister from acceding to a project of Lloyd-George that the Italians send a military expedition to Georgia in aid of the White Russians.1 His distaste for Western adventures in the Caucasus was shared by Bernstorff and Einstein. As Italian Foreign Minister under Giolitti (June 1920 to July 1921), he pursued a moderate policy toward the new Yugoslavia, wanting ‘to divide dissatisfaction equally between the two countries’, and he negotiated the Treaty of Rapallo with Yugoslavia in 1920. He was an active participant in the post-war conferences in Boulogne, Spa, Paris and London and helped draft the note inviting the Ankara government to what became the Lausanne Conference.2 His contributions to his country’s history were manifold. Not only did he avert conflict with Yugoslavia after World War I, but he became a leader of the anti-Fascist resistance, first within Italy and then outside it. In the wake of World War II, he sought to purge high-ranking Fascists while avoiding sweeping disqualifications like those recently carried out in Iraq which would disable the state and sow the seeds of future conflict. He similarly sought to contain Italian communism without outlawing or de-legitimitising it, and sought through a variety of means as Foreign Minister after World War II, to foster freer trade and European unity. Post-war Turkey In March 1921, Briand and Sforza proposed that the Allies throw on Greece the onus for rejecting the Allied proposal of an inquiry into appropriate borders in Asiatic Turkey. Lloyd-George, with Briand’s acquiescence though apparently without Sforza’s, sent Hankey to tell the Greeks it was up to them what to do; the disastrous

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invasion of Asia Minor ensued.3 Sforza had warned the Greek Premier, Venizelos: ‘Remember that if one can die of starvation, one can die of indigestion.’4 His objective for Italy in Turkey was ‘peaceful penetration [including immigration] with the further object of obtaining concessions and raw materials . . . The Turks understood the Italian point of view and left the Italians alone.’5 In March 1921, Sforza signed a secret agreement in London with the Turkish nationalists, who agreed to recognise Italian interests in Adalia in exchange for immediate evacuation of Italian troops and an Italian promise of diplomatic support at the peace negotiations.6 Sforza was strongly of the view that harsh treatment of Turkey would only stimulate resistance.7 This policy enjoyed some later success; by 1931, Italy accounted for 14.5 per cent of Turkey’s imports and 24.1 per cent of her exports.8 Sforza opposed Lloyd-George’s anti-Turkish policy, believing that the Russians were the real threat at Constantinople. ‘Kemal was an old friend of his. He was an honest man and a loyal soldier and when he was once on the point of being arrested, Sforza had offered him the sanctuary of the Italian Embassy.’9 It was impossible to believe that [by destroying the Turks] a mortal blow would be dealt to the Moslem world and to its cohesion and spirit of resistance. This spirit of resistance is merely the Mussulman defensive: a defensive provoked by fear. The essential key is to remove this fear.10 This insight has continuing pertinence. Sforza in 1919 fostered secret Franco-Turkish meetings in Rome, ‘the Allied capital most accessible to the Turks’.11 Noting that there were 135,000 Russian refugees at Constantinople, he worried: ‘If the Russians at Constantinople become Bolshevik, it was not improbable that the Turks at Constantinople would follow suit.’12 Curzon observed of Sforza in Turkey: ‘Count Sforza appeared throughout our conversations to be animated personally by most friendly intentions, but he made no great effort to disguise that his countrymen were not similarly inclined.’ The later feud between Churchill and Sforza may have had its roots in Turkey: ‘The Italians were rightly suspected by the British of being the least reliable of the Allies. Sforza, the inheritor of a famous Renaissance name not exactly associated with straight dealing, was doubly unpopular, being regarded as outrageously vain and equally dishonest.’13 At one of the post-war conferences, ‘[He] wondered whether the Allies should not try to avoid the embarrassing situation of having to decide if they should employ an army of up to 300,000 men to reduce the nationalists into submission . . . was not conciliation more advantageous than reliance on force?’14 He rather immodestly told Colonel Repington: For a man of the world to be Foreign Minister was an advantage to a country, and he told me how he had realized what modern democracy had lost by not comprehending this . . . Sforza is a man who realizes that his task is the restoration of the peace and the unity of Europe. His optimism in foreign

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policy is less a mask than the real measure of the man. His main practical aim is to pacify Europe while securing economic profit for Italy. His head is cool and he regards politics without passion. He may not be a Bismarck, but a Bismarck would be highly inconvenient just now. I think Sforza adds something to the moral forces of our postwar world.15 The French permanent official Phillippe Berthelot took a different view, according to Repington:16 ‘He thought him a ladies’ man and a diplomat de salon . . . Bismarck had once observed that to weigh the value of a man one should subtract his vanity and then see what is left afterwards. But Sforza has no vanity! How has he got across Berthelot?’17 The Aftermath of Versailles At the Spa Conference in 1920, Lord D’Abernon noted, the picturesque Italian Foreign Minister has been given an appropriate background in a battlemented chateau with turrets, accessible only by means of a drawbridge suspended over an artificial moat. As a reputed descendant of the tyrants of Milan, he is thoroughly at home in these medieval surroundings. He mingles, however, modern methods with medievalism, for whereas British and French ministers have bound themselves to the strictest reticence in their dealings with the press, Count Sforza addressed on the open boulevard massed bands of Italian journalists and gives them discreet accounts of inter-allied conversations.18 At the Conference, he was ‘carefully non-commital and somewhat changeable’; though not an enthusiast for the occupation of the Ruhr, he offered to assist with one battalion. This was also what he provided at Constantinople ‘to show the flag’. He was ‘somewhat too medieval and knightly to feel quite at home in wrangling with Treasury experts in sordid squabbles over percentages’, although he managed to increase Italy’s share of reparations from 7 1/2 per cent to 10 per cent and to acquire for it a seat on the Rhine High Commission and most of the Austro-Hungarian fleet.19 He referred to reparations as ‘an inequitable division of our disappointments’ and to Austria as having been ‘conquered too completely’. He proposed in 1922 an elaborate plan for reducing reparations which would have charged off a portion of the gross sum demanded from Germany as uncollectable debt from other Central Powers, would have subtracted total inter-Allied war debt from the reparations claimed from Germany, and would have required payments only of the inter-Allied debts actually collected; he also favoured imposing a balanced budget and currency reform on the Germans, an end to charges for occupation costs, and an end to any occupation by 1926. His attitude toward the value of reparations resembled that of Inönü.20 He became heavily involved in discussions about Upper Silesia, there even being references to a ‘Sforza Line’ but his policy was not fully understood.21 The British

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general Henry Wilson lamented that the arrangements for a Silesian plebiscite agreed to by Lloyd-George and Sforza allowing Silesians resident in Germany to vote in Cologne would require 600–1,000 trains and the provision of 300,000 beds and one million meals.22 At another conference in 1921, Colonel Repington found him to be ‘an agreeable man with distinction and dignity . . . [who] does not desire the restoration of Austria in any form, believing that she would be the satellite of Germany . . . even if the present Austria united with Germany some day, we could work the Slav and other states carved out of Austria and rule by dividing.’ He included a secret clause in the 1920 Treaty of Rapallo with Yugoslavia directed against a Habsburg restoration in Hungary.23 At the same time, he supported the temporary rescue of the Austrian economy arranged at the conference: The abandonment of Austria is the beginning of a great future disturbance which will entail the ruin of the Benes˘ scheme of Czecho-Slovakia and the eventual spread of German domination over not only Austria but Hungary which is too hard beset by Romanians and Jugo Slavs not to seek refuge in a German or in fact any combination which is against the Romanians.24 In this prediction, he was a dozen years ahead of his time. During this period, he took the view that: Italy’s position is what France’s position would be if Germany had suddenly vanished from the map . . . All Italy had to do was to be generous, tactful and constructive to become the leader and rallying point of all Central and Southeastern Europe. Sforza concluded pacts with Czechoslovakia and Romania, he called a conference of the successor states in Rome, he liquidated D’Annunzio’s Fiume adventure and turned a virtual state of war with Yugoslavia into friendship via the Treaty of Rapallo, which he concluded in November 1920.25 This was described as ‘not an ideal solution of the Adriatic problem, although it was the best compromise it was then possible to reach’.26 This agreement included a secret provision ceding part of Fiume: ‘It is agreed that Port Baros and the Delta shall be . . . under the sovereignty of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes . . . It is understood that the present undertaking must remain secret. Carlo Sforza. The President of the Council has seen this document. Carlo Sforza.’ After much travail, Sforza’s solution was accepted by Mussolini in the Pact of Rome in January 1924, by which Italy retained and incorporated Fiume and Port Baros was ceded to Yugoslavia.27 The Italians gained all of Istria, Zara and four islands off the Italian coast, leading Sforza to conclude in his Contemporary Italy that: ‘No country achieved its war aims more perfectly.’28 Later, of course, Mussolini turned on the Yugoslavs, but Sforza’s achievement ‘remained throughout the 1920s as an inconvenient reminder of an alternative course that had never received a fair trial – the course of understanding, rather than provocation toward Italy’s most difficult

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neighbor’.29 As a parliamentarian during this period, he learned some oratorical techniques that served him well later: ‘They don’t expect me to be able to speak, and consequently are surprised when I do fairly well.’30 The pacts with successor states other than Hungary were part of the beginnings of the Little Entente, a project that Sforza supported, even though initially there were some French politicians who would instead have explored a Habsburg restoration as a counterweight to Germany, a project to which Sforza was strongly opposed.31 Sforza was not entirely a renunziata. In July 1920 he caused Italy to denounce the Titoni-Venizelos agrreement of July 1919 ceding the Dodecanese Islands, except Rhodes and Castelerizzo, to Greece and replaced it in August 1920 with the BoninVenizelos agreement, which merely modified the Italian regime on Rhodes without ceding other islands.32 There was an element of renunciation in this, inasmuch as the earlier agreement had contemplated the partition of Albania with Greece. Instead, Albania became independent under League of Nations protection but with substantial Italian economic influence, and the Yugoslavs in 1922 were induced to withdraw from Albania by pressure from the League, without the need of Italian military involvement.33 The Coming of Fascism A propaganda official life of Mussolini boasted that: ‘On Count Sforza . . . he delivered several smashing attacks until the Giolitti cabinet . . . fell.’34 In one of them, Sforza was denounced as a ‘world-weary diplomat . . . devoid of all feeling’,35 in consequence of the secret clause conceding a small port to Yugoslavia. On his fall, Repington noted: ‘Sforza is out of office in Italy after Giolitti’s resignation after a vote which displayed lack of confidence in Italy’s foreign policy . . . Where is the promised Turkish barrier against Bolshevism now? Barrier and Bolshevism are allied!’36 But in the end Sforza was right and Repington was wrong. The Rapallo treaty in fact was one in which ‘Italy obtained much the best of the bargain’, 467,000 Yugoslavs being left under Italian rule.37 After Mussolini assumed power, Sforza then being Ambassador in Paris, he resigned that post with a telegram, published in the press, declaring that: ‘The foreign policy of the new government amounts to no more than a mere collection of sentiment and resentment’,38 refused the office of Foreign Minister and became the leader of the opposition in the Italian Senate as a member of the Italian Association for Democratic Control (sometimes referred to as the National Union of Democratic and Liberal Forces, or the Democratic Party), which was dissolved by the government in 1926. This did not prevent him from unsuccessfully seeking from Mussolini appointment as Italian negotiator at Lausanne, in which he was interested because of his support of and commitments to the Kemalist government.39 In his autobiography, Mussolini declared that Sforza was ‘loquacious and irresponsible as a minister in past governments; [he] had been a nuisance to the country – an amateur in everything that concerned any perplexity of foreign policy.’40 He vigorously protested against the murder of the Socialist leader Matteoti, speaking in the Italian Senate in 1924 after

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his wife was warned that she would be widowed if he did so, and declaring to Mussolini: ‘You have the choice: either you are guilty as no man has ever been or you are incompetent as no man has ever been.’ After the Senate voted 225 to 21 in favour of the government, Sforza was one of the few members of the divided opposition who urged direct action to oust and arrest Mussolini, most conservative and liberal Italians still hoping that the Fascist movement would moderate in time.41 He left Italy in March 1927 after his country house was burned down by the Fascists,42 undertook a tour of the Orient, but continued for a time to live in France near the Italian border. In 1926, he married Valentine de Dudseele, the daughter of a Belgian count. In the years that followed he wrote copiously for the Dépêche de Toulouse and the Brussels Soir.43 In 1930, he testified for the defence at the trial in Switzerland of three Italian aviators who had scattered anti-government leaflets over Milan; they were acquitted but ordered to leave the country.44 He viewed as nonsense the contention that the Fascists had saved Italy from Bolshevism. The occupation of the factories in 1920 was the ‘last flash of a fire that was slowly dying out’. The workers’ movement died from non-resistance and ‘would instantly re-ignite if violence were used against the workers’. The Fascists had no real attachment to private property; their 1919 programme called for abolition of banks and stock exchanges. ‘You will no more see Bolshevism in Italy than olive trees in Russia.’45 In 1932, he undertook a detached view of ‘the Fascist decade’, crediting Mussolini with a wise agreement with Yugoslavia in 1924, partially undermined by later concessions to Hungarian irredentism. He criticised the Fascist destruction of autonomous institutions, unproductive spending and the concordat with the Vatican, which he thought would generate a future reaction. The deterioration in personal character was the main vice of Fascism: ‘The strength of a city is not ships or walls but men’; the regime had forgotten ‘how safe a thing freedom is’.46 Writings in Exile In 1927, he reflected on the folly of the Gallipoli campaign, with its assumption that by dealing a mortal blow to the Turkish race, the cohesion and spirit of the Moslem world would be broken everywhere . . . The problem of establishing influence in the East cannot be a simple problem of force. And this is true for all the East, near and far, and for the Oriental policies of every country, not merely Great Britain.47 In the following year, he recalled the magnanimous policy toward the Yugoslav lands favoured by Mazzini and Cavour, and, after the First World War, by San Giuliano as Foreign Minister. San Giuliano wanted Alpine frontiers, but only the Dalmatian Islands, not the mainland, a view reflected in the Treaty of Rapallo in November 1920. Sforza held to the view that it was not ‘wise to build a Chinese wall where we want free and fertile outlets to the East’.48 In 1929, he had urged: ‘Yugoslavia is one

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of the safest guarantees that Austria-Hungary at whose hands we suffered so much in the past will never rise up again.49 . . . The Great War really was the War of the Austrian Succession.’50 In 1928, he gave a series of published lectures in the United States.51 In them, in words that do not compel universal agreement, he minimised the consequences of the disintegration of Austria-Hungary: ‘A division of Europe on the basis of nationalities is but the first step toward an associated Europe . . . A small price to pay for such a step forward is the momentary diminution of production, such as certain gloomy economists enjoy emphasising.’52 He viewed Austria-Hungary as ‘a sterile oligarchy of courtiers and bureaucrats with no spiritual message to the world’,53 a view differing from that of others like the novelist Joseph Roth who stressed its tolerance.54 He approvingly quoted the Vatican Secretary of State, Cardinal Pacelli (later Pope Piux XII): ‘The particular distinction of the last year has been that it saw the entry into the League of [Germany]’,55 an entry secured by long labour on the part of Count Bernstorff. Bolshevism, the product of ‘a human tide toward a new form of hope’ could not be held back ‘if the enraged nationalisms and imperialism are going to provoke a new bankruptcy of the European civilisation’.56 In 1935, he wrote an article on pan-Arabism and Zionism. He viewed panArabism as little more than ‘a propaganda cover for nationalist agitations’. He was sceptical about the future of Zionism in Palestine and of the prospects for ArabJewish coexistence there: ‘One does not find every ten years a Faisal capable of bringing formulae to life.’ He advanced the unconventional proposition that: Under certain forms and limitations, for instance a reasonable distance from the Palestinian frontier in order to avoid incidents and discussions, some sort of Jewish immigration, even on a great scale, might be highly serviceable for the welfare of Syria – central and eastern zones of Syria which have been abandoned for centuries and are far from all political frontiers.57 He urged this Syrian project again in a speech at the University of Chicago in 1942, demanding: ‘Do the Jews really think it so necessary to add another frontier and another flag?’ and looking forward to a Syria balanced between Moslems, Christians and Jews on the Swiss model. His other reflections on the Near East in 1942 have better stood the test of time. He noted that the Arab world was ‘morally much more linked with our political and historical life than with Asia’. The successes of Japan in the Far East he regarded as a premonition of the end of colonialism: ‘In very few places in Asia have the people of the East helped the people of the West.’ For this reason, he had successfully opposed proposals for an Italian mandate over Georgia in 1920, just as his friend Lewis Einstein had opposed an Armenian mandate for the United States: ‘Good relations with a great country like Russia [were] more important.’ Iran had ‘a national feeling which no foreign invasion could again impair’. He was alarmed at Turkey’s movement toward Germany in the early part of the second war: ‘The Turks are intelligent but without imagination [having] dropped the democratic foundations Mustafa Kemal

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had given . . . Morally Turkey marches in step with the totalitarian states of the West.’ This judgment was premature. He lauded Atatürk’s foreign policy, recalling his renunciation of any claim to Libya with the statement: ‘The maintenance of Turkish domination over the Arabs has been one of the main causes of our decline. I do not want to hear any more about them. Please, settle matters with them as you like, and as they like.’ Praising the Turkish leader, he noted that: ‘Ghosts are more common in international life than men who are not afraid of them.’ Recalling his renunciation of any share of Turkey, he observed: ‘When I gave up an empty claim to a partition of Turkey, I gained for Italy in Turkey a market for Italian industries which ousted from the Near East most of our old French and German rivals.’58 Makers of Modern Europe In 1930, while in exile, he wrote his most engaging and entertaining book, Makers of Modern Europe, a series of biographical sketches of figures from Franz Josef to Mussolini and Lenin that only someone with his long and broad experience could have written.59 The Times Literary Supplement aptly observed that: ‘The subtlety of a thoroughly Italian mind is brought to bear upon the analysis of character, with the result that, though many of the thirty-seven character studies in the volume are quite short, none of them is trite or superficial.’60 His preface notes that he did not participate in Versailles, whose actors were ‘fettered by pride (which was called patriotism), by vengeance (which was called justice), by fear (which was called prudence )’ to the extent that even laudable provisions were ‘committed with dark intentions’.61 He was instead familiar with the later conferences characterised by ‘the sobering down that enabled men’s minds to begin recovering their balance . . . the readjustment of old psychologies to new situations’. For him, the unification of Germany and Italy were the significant events of the nineteenth century: ‘Bismarck . . . gave to Germany an iron colouring that she in all probability would not have taken without him . . . Cavour . . . gave Italy a physiognomy of freedom and tolerance.’62 He regarded Franz Joseph as ‘a seventeenth-century autocrat . . . He entrusted to myrmidons and spies the task of keeping order in his empire . . . He failed . . . in . . . the most important quality of a ruler, to suffer that a great minister be in power.’ He was ‘the last sovereign who sincerely believed in his legitimate right to govern peoples and to bequeath them to his descendants’.63 As for Franz Joseph’s descendants, Rudolf, who committed suicide, he viewed as a reactionary ideologue, though one correct in his view of Wilhelm II: ‘He is narrowminded, refractory as a bull, and thinks he is the greatest genius on earth.’64 Franz Ferdinand, on the other hand, might have saved the Empire by ‘do[ing] away with the 1867 compromise which had established two privileged people, the German in Austria and the Magyar in Hungary’.65 Foreign Minister Aehrenthal failed to realise ‘that Austria could no longer indulge in any other programme than that of living . . . he imagined he might go against the stream of history . . . the mistake was not devoid of grandeur.’66 The

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Hungarian Tisza, ‘it was his greatest weakness – believed in force only’ and in the invincibility of Germany.67 Lord Curzon for him failed to understand that life is not a career one begins at Eton and Oxford . . . England imagined she could supply the people with ready-made statesmen . . . he realises little by little that in order to become a statesman, it was not sufficient to have travelled round the world, or to have toiled for that end from schooldays.68 Marshal Foch he found to be ‘a deeply honest and disinterested man . . . [who] knew the limitations of military force . . . ripened by what he had seen, by what he had the merit of not having shut his eyes to’. Thus Foch opposed support of the Greeks in Asia Minor ‘as if, after four years of trenches to defend our countries, it would be possible to think of mobilisations for diplomatic interests in the Near East’, an insight fully shared by Rumbold in refusing to present an ultimatum to the Turks. Foch’s initial approach to the Ruhr would have involved occupation of only a small part of it, and as to Austria-Hungary, Foch declared: ‘The new successor States are living entities at least.’69 The Italian General Cardona was popular with those who ‘believe that a hard jaw is a sign of genius, and that brutality is a proof of energy’,70 he failed to understand that the Italian victory at the Piave was due to ‘new unity of national spirit [which] sprang from a free impulse of the mind, whereas all his decimation had been in vain’. Joffre and Cardona were kicked upstairs because of their ‘assertion of infallibility, waste of human lives, discontent among the troops’. Cardona’s successor, Diaz ‘instituted . . . propaganda offices’, gave sums ‘with which to help, without wounding their pride, the families of officers and soldiers’, provided ‘every soldier [with] a life and a death insurance . . . a sum of money to help them take up their regular work again . . . in modern warfare, a great problem of social economics and psychology has superimposed itself on the strategical problem.’71 Writing of the wartime Popes, Sforza said of the humbly born Pius X: The prejudices of the aristocrat are often counterbalanced by his scepticism, always by his laziness. Those of the peasant have no counterpoise . . . All the priests who thought that the claims of the Church must be conciliated with those of modern democracy were violently persecuted.72 Pius X was violently anti-French, his successor ‘illustrated one of the unwritten laws of the Roman Church: the new pope must be different from his predecessor.’ [Benedict’s] thoughts quickly crystallised in the following hope: peace without victory on either side, with . . . a restoration of Catholic Poland, the liberation of Belgium, the elimination of all Russian influence in the Balkans, a few Austrian territorial concessions to Italy. Adroitly formulated, each . . . might have seemed a concession to the war-aims of the Entente. In actual fact . . . they

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represented nothing but definite interests of the Church of Rome . . . he passed on the unity of the Church untouched to his successor.73 Of the Serbian Pachich, whom he admired: ‘If one had opened his heart, one would have found these three words inscribed in it: Serbia, Bulgaria, Albania. With hatred, Bulgaria; with greediness, Albania; but Serbia, his little peasant Serbia, with boundless love and pride.’74 Venizelos, by contrast, provides a conclusive proof of this truth: . . . nothing is more uncertain than that the grandeur and prosperity of a country should be in absolute and direct relations with its territorial acquisitions . . . Greece has lost infinitely . . . by the expulsion of Greek people from Asia . . . But this terrible loss has not altered the aspect of maps and atlases . . . the disaster seems already forgotten.75 Lloyd-George declared of Versailles: ‘We had to give satisfaction to the crowds; but at the same time insert in the treaty clauses for revision.’ ‘When he began being clever, he overdid it’, and was guilty of ‘jugglings that a man born with a certain amount of aristocratic scepticism would never deign to perform’.76 Bonar Law’s conservatism was not based on tradition or on love for certain characteristics of English life: ‘He was a Conservative because he was cautious.’ His offer to settle war debts to Britain ‘would have markedly hastened European reconciliation and would probably have exercised singular influence, through the power of precedent, on the question of the American debts’.77 Balfour was representative of the aristocratic men who would be ashamed to be only politicians; they are themselves . . . No climbers, no party intriguers, no boasters, no demagogues, with no illusions about popularity and fame, these men are the best servants of their country, but . . . they are poor leaders of parties and groups . . . public opinion turns to them in painful periods, when the men of success shrink from unpopular decisions . . . In England, these men are – or were, I am afraid, for England – a better set than on the Continent, [where] the devotion to the State may take the form of a dislike of liberty or at least of an excess of belief in bureaucratic efficiency . . . he understood that there was no use in building sand-banks against the rising waves; but he had no message for his humbler countrymen.78 His scorn for Austen Chamberlain was boundless: ‘The direction of British diplomacy . . . was the weakest and most hesitating that England has ever known . . . he did not believe in the power of his country.’79 Poincaré in the Ruhr felt obliged to choose between a dangerous step forward and a humiliating retreat seemingly imposed on him by England . . . his Ruhr policy had been prompted at least as much by his desire to create a new situation in the FrancoBritish relations as by a wish to evolve a means of pressure on Germany.80

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Alexandre Millerand he admired as a partisan of decentralisation, ideas that interested me all the more since I am a partisan of them for my own country . . . that man . . . can only be, essentially, a man of peace . . . a man of happy and trustful devotion to the atmosphere he loves, who does not cast too many envious looks abroad.81 As for Briand, an apostle of a United States of Europe, who resembled Jean Monnet and Jacques Delors: ‘French, he wants a French hegemony; only he seeks it in the initiative of ideas and plans which will remain – so he thinks even when he imagines he is being solely European – French plans.’82 Giolitti believed that Fascism could be sobered into legality by Parliament . . . [he] did not perhaps see quite so clearly movements that developed out of his ken . . . a great Liberal statesman of the nineteenth century; he firmly believed that all factions and all interests would find their compromise in Parliament. Indeed, he only broke openly with Fascism when it practically suppressed the right to vote.83 Sforza credited King Albert of Belgium with ‘unobtrusive firmness, courageous prudence’.84 He also admired the Belgian Socialist Vandervelde: Socialism . . . usually affects a scant belief in the value of individuals . . . the Belgian Socialists have, in a few years, won a series of battles which, formerly, would have entailed street fights: universal suffrage, syndical freedom, old age pensions, legal enforcement of the eight-hour day, income tax, and death duties.85 The Russian diplomat Krassin he credited with having written: The Russian people has a long way to go before it can call itself civilised. The aristocracy has embittered and brutalised the masses to their very bones, and very likely two generations will have to grow up in more healthy surroundings before we can begin to behave like ordinary human beings.86 Stambulisky of Bulgaria ‘was the leader of the first Jacquerie in power; he put up a good show, even in practical statesmanship.’87 He found in the irredentism of Sonnino as Italian Foreign Minister ‘the diplomatic origins of Fascism’.88 D’Annunzio supplied the literary origins: ‘It is not Italy which has annexed Fiume, but it is D’Annunzio’s Fiume which has annexed Italy – for the time being.’89 Facta, Mussolini’s predecessor, was ‘a nonentity assuming power for a few months, while the leading actors arrange their troupe as they please and stage their re-entry . . . such games are not always safe.’90

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As for Mussolini: ‘The regime that shows the greatest similarity with the Fascist one [was] that of France under Napoleon III’. Parliament, local government, the judiciary, the universities and the press were there reduced to impotence. Identical is the psychology of the two governments: the silence of the nation is broken, as frequently as possible, by pageants, exhibitions, sporting events, and all things to appeal to uncritical imagination, while the intelligence must be kept inactive . . . if there is anything new, it is nothing but the remnant of the revolutionary violence of the old Fascism that has not quite died down yet under its veneer of policing zeal.91 He took a dim view of Pius XI and his condordat with Mussolini, whose subventions to the Church ‘give the permanent personnel of the Curia a new strength to resist those indiscreet American and British Catholics who hold that the Church has need of new blood’.92 [Benedict XV] had left to Catholic laity the widest possible autonomy in the social and political fields . . . In Italy, the live forces of the religious organizations having been destroyed, the Popular Party dissolved, Sturzo exiled . . . the Pope, who thought he had become all-powerful, finds himself alone as soon as the Fascist leaders put the alternative to him, either of submission or of open warfare.93 As for Lenin: ‘His writings thicken the mystery, for it is impossible to find one page in them, one single page, in which one finds the pulsing of a great soul . . . or, quite simply, any kind of originality of judgment.’94 This view was later shared by the historian John Lukacs, who saw Lenin as possessing Stalin’s amorality without Stalin’s realism.95 With respect to Atatürk, he foresaw the recrudescence of Islamic traditions: All the rubbish of most of his reforms is but stuff for the newspapers; they are certainly not to the credit of his sense of history . . . Dictators always end in disaster, because they are obliged to seek for a policy of show and vain prestige; they have to supply glory to compensate for liberty. Kemal had the pluck and originality to adopt a courageous line of renunciation at the beginning of his domination and – what is still more original – to stick to it even amid the intoxication of military success.96 Pilsudski ‘remained, every inch of him, a Polish gentleman of the smaller nobility . . . the queerest dictatorship to be found in Europe . . . the reincarnation of old, romantic, quixotic, anti-materialistic Poland.’97 As for Stalin, Sforza thought he perceived unrest in the Russia of 1929 and 1930: ‘If the Czar’s secret police did not save the lords of the Old Russia, the Soviet’s terroristic methods will not save the comrades of the Kremlin . . . riding a tiger.’98

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Summarising, Sforza declared: In some fields, such as the economic, the religious and the colonial . . . there were traditions and dangers which could not be disposed of simply by the laws of democracy . . . life has mysteries and difficulties that no political credo can solve . . . these . . . cannot be quoted as failures of democracy.99 European Dictatorships In 1932, Sforza published a smaller book on European Dictatorships,100 sounding similar themes arranged on a national rather than personal basis. The political decline after World War I was world-wide; America was not immune: She slipped down from a Wilson to a Harding . . . labouring as they did just then under such depression and shock, they would have been quite capable of swallowing even a Daugherty . . . After the heroic period of Washington . . . came Aaron Burr; after Lincoln, the carpet-baggers. Sforza saw in the dictatorships of the thirties a ‘phase more or less recurrent’ like the period of reaction following upon the Napoleonic Wars. [In Europe] more and more men, especially among the middle classes, began to think that politics had ceased to be true to their theoretical purpose of safeguarding the common interest . . . The example and the fear of Bolshevism helped to strengthen such a feeling by adding to it the terror of the Russian vision, and the hope that so-called strong governments might more fearlessly fight the Russian danger . . . in a few years, no one will trouble any more about European dictatorships, at least in the pathological form they assumed after the World War. He ascribed dissatisfaction with parliamentary government to the fact that modern parliaments must concern themselves with a whole system of economic as well as political laws . . . too many laws . . . the remedy I am thinking of will consist of accepting, or pushing, the principle of federalism (or regionalism, as one might say for Italy and for France). Consider, for example, the British parliament: the House of Commons ought to remain the supreme legislature, while questions relating to health, agriculture, mines, public works, etc. should be dealt with by local assemblies for England, Scotland and Wales. In consequence, the business of the House of Commons would be halved, with the result that its control of foreign, military and imperial affairs would be done efficiently instead of inefficiently, and the prestige of the Commons would rise again to the heights of the great English parliamentary epochs.101

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In the ensuing 75 years, the nations of Western Europe have moved in this direction, though more haltingly than Sforza would have liked. Another of his suggestions has not been followed: Even the central government ought to be decentralised; by which I mean that we should welcome the creation of non-political, non-party councils attached to each state department for the discussion of laws before these were submitted to Parliament, as well as regulations for the enforcing of laws . . . not only would the task of Parliament be considerably lightened, but the quality of the material it should work on would, technically at least, be greatly improved.102 ‘The theorists of fascism were suspicious of local traditions. They preferred centralisation, alleging that it made for strength.’103 ‘Dictatorships,’ he observed, ‘eliminate courageous servants, critical minds, the best brains . . . under their rule, bureaucracy has waxed even more powerful than in the past when, at least, it was checked by the double control of cabinet ministers and parliaments.104 Democracies play into the hands of dictators when they boycott them.’ This is of course today’s fashionable remedy for all foreign ills. ‘Monsieur Clémenceau’s policy of the barbed wire round Russia has been morally useful to the Soviets, for it has furnished them with an alibi for the tremendous suffering of the Russians.’105 Einstein, in his correspondence with Frankfurter, similarly foresaw the use Hitler would make of any Western boycott, though in the circumstances of 1933, this was a course he favoured. Even Rumbold had not totally given up in 1933 on the possibility that diplomacy might contain and moderate the Nazi regime, though he was doubtful of this possibility. ‘A poor dictator,’ said Sforza, ‘is sick of his spies, of his secret police, of his pretended infallibility; he would like to go back, but he cannot; he is a victim of the interests, the hatreds, the fears he has created.’106 ‘Pilsudski’s annexations [in the Ukraine],’ he prophetically observed, ‘will always remain a heavy problem in the future of Poland. It is the eternal penalty of all dictatorships – they think that their justification lies in “glory” and conquest.’ Sforza was an opponent of proportional representation in the election of parliaments, the evils of which are displayed in the present Israeli Knesset: ‘The German politician . . . is nothing but a soldier of his party . . . Kept at arm’s length from all real life by the mature men in power, the young take their revenge by flocking to the two extreme parties.’107 As for Germany, ‘anti-semitism is the only real link between all the Nazis. It is difficult to be united in one moral aim . . . it is easier to unite antagonistic groups into one common hatred.’108 Unlike the Nazis, the Communists do not represent a political danger in Germany. What matters is that Communism has become a factor in the intellectual formation of the young. Its doctrines . . . become . . . a formula by which one considers oneself freed from all the restraints of the old morality.109

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This insight was later shared by John Lukacs, who saw in the popular hatreds roused by the nationalist right graver dangers than those presented by the less secure dictatorships of the left, which suppressed rather than aroused public passions. The Socialists in Germany and Italy, ‘remaining deaf to the necessity for individualistic life . . . went on repeating the Marxian formula like a religious community muttering its empty prayers’.110 Monarchies, in his view, ‘[c]annot but rely on a certain emotional element of hereditary affection, of respect for the moral character of the Sovereign. When this affection, this respect, disappear, the Monarchy, even if it endures, is nothing but a rootless tree.’ In the free European countries, the political men . . . are not specialists, but are, or at least should be, universal minds . . . As long as the specialist remains on his pedestal, there is no hope of any rapid ripening of the political atmosphere of Germany . . . The great majority of Russians had never known freedom. It is a fearful truth that, even today, they neither miss nor prize it . . . to be a useful lesson to the world, Bolshevism has to die of itself.111 He reaffirmed his expressed admiration for Atatürk’s restrained foreign policy, but noted that: ‘Ankara xenophobia has cost the Turks dear in the economic field.’112 Atatürk, however,’ stuck to all of the external forms of a republican democracy . . . an involuntary dictatorship . . . aiming at making autocrats and dictators impossible in the self-government of a renovated free nation’. The demise of the monarchy in Spain illustrated that: ‘A dictatorship resting exclusively on physical force is essentially anti-monarchical because it is against divine right just as it is against popular will.’113 The War ‘became an open school of lies, calumnies and hatreds . . . Democracy was bound to suffer fatally from this, since Democracy is essentially rooted in mutual toleration . . . [Dictatorships] are simply the continuation of the state of mind which war let loose.’ This view is worth recalling as American politics grow ever more polarised. Bismarck ‘rallied [Germans] around a formula of concrete action, of material conquests, of organised obedience. He made a great Germany, but at the cost of the Germans. A second-rate contentment developed among those who had been a nation of thinkers.’114 The Coming of War In 1935, he sent to Lewis Einstein, an old friend, a photo from France-Soir showing Mussolini taking a half-hearted salute from local notables at Bolzano, which in his view depicted ‘la comédie Italienne – You feel it – do not you?’115 In 1938, while in exile, he found himself accidentally in attendance at a party in the south of France given by a group of young Englishmen one of whose parents, a friend of Sforza’s, had gone away unexpectedly.

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He seemed delighted to eat off the floor, and told several stories about skulls that made our centerpiece seem a happy idea . . . He also predicted that he himself would be one of the few refugees in history to return to power. He would be brought back, he said, by the Italian community in the United States. In addition, ‘he spoke sarcastically of Mussolini, describing him as “a great reader of newspapers.” He believed him to be completely under Hitler’s domination and thought war inevitable.’116 He left Belgium, his primary place of exile, upon its invasion in 1940 and, after briefly passing through London, stayed in the United States from 1940 to 1943, having identified himself to an American consul on arrival by displaying an honorary Phi Beta Kappa bestowed on him by Wesleyan University in lieu of documents left in France. Before the fall of France, he persuaded the French to accept Italian exile contingents to fight the Germans, but time was lacking to organise them.117 In 1940, from exile, he warned King Victor Emmanuel against Italian entry into the war, prophesying that: The world will shake itself. In the long run, the United States will enter the conflict. They cannot do otherwise because there as well Germany’s ambition for world hegemony will have aroused too much fear. America will astonish the world by military and economic preparations which will make everything fall before them in the end. Where our Prime Minister is deceiving us, where you are deceiving yourselves, is in believing that Great Britain will imitate France and collapse after a brief resistance. No. England has her back to the wall, but not only will she resist, not only will she and her Dominions astonish the world by their tenacity, but in London itself a resistance will be organised so heroic that the world will perhaps have never seen its like.118 If Your Majesty lends his name and his signature to this senseless war, Your Majesty must remember that it will mean the most terrible of destructions for Italy. The calamities will be so appalling and the loss of national honour will be so shameful that in the end they will destroy the bonds of affection and loyalty between the Italian people and Your Majesty.119 He recalled that Italy had defaulted on the Triple Alliance before the First World War, because it had been ‘torn up by the Austro-Germans’, who had ignored Article VII of the Treaty promising Italy mutual compensation. Similarly, in 1940, Italy should ‘break the dangerous links with the Reich whose victory would mean Italy becoming a vassal state.’120 In a letter to Sumner Welles after Italian entry into the war, he urged: ‘Remember: the best way to fight Fascism is to repeat all the time a distinction between Italy and Fascism.121 The Triple Alliance in his view was a purely defensive alliance: The victory of Russia implied for the Vatican in 1914 the disappearance or at least humiliation of Imperial Austria, the only great state in which the Catholic

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religion enjoyed unequalled external protection . . . the structure of the Russian church would never have given way as long as Czarism lasted.122 He credited Italians with ‘freedom of mind toward dogma and discipline, instinctive distrust of formal heresy . . . There never was any antisemitism in Italy.’123 Before going to America, he had followed the French government to Bordeaux in its retreat from the Germans. There, it was related, a French civil servant had told him . . . of Pétain’s surrender: ‘You must leave France at once.’ Sforza went to his hotel, collected his wife and daughter and one piece of luggage and hurried to the docks to get a ship out. Not one was leaving. He found a small fishing yawl tied up, empty. They jumped in, cast off a rope and let the boat drift down on the receding tide out to sea in the hope of picking up a passing vessel. They were adrift for a whole day and night before they hailed one, a Spanish vessel laden with onions for England. The Sforzas for three days lived on onions . . . Churchill agreed that his best field of service to the Allies was in the U.S. where he had once been the Italian Ambassador. He gave him money to procure necessities and gave him passage on the next boat leaving for North America.124 When he reached the United States, he rapidly established himself as a leader of the Italian-Americans, in addition to cultivating numerous contacts among the great and good of Washington. In 1940, Harold Ickes found him ‘a tall, well set up Italian with white hair who speaks very good English’ and who indicated that his children might become American citizens. Another description characterised him as ‘tall, straight, with a short snow-white beard and firm lips from which the pronoun “I” flowed in steady profusion. Sforza gave an immediate impression of great vigour and intelligence, of a strong drive steered by mature reflection and supported by selfconfidence.’125 He urged support of an Italian-language newspaper in New York in competition with the newspapers of Generoso Pope, who was a supporter of Mussolini. Ickes observed that: He impressed me as being an honest-to-god democrat, despite his long line of noble ancestors. He related that he had advised Daladier to propose an alliance with Mussolini in return for French colonies, and on pain of a French invasion if the alliance wasn’t agreed to, and [he] also asserted that he had been the target of several assassination attempts. He had declined to establish an exile government in Britain but would be willing to do so with the support of the Americans.126 Roosevelt felt that conditions were not ripe for an exile government.127 He was introduced to Felix Frankfurter by the editor of Foreign Affairs, Hamilton Fish Armstrong; Frankfurter found him ‘an exponent of the virtues of a cultured and dextrous diplomacy which he associated with such traditional European figures as

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Jules Cambon of France and Stresemann of Germany’.128 At this point, he was described as ‘a man of about seventy, twenty years out of office, fifteen years out of his country, but still gravely talking and acting as if in some way he were the real Foreign Minister of his country and everything else were forgery and usurpation’.129 By March 1942, Goebbels was observing in his diary: ‘The U.S. has now proclaimed Sforza as the standard-bearer of a future Italian regime. He is a spokesman of a socalled ‘Free Italy’ For the present, such nonsense is ineffective.’130 In mid-1942, the United States, speaking through Under secretary of State Dean Acheson, committed the United States to a significant role in Italy’s post-war reconstruction.131 In August 1942, Sforza organised a Pan-American Congress of Free Italians at Montevideo in Uruguay, which espoused moderate post-war aims, including the return of the Dodecanese Islands to Greece and the use of Fiume as the international headquarters of a new League of Nations. ‘Overflow crowds stood in the streets for a distance of four blocks from the assembly hall.’132 On his return from Montevideo, he wrote to thank Lewis Einstein for financial support: You will be astonished to hear how modest were our means which did not make it impossible to keep the flame burning in Italy, to do abroad big things like the Montevideo Conference, etc. In Uruguay and Argentina I felt myself at once in Italy and America . . . It is evident that a National Committee (which must not become in the least a government in exile) will provide a flag, a beacon, a symbol for the Italians in Italy and scattered throughout the world . . . All will be destroyed if hopes are going to be entertained that Italy may revolt, send away mighty Musso and accept his worst and most abject accomplices, the Grandis, etc.133 ‘Unlike the Mazzini Society,134 the National Committee included Italian communists and assumed the character of a government in exile.’135 On Columbus Day 1942, this group and the Mazzini Society secured an important political achievement: a speech by President Roosevelt declaring that America’s enemy was Fascism, not Italy, widely regarded as a modification of the ‘unconditional surrender’ policy. Defining war aims, he urged European integration in an article in Foreign Affairs in 1943: ‘joint central banks, common currency, equal opportunity for trade and labour . . . if we try to be too precise, we risk sounding utopian.’ This was 45 years before the Treaty of Maastricht. As for the Middle East, ‘greater strength for the Arabs, hence less fear of the Jews, is the precondition of Arab-Jewish harmony.’136 This insight was shared by Rumbold, who urged the need for a Palestinian Arab state in a guarantee against further Jewish expansion. In this bleak period, he declared his faith that ‘history is made not by social fatalities, not by class organization, but by passions, by feelings, by men.’137 He did not admire the prewar Léon Blum who ‘believes that the writings of Karl Marx are gospel truth and therefore he is lost’. He charged Blum with ‘diplomatic timidity . . . obey[ing] those who belong to the most blind and conservative parties’ in regard to Spain, where Bolshevism was impossible: ‘There is no order and there never will be order in Spain.’ He found ‘a great moral lesson’ in

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the suicide of the Hungarian Foreign Minister, Count Teleki, who had sought to do business with the Germans. Again criticising the performance of the Blum government in 1941, he decried Blum for permitting France to become surrounded by Fascist states by his failure to support the Spanish Loyalists, which rendered France ‘a second-rate country surrounded by enemies’. Contrary to Blum, he saw then ‘no danger that Russian communism might invade and take hold of Western Europe’. Blum’s excuse for focusing on domestic matters was: ‘I want to show the world a Socialist who comes into power and who does the very things he promised to do.’ Sforza’s reflection on Blum’s tenure and policy toward Spain was: ‘You may find a great deal of physical or moral courage in a man in power, but rarely courage enough to resign.’138 Decrying the fact that 40 per cent of the land in Spain was owned by a few aristocratic families and 40 per cent by bishops and monks, he observed: ‘There is a group of violent enemies of the Catholic Church in Spain and these are the bishops, with their idea that only material powers make the church rich.’ His pre-war activities as an exile included visits to the Universities of Texas and Iowa: ’I have greatly enjoyed Texas – so living, so individualistic, so little standardized . . . These growing southwest and west institutions are really very interesting.’139 He visited the French mandate in Syria at the invitation of the French Colonial Minister, Georges Mandel.140 Exile Politics During his period in America he ‘attempted to explain to labor and the ItalianAmerican left that Fascism enjoyed diverse support and thus should not be dismissed as sheer capitalist reaction’.141 In late March 1941, Ickes, at his urging, brought the desirability of support for anti-fascist Italian newspapers before the American cabinet; in June 1941, Roosevelt seized Italian ships in American ports and froze Italian assets.142 Sforza met with Roosevelt in April of 1941, having been introduced to him by Nicholas Murray Butler of Columbia, who also arranged for Sforza to speak at Columbia’s Casa Italiana over the objection of its pro-fascist director.143 He wrote numerous articles, including a definition of war aims.144 After Sforza and others returned to Italy, the Mazzini Clubs he helped organise split, their left wing regarding Sforza and others who had in varying degrees cooperated with Badoglio as quislings.145 In 1941, Sforza published a short book of recollections, under the title of The Totalitarian War and After.146 In it, he credited himself with telling ‘the “three” in Paris that the Turkish military force had not been destroyed and that Kemal Pasha would rapidly throw the Hellenic armies into the sea’. He expressed resentment of his reception as an exile: ‘the prehistoric herd instinct scenting the dangerous approach of new beasts’. In an article in an Italian-American newspaper in 1940 he had similarly lamented ‘the loss of old friendships, unnerving labor, and prolonged exile abroad . . . where we were treated by most peoples as dangerous Bolsheviks [because of] puerile and criminal pro-Fascist illusions’.147

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His view of Germany in the book was that ‘German romanticism and Prussian officialdom decided at the beginning of the nineteenth century to do in two generations what the French had achieved in six centuries.’ The burden of reparations was greatly exceeded by the ‘looting perpetrated in Germany by the bitterest enemies of democracy . . . the burden [of subsidies to the junker estates] was double that of reparations under the Young Plan’, a point also made by A.J.P. Taylor, who ascribed to this factor considerable responsibility for the German inflation. Like Vansittart, and unlike Bernstorff and Rumbold, he thought that Stresemann’s ‘conversion to new ideas was only a comedy staged in order to cheat the British and French and Italians’. The German Social Democrats had ‘disappeared without daring to use their Schupo . . . what matters for victory is moral force even more than material armaments.’ The Russian debacle in the Russo-Finnish war led him to think that ‘soviet standardization had decreased the value of the Russian men’, but nonetheless he entertained the hope, even before Hitler’s invasion of Russia, that ‘with Stalin or without him, old Russia may prove someday that she is still a great human force. Dictators will learn it if they are going to try what Napoleon tried in vain a century ago.’ Looking forward, he prophesied that: ‘After the momentous events of this war, imperial and royal regimes can still retain sufficient force of magnetism and of faith in the future to create an atmosphere of solidarity and optimism.’ Writing in 1941, before the German invasion of Russia and before Pearl Harbor, he foresaw that: If Great Britain wins . . . there will be no armistice. The collapse of the totalitarians will be so sudden and so complete that the winners will be able to impose their views more completely in the first moment of the deliverance of Europe than 12 months later. Thereafter, they should not forget that peace requires ‘the continuous creation of international solidarities’. One reviewer found the book to be ‘scrappy and superficial’;148 another found the author to be ‘one of the wisest statesmen Europe has given the world’,149 while a third found ‘an astonishing amount of revealing data, shrewd observation, and epigrammatic wisdom’.150 By June 1942, his activities in the United States led his friend Lewis Einstein to include reference to him in a memorandum to Ambassador John Winant about the Italian situation, cautioning against excessive Anglo-American involvement with the Italian monarchy and “moderate” fascists. He anticipated a revolution from the left which Italy would eventually repudiate, as it did after the First World War. Conciliation with fascists ‘would mean the preservation of Fascism and later lead to a fresh revival of similar evils . . . it seems desirable to strengthen the Free Italian Movement which is being organized in the United States and which may later help to shape the future Italy in a democratic rather than communist direction. The leader, Count Sforza, a Moderate with old fashioned liberal ideas, possesses courage, a high integrity, and wide international experience. He has wisely stated that after the war it will be

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for the Italian people to decide freely on their future form of government . . . Only lately he put the situation very tersely by saying, “if England wins, Italy loses, but if England loses, Italy is lost.”’151 In February 1942, Sforza’s view was: Almost everybody in Italy is sick with fascism. Mussolini is despised by 42 million Italians. But I cannot say that either in England or the US they work efficiently to open new psychological roads – too many people still play with the Aostas or other analogous corpses.152 In November 1942, he cautioned Sumner Welles against any flirtation with the Hapsburg dynasty: ‘Peace and order cannot be based on rotten failures of the past . . . What matters now is not to have a new and much more bitter Darlan incident – more bitter, because, this time, without any military reason.’153 In December 1942, Einstein wrote to the London Telegraph to urge the difference between German antiNazis and Italian anti-Fascists: Not many of the former, whatever is their hatred for Hitler, disapprove at heart of German expansion whereas not a few Anti-Fascists have a record which speaks for opposition to aggrandizement at the cost of other nations. Count Sforza, for instance, received the sobriquet of Knight of the Rinunziata (renunciation instead of Annunziata) after the Treaty signed with the Jugoslavs at Rapallo . . . It is desirable to strengthen the Free Italian movement now forging ahead in America.154 Behind the scenes, however, the USA . . . heavily influenced by the British and the Vatican, decided against support of an exile government led by Sforza, and likewise rejected proposals to raise a Free Italian legion. In March and April 1942, overtures were made to the Italian monarchy upon repatriation of the Italian ambassador and later, in September 1942, through Myron Taylor at the Vatican. The Vatican warned against the bombing of Rome, stressed the danger of Communist revolution, and urged a role for the monarchy in the transition from fascism.155 In October 1942, Taylor reported to Roosevelt that Badoglio might . . . prove an adequate chief during the transition period after the fall of the present regime. He has the confidence of the Royal Family and the Army . . . Count Sforza has no following in Italy. He is an ‘unsympathetic’ person to the Italian people.156 The Feud with Churchill After returning to Italy to become a Minister without portfolio in the Badoglio government, Sforza opposed retention of the monarchy and continuance of the Badoglio government, earning the wrath of Churchill and Eden, who thought they

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19. Sforza to Hull, 30 July 1943 (Library of Congress)

had conditioned his return on the support of these institutions. At the end of July, he declared in a letter to the New York Times that: ‘Allied public opinion would make no worse mistake than showing itself afraid of the so-called danger of revolution. This fear was the best ally of Hitler and Mussolini during the many years of Chamberlain’s blindness.’157 Urging that the king be deposed, he observed: To oppose such possibilities out of traditional ideas of a formalistic order, which is not order because it is based on treason, may mean not only the lengthening of the war but the creation of the very disorders of which some are more afraid than they are of a long war. Sforza forwarded this statement to Hull on the day it appeared in the New York Times.158 In his initial support of Badoglio, Churchill was acutely aware that the

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Italians held 74,000 British prisoners of war who could be sent into Nazi hands in Germany.159 In August, Sforza met with Secretary Hull, who said to the Count that if he were going to make this proposed trip [to Italy] he might wish to go via a British bomber. I only made this remark to divert him from requests of this government for various courtesies and cooperation.160 Sforza wrote on September 30 to thank Hull for making the travel arrangements and for declaring: ‘Yes, you go as you say, as a private citizen, under your own responsibility and at your own risk.’161 In September 1943, in order to return to Italy, he had been made to sign a letter to Assistant Secretary of State Adolf Berle pledging support for Badoglio. The letter pledged no fealty to the monarchy, but declared: ‘So long as Marshal Badoglio is acceptable to the Allies . . . I consider it criminal to do anything to weaken his position . . . matters of internal Italian politics can and should be adjourned for the period of the struggle.’162 Sforza felt that there were Fascist survivors in the Badoglio government, and that Badoglio as Mussolini’s former Chief of Staff could not command confidence in the long run, particularly since the King and Badoglio had surrendered the Italian fleet. Sforza’s hostility to the monarch should not have come as a surprise to either the British or Americans: in September 1943, he gave an interview to the New Yorker in which he declared that the House of Savoy had reached ‘its curse, its end mentally, physically, and morally’; elsewhere, he referred to the King as ‘the Pétain of Italy’. The King had lost credit with the Allies by proposing the Fascist Dino Grandi as Prime Minister. The course followed by Sforza of dissassociating himself from the Badoglio government in the public mind was essentially that recommended by a sympathetic British journalist, Wickham Steed: ‘I would rather see some of the semi-Fascists obliged to face the first results of their own folly, so that the country might turn to Sforza as a supreme hope for the future, not solely as a lightning conductor.’163 Sforza forecast that after the War: [Italy] is going to surprise everybody by becoming a republic and making a quick come-back. Italy is at home in reorganization following tragedy. It is our special technical ability . . . if he had been in Rome last week and had a whack at history, he would not have signed the surrender but would have signed a declaration of war on Germany instead.164 On September 9, Churchill was receptive to Sforza’s return, if suspicious of it. ‘If Sforza went at all he should go to Eisenhower’s headquarters where he could be strictly controlled and not be loose in the area.’165 Sforza’s return had the hearty support of Roosevelt, who on September 25 urged: ‘We ought to promote the building up of a broad based government including Sforza.’ Three days later, Roosevelt followed with a statement: ‘We would be very foolish not to embrace him after his generous letter. A shotgun marriage will have to be arranged if necessary.’166

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Two days later, after Churchill had expressed misgivings about Sforza’s ‘playing with the team’, Roosevelt responded with quotations from a Sforza speech, which he conceded was ‘not complimentary to the King of Italy’. In it, Sforza declared: We may rally around any government which enjoys the confidence of the Allies if this government for the time being proves that it is able to wage a war and to oust the Germans out of Italy. If I had to proclaim a republic tomorrow I would first say no, first we must oust the Germans out of Italy. This is what the Italians want, but when Italy is free, the Italians will decide.167 In October 1943, Sforza arrived in Britain. Sir Alexander Cadogan of the Foreign Office noted on October 2: ‘I don’t see why we should make a fuss about Sforza, who’s a dud’, and on October 11 ‘the Prime Minister gave Sforza a good schooling!’168 A minute of his conversation with Sforza has Churchill declaring The Monarchy in Italy certainly counted for something and commanded loyalty. In any case, it was the only thing that represented any continuity in the Italian state and was the only remaining symbol of Italy. If that disappeared, I could not see what would be left.169 In the same month, Churchill is said to have described Sforza as ‘a useless gaga conceited politician’ and to have observed: ‘It is quite evident to me that the old fool wants to be King himself, hence his republicanism.170 He struck me as a foolish, played out old man, incapable of facing, let alone riding, the storm.’ Robert Murphy’s comment may be appropriate: ‘The difficulty is that both of them wish to do all the talking.’171 Oliver Harvey, one of Churchill’s aides, went even further, characterising Sforza as ‘a slippery intriguer who won’t get us anywhere. I fancy he is rather a crook besides being quite out of date.’172 ‘He won’t join the Badoglio government. He believes the dynasty is sunk. He seems to think that a kind of liberal regime under himself is possible.’173 In the same month, Sforza wrote to Mason-Macfarlane, the British commander in Italy: ‘We believe that the road to compromise with treason and fascism will lead only to dishonour . . . You know only too well that the cause of “order” is most frequently betrayed by false conservatives.’174 In this period, MasonMacfarlane complained: ‘Sforza and Croce spent most of their time in wooing the press and especially foreign war correspondents in support of their views.’175 Sforza and the group surrounding him in Naples declared that: ‘Their objection to the Marshal was not personal. But they considered it was a violation of the tradition of Parliamentary Government in Italy for a soldier to be Prime Minister.’176 De Gaulle, his fellow exile, who met with him in the same month, took a kinder view: On the ruins of the Fascist system he had unceasingly opposed, he was preparing to assume the direction of his unfortunate country’s foreign affairs. I was struck by the nobility and courage with which Sforza envisaged his coming

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task . . . Franco-Italian cooperation, which Europe is going to need more than ever.177 Sforza voiced no objection to de Gaulle’s requests for minor frontier rectifications in four Alpine passes and the communes of Tenda and Brigua, which had passed to Italy after a plebiscite in 1860, or to requested autonomy for the French-speaking Val d’Aosta and the transfer of some ships. De Gaulle for his part supported resumed Italian control of Trieste and the former Italian colonies. When, later in the war, the French occupied the communes concerned, the British and Americans demanded their evacuation pending the peace treaty; Sforza and the Italian government supported de Gaulle, who ultimately secured what he wanted.178 In October, Sforza declared to Lewis Einstein a purpose not to join the Badoglio government, in order to ‘stay clean and away from traitors and cowards’.179 Badoglio went to Naples to attempt to induce him to join the government and offered him the vice-premiership, declining to serve under the King.180 On November 6, the King offered him the Premiership, and he again refused, sending messages to Mason-MacFarlane, Eden and Berle declaring: 1. That if all public men consulted by him agreed on my name it was because my past gave them the belief that I may have force to unite and govern nation. 2. That since I had always believed in advantage of representative Monarchy, I had already succeeded in persuading even extremists to accept formula Grandson as King with Badoglio as Regent since all princes are corrupt or dishonored; but that I have fully realized that this is maximum can be imposed on nation. 3. Therefore if I accepted present government, my name would lose any force and prestige . . . neither I nor Badoglio can do anything without a complete moral purification of a situation where rightly or wrongly all forces of reaction and responsible [for] disaster hail King as their symbol . . . there is a minimum that is indispensable to avoid too radical changes and to assure Italian efficiency and collaboration.181 In the same month he declared his conviction that ‘the monarchy is doomed’.182 In November 1943, Eisenhower reported to Roosevelt that: [Sforza] does not repeat not carry as much weight in Italy as we originally supposed except with a minority group. He has been so long away from Italy that he is felt to have lost touch with the Italian people and Italian affairs.183 Nonetheless, he told Macmillan that the American government attached great importance to Sforza’s return to Italy.184 In the same month Eisenhower, referring to Sforza’s declared unwillingness to serve under the King, observed: If Badoglio is unable to obtain ministers he will probably resign. The King will then send for Sforza. Sforza may take the bait in spite of all his professions and

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form a coalition government. If so, well and good. If he refuses, the King will send for Badoglio again.185 When Badoglio tendered his resignation, the King procrastinated, and then created a government of experts under Badoglio when the conservative Bonomi urged that any political government be postponed until the liberation of Rome, when the status of the monarchy could also be altered. This solution well suited the British. Anthony Rumbold minuted: It will be impossible to substitute a new government for the government of experts without raising the constitutional issue. Our only chance of avoiding the most appalling political difficulties when Rome is reached lies in the hope that the politicians in Rome . . . will agree to put off the constitutional question . . . and . . . serve in a provisional government.186 In 1943, Sforza had been, along with Ugo La Malfa and Ferrucio Parri, one of the founders of the Action Party, whose manifesto expressed the ideal of ‘a European federation of free democratic states’ voiced by Sforza in 1941. His formal joinder of it took place in May 1943; in June he declared his purpose ‘to struggle for Italian renovation without anarchy and without excesses of revolutions’.187 A month later, he wrote to two leaders of the Action Party to caution about contacts with the Communists. I admit the necessity of active and even cordial contacts with them for destruction of Fascism, but am afraid that it would be dangerous to put them on equal footing with Catholics and Socialists in some official declaration. It would be dangerous not only for American public opinion but because once you give them an inch they will take an arm . . . it is impossible to collaborate loyally with fanatics without any respect for our elementary laws of individual morality.188 The manifesto called for the bringing about of a European federation of free democratic countries which decisively rejects the principle of absolute state sovereignty, advocates the renunciation of all purely territorial claims, and favours the creation of a legal community of states with the necessary institutions and the means to establish a regime of collectively organized security.189 Badoglio refused to require the King’s abdication: ‘If I had acted as Sforza wished me to do, I should have been acting as a dictator and not as the head of a democratic government.’190 Harold Macmillan observed : ‘He was undoubtedly a notable figure among the Italians in America . . . except on one occasion when Murphy managed to interject a question, our visitor spoke without stopping for an hour and a half.’191 De Gaulle in January was supportive of Sforza’s view that: ‘The throne and the government

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must be swept clean.’ ‘Anglo-American forces, applying a system of expedient devices and maintaining King Victor Emmanuel and Marshal Badoglio in office were setting obstacles in the way of Franco-Italian reconciliation and accumulating motives for revolution in the peninsula.’192 In December 1943, Sforza wrote to Anthony Eden to explain that despite the Berle letter, he could no longer support Badoglio because ‘no effort is made to create a war spirit in Italy’. He urged that Eden send special emissaries to study the situation along with Macmillan. Noting that he had secured acceptance of a compromise which would install the king’s grandson in his place, he observed: ‘The potential position of Italy is not so different from the present position of the partisans in Yugoslavia, about which you have recently expressed honest and statesmanlike views.’ The effect of this may have been marred not only by praise of the Yugoslav communists but by Sforza’s vanity in declaring: Everyone says that had I been in Italy or quite near Italy on July 26, Italy would not now be a ruin and the Allies would be at the Brenner. True or not, it is not bad that in Italy they go on believing in someone who is not an extremist and who has always been a friend of the western democracies.193 Macmillan took a dim view of American efforts at military government: ‘A vast Tammany Hall designed to give good jobs to people strong in the New York Italian community – make them all colonels. They didn’t care tuppence about what the Italians really needed.’194 The reductio ad absurdum of this system was the notorious civic collapse in Naples after its liberation in the autumn of 1943, described in fiction in Curzio Malaparte’s The Skin, of which Alan Moorehead wrote: ‘It was not the war, it was the aftermath of the war that destroyed Italy.’195 Macmillan opposed American plans for military direction and favoured restoration of Italian civil government; with respect to both Italy and French Algeria, he was an exponent of free trade.196 Goebbels observed of the British and Americans: ‘They are obviously toying with the idea of revolutionizing the whole of Italian political life. They are proving their lack of political instinct, however, by selecting the 80-year-old Count Sforza for this purpose.’197 Six days later, the then 71-year-old Sforza had gained another three years in the eyes of Goebbels: ‘Sforza declared that he would have nothing to do with any Italian government until the King abdicated. This eighty-three-year-old fogey pretends to represent Italian youth.’198 Badoglio, thwarted by the politicians, accordingly formed a government of technical experts pending the capture of Rome. This was described by one historian, using Disraeli’s language, as a government of ‘transient and embarrassed phantoms’.199 Sforza’s Action Party declared that it wanted: ‘A respectable and respected regency at the head of the State, if a President of a Republic is impossible at the present time’.200 In September 1943, Sforza declared: It will be easy to build [Badoglio] up, as an early adversary of Fascism, as a general dismissed in the past by Mussolini, as a general who reluctantly took command in Ethiopia and later on in Europe. It is impossible to do anything

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of the kind for the king, because to show him as a silent victim of Fascism during twenty years is to show him a despicable weakling. I do not pretend in the least that it is now time to discard the monarchy . . . This is a problem for peace time . . . It would be most dangerous to give the sensation that the Allies identify Social Order with Monarchy . . . the Republic [should not be] left to feeble and foolish Kerenskians.201 Sforza and Croce wrote to Eden, Hull and Molotov on January 31 that it would be ‘dangerous to create the false impression that the neo-Fascist regime of Victor Emmanuel and Badoglio has some support among certain elements of the United Nations’.202 In late January, a conference of six parties at Bari called for abdication of the King.203 By February 1944, the British were seriously annoyed at Sforza. The British ground commander, the Canadian General MacFarlane advised the Prime Minister: Sforza is very active but imagines that he has more influence than he really possesses with opposition. I regard him with distrust and dislike, unfortunately owing to support from, amongst others, the allied press and [Badoglio]. He is generally centre of stage.204 On February 9, Churchill advised Roosevelt: I am much annoyed at any attempt at working with Sforza and the Italian junta at this stage of the battle. If you read Sforza’s original letter to Berle, you will see how completely he has broken his undertaking. I do beg that no decisions be taken without our being consulted and without you and me trying to reach agreement.205 On February 10, Sforza and Croce wrote to the Action Party to urge a lieutenancy under the Crown Prince with a civilian minister of national defence ‘to avoid the depressing influence of defeated pro-Nazi generals’. Also urged was a purge to try and eliminate all big military and civil fascists who betrayed last September but to forgive all minor Fascists urging them to rehabilitate in war . . . knowing that present big army is definitely rotten to create only a small decent standing army South and organize volunteers North which has never been done on a national form.206 The British on the scene then came to accept the proposal of the opposition parties for an abdication to the Crown Prince, who would remain a figurehead under a lieutenancy. On February 22, however, Churchill declared in the House of Commons: When you have to hold a hot coffeepot it is better not to break the handle off until you are sure that you will get another equally convenient and serviceable. [The Bari politicians] are of course eager to become the Government of Italy.

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This called forth an angry rejoinder from Sforza and Croce: Incomprehensible is statement about “representatives of parties anxious to get the power” since the second signer of this telegram was offered by King on 5 November to become Prime Minister and refused only because King’s presence was obstacle to serious war effort – not to speak of the many offers of Badoglio to the parties to join at once the government.207 On March 8, Churchill was still intransigent, alluding to ‘the tame and helpful government of Badoglio’ and appealing to Roosevelt to resist any change, lest ‘we should have another, but more intractible, version of the de Gaullist Committee’.208 In February, Anthony Rumbold had cautioned: ‘If Sforza becomes a prominent member of any future Italian government, we may look forward to finding him extremely intractable’, while Eden, for his part declared that Sforza and the Italian democrats ‘will claim to escape from all penalties imposed upon king and Badoglio and there is no reason why they should’.209 On March 14, however, the Russians dropped a diplomatic bombshell by recognising the Badoglio government, while urging that it be broadened. The British, ‘although they still belittle Sforza . . . fully agree with his opinion that the Soviets are trying to “diplomatically Sovietize” Italy as the focus for a wider European program.’210 In April, Churchill told Harold Macmillan, the British political representative in Italy: I do not mind very much whether the King retires now or waits till Rome is taken so long as Umberto is anointed Lieutenant and Badoglio remains at the head of the Government. Do all you can to keep Sforza out of any office of real power. Macmillan had advised: ‘There are two points of which it is in our interest to make certain . . . The second is that Sforza should be neither Prime Minister or Foreign Secretary. Badoglio should continue to be Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary.’211 On April 12, under pressure from the British and Americans the King agreed that he would abdicate in favour of his son when the Allies reached Rome.212 This made possible the creation of a political cabinet by Badoglio. Mason-MacFarlane advised that: The price paid for the Action Party’s decision [to participate] was the appointment of the additional ministers without portfolio and the limitation of party membership to the parties represented at the Bari Congress. Sforza also used his influence to induce the Party of Action to come into line.213 By June 3, Sforza wrote to one of his Action Party colleagues: ‘I am more and more worried by a strange rising and ascending collusion between Communists and Generals . . . The Coalition Cabinet to which I lent my name was forced upon us by the Communist initiative.’214

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Later in April, the British Ambassador to Italy, Sir Noel Charles, advised Churchill that: ‘The Americans have played up well and are quite happy with Sforza’s being included in the cabinet . . . Badoglio is aware that you did not wish Sforza to have one of the main posts.’ In this period, Sforza wrote a letter to Churchill declaring that: Since I have been in Italy I have been deeply confirmed in what I told you in London a) that it is easy to create loyalty around Badoglio because Italians feel that in his heart he has always been anti-German b) but that it is impossible to unite Italy with a King who through his long complicity with Fascism has brought upon Italy the most terrible disaster in her history. Of the fatal meaning of that disaster he seems utterly conscienceless. He thinks only of his House and not of Italy and by so doing he betrays even his House.215 Sforza declared a willingness to serve a royal government abroad but not to join it. On April 30, Churchill advised against immediate creation of a consultative assembly ‘in which I have little doubt that Sforza will endeavour to recover lost ground . . . Badoglio is under no need to fritter away his prestige in order to pick up untrustworthy support.’216 On June 10, the Badoglio government fell, infuriating Churchill, who considered that there had been bungling ‘by that old woman Mason MacFarlane’. ‘Don’t quite see what we can do. Nothing unconstitutional has been done. Of course we can refuse to recognize Bonomi crowd, but that may be unwise.’217 Ivanoe Bonomi, the new premier, was a veteran politician and collaborator with Sforza at the time of the Treaty of Rapallo. In June 1944, Churchill wrote to Charles: ‘I have heard from Macmillan about Sforza’s aims and intrigues.’ Again referring to the Berle letter, Churchill called Sforza ‘thoroughly untrustworthy . . . he may easily receive American support because of the influence he has through the Mazzini clubs which he founded in New York. I hope you will beware of him at every point.’ Macmillan noted: ‘What perhaps was insufficiently realized was that New York State was the key state in the coming Presidential elections and Sforza claimed to swing many thousands of votes.’218 Sforza was ‘undoubtedly a notable figure among the Italians in America’.219 Sforza had received a doubtless unwelcome endorsement in comments by Andrei Vishinsky, the Soviet member of the Control Commission to Macmillan, to the effect that Sforza and Badoglio were the only two Italians of any stature. Charles responded: ‘I do not trust Sforza at all and am glad to find that Bonomi and others are seeing through him. I hope that after the American election his shares will fade out.‘ In Charles’ view, Sforza sought ‘to be leader of the Government himself’.220 On June 5, the King, without formally abdicating, transferred his powers to his son Umberto as Lieutenant General.221 On June 16, Churchill wrote to Eisenhower: ‘I fear we shall have to accept the results of the intrigue against Badoglio.’222 On June 9, Mason-MacFarlane had reported: ‘I think and hope that I have persuaded Bonomi to take the post of Foreign Minister. Sforza has done his best to obtain it.’223 Sforza’s activities gave rise to two unusually sharp exchanges between Churchill and Roosevelt. In the first of these in June 1944, well before the American election,

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Churchill sought Roosevelt’s permission to read the Berle memorandum to Parliament in order to respond to the uproar occasioned by a State Department statement upholding Sforza’s role. Churchill observed: When Count Sforza passed through London, I went through this letter with him almost line by line, before witnesses who are available, and he made the strongest declaration amounting to a gentleman’s word of honour that this represented his position. [The witness in question appears to have been Alexander Cadogan of the Foreign Office, who alleged that Sforza had committed to support of the King].224 However no sooner had he got to Italy than he worked busily at the intrigues that destroyed the Badoglio government . . . were Count Sforza to obtain the Premiership or the Foreign Secretaryship, the relations between the British Government and the Italian government would suffer very much from our complete want of confidence in him. Churchill went on to use heavier weapons: I feel entitled to remind you that on every single occasion in the course of this war I have loyally tried to support any statements to which you were personally committed. For instance in the Darlan affair . . . also in the matter of the division of the Italian Fleet . . . it will be most unfortunate if we have to reveal in public controversy the natural differences which arise inevitably in the movement of so great an alliance. He reminded Roosevelt that Britain had 232,000 casualties in its war with Italy.225 Roosevelt responded that he had no objection to the use of Sforza’s message to Badoglio transmitted with the Berle letter, which he thought was already public. The State Department had sought to disassociate itself from the British position on ‘an area of combined Anglo-American responsibility’; the American position was to accept ‘democratic solutions in Government worked out by the Italian people themselves’.226 Churchill referred to the Bonomi cabinet as ‘this group of aged and hungry politicians’.227 The Socialist and Action parties initially remained outside the Bonomi government. At one point, there was concern that it might prosecute Badoglio, leading to his being lodged at the British Embassy until Sforza guaranteed he would not be prosecuted. Later, Badoglio was removed from the Italian Senate.228 In September 1944, Sforza told Einstein: ‘In spite of so many sufferings, the Italians are at work again. The Allies help with sympathy, of course the rapidity of action, ours and theirs, under the pressure of cumbersome and antiquated conditions of armistice is another thing.’ He noted that his wife was leaving America to join him: She is thrilled and happy and she does not care if all our properties are destroyed. My old beautiful pineta near Spezia has been destroyed by the Germans, all our silver, paintings, etc. stolen. We do not care. Probably Grand

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Pin which you know near Toulon has been looted. Nothing matters except to live free in a decent world.229 In the same month he made a speech in Rome attended by most of the members of the Italian Government; he avoided mentioning the monarchy but emphasized the ‘stab in the back’ of France on 10 June 1940, mention of which set off an antimonarchical demonstration.230 On November 24, Sforza reported the death of his older brother Ascanio, a victim of the hardships he went through while escaping from Piacenza and reaching Rome through the German lines in order to give up precious information. He was full of vitality and intelligence. To me, it has been very hard. My youngest brother, a cavalry colonel, was made a prisoner by the Germans; after three weeks, he succeeded in escaping and is now in Switzerland; he wants to join our partisans who fight so well, but is still too feeble. I wanted, and I still do want, to go to Washington for a short mission. Truth, frankness, confidence may arrange everything. We have in fact the same identical interests as Great Britain and you, in any other direction, there are risks and adventures. In the end, Sforza lost both his brothers to the war, both on the Allied side. He went on to observe: ‘I like and respect Bonomi. I hope with all my heart that he’ll succeed in strengthening the Cabinet. I have disavowed those who urged my name as Prime Minister. As soon as we have an improved Cabinet, I hope to leave for my American mission.’ 231 As late as October 1944, Macmillan regarded Sforza as a plausible Prime Minister.232 In November 1944, Churchill declared to Roosevelt: ‘I do not believe Sforza counts for anything that will make men kill or die.’233 In December 1944, following the American election, Churchill sent a message to the British Ambassador to Washington, instructing him to read it or leave it with Secretary of State Stettinius, and indicating that he would ‘if necessary repeat it to the President personally’. Churchill reminded the Americans that the British had the command in the Mediterranean as the Americans did in France. Sforza ‘will not command the slightest trust or confidence from us’ if appointed Prime Minister or Foreign Minister. The Badoglio government which had rendered the great service of surrendering the Italian fleet fell in circumstances which both our greater allies, the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R. have admitted were irregular . . . Count Sforza figured as Minister for the Purge, and it was under his administration that the far from edifying incident of the two-hours lynching of Donato Carretta took place in Rome. He intrigued against Bonomi, causing the Under-Secretary of Foreign Affairs, Visconti Venosta, to resign. The opinion of the Italian government has been clearly shown by their marked

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wish to have Count Sforza’s civil capacities win their full play at a very considerable distance from the shores of Italy. The Count has . . . been weighing the honourable employment of Ambassador to the United States against his chances of getting something better out of a political upset in Rome. He has played a leading part in making Signor Bonomi’s position so impossible that he had to resign . . . he . . . has absolutely no popular mandate or democratic authority of any sort or kind. (Sforza, in a letter to Lewis Einstein, declared: ‘I have always been a close friend [of Bonomi] in spite of silly rumors sent to London.’)234 He reminded the President that he had carried out ‘proposals . . . for easing the Italian situation, especially before the Presidential Election . . . I consider therefore that I am entitled to expect considerate treatment.’235 This and the preceding letters were justly characterised as ‘the most violent outburst in all their [WSC-FDR] correspondence’; Churchill was especially upset by the possible implications for the British intervention in Greece of Roosevelt’s interference with his proposed course in Italy.236 Lord Halifax, the British Ambassador in Washington, called it ‘the most sustained anti-British outburst of the war’.237 Roosevelt was also getting nagged by his wife on behalf of Sforza. ‘I liked the statement on Sforza . . . but are we going to use any real pressure on Winston?’238 In December 1944, Myron Taylor reported that: ‘Sforza does not trust Togliatti and believes there is direct contact with, and encouragement by, Moscow of Togliatti. He scouts the danger of eventual Communist control of Italy, but hunger of the masses might cause trouble.’239 Sforza did not get the Foreign Secretaryship, though he was made instead one of four members of a committee on relations with the allies, along with Badoglio, Togliatti and Tarchiani.240 As noted, he was also the Minister charged with purging Fascists from the administration, a function he was given on July 28,241 which he carried out with gusto and enthusiasm, disposing of 309 of 420 of the Mussolini regime’s senators, as well as three hundred generals,242 leading him to be described as ‘a veteran intriguer whose objective was the premiership. He employed his position to build up his base of support on the left.’243 To the Allies, he declared a purpose ‘to make quickly striking examples of the worst cases and let matters die down. He did not think it of importance to pursue the small man.’244 A British official history credits him with ‘insistence on the inclusion of a judge (later a senior barrister) as president of every tribunal of first instance, and . . . humane and relatively tolerant instructions . . . summed up in the injunction “act quickly, strike the ‘high-ups’ and let off the smaller fry”’,245 a policy not recently followed by Americans in Iraq. An American officer, Lt. Col. S.H. White, reporting in July 1945, assessed Sforza’s policy: Epuration may have been slow but that is partially because it has been careful; the spirit in which it has been carried out has been excellent; on the whole it has been effective and the operation has not left a feeling of resentment.246

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Ironically, it was Palmiro Togliatti, the 51-year-old leader of the Italian Communists who, as Minister of Justice in the post-war coalition government, drafted the June 1946 Amnesty . . . Togliatti saw little advantage in pushing the nation to the brink of civil war.247 [A] ‘wind from the south’ had blown and had brought with it that cynicism which saw that no one really believed in political ideologies. To this depressed realism was added a sense of Catholic mercy and an acceptance that, through two decades, everyone who mattered had been some sort of fascist.248 Mention of Sforza’s name to Churchill, according to Macmillan, was like ‘a red rag to a bull . . . I sometimes felt that Roosevelt, who had a great sense of fun, used this Italian politician like a matador’s cloak to infuriate his colleague and friend.’249 Macmillan was not happy with the vendetta against Sforza conducted by Eden and Noel Charles.250 He initially found Sforza ‘witty . . . interesting . . . [and] revealing’, though later declaring: ‘I know the gramophone record the moment it is turned on.’251 Macmillan urged that: ‘We place the responsibility where it belongs, that is, on the Italians. He would not commit himself to say that self-government is necessarily good government . . . What goes wrong is their own affair.’252 Churchill’s loyal staff member John Colville included in his published diaries a note identifying Sforza as an ‘Italian politician of ancient descent and mushy liberal sentiment, weak, vacillating, and incompetent’.253 Robert Murphy’s appraisal was more detached: ‘The Count had achieved his objective of reviving party politics . . . but Italian Communists were making tremendous progress and were being openly supported by Soviet Russia . . . too many were concluding now that the Communists were to be the winners in Italy.’254 Aneurin Bevan for his part found him insufficiently to the left, complaining that the Italian government does not contain any member ‘of any of the parties in Italy who share our views’.255 Sforza was vigorously defended in January 1945 by the British MP Ivor Thomas, who derided Harold Nicolson’s characterisation of Sforza as an ‘elderly peacock’, noting that Nicolson in his writings had lavished praise on the ultimate ‘elderly peacock’, Lord Curzon. Thomas pointed out that Sforza had not sworn allegiance to the King personally, and that as Foreign Minister in 1920 he had pursued a notably moderate policy, renouncing Albania and Anatolia and seeking only temporary control of the Dodecanese Islands. He favoured a plebiscite for the Dodecanese, and was willing to contribute the Italian colonies to an international pool. Thomas demanded to know what Churchill wanted: ‘Is it a proud and loyal collaborator? Or is it a penitent servant?’256 In December 1944, Harold Nicolson recorded Churchill’s praise of his ‘elderly peacock’ speech: When he came to see me on his way through London, he wasted ten minutes in explaining to me how far older the Sforza family was than the House of

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Savoy. I was obliged to interrupt the man. I was obliged to say to him: “Count Sforza, these dynastic personalities have little to do with the prosecution of the war.” “Since then,” confided Winston, “he has behaved with the utmost lack of faith. When I saw him the other day at Naples, I was rude to him. I was very rude. I will show you exactly how rude. Now you be Sforza queuing up with the other ministers and I will be me.” There then followed a dumb-crambo in which Winston, all genial and smiles, bowed and grinned and grasped the hand of the man who came in front of Sforza. Then it came to my turn, in my unwanted role as Sforza’s impersonator. Winston drew himself up with an expression of extreme disgust and gave me a hand like a fin of a dead penguin. I do not know how my colleagues in the smoking-room interpreted this strange scene.257 In September 1944, six anti-Fascist parties declared that they wanted Sforza as Prime Minister or Foreign Minister. On December 8, 1944, Churchill let it be known that he ‘could have no confidence in Sforza and would have none in any government in which he was a dominating member’. On December 10, at an Allied conference, the British again insisted on Allied approval of the personnel of any new Italian government; the Americans were willing to relinquish their veto over the civilian ministers.258 This British de facto veto prevented Sforza from serving as Foreign Minister in the second Bonomi cabinet. The Action Party and the Socialist Party declined to participate in the second Bonomi cabinet, though the Communists entered it; this helped give Italian politics the conservative colouration it has maintained to the present day. Following his exclusion as Foreign Minister, Sforza resigned as Minister for the purge and declined the post of Ambassador to Washington. Postwar Politics In June 1945, Churchill advised the British ambassador to Italy, Sir Noel Charles: It is no part of our policy to interfere in the turmoil of Italian politics. The ambassador’s attitude should be one of mild disdain, but there should be no veto. If the foolish and crooked old man becomes Prime Minister, I shall have the pleasure of having as little to do with him as possible.259 In September 1945, Sforza was elected President of the Consulta, a preliminary parliamentary assembly; during this period Ferracio Parri of his Action Party was Prime Minister; the Parri government fell in December 1945. It was said to be the only radical government in Italian postwar history . . . Parri devised a scheme which favoured medium and small industrial enterprises in preference to the big firms. He also intended to introduce other economic and financial reforms, such as a more efficient income tax, that would have brought about structural changes in the country’s economy . . . the failure to carry out radical

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reforms in 1945 perpetuated a deep internal division in the country; a large part of the population, a majority of the working class, was not just pushed into opposition; it found itself outside the political system. Whether such a development was inevitable in view of the cold war is still a matter of controversy. Seen in wider perspective it was certainly a national misfortune for Italy, and a source of much tension and internal weakness.260 In the elections in June 1946, the Christian Democrats obtained 207 seats, the Socialists 109, the Communists 104, the Liberals 46 and the Action Party only seven. The Action Party was said to be ‘an intellectual elite with few ties to the masses. Had the PSI and Bari Congress republicans emerged victorious, America’s liberation of Italy would have enjoyed a certain ideological purity.’261 The journalist Elizabeth Wiskemann wrote: ‘There had been another reason for the collapse of the Azionisti. It was part of their frankness, their guilelessness, to make very plain that they were anti-clerical.’262 In February 1947 Sforza became Foreign Minister in the third De Gasperi government, serving until July 1951. His most valuable gift during these years was an imperviousness to criticism. Because he refused to placate nationalist opinion with uncompromising claims for the return of Trieste or the colonies he was dubbed a “rinunciatorio”; because, with great skill and patience, he led Italy slowly but soundly towards the western side and away from neutrality in the cold war, until she eventually became a full and equal partner in the Atlantic Treaty, he had to bear constantly the force of Communist vituperation.263 Sforza considered that both the King and his son had acquiesced in the war, and that in addition the king’s son was ‘deficient in manly vigour’. He conceded a plebiscite only on the issue of whether the King’s grandson should succeed to the throne, a referendum the monarchy lost as a result of adverse votes in northern Italy. More than personal pique was involved in Sforza’s confrontations with Churchill. A French commentator has suggested that long-term calculations led the British to want a weak post-war Italy in the middle of the Mediterranean; it was only in driblets that they restored Italy’s strength and a minimum of disorder in the country was not entirely against their wishes.264 Eden was quoted as declaring that with Sforza: ‘They will want to escape from all penalties imposed on the King and Badoglio and there is no reason why they should’;265 ‘Sforza protested against loss of territory and any treatment of Italy but that of a friend and ally such as he himself had been. He identified the country with himself.’266 Sforza was referred to as ‘the viper of Milan’. Secretary Stettinius in a memorandum to President Truman written on the day after Roosevelt’s death similarly noted that: ‘Italy’s status has improved, but less than we desire in view of

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the British policy of keeping Italy dependent.’267 The revisionist historian Gabriel Kolko observed that: ‘Churchill . . . with much justification came to view the returned leader as an American ploy’;268 Eden refused to receive communications from Sforza for many months.269 According to Stettinius, Churchill regarded Sforza as ‘a leftist he predicted would lead the nation to communism’,270 and as ‘a no-good bum, and he felt he had a personal right to make this statement’.271 Sforza became Foreign Minister in 1947, replacing the Socialist Pietro Nenni, in a de Gasperi government that included only the Christian Democrats, the Liberals and Sforza, who was by then a Republican; the government renounced Action Party reformism in favor of an orthodox financial policy under Luigi Einaudi, the Finance Minister. Sforza had a reconciliation with Churchill, asking to see him ‘so that the disagreement you had with him about his attacks on Marshal Badoglio in 1943 and 1944 can be satisfactorily buried’.272 He noted that in the period prior to the Marshall Plan, ‘the burden of postwar mediation fell on France,’ and pointed with pride to Italy’s customs union with France negotiated in December 1947, and to the role played in postwar Europe by De Gasperi, Blum, Schuman and Bevin.273 Bevin, who did not like him much, referred to him as ‘that man Storzer’. Sforza for his part wrote Lewis Einstein: ‘I liked Bevin – he understood everything, but there are still alas blind zones in London. They damage England. But I’ll continue to work for intimate relations with England.’ 274 Allied troops left Italy in December 1947, Sforza having assured Bevin that he ‘believed the caribinieri and police were reliable and had created a stronghold in Rome in which they could hold out’ in the event of a Communist insurrection.275 He played a role in negotiation of the Italian Peace Treaty signed in February 1947, which ceded the Dodecanese Islands to Greece, the Adriatic Islands and Dalmatia to Yugoslavia, and some minor frontier adjustments to France. The treaty also renounced the Italian colonies and pledged autonomy within Italy to the German-speaking Aldo-Aldige. At British insistence, $260 million in reparations were to be paid, chiefly to Greece and Yugoslavia, with lesser amounts to Albania and Ethiopia and a separate payment of $100 million to the Soviet Union. Military limitations were imposed, restricting the army to 250,000 men and the air force to 200 fighters and 150 transport aircraft.276 Sforza urged that the treaty be signed to liquidate Italy’s anomalous international status, and that it be ratified by the Chamber of Deputies, though not until after its ratification by the United States Senate, finally forthcoming on June 14, though not without opposition from American liberals and the Italian-American community, who thought its provisions were too severe. The delay gave Sforza and De Gasperi time to mobilise Italian sentiment for the treaty; they and the Vatican feared that any required renegotiation with the Soviets would result in long delay and would leave Italy in purgatory in the meantime.277 He was also involved in negotiation of the NATO treaty signed in April 1949 after its ratification by the Italian Chamber of Deputies on March 17;278 he initially had balked at a military as distinct from economic pact, fearing the isolation of Eastern Europe.279 In 1946, the Italians had hoped to serve as a ‘bridge of reconciliation’ between East and West. 280 The treaty was ratified in Italy in 1949 by a vote

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of 342 to 170, over solid communist and socialist opposition and scattered opposition in the other parties. The inclusion of Italy in the treaty had initially been opposed by President Truman and by George Kennan, who viewed Italy as culturally and politically outside the Western orbit and as unreliable; only the French among the negotiating countries strongly supported Italian inclusion, favouring a Latin grouping as a counterweight to Germany and seeking the inclusion of Algeria in the treaty zone.281 With the signing of the treaty, Sforza had an American commitment to defend Italy against foreign attack. Meanwhile, Marshall Plan aid flowed into his nation to shore up its economy and defeat the threat of internal assaults on Italian democracy. Italy and the United States were linked in a partnership that has lasted ever since.’282 At the time of the Korean War, Italy’s participation in which was limited to the sending of a field hospital, de Gasperi told Sforza that: ‘Old Europe was wiser and more expert than American anciulloni [kids]’ and should ‘say a firm word of peace’.283 It was said that Sforza rejoined European diplomacy at the Paris Conference on the Marshall Plan in July 1947 . . . Tall, bearded, monocled, immensely dignified, perfectly dressed . . . grand diplomatic oratory with every word thrice sifted and political allusion balanced against literary effect. He was the only speaker to make the Assembly applaud . . . insight, finesse, a still undimmed vision and a hand that has not lost its cunning [in] that postwar sense of new faces and a new and brave start. If at first sight this old aristocrat seems a man from the past and a stranger on the diplomatic scene of our day – in truth it is perhaps the others who are the strangers, and he alone that is at home on this particular scene. He has seen it all before. He re-enters it, with dignified mastery and a secret delight, a grand old actor who at last, at last, is given the role of his life.284 His immediate response to the Marshall Plan offer was as rapid as Bevin’s; on June 12, 1947 he declared: ‘We are grateful for the far-sightedness that inspired General Marshall’s speech at Harvard . . . we are at a supreme turning-point of world history. We are on the eve of a transformation of the old world.’285 More than any of the other European leaders, unlike Bevin in Britain and Bidault in France, the Italian government understood the immediate task before them not as helping to create a European-American-Western bloc but . . . as a step toward converting Europe into a zone of peace and thus removing the cause of confrontation between the two world powers.286 ‘Sforza and De Gasperi consistently pressed for a bolder initiative and more rapid timetable’,287 but deflected efforts to impose American models on nationalized and

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other industries;288 pursuing ‘anti-inflationary monetary policies combined with the protection of several sectors of the Italian economy and the preservation of part of the corporativist structure inherited from the Fascist era’.289 Throughout, they ‘regard[ed] the [Communists] as a justus hostis, a legitimate enemy to be defeated, rather than eliminated as the United States would have wished.’290 This reflected his essential liberalism: To love one another is too difficult, that is why pacifist propaganda is so sterile. It is not out of generosity but out of wise selfishness that we must be tolerant in order to better understand. Freedom may suffer eclipses, as now in Russia, but will never perish.291 Their acceptance as political leaders after the war is said to have been due to the fact that such older men were rather unusual in surviving politically and ethically unscathed from thirty years of turmoil – their political credibility enhanced, as it were, by their scarcity value . . . the old men who rebuilt Western Europe represented continuity . . . In the cold light of peace, the dull compromises of constitutional democracy took on a new appeal. What most people longed for was social progress and renewal, to be sure, but combined with the reassurance of stable and familiar political forms. Where the First World War had a politicizing, radicalizing effect, its successor produced the opposite outcome: a deep longing for normality.292 In mid-1947, De Gasperi and Sforza were secure enough to require the removal from participation in government of the Communists.293 On the day after the Italian elections in 1948 returned the Christian Democrats to power, Italy signed the OEEC treaty. Sforza was referred to by Dean Acheson as one of ‘the distinguished and able European six,’ these being Spaak of Belgium, together with ‘Bevin, Schuman, Count Sforza in Rome, Dirk Strikker in the Netherlands and Joseph Bech in Luxembourg’.294 He returned the compliment, writing to Lewis Einstein that: I have a great personal respect for Acheson.295 Perhaps you are right – he is born to be unpopular, but, I add, so much the better for him. So am I, in a way, although everybody realizes that I am working for peace and for Italy. There is a great vitality in this country and that matters much more than any occasional feeble D’Annunzio. I say D’Annunzio because nobody thinks any more of Musso.296 The success of the Christian Democrats at the 1948 elections significantly reduced Italian bargaining power vis-à-vis the United States, which was concerned chiefly with the threat of Communism.297 In March 1948, De Gasperi and Sforza had rejected American proposals for a surreptitious shipment of weapons, instead arranging to

20. Treaty of Paris, 18 April 1951 (European Commission)

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have them stockpiled in Germany lest discovery of the shipment prejudice the election campaign.298 In September 1948, Sforza was the Christian Democratic and Republican candidate for the Italian Presidency; as a result of defections in these parties, he received 353 votes on the first ballot as against 396 for Professor Di Nicola, the Communist and Socialist candidate, 45 for others and 57 abstentions. He withdrew his candidacy after failing to win Social Democratic support, Professor Luigi Einaudi ultimately being elected.299 He successfully negotiated treaties with Greece and Austria resolving questions involving the Dodecanese and South Tyrol in November 1948.300 He negotiated two abortive customs-union agreements with France, signed on 26 March 1949 and 23 June 1950. Neither was ratified, falling victim to two factors: a) that the economies of the two countries were competitive rather than complementary, and 2) that the French were more interested in tighter cartel-type arrangements like the Schuman Plan. In this period, he to wrote Lewis Einstein: ‘Yesterday in the House a speech of mine amazed for its frankness about the Communist religion. I hope for France even more than for Italy that Corbin is wrong. Our union is the only way to eliminate a future German danger.’ 301 He admonished Paolo Taviemi, one of the Italian negotiators of the Schuman Plan: Always encourage contact with the British, leaving the door open to them. It is in our political and economic interest that Britain should finally join the agreement. When it becomes clear that agreement is on its way, she will join; facts, actual facts are what the British prize above all.302 In the negotiations leading to the Schuman Plan creating the European Coal and Steel Community, he unsuccessfully pressed the British to stop quibbling over detail and ‘used a phrase redolent of what was often to divide the continent from its off-shore neighbours in future years. It was, he said, “the music and not the words that counted’.” He believed that ‘Germany could be prevented from becoming a danger if Britain, France and Italy stayed close.’303 The ultimate British response was that of Herbert Morrison, not one of the great Foreign Secretaries in British history: ‘It’s no good. We can’t do it. The Durham miners will never wear it.’304 Sforza again played a role in resolving territorial disputes with Yugoslavia. An Italian declaration on 20 March 1948 asserting ownership of Trieste but not the Dalmatian coast to its East was confirmed by France at a conference at Santa Margheita in February 1951, and by Britain in the following month when Sforza and de Gasperi visited London. Ultimately, in October 1954, Trieste was partitioned between Italy and Yugoslavia.305 There were prolonged negotiations about disposition of the Italian colonies, Bevin being fearful that re-installation of the Italians would require the use of British troops at a time when Britain was thinly stretched, and might create another Palestine. Sforza prepared a 20-page printed memorandum, urging the importance of the colonies to Italian emigration, observing that none of the other potential trustees had a need for such outlets, and pointing out that there were 40,000 Italians in

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Tripolitania and 72,000 in Eritrea who should not be subjected to foreign administration. As to Somaliland, he credited the Italians with composing tribal feuds, a success not enjoyed by those who followed them.306 Bevin and Sforza finally reached an agreement in 1949 pursuant to which Italy was immediately to recover Italian Somaliland; Eritrea was to be divided between Ethiopia and the Sudan, with the Italians retaining some rights in Asmara and Massawa; Libya was to be a trusteeship for ten years and then become independent, the British were to be trustees for Cyrenaica, the French for the Fezzan, and the Italians to succeed the British in Tripolitania for the last eight years of the ten-year period. The British insistence on retaining Cyrenaica was due to pledges made to the Senussi in Cyrenaica in 1942.307 By reason of the last-minute defection of Haiti, this arrangement failed to secure a required two-thirds vote in the UN General Assembly. Later in 1949, the UN approved independence for Libya and Eritrea, with the British to retain bases in Cyrenaica. There was to be a UN Commission for Eritrea and a ten-year Italian trusteeship for Italian Somaliland.308 In 1949, commenting on Russia’s acquisition of the atomic bomb, Sforza observed: ‘The atom bomb was well on its way to becoming America’s Maginot Line. Now that danger is past. You must have superior moral and intellectual courage.’309 He actively participated in the Brussels Treaty negotiations creating NATO, urging that the Standing Group of the Military Committee consisting of the US, Great Britain and France be enlarged to include Italy: ‘Any step which might result in a feeling of frustration and insecurity on the part of any member of our organization would create seeds of danger far greater than any potential inconveniences.’310 He approvingly commented on proposals by Oscar Cox, a prominent Washington lawyer, for an expansion of the US defence assistance programme and the permanent stationing of US troops in Europe in exchange for increased military spending by the Europeans.311 After contracting phlebitis in 1951 and retiring from office, Sforza died in 1952, but not before publishing in Italian his memoirs of five years at the Palazzo Chigi. Shortly before retiring, he wrote to Bevin to explain why he had not pressed the Social Democrats, who were inside the government, and the Nenni Socialists, who were outside it, to unite in advance of the forthcoming municipal elections. Nenni wanted the Social Democrats to resign from the government, which Sforza thought would doom his hopes to ‘regain these famous old capitals [Turin, Genoa, Venice, Florence] to add this final touch to our great victory of April 18, ‘48 when we saved perhaps continental Europe from the Communistic attack which seemed so insolent.’312 A review of his memoirs in The Times Literary Supplement noted that Sforza’s forced retirement for 15 years after his departure from Italy in the wake of Mussolini ‘tempered though it was by study and by writing was nevertheless the tragedy of his life’. He was credited with ‘making every attempt to unify Europe’ and with sharing with Robert Schuman the view that ‘if France and Italy do not absorb Germany, the United States may prefer Germany’, a vision giving rise to the Schuman Plan, the Common Market and ultimately the euro. As early as 1948 he was concerned about the division between an inner and outer Europe, urging in a memorandum to the

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21. Sforza to Kissinger, 29 April 1952 (Archivi Centrale di Stato, Rome)

French that the OECD created for the Marshall Plan be made permanent ‘to prevent return to forms of autarchy [and to intensify] interchange of products’; that it be governed by ministers, not civil servants. He also felt that the 16-member OECD rather than the six-member Brussels Pact should be at the heart of further movement toward European union, urging creation of a European Court of Justice separate from the Hague Tribunal, a proposal that was successful.313 Free circulation of labour, in this view, would block economic penetration from the United States and Africa. Sforza had the odium of signing the Italian peace treaty, and of seeing Italy’s UN membership vetoed by the Soviet Union; he narrowly missed acquiring a trusteeship

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for Italy over its former colonies, to the subsequent great loss of the Libyans, Eritreans and Somalis, none of whom had happy post-war histories following the withdrawal of superficial and uninterested British trusteeship regimes. Had such a trusteeship ensued, the freeing of the colonies, he elsewhere noted, would have ‘guaranteed the future economic and moral rights of Italians in Africa’.314 The review noted that the book was ‘compiled with a little of the author’s well-known vanity, but also with integrity and humanity’.315 Sforza was one of the few advocates of European unity in the 1920s, and after the war took the view that: ‘Nationalism had done its work in the 19th century. To cling to it now was perilous, for even Mazzini … looked forward to the time when it would be superseded by the larger principle.’ Even Inönü in later life turned toward unification with Europe, an effort carried on by his political heirs. In 1948 at the University of Perugia Sforza urged that: ‘Through suffering we pass to new and better things . . . since to love one another was too difficult, there was some use in spreading knowledge and ideas, which might induce tolerance.’316 References to Sforza’s vanity were not infrequent. Nicolson’s ‘peacock’ reference stuck in England; in his memoirs published in 1958, Robert Vansittart of the British foreign office wrote of the Spa conference in 1922: ‘Sforza, the Peacock Man, was there to discuss “an inequitable division of our disappointments”.’317 Writing of Walther Rathenau, Vansittart observed: ‘this “prophet in a tailcoat” might form with the Kaiser, Sforza and MacArthur a quartet whose vanity was a by-word – but what should we do without by-words.’318 A New Yorker profile in 1949 referred to Sforza’s ‘air of feudal benignity’.319 His principal English obituary referred to ‘a certain pomposity of manner and an irritating egoism which often made those with whom he came in contact, whether Italian or foreign, feel that they were being patronized’.320 But a British admirer found ‘a typically Italian interplay of impetuousness, strenuousness, cynicism, kindly idealism and serene hope’,321 while the journalist Elizabeth Wiskemann felt that he had ‘the unspoilt vanity of a child – although he was 74 in 1946 he did not seem anything like his age. He was intelligent and enlightened, pleasingly balanced between zeal and sophistication.’322 He was a champion of European internationalism, and considered that the papacy had absorbed the functions of the monarchy.323 In December 1948, former US Deputy Secretary of State Sumner Welles, who remained an active commentator on post-war problems, told Lewis Einstein: ‘I wholly share your view with regard to Count Sforza. He has been a Godsend to Italy in this time of stress.’324 Elsewhere, Welles referred to him as ‘one of the handful of men to whom we will have reason to be grateful if this sad world takes a turn for the better’.325 Sforza’s faith, like that of Bernstorff and Einstein, was a secular faith, but no less intense for that: Freedom is not only a matter of comfort and convenience which can be handled solely in terms of foreign policy. Freedom is the highest human ideal and it must be defended with an ardour and determination which we might well call religious.326

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The judgment of H. Stuart Hughes seems a just one: Count Sforza was a great Italian patriot. Beyond that, he was a good European and a citizen of the world. An aristocrat and a democrat with equal conviction, Sforza combined a sovereign self-confidence and hauteur with an ease and familiarity of manner and a negligence in speech and dress. He was both charming and tactless – his outspokenness was proverbial – and he inspired both strong personal devotion and strong dislike.327 His diplomatic approach was empirical and unideological: in 1952, he told the young Henry Kissinger: ‘You are so kind as to ask my reaction to the basic approach of the review [Confluence]. I would dare to venture to suggest only this: less generalities and more factual data.’328

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5 ISMET INÖNÜ

Ismet Inönü, first Foreign Minister of the Turkish Republic and its second President, was born in 1884, the son of a jurist who was the judge in charge of judicial inquiries at Izmir. He attended primary and secondary schools in Sivas, the Military High School and Civil Service School in Sivas, and the Artillery School at Halicioglu, becoming a captain in 1906 and serving as chief of staff in a campaign in Yemen, where he remained for three years and was involved in several successful diplomatic negotiations. In 1912, he was the military advisor to the Turkish delegation that negotiated an end to the Balkan War with Bulgaria and was a member of a commission inquiring into the reason for Turkish defeats. Thereafter he became a lieutenant colonel and in 1915 a colonel on the Imperial Staff. During the war he served on the eastern and Syrian fronts, and was in command of an army defeated by the British at Beersheba in 1917. Although he is credited with winning two important battles at Inönü, from which he took his name, a critic asserted that: ‘He had never won a battle in his life and he lost Eski Shehir to the Greeks.’1 In 1918, he was Under-Secretary of State for war, and chairman of the peace commission, and was believed to be responsible for the appointment of Mustapha Kemal as commander in the east. In 1920, he was a member of the Revolutionary Provisional Assembly established by Atatürk, and was chief of the general staff with a seat in the cabinet, Deputy War Minister, and commander on the western front, and in 1921 led troops in the victories at Inönü. Inönü made several great contributions to his county’s history. He negotiated the Treaty of Lausanne, which rendered Turkey a satisfied power without losing British friendship and assistance in containing first Soviet Russia and then Nazi Germany. He fostered reconciliation with Greece; when war approached, he sought and obtained an alliance with France and Britain on terms that would not embroil his county in a conflict with Soviet Russia. Thereafter, he signed a friendship treaty with Nazi Germany while preserving the British alliance. After the war, he sought and obtained American support against Russia. When the fidelity of that support was called in question by American statements during the Cyprus crisis in 1964, he reinsured his country by joining the Bandung group, sending a trade mission to Moscow and seeking closer ties with Western Europe. He was also an advocate of

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Westernisation and of primary and higher education and was that rarest of things, a dictator who voluntarily relinquished dictatorship. Apart from his military training, he was entirely self-educated, and had varying degrees of fluency in French, English, German, Greek and Bulgarian. His Western orientation derived from reading, not extensive travel. Aside from his time at Lausanne, he had visited Germany and Austria to seek a cure for his deafness, as well as France and Greece for a period of about six weeks just before the outbreak of World War I. He was on good personal terms with a series of Greek premiers. He visited England for the funeral of George V and the United States for the Kennedy funeral and later for discussions of the Cyprus question with President Johnson. He also met on several occasions with General de Gaulle. He played chess and bridge and read widely, in the expressed faith that ‘working hard to learn new things is more important than being very intelligent.’2 When an issue is brought to my attention I study it from every angle and then carefully figure out what should be done about it . . . I spent last night in this armchair and thought about this. I came to the conclusion that this is really what makes me different from other people.3 In foreign policy the nearest dangers should be seen and warded off. We should refrain from making enemies as far as possible in our foreign policy. We cannot have a policy based on animosity. We should take care not to take any hasty step that might lead to incurring the enmity of any great state.4 This differs from modern American policy, which sometimes seems based on creation of a Demon of the Month. He was said to be careful about food, sleep and exercise. In the war years, he rode horses for an hour before work, and usually took a half-hour nap after lunch, going to symphony concerts on Saturdays and to the horse races on Sundays. Inönü’s view of Ottoman foreign policy was that it ‘can be defined as an abject submission to any foreign power they chose, under the guise of friendship, or alliance, or whatever name you like.’ The Mudania Conference He was the Turkish representative at the Mudania conference in 1922, which had been convened after Horace Rumbold, the British Ambassador, and General Harington had defied their government’s instructions to deliver an ultimatum to the Turks. ‘The bloated corpses of Greek soldiers could be seen and heard, slapping against the supporting piers at the water’s edge beneath the open window of the conference room.’5 Harington related: The scene is before me now – that awful room – only an oil lamp . . . I paced up one side of the room, saying that I must have that area and would agree to

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nothing less. Ismet passed up the other side saying that he would not agree. Then, quite suddenly, he said ‘J’accepte’. I was never so surprised in my life.6 Inönü regarded this as an example of striving until the last minute to obtain the desired result in negotiations.7 The principal inducement to the Turks to agree was revision of the Sèvres treaty to allow them to retain Eastern Thrace to the Maritza River, including Edirne (Adrianople). Ismet corresponded with Harington until Harington’s death in 1940, signing himself ‘your comrade of Mudania’.8 Lausanne In October 1922 he was named as Foreign Minister and in 1923 he represented Turkey in negotiations with Lord Curzon and Sir Horace Rumbold at the Lausanne Conference. He refused to enter into any discussion of war guilt9 and was aided by Curzon’s fear of a Turkish alliance with the Russians; he had to use the Russians without becoming dependent on them. He began in an uncompromising fashion: ‘Ismet Pasha then arose and made a most tactless address, controversial and threatening in tone: it was not the time and the place for that kind of speech, as the first session was purely ceremonial.’10 But ‘these Western diplomats, accustomed for long years to face crushed and humbled Ottomans are to witness throughout the conference . . . a new style in Ismet Pasha’s personality.’11 Inönü took the view that ‘They must see that there is equality between us; if he speaks, than I speak too.’12 ‘Diplomacy is a continuous struggle. Just as on the battlefield, you have to be prepared for a new trial at every moment. ’In the early stages of the conference, Curzon charged him with ‘complete indifference to the importance of the subject [minorities] and a levity which is shocking’, in later stages the ‘process of haggling was continued with pertinacity and at a length that recalled the palmiest days of Oriental diplomacy in the past.’13 ‘Ismet, like all other Turks,’ Curzon observed, ‘is doubtless at bottom a true-born son of the bazaars.’ Curzon alluded also to ‘these impossible people who seem to combine the intelligence of an undeveloped child with the inculcated obstinacy of the mule’, further complaining of ‘the varying moods of hope, amazement, fury and despair through which we pass from day to day’.14 The American observer Joseph Grew saw more deeply, regarding Inönü as ‘Napoleonic – the greatest diplomat in history’.15 He followed the advice given him by the French legislator Franklin-Bouillon: ‘They haven’t a clue about Turkey. And they won’t get it from one telling either . . . explain everything over and over again until they get fed up.’ Explaining Turkey’s situation and the justness of her demands at every opportunity, he tried to wear out the conferees.16 This method is likewise unfamiliar in contemporary practice; even the most obvious opportunities to explain American interests and positions in a foreign idiom are forsworn.

22. Turkish Delegation at Lausanne (Library of Congress)

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He secured possession for Turkey of Dedeagac in Thrace in exchange for surrender of reparations claims against Greece, and was said to have achieved the ‘greatest diplomatic victory in history’.17 Nothing was left of the capitulations except a few foreign legal advisors. ‘His tactics were those of attrition. He dug himself in. He stonewalled. He contested one minute point after another. He demanded constant adjournments, to consult Angora. He gained time, smiling affably, by exploiting his deafness, by pretending not to understand French.’18 When Curzon complained, he declared: ‘“It is disgraceful and unbecoming to a human being to tease people for their natural disabilities”. “Lord Curzon turned several shades of purple.”19 Even Grace Curzon ‘found him most difficult to talk to, as indeed George also found him in conference, but I did my best, and after the banquet I even danced with him’.20 He also charmed the wife of the Bulgarian envoy, an early feminist, who later recalled with approval his actions as Prime Minister which ‘made Turkey adopt the Swiss code, introduced the wearing of hats, abolishing the red fez of old . . . women were forbidden to retain the veil, and all the old schools of Turkey were closed because they were considered backward.’21 The territorial settlement involved an enormous population exchange: 1.2 million Orthodox Greeks from Asia Minor were resettled in Greece, while 400,000 Moslem Turks from Macedonia and Eastern Thrace were resettled in Turkey.22 As elsewhere in Europe ‘multinational empires [gave] way not to multi-national democracies but to sharply defined nation-states.’ Rumbold commented on the effects of this phenomenon on Jews in Poland and elsewhere. Under the old order the empire’s non-Muslim subjects, the Christians and Jews, were exempted from military service but obliged to pay extra taxes instead. As long as they remained loyal to their sovereign and his local representatives, and respected the privileges of the Muslims, the minorities were more or less free to go about their business as merchants, craftsmen, or peasants.23 ‘Traditional Ottoman society, with its peculiar, arbitrary mixture of cruelty and fairness, had allowed Christians and Muslims to live together, the modern states which were emerging from the Ottoman empire would not.’24 Article One of the Lausanne Treaty provided: ‘There shall take place a compulsory exchange of Turkish nationals of the Greek Orthodox religion established in Turkish territory and of Greek nationals of the Muslim religion established in Greek territory. These persons shall not return . . . without authorization.’ For a million Greeks and 100,000 Turks, the agreement improved the chances of getting away safely; for the 50,000 Greeks of Cappadocia in the Turkish interior and the 400,000 Turks of Eastern Thrace, untroubled by war, it came as a sudden eviction, designed to make room for refugees moving in the other direction. Atatürk was said by Inönü to have said in the midst of this process: ‘One day we might find ourselves making an alliance with the Greeks.’25 A sizable portion of responsibility for the scheme was borne by the League Commissioner for Refugees, the Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen, who ‘understood that part of his job was to absorb the moral and political cost of proposals that

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everybody backed but no one wanted to sponsor openly’.26 Riza Noor, Ismet’s deputy at the conference, viewed Nansen’s propsal as ‘manna from heaven . . . we had wanted to put the population exchange proposal forward, but had not dared to do so.’27Curzon, who saw no alternative, viewed repatriation as ‘thoroughly bad and vicious . . . the world would pay a heavy penalty for a hundred years to come.’ The treaty provided the armies with 15 days to move out, with repatriation to follow within a month; even this limited delay had to be bargained for by the British. The Thracian agreement was in part a product of Greco-Turkish fear of Bulgarian ambitions in the area, and Greece’s need for vacant farmland to allocate to the Anatolian Greek refugees. ‘[M]utually agreed exchanges allowed the governments to reap the “benefits” of a unilateral eviction of unwanted minorities, without incurring the moral opprobrium.’28 Concerns about military security were present on both sides: ‘Irregular fighters, with a modicum of popular support, can never be defeated without removing the civilian population that succours them.’29 Ismet initially sought to include the Greeks of Istanbul, then half the city’s population, in the population exchange, and sought the expulsion of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate. Eventually, he acceded to the retention of the Greek community in exchange for the continued presence of a Moslem community of roughly equal size in Western Thrace, the stripping from the Patriarchate of all administrative functions, and an end to the exemption of the Greek community from conscription. This last, it was thought, would lead to the emigration of younger Greeks, while the exclusion of the Patriarchate from politics would make the remaining Greeks easier to rule, while its continued presence in Turkey would allow it to be supervised.30 Because of the numbers involved, most of the hardship fell upon the Greeks, particularly those from Asia Minor; the exodus was accompanied by typhus and other epidemics, leading to appeals for relief, including one from Lady Rumbold leading to provision of a field hospital for settlers in Eastern Thrace.31 For the expelled Turks, given that the new Turkish state was barely capable of administering Anatolia at the time, it is indeed remarkable that it oversaw the exodus from Greece in such a way that most of the exchangees survived the experience, however little they enjoyed it.32 ‘Turkey provided them with safety, and adequate material circumstances for most of their lives.’33 After settlement of territorial issues, Lord Curzon sought Turkish concessions on capitulations and minority issues by threatening to leave the Conference. Ismet’s levity on minority questions offended the American envoy, Joseph Grew. After fervent denunciation of the Armenian massacre in 1915, demands were made for allied rights of intervention on behalf of Armenians and others. ‘But,’ answered Ismet, without the flicker of a smile, echoing Talaat Pasha’s words to Bernstorff, ‘you just said we had killed all the Armenians. Are there any left?’34 Rejecting appeals by an Armenian representative, he declared :

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I thought that you too would help us to live together in harmony as sons of the same homeland . . . You want us to break up our country and set aside a section of it for you. We will never consider this, will never accept it.35 When Turkey refused concessions on these issues, Curzon, leaving his French allies in the lurch, proposed a purely territorial agreement under which the Turks would renounce Mosul. Curzon’s bluff was called by Inönü. Ismet twists about in his chair, mops his forehead, dabs with his handkerchief, and is very nervous. Bompard speaks well, Garroni lamentable, [Curzon] unsurpassed. He uses every tone, appeal, cajolery, despair, menace . . . Ismet was obdurate, for once he lost his temper. He stormed at them: ‘I shall return to Angora and tell my people that the Conference under the Presidency of Lord Curzon desires war.’. ‘No, no, no’, they shouted back at him. Still Ismet refused to give way. ‘Je ne peux pas, je ne peux pas,’ he mumbled.36 ‘I can accept no reservations on the independence of the Turkish nation.’37 After the breakup of the conference, the British diplomat Harold Nicolson related, ‘Ismet took the lift. I was in the same lift too . . . He did not seem upset at all . . . He left the conference building as if nothing extraordinary had just happened.’38 Thereafter, Curzon sent Inönü a barrage of telegrams urging return to the Conference, which ‘strengthened Inönü’s hand in dealings with Atatürk’s recalcitrant Parliament’. At the conclusion of the treaty, the only one of the post-war treaties to survive the Second World War, the London Times asked the rhetorical question: ‘Has Turkey become, by some miracle, a civilized power?’ Nevile Henderson later ‘asked him how he had got on with Lord Curzon. “He treated us like schoolboys,” said Ismet, “but,” and his eyes twinkled, “we didn’t mind. He treated the French and Italians just the same.’’’39 Inönü’s final agreement to neutralisation of the Straits came after the departure in frustration of Admiral Keyes, the British naval delegate, Inönü exclaiming: ‘But Keyes is not going,’ ‘But he will come back,’ ‘But General Harington always came back.’40 Keyes later reported: ‘I had a three weeks’ incessant battle with Ismet Pasha during which we made good friends.’41 Ismet was determined to hold out for the re-fortification of the Dardanelles and for placing drastic restrictions on the passage of men of war through the Straits, unless he could obtain guarantees which we were not prepared to grant. It was clear that we were not going to war about it, and the Turks knew it.42 Lausanne was characterised by A.J.P. Taylor as a ‘reversal of traditional British policy and an implied threat to Soviet Russia’.43 In defending the massive exchanges of population provided for by the treaty, Ismet told the Grand National Assembly in 1923:

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Circumstances beyond our control have made it impossible to co-exist with certain ethnics . . . Our co-ethnics whom we will admit to the country and who will suffer much because of migration must endure this situation, which will be only temporary, for the sake of the future. Upon the resumption of the Conference, with Rumbold as the British delegate, Turkey had no difficulty in rejecting most of the French and Italian demands. Thus the French, who had conceded their territorial claims before the conference, were faced with the disturbing fact that whereas they had come to Lausanne under the impression that Turkey was the foe of Britain and the friend of France, it was the foe that had been able to obtain her desires and the friend that had failed to win any concessions.44 The Ottoman debt, much of which was held by the French, was fixed at 141 million Turkish lira, 57 million of which was allocated to other Ottoman successor states, and the powers of the Ottoman Debt Council were ended. The experience left Inönü with a horror of foreign debt: ‘He scrupulously avoided taking loans from abroad during his own term as prime minister.’45 One of the few questions left unresolved at Lausanne was ownership of the Mosul oilfields; this was left to the League of Nations, which rejected Turkey’s claims in 1926. The deal thus to defer a Mosul settlement was fostered by Atatürk’s caution about extra-Turkish aspirations and by Bonar Law’s direction to Curzon: ‘We cannot go to war for Mosul . . . we shall not by ourselves fight to enforce what remains of the Treaty of Sèvres.’46 What the British salvaged from Lausanne was the neutralisation and nonfortification of the Straits, maintained until the Montreaux Treaty in 1936, together with a Straits Commission to monitor traffic through the Straits; marine traffic between the coasts was reserved to the Turks, though they considered that they had also ‘breached the Russo-Turkish accord and restored Anglo-Turkish unity without sacrificing that of France and Italy’.47 The non-fortification allowed the British to present a naval threat to the Black Sea coast of the Soviet Union. In addition, the Turks recognised Italian sovereignty over all but two of the Dodecanese Islands, which the Italians had ruled since 1911; the treaty provided for their demilitarisation. The British, of course, ultimately succeeded in retaining the Mosul oilfields. The treaty was ratified by the Turkish National Assembly in August 1923 by a vote of 213 to 14, ‘but only after Mustafa Kemal had called new elections that defeated many of the critics of Inönü and his treaty’.48 The treaty also barred Turkey from raising import tariffs for six years, a boon to foreign merchants replacing the expelled Greeks. The expiration of the tariff concessions coincided with the advent of the depression, and ushered in a period of autarchy and economic nationalism: ‘an intensive, almost Soviet-style programme of industrialization, designed to shelter the country from the vicissitudes of the world economy’.49 Speaking at the 70th anniversary commemoration of the treaty, President Demirel declared: ‘For the first time in the twentieth century [nations] were forced to achieve

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diplomatic assessment, seeking and reaching a fair reconciliation rather than imposition of conditions.’ Turkey ‘was not interested in a document which she could declare invalid at the first opportunity or which she could put aside easily. She sought an arrangement based on mutual rights and interests . . . realism, fortified with selfconfidence.’ Atatürk, it was observed by Turkey’s foreign minister in 1997, ‘was the only national leader among his contemporaries who did not fight with the ambitions of expansionism and to extend his area of influence’. The Turkish foreign minister paid tribute to Inönü’s ‘masterful diplomacy at Lausanne and his humanitarian approach to the problems’.50 Ismet lauded the treaty as creating a homogeneous uniform homeland presenting to the outside world a position freed of unnatural restrictions and shed of domestic concessions which created a government within a government . . . released from abnormal financial liabilities, a liberated motherland with absolute right of defense and plentitude of resources. Atatürk thereafter adopted the slogan, memorialised to this day on a large plaque on the Istanbul waterfront near the Sirkeci station: ‘Peace at home, peace in the world’. The final embarkation of Allied troops in July 1923 was carefully arranged ‘to preserve Allied dignity in face of a Kemalist triumph’. After the Lausanne Treaty, Ismet negotiated a bilateral treaty with the United States which provided for mostfavoured nation treatment but gave the Americans little else. Reporting to Secretary of State Hughes, Ambassador Joseph Grew said: We have given up the articles on naturalization and claims, we have failed to obtain the desired modifications in the Judicial Declaration and we have failed to obtain any provisions whatever with regard to minorities . . . the Turks were logical and frank in their methods.51 Ismet rejected all claims for autonomy of the small part of Armenia retained by Turkey.52 On the 70th anniversary of the treaty, while Ismet’s son Erdal Inönü was Deputy Prime Minister, a celebration of the treaty was held at Ankara, attended among others by Lord Ravensdale, Curzon’s grandson, and Lady Ravensdale, and by Sir Henry Rumbold, Rumbold’s grandson, and Lady Holly Hawkes Rumbold. Turkey After the War A history of the League of Nations notes that: ‘Turkey adopted a policy of toleration to what remained of minorities’ (120,000 Istanbul Greeks and about 65,000 Armenians) after the Armenian massacres and the Greco-Turkish War and population exchanges that followed it. It rebuffed inquiries from the League by providing declarations from its minority groups of ‘no wish for special treatment’. It was involved in a dispute with France over ownership of Alexandretta on the Syrian

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border; in the prelude to the Lausanne negotiations the Turks had allowed the French to keep Alexandretta in exchange for a cessation of hostilities and an agreement in March 1921 to make Turkish an official language. In 1937, after the French had indicated a purpose to liquidate the mandate over Syria, Turkey took the position that the 1921 agreement was based on trust of the French, not of the Syrians; the League of Nations, after Turkish withdrawal was threatened, gave the region independent control of its internal affairs. In 1938, when the French and British were eager to enter into a pact with Turkey, France allowed Turkey to station troops in the enclave to protect the Turkish minority, and in 1939 the enclave was annexed by Turkey as an unstated part of the new alliance with France and Britain,53 with a theoretical right of secession.54 Inönü was briefly Premier under Atatürk from 1923 to 1924, and again from 1925 to 1937, ‘exercising a careful censorship over the ideas of the sometimes too enthusiastic Kemal’. He was credited with being the co-draftsman along with Atatürk of the act creating the republic.55 He drove into opposition 32 deputies who favoured a more decentralised policy and more receptivity to foreign loans, and then acquiesced in the suppression of the opposition Progressive Republican party.56 Although devoted to the libertine Atatürk, he enjoyed relating a story of Atatürk’s visit to an obscure village: ‘Atatürk asked one of the villagers: ‘Do you know Atatürk? What sort of man is he in your opinion?’ The villager answered: ‘Of course I know him. He is a very good man. He is a saint with a beaming face and a long beard down to his waist.’ Turning to those around him, Atatürk muttered under his breath ‘Let’s get out of here!’57 He had a falling out with Atatürk shortly before Atatürk’s death about Turkish policy at the Nyon Conference, leading to his resignation as Premier in September 1937,58 being succeeded by the banker Celal Bayar, who was expected to rationalise the elaborate bureaucratic system of audits inherited from the Ottoman regime.59 He became President by acclamation on 11 November 1938, after Atatürk’s death, remaining in Ankara to ensure a smooth transition.60 In 1925, a Treaty of Friendship was entered into with the Soviet Union, supplementing the Treaty of Moscow of March 1921, the first treaty of the new Republic. By the 1925 pact, both nations agreed not to join the Anglo-Frenchdominated League of Nations and Russia agreed to remain neutral in the Mosul dispute; the earlier treaty settled the Armenian frontier, renounced Russian capitulations, and mutually agreed not to recognise the treaties of Sèvres and BrestLitovsk. Inönü visited Russia for two weeks in 1932; according to his son Erdal, his only meeting with Stalin led him to conclude that the Sovet Union’s first interest was in recovering the lands lost at Brest-Litovsk in 1917; only after this aspiration was satisfied did he think that Russia would renew its claims at the Straits. This forecast was exact and accurate. A neutrality pact was signed with Italy in 1928, but on the outbreak of the Ethiopian war, Turkey, because of its commitment to collective security, joined in the

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League sanctions against Italy, sent a general to Ethiopia to train Ethiopian troops, and gave Britain access to her ports in the event of a British war with Italy over Ethiopia. Inönü had met Mussolini once in the early 1930s. In 1930, there was a settlement of outstanding questions with Greece, ‘an exuberant reconciliation . . . compliments that were handsome even by the standards of diplomatic politesse’.61 Upon Inönü’s accession to the Presidency, he received an unusual tribute from D. Caclamanos, the second delegate of Greece at the Lausanne Conference, who related how Ismet, carrying out instructions from Atatürk, settled an extravagant claim for reparations based on the Greek invasion of Asia Minor insisted on by the extreme element at Ankara. General Pele, the French delegate, withheld from the Conference a telegram from President Poincaré asking the Western naval forces to oppose by force any Greek naval attack on Turkey. Knowledge of this proposal would have stiffened the Turkish extremists. Inönü, in addition to obtaining a minor territorial concession, obtained a clause recognising the reparations claim as well-founded but reciting Greece’s inability to pay it. Ismet declared of reparations in his 1923 speech to the Grand National Assembly: Victors in the four corners of the world have had the losers sign innumerable reparations agreements, they have disarmed their opponents to the last pocket knife. Is it the victorious nations who benefit from the blessings of peace or the defeated? This system entails maintaining the state of war forever, even after the signing of the peace.62 Bernstorff, Rumbold and Sforza had a similar distaste for reparations agreements. Caclamanos’ letter referred to Inönü as a man of outstanding gifts, of wisdom, and of moderation . . . [r]ather short in stature, elegantly slim, olive-skinned, with flashing black eyes denoting intelligence and energy and simple dignified manners, he impresses you at first sight with his modesty and lack of any spectacular or obtrusive swagger.63 He was ‘conventional in morals . . . disapproved of the orgies in which Mustafa Kemal indulged and of his companions on these orgies.’64 In Inönü’s view, there was a need to draw a distinction between the exploiters of religion and sincere Moslems.65 This led to some deviations during his regime from Atatürk’s policy of strict secularism, including some state support for the education of imams. One of the more remarkable evidences of the reconciliation between Turkey and Greece resulting from Lausanne was Venizelos’ nomination of Atatürk for the 1930 Nobel peace prize; Venizelos also became a good friend of Inönü. Policies as President On acceding to the Presidency, he announced that: ‘It will be our task to see that Turkey falls neither into anarchy nor tyranny.’ Following the Munich agreement, a

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semi-official newspaper referred to ‘the “illusion” that the “accord” of Munich effectively marked the beginning of an prolonged conciliation’.66 Typical of his method was his exploitation of the Rhineland crisis to get rid of the vestiges of international control of the Straits, provided for at Lausanne. In February 1936 he addressed a note to Britain requesting a new conference at Montreaux, which resulted in an agreement restoring Turkish sovereignty over the Straits, providing for the free passage in peacetime of merchant ships and warships of the Black Sea powers, but providing that in wartime Turkey could bar enemy ships and neutral merchant shipping and that no ships of a belligerent could pass in wartime save in fulfilment of a mutual assistance treaty with Turkey. The British acceded to this change, in the view that the disadvantage of fortification of the Straits was outweighed by the value to Britain of Turkish cooperation and of not rendering Turkey a dissatisfied power that would accord Germany a preponderant position in Turkey.67 The British had considered offering the Turks a revision of Lausanne in exchange for a treaty of alliance several months earlier, but they decided not to ‘run after the Turks’.68 As Sforza noted, Atatürk’s and Inönü’s foreign policy forswore territorial expansion; a British Ambassador later declared: ‘If irresponsible individuals ever hinted tendentiously at the presence of populations of Turkish race outside of Turkey, they received nothing but discouragement from the Turkish government.’69 Inönü had a long and happy marriage, with two sons and a daughter, and was said to be ‘by no means a ready speaker, slightly hard of hearing’. He was a conventional Muslim, who carried a miniature Koran in his pocket, and who saw to it that his children received private religious lessons from an official of the Department of Religious Affairs.70 Notwithstanding their falling-out, Atatürk left money for the education of Inönü’s children.71 In 1941, it was said of him that: ‘Conservative and traditional in policy, he is the last man likely to lead his country into adventurous courses.’72 His early political premises were austere and scarcely individualistic. In his speech to the Grand National Assembly, he urged: There is not anybody at home, nor abroad, who is unaware of the sufferings affecting our country and especially her poverty and devastation. We are sitting in the midst of treasures of gold. The means to open them are to endeavour, undauntedly and constantly, toward a definite target . . . It is now the time to labour.73 He also observed: ‘We are all aware that the sons of this land, not enough in numbers to defend our borders and the motherland, have been wasted beyond our borders.’ Le Figaro observed in 1923: ‘The war was fought with the intention of expelling Turks from Europe as slaves. But we see that its result was, on the contrary, to Westernise the Turks.’74 At the Lausanne commemoration, the then British Foreign Secretary, Douglas Hurd, quoted Robert Vansittart on Atatürk: ‘He had more energy than any remembered European, including Napoleon. So intense was it that he could drive his backward people not only to victory, but to the avoidance of conquest.’75 In 1934,

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Inönü was quoted as saying that: ‘Life should be sacrificed for society. The individual is powerless and disoriented before nature in a society in which he has no disposition to sacrifice his life for society.’ He was regarded as ‘slow and plodding . . . obsessional, cautious, serious, dependent on the ideas of others, [and] better read’ than Atatürk.76 An admirer however described him as ‘a man of singular and elastic intelligence, of exceptional cunning, a profound observer, full of brio, of a happy disposition, animated by the highest ideals, most cultivated, who makes up for the Ghazi’s [Atatürk’s] shortcomings’.77 Inönü’s succession brought an end to ‘unrestrained and lively gatherings under Atatürk often followed by late and convivial sessions at the “Pavillon”, the cabaret in the basement of the Ankara Palace Hotel . . . Foreign representatives were spared those prolonged and copious potations’, which were succeeded by restrained and sober meetings under . . . Inönü who has done much to restore Ankara life to an even keel. The leading personages in the Government, official life and some of the more important editors used to gather in the President’s House, play bridge, and discuss pending questions. It was this inner circle from which political decisions and political guidance radiated.78 Other less informed observers described him as ‘cold as charity’, with ‘deep religious feelings continuously outraged’ who ‘abhorred the sight of strange men and women clasped in each other’s arms in a public dance hall’, who disliked Western music and who in manner was ‘very Napoleonic, very severe’.79 On his accession to power, he had himself elected permanent chief of the Republican People’s Party. The accession was acclaimed by the British Ambassador as distinguished by ‘utmost promptitude, scrupulous regard for constitutional practice, without a ripple in the country’s life’.80 The burial ceremony for Atatürk was entirely secular, Inönü acclaiming him as ‘a heroic human being that our own nation raised’.81 Inönü’s face appeared on coins and banknotes and in portraits in public buildings; statues of him were erected. Ministers were appointed and dismissed more or less at will. From the time of his election as President at least until the end of the Second World War, Ismet Inönü was, for all practical purposes, a dictator. He could not be criticized by the citizenry, the members of the party, or the press. Martial law and extensive police powers precluded any criticism of [his] policies and actions.82 In early 1939, in a speech at the University of Istanbul, he had declared an intention to democratise, but this project was postponed until after the war. In June 1945, he refused to accept parliamentary control of the government, but by November of that year was prepared to declare that ‘the democratic character of the regime has been preserved in principle. We never accepted dictatorship; on the other hand it was condemned as unworthy of the Turkish people. The lack of an opposition party is our sole deficiency.’

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23. Ismet and Curzon at Lausanne (Cambridge University Library)

In November 1945, repressive laws extending police power and impairing press freedom were repealed, and political parties were allowed, Inönü declaring: ‘We shall strive with all our strength so that differences of political opinion do not lead to enmity between our compatriots.’ Severe laws were reinstituted by Recep Peker as Interior Minister in August 1946, but were rescinded in December 1947 after Inönü had removed Peker in September, having declared in July that he found charges of sedition to be baseless.83 In 1946, he voluntarily surrendered his title of National

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Chief and his role as permanent chairman of the RPP.84 Later, he declared: What I know about non-democratic regimes is not theoretical. I lived under all kinds of non-democratic regimes as a minor civil servant with no authority at my disposal. Later, I had authority and at times I used fully all the means available to rulers under such regimes and observed the consequences. Today, we either try to develop this country under democracy or we go down the drain.85 In January 1946 a new Democratic Party was formed in opposition to the government Republican People’s Party, and in elections in July 1946, it acquired 61 deputies. In the 1950 elections, it secured 53 per cent of the vote as against 38 per cent for the RPP and five per cent for the more religiously oriented Nation party.86 The Inönü government stepped down, and ‘commanded respect by their dignity in bowing to the popular will’.87 Inönü ‘had the singular honor of being the world’s only statesman who voluntarily abdicated his dictatorial powers to make democracy possible.’88 He was surprised by the result, expecting to continue in power for another decade, declaring: ‘I never expected to see so much ingratitude.’89 He observed: ‘I have been a general, a diplomat, a Prime Minister and the President of the Republic. The only thing left is to be the leader of the opposition.’90 It was said that, for Inönü, [b]ecoming a Western society was seen as an end in itself rather than a means for achieving some higher order . . . He was extremely interested in discovering more about the societies of Western Europe, his curiosity extending beyond politics. He read novels, he studied philosophy and he listened to symphonic movements on a record player he had purchased from an officer of the Suez Canal Company . . . Inönü adopted and strongly defended the idea that a transition to political democracy ought to be made . . . A reasonably strong faction within the RPP opposed his choice, but he pursued it without hesitation, in the tradition of a true believer.91 Inönü, it has been suggested, acted from a mixture of motives: to prevent a political explosion; to respond to pressure from the propertied classes, which had grown in influence during the war; to ensure Western support against the Soviet Union; as well as his sympathy for Westernisation.92 It has been justly observed that: In the absence of Ismet Inönü, Turkish democracy might well have been delayed in its development. In his own character, in his personal reading, and in his public utterances is evidence indicating that perhaps from the very start of his administration in late 1938, Inönü had been driving toward the eventual liberalization of the political regime. Otherwise, it becomes difficult to explain many of his words and deeds. Hence the character of the top leadership is of signal importance in explaining this unique, bloodless transition in Turkey

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from a single-party authoritarian regime to a multi-party, democratic structure based on contested, free elections. (That political violence was to erupt ten years later does not render the event less unusual.) Other factors inducing the change included 1) increasing popular demand for greater participation in government by a growing middle class 2) Turkey’s signing of the Charter of the United Nations 3) the Soviet threat and the authoritarian nature of the Soviet regime 4) the Turkish need for Western aid and support 5) the victory of the more liberal nations over the more authoritarian in World War II and 6) the obvious growth of corruption within the single-party state and Inönü’s personal reaction to this state of affairs. Only by the existence of a strong, vigorous opposition could Inönü gain effective control over his own party, which by 1950 had become strongly tainted by corruption and oppression.93 In 1954, the Democrats secured a greater victory at the elections in that year; in May 1960, the consequences of great economic mismanagement gave rise to a military coup, carried out with Inönü’s acquiescence, and the dissolution of the Democratic Party and execution of the Prime Minister, Adnan Menderes. Menderes had refused to hold new elections, had misused the state broadcasting monopoly, and had begun suppressing the political opposition, while impairing the autonomy of universities and of judges. In 1955, in a period of tensions with Greece over Cyprus, Menderes had allowed mobs to run amok in Istanbul, driving out much of the remaining Greek community. After the coup, Inönü wrote to his son Erdal: Here some extraordinary events have taken place. I am sure you know the details. I had warned . . . several times; they did not pay attention to me. It should not have ended up in a military intervention. In no way have I been a part of its preparation and execution. I only predicted that it would take place and said so openly. I shall now try to put things right.94 General Gurcel is said to have told him that he was not consulted because he would not have approved. Inönü was instrumental in getting the coup leaders out of politics and insulating them against reprisals by making them senators for life.95 He also opposed political purges of the army, judiciary and universities: ‘If people are removed from their jobs in large numbers, an incurable enmity will emerge and there will be no security of office in the country. I oppose it.’96 Rumbold and Sforza likewise regarded political purges with distaste, an insight not shared by the authors of ‘debaathification’ in Iraq. Whether or not Inönü was complicit in the coup, it seems generally conceded that he could have prevented it had he wished to do so. Inönü is said to have unsuccessfully opposed the carrying out of the death sentences, later declaring, in forestalling renewed resort to them after the 1971 military intervention, that: ‘In the past, capital punishment meted out to political offenders gave rise to an enmity and rancor between the people that lingered on for years. At least this time around, Turkey should not make the same mistake.’97 Inönü again served as Prime Minister after

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elections in October 1961, from November 1961 to February 1965, assuming office at the advanced age of 77, and as a special Senator until his death at the age of 89 on December 23, 1973. His 1961 government was a coalition between the RPP and the Justice party, which in March 1963 launched an ambitious five-year plan; before taking power, he had to deflect pressure for another military intervention by officers distressed at the strong support for Menderes’ party at the elections.98 A more liberal constitution granting rights of free political expression and organisation was adopted in 1961.99 There was an abortive army putsch in February 1962 inspired by dissatisfaction at the pace of change in a nation perceived as being in need of many reforms. In May 1963, the same putschists tried again; this time their ringleader, Colonel Talat Aydemir was hanged. In December 1963, the coalition government fell and the counter-revolutionary Justice Party nearly came to power; in the final event, Inönü formed an RPP minority government supported by the Army. In May of that year, he resigned in a crisis over an amnesty issue, but was recalled to office, this time as leader of a three-party coalition. After massacres of Turks on Cyprus in December 1963, the Inönü government cancelled the 1930 treaty of friendship with Greece, subject to a six-month moratorium, thus affecting the residence rights of 12,000 Greek passport-holders in Istanbul. Under pressure of inflamed public opinion arising from events in Cyprus, this population and their dependants were expelled, their property being confiscated without compensation.100 In February 1965, Inönü’s minority government lost a vote of confidence. In October 1965, the Justice Party won the elections and Inönü again became leader of the opposition. Even in opposition, his prestige was such that he was able to tell the president in July 1965, Cemal Gursel, to resign from an Association to Fight Communism which Inönü considered a fascist organisation.101 In May 1971, the military, with Inönü’s assent, again intervened by requiring the establishment of an all-party government led by Nihat Erim, a member of Inönü’s party, which declared martial law to suppress student violence and Kurdish unrest.102 The Secretary-General of the RPP, Bulent Ecevit, resigned in protest. In May 1972 at a party conference, Ecevit’s faction won a vote of confidence, causing Inönü to resign from the party chairmanship;103 in November 1972, regarding the Ecevit policy as too ideological and left of centre,104 he resigned first from the RPP and then from the lower house of the Assembly. Under the 1961 Constitution, he, as a former President, became a Senator; he served as such until his death on 25 December 1973.105 In March 1973, he forcefully and successfully opposed a proposal to extend the President’s term of office, urging him to ‘leave with honour’ and urging his successor to foster ‘peaceful coexistence’ between the parties and between civilians and the military.106 He was buried at the Atatürk mausoleum. In 1972, he was succeeded as leader of the RPP by Bulent Ecevit.107 There was another military coup in 1980, the military swiftly returning to its barracks. His son Erdal, a physicist, entered politics to help foster the return to civilian rule. It was said of Ismet that: ‘In difficult times, he is not just the leader of the opposition; he is the most dependable authority and the last hope for the country.’108

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His domestic policy was not characterised by great economic intelligence or regard for the private sector of the economy. He justified his policy by pointing to its political virtues: Because we have adopted a mixed economy, for the first time those at opposite ends of the ideological spectrum have begun not to have enmity toward each other. The members of the state sector and the private sector are now getting together, deliberating what measures should be taken, and agreeing on some policies.109 Protecting and promoting the prestige of the state was very important to Inönü. He took very seriously such government policies as linking every corner of the country by railway, keeping the Turkish lira strong against foreign currencies, safeguarding the country’s economic independence, and making payments by the state on time.110 Subsequent Turkish history indicates that inflation was a real danger. The Turkish Revolution {The T. R.} did not, as in Russia, bring an entirely new class to the head of affairs, since in the new regime pashas still formed the upper administration, their position secure as a result of hundreds of years of tradition and further strengthened by the prestige gained in the war against the Greeks.111 He severely repressed a Kurdish rebellion in 1925.112 One especially vehement critic charged that as Prime Minister he was ‘divorced from all the commercial life of the world . . . monopolies he had given as presents to his personal friends. Ismet would call in no foreign experts nor send Turks abroad to be trained . . . [he] blotted out what trade was left.’ He accepted an $8 million Soviet loan for modernisation of the textile industry in 1929 to 1930, but devoted little attention to the modernisation of agriculture. In 1949, the country was described as ‘a poorly managed capitalist economy in which most of the capital happens to be supplied by the government’.113 He was also charged by his critics in 1932 as being ’pompous and irritable, [a] martinet in the Assembly, as he had been in the army, ignorant of finance and incompetent in politics’. 114 Lausanne had limited tariff changes until 1934, and payments on preexisting foreign debt consumed about 15 per cent of the budget in the 1930s; the last foreign concession was bought out in 1943. In 1930, the then American ambassador, Joseph Grew, noted, however, that: ‘The new cabinet is a good deal stronger than the old one and it begins to look as if radicalism in Turkey had run its course.’115 During the Atatürk era from 1927 to 1940, Turkish population increased from 13.6 million to 17.8 million. Budgets and foreign trade were kept in balance; there was little foreign assistance, little corruption and little private initiative; most of the entrepreneurial activity involved representation of foreign firms. Inönü’s autarchy

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reflected in part a lesson he took with him from the Lausanne Confererence: ‘One should never forget that in times of need, aid, even if it is from a close friend, is never without a price.’116 Lord Curzon had a more jaundiced view of this economic nationalism: ‘They have begun by freeing themselves from the Greeks and Armenians, who have been their merchants and middlemen in the past, and incidentally they are just beginning to discover the disastrous consequence of their idiotic policy.’117 On Inönü’s departure as Premier in 1937, the London Times noted that: In the economic life of Turkey, etatisme will continue to be the guiding principle . . . The State will retain control of the more important industrial undertakings and development first because the security of the country is considered to be wrapped up in them and secondly because private enterprise is suspected of seeking to exploit natural riches without due regard to the country’s good; but the state will leave to the individual the marketing of industrial products.118 Per-capita national income doubled between 1923 and 1938, but was still lower than that of any European country; this was still an impressive achievement in a depression era in which many economies were moving backward. The literacy rate likewise doubled, but from only ten per cent to 20 per cent ; it reached 30 per cent in 1945 and 35 per cent in 1950;119 by 1970, it was 56 per cent, and by 2000 85 per cent. There were also major improvements to the rail-way network, at a cost of $200 million in 1936 dollars; ‘For much of this the requirements of national defence are more apparent than any economic justification.’120 A five-year industrialisation plan commenced in 1934, including projects in the iron and steel, textile, cellulose, ceramic and heavy chemical industries, an autarchic programme inspired partly by fear of impending war. Financial management was notably orthodox: A currency as stable as any in the world, held in fixed relationship to gold without notable fluctuation in exchange since 1929; . . . the eleventh consecutive year of balanced budgets; six years of favourable general balance of trade; vast development of public works paid for out of income by this generation; greatly enhanced credit abroad, a moderate internal debt, and a Central Bank whose gold reserve is steadily increasing. There is perhaps nothing to equal this record in any other country today,’ a commentator noted in 1936, ‘especially if one considers the total bankruptcy from which the start had to be made.’121 A music conservatory was established in 1936; opera and ballet companies in 1940. The secular state established by Atatürk was maintained. In 1941, it was made a criminal offence to recite the call of the faithful to prayer in Arabic. A Labour Law with hours-of-work limitations was enacted in 1937; it provided for compulsory conciliation of claims under individual labour contracts, not collective bargaining, Inönü declaring that: ‘[It] will sweep away the clouds which make possible the birth and life of class consciousness.’122 In 1949, voluntary religious education was permitted in the schools, and Ismet permitted the opening of seminaries to train

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imams; these initiatives were carried much further by later governments attempting to introduce compulsory religious instruction. The Menderes government in 1951 expanded these schools; the military after the 1979 coup allowed their further expansion. By 1996, eight per cent of 3.8 million middle- and high-school students were enrolled in such schools, which were expanded during the Demirel and Ciller regimes. Under pressure from the military, the religious middle schools were later abolished. Between 1998 and 2002, the number of imam students fell from 900,000 to 71,000, producing 25,000 graduates annually, as against an annual need for 5,500 new imams. The current Prime Minister, Recip Erdogan, is a graduate of an imam school. There are also now said to be 19 Islamic newspapers, 11 periodicals, 51 radio stations and 20 television stations.123 Inönü would have had no patience with this: I know the rhetoric of religious exploitation better than anybody. We grew up in that milieu. But if I ever embark on that path, we will never be able to put an end to the competition even if we want to. No one will want to be inferior to the other, and in the end secularism will go down the drain.124 In March 1970, Inönü, then in retirement, denounced the Demirel government for using religion in politics by expanding the imam schools beyond the training of clerics.125 There is no reason to doubt the judgment of Atatürk’s leading biographer that: ‘Atatürk’s enlightened authoritarianism left a reasonable space for free private lives. More could not be expected in his lifetime . . . Atatürk’s reforms have withstood hostile pressures better than many contemporary efforts at radical change.’126 In 1940, in his most creative domestic initiative, Inönü fostered Village Institutes. Approximately 20 Institutes were created to administer a five-year training course in teaching methods, agricultural techniques and public health, some 25,000 graduates being sent back to improve literacy and public works in villages. They were transformed into more conventional teachers’ colleges in 1947 and 1954. A programme for the creation of community centres or People’s Houses in villages gave rise to the creation by 1950 of 478 houses and 4322 meeting rooms.127 A land reform law enacted in May 1945 and assertedly modeled on a Nazi hereditary land law gave rise to limited expropriations and was strongly opposed by the Democrats under the leadership of Menderes, who shut down the People’s Houses. That villagers were forced, under duress in some areas, to participate in the construction of schools, that the universal and humanistic character of village institutes was regarded as alien and un-Turkish, and the allegations of leftism, indeed of communism, all combined to make the village institutes one of the first victims of the multi-party regime.128 In the 1930s, a start toward democracy was made in a shift from indirect to direct election of the one-party National Assembly. Inönü favoured the adoption of a proportional, representation system for at least a transitional period-on the theory that it would foster compromise among political groupings. The Village

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Institutes were a means of extending primary education, consistent with Inönü’s belief that: In those countries where primary education is lacking, a medieval political system lingers on in all its aspects. No matter what the laws stipulate, no matter how extensively and carefully the rights and duties of the citizens are spelled out in those laws, unless the citizens receive a basic education they will not be aware of those rights and responsibilities. Under these circumstances, the people cannot internalize their rights and responsibilities and at the hands of those with economic and political power, they will live like slaves.129 The cause of primary education is the cause of being human, being a nation . . . I can say that when I die I will have left the Turkish nation two monuments: One of them is the village schools, the other the multi-party regime.130 The village schools extended only to the fifth grade; eight years of education did not become compulsory until 1997.131 While fostering an opposition party, he believed in discipline within parties: ‘A government cannot work effectively if it does not know the next morning it will still have the majority in Parliament or whether that majority evaporated the night before.’132 Inönü also established a much-admired office to provide several hundred translations of classics of world literature,133 which gave employment to many Turkish writers. This example has not been followed in Arab countries by either domestic or foreign governments. Atatürk in 1933 gave sanctuary in Istanbul to several hundred German and German-Jewish refugee scholars, including the philologists Leo Spitzer and Erich Auerbach, the composer Paul Hindemith, the political scientist Ernst Reuter, later Mayor of Berlin, the economist Wilhelm Ropke and a host of eminent scientists and physicians.134 Albert Einstein was offered refuge but went instead to Princeton. The major blot on Inönü’s domestic record was an infamous capital levy known as the Varlik Vergesi, enacted in November 1942 when the fortunes of the Axis were at high tide and the Turkish economy was in desperate straits,135 by reason of Inönü’s maintenance of a million-man army. The tax was the work of the Prime Minister, Saracoglu, Inönü at the time confining his activities to the field of foreign affairs. The tax resembled in principle capital levies applied elsewhere in Europe, and was not on the face of discriminatory. It was applied by local boards made up exclusively of Muslims, from whose decisions there was no appeal except by petition to the Grand National Assembly, and was inspired by the windfall profits perceived as having been made by merchants selling scarce commodities in the large cities. No tax declarations were required, the assessments were entirely arbitrary and were required to be paid within 15 days, forced labour and forced sales of property being provided for with respect to persons failing to pay. 136 The unfortunate official charged with implementing this tax in Istanbul later wrote a book about the experience, referring to the tax as a ‘misbegotten offspring of German racialism and Ottoman fanaticism’,

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and relating that on the day after the tax was announced, he received a call from one of his former professors: Faik, my boy, the text of the capital tax appeared in this morning’s paper. Yes, Professor. Naturally the journalists got it wrong, they gave an incomplete text. No, in all the newspapers I saw, the text was complete. How so, complete? No provision for objections or appeal! No indication of the rate of taxation . . . That is the kind of tax it is, Professor. My boy, have you all gone mad!137 Of 114,368 persons defaulting in payment, 2,057 were interned and 1,400 who did not pay were taken to a labour camp at Ashale for nonpayment of tax, where 21 died.138 A substantial number of firms were sold at auction to new and inexperienced owners.139 It was said that Ashale was ‘a healthful place. The people who were sent there had a good time, although most resented their exile deeply.’ The tax was described as a ‘small-scale bloodless financial massacre’. Foreign merchants subject to it appealed to their embassies, which won concessions, leading one observer to declare: ‘By God, they have revived the capitulations!’. While by the standards of Europe at the time it was ‘scarcely a flea-bite in world-wide terms’, its ethnically discriminatory administration was largely hushed up in the Western press. One of its administrators referred to it as an Ottoman-style measure, the ‘last manifestation of the vampire-mentality of extortion’.140 Those sent to ‘hard labour’ were mildly treated; the ‘labour’ was largely for the benefit of press photographers. At the height of the Cold War, two American commentators charitably observed: ‘It is perhaps credible that many of the men in command from President Inönü on down were themselves both distressed and surprised to discover the lengths to which tax boards made up of “average citizens” had been willing to push matters.’141 An article in the New York Times by C.L. Sulzberger on 11 September 1943 disclosed that Muslims subject to the tax were assessed at 4.94 per cent of their worth, while the percentage applied to Greeks averaged 156 per cent, to Jews 179 per cent and to Armenians 232 per cent.142 Two lists were compiled, one of Muslims, which included foreign residents except for Greek nationals and Jewish citizens of Axis powers, and one of non-Muslims, who were assessed ten times as heavily. This as previously noted, was a reversion to Ottoman practice, in which minorities were taxed heavily and excused from normal military service. The Donmes, a small and insular community of Muslims of Jewish descent, were assessed twice as heavily as Muslims; they had settled in Turkey as a result of the forced repatriation of Muslims, and would in all probability have lost their lives had they remained in Salonika. There were assertedly other anti-Semitic measures in May 1942, Hitler in his table talk referring among other things to the dismissal of Jews by the Turkish Information Agency.143 German diplomats reported that in 1938 and 1939 Inönü had voiced to

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them a purpose to eliminate Jewish middlemen from the Turkish economy.144 On March 15, 1944, just before the Cairo conference, the tax was repealed and unpaid assessments were abated. The American State Department had used ‘strong and direct language’ to protest its application to American concerns.145 The British Ambassador, Knatchbull-Hugessen, repeatedly remonstrated about the tax. On January 18, 1943, he asked for assurances that seizure and forced labour would not be applied until the only appeal – petition to the National Assembly – was exhausted; he got no answer and concluded: ‘They evidently want to frighten.’146 On 20 January he protested again; on 5 and 21 February, he made clear that it did not redound to Turkey’s international credit. In January he attended a reception: ‘The Minister of Finance distinctly intoxicated and no wonder after his recent efforts.’ On May 7, he noted: ‘They are hunting for money here, mainly to pay for the army. I don’t see how they will get the money.’ Another article explained that the tax had been conceived at a time when the Battle of Stalingrad was uncertain, and was designed to collect as much as possible from the Christian and Jewish populations without destroying their ability to continue working, one official being quoted as declaring that the purpose was ‘liquidation of a mentality . . . let them tuck up their sleeves and swing the hoe’.147 Saracoglu, the Premier, was quoted as saying that the tax was aimed at the rich and profiteers, rather than peasants.148 The tax was aimed at a real problem. The Turkish price index rose from 100 in 1938 to 126.6 in 1940, 175.3 in 1941, 339.6 in 1942 and 590.1 in 1943. The tax soaked up large quantities of the inflated money supply and moderated the price index. In March 1943, Saracoglu asserted that the tax had yielded 225 million lira, against an estimated yield of 465 million. By February 1944, 315 million had been collected, 280 million of it from ethnic minorities; upon repeal, 108 million in uncollected taxes was written off. The government explained repeal as an accounting measure: there was ‘no operational use in keeping this balance on our records from year to year’. The commander at Askale exhorted the released prisoners: In its magnanimity, the government has given the order to free you . . . From now on, you are free citizens. You will now return to your homes. Be good citizens. Love this country. And may God continue to keep war away from us!149 The German Ambassador, Von Papen, attributed repeal to American pressure.150 It was not suggested by anyone that Inönü had any personal prejudices; Ambassador Steinhardt, himself a Jew, noted that: ‘One of the three men closest to Inönü is a Turkish Jew and he has one or two others in his immediate entourage.’151 Carl Ebert, the former conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic was said to be ‘a favorite of President Inönü.’152 Asked about the tax in the early 70s, Inönü referred to it as ‘a tax on all the Turks’.153 One Jew after the war observed: ‘The Nazis wanted them to turn us over or to kill us, and they didn’t do that. We survived, unlike our brothers in Greece and most of Europe.’ The historian Stanford Shaw, in his apologia for the tax, observed

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that: ‘The deprivation of their wealth by the government drained what resentment there might otherwise have been among Turks against Jewish wealth while the mass of the population was suffering because of the war.’154 After the war, about half the Jewish community emigrated to Israel. Ismet had never had sympathy for minority populations; at the time of Lausanne, he had wanted a complete exchange of Greek and Turkish populations, and resisted the exceptions made in favour of about 100,000 Turks in Greek Western Thrace and a like number of Greeks in Istanbul.155 In 1934, minority communities had been forcibly removed from Eastern Thrace to Istanbul by local authorities after antiSemitic outbreaks in Thrace stimulated from both Germany and Greece, leading to the flight there of nearly 10,000 Thracian Jews.156 Inönü in a speech before the Grand National Assembly condemned anti-Semitism and declared to the Jewish community that the government remained determined to protect Jews against attacks and to treat them equally and that they were encouraged to return.157 On the outbreak of war in June 1941, Greek, Armenian and Jewish men of military age were mobilised as part of a general mobilisation, but were sent to roadbuilding camps in the Anatolian interior,158 a survival of Ottoman practice. Proposals to limit Jewish immigration were defeated in the Grand National Assembly in 1938 by overwhelming votes, though during the war access was denied to refugees not in transit to Palestine,159 though the authorities frequently winked at evasions of this principle. Transit visas for those accepted for admission elsewhere were granted substantially as of right. Roughly 100,000 Jewish refugees, many without visas to Palestine, were allowed to pass through Turkey during the war. However, Turkey turned away a vessel, the Struma, carrying more than 700 Jewish refugees lacking visas for Palestine in December 1941; the passengers met a tragic end when the ship was torpedoed by a Soviet submarine in the Black Sea.160 The Jewish population was 79,424 in the 1927 census and is said to have risen to about 125,000 during the war. The Varlik and the establishment of the State of Israel prompted substantial Jewish emigration after the war, 26,306 leaving in 1949 alone. The Jewish population fell from 76,965 just after the war to 45,995 in 1955, 43,928 in 1960 and 38,267 in 1965, at which point separate enumeration of religious groups was discontinued.161 More than 90,000 Jews are said to have escaped through Turkey during the war, including 16,474 ‘official’ Jewish immigrants with visas for Palestine and about 75,000 ‘unofficial’ immigrants,162 but 330,000 perished in Romania with about 270,000 (mostly women and children) surviving, and 560,000 were deported to death camps from Hungary, both countries with access to Istanbul until early 1944. In extenuation of the Turks, it can be observed that the Holocaust did not fully get under way until the last year of the war, and that the Hungarian Jews were not in mortal danger until the overthrow of the Horthy government by the Germans in March 1944.163 From April to June of 1944, Ambassador Laurence Steinhardt reported to various correspondents that the refusal of the Germans and Bulgarians to grant safe conduct to vessels carrying refugees meant that ‘the most we can hope to achieve is the rescue of limited numbers by the use of small Turkish and Bulgarian boats’.164 The Turkish Minister of Foreign Affairs was described as ‘a tower of

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strength’ for permitting the entry into the port of Istanbul of 1,000 Jewish refugees over two months who lacked both Turkish visas and Palestine entry certificates; transit visas were granted to Jewish refugees from Greece reaching Izmir. 165 Steinhardt correctly perceived that the touchstone of Turkish policy was national interest: What has particularly amused me . . . are the statements that the Turkish authorities have been magnanimous, have acted spontaneously or from humanitarian motives [which indicate] total ignorance of what has been going on and of why I have aged ten years in the last two years.166 Inönü’s policies toward the Kurds were of a piece with the nationalism and belief in a unitary state that motivated him throughout his career. He favoured a policy of nondiscrimination and equal treatment of the Kurdish language, but opposed autonomy proposals and ruthlessly suppressed insurrections. The Kurdish problem was exacerbated in the 1980s by discriminatory language legislation imposed by the military government; these restrictions were later relaxed and a major programme of public works in southeastern Turkey is now in progress Wartime Diplomacy The Inönü who confronted the war was described as: Honest, conscientious, straight as a die, brutal and brutally direct, he was going slightly deaf, a defect which he made into an asset in his interviews with foreign statesmen and diplomats . . . Ismet Inönü was a Turk, no man’s fool, no fool’s servant and no follower of any predetermined ideological, nationalist, or geopolitical theories.167 In 1935, a trade treaty was entered into with Nazi Germany. As Bernstorff had prophesied, post-war Germany was still Turkey’s leading trade partner, absorbing 51 per cent of Turkey’s exports in 1936 and supplying 45 per cent of her imports, as a result of Schacht’s ‘bloodless invasion’ involving the use of clearing balances in place of foreign exchange, a barter system. The figures were almost the same in 1938, but thereafter plummeted to nine per cent of exports and 12 per cent of imports in 1940, 22 per cent and 12 per cent in 1941, 24 per cent and 38 per cent in 1943 and 79 per cent and 30 per cent in 1944. The increase in the last two years reflected the chrome agreement with Germany and the German closure of the Aegean Sea to Allied shipping. ‘Before Atatürk’s death, it had been decided that this economic bondage to Germany was irreconcilable with a political alliance with [Britain] and initial steps had been taken to cast off the fetters.’168 In February 1937, Inönü rebuffed a German protest against provisions of the Montreaux Convention permitting Russian warships to be sent into the Mediterranean, noting that Germany was neither a Mediterranean power nor a signatory to the Convention.169 In May 1938, Turkey obtained an £18-

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million loan from Britain for the purchase of warships, which Prime Minister Chamberlain described with some exaggeration as ‘the first time we have ever used our financial resources for political purposes’.170 This was swiftly offset by a loan of 150 million reichsmarks from Germany.171 The wife of a British diplomat described Inönü upon his accession to the Presidency in 1938: Ismet is short and sallow with a strong beaked nose, a crest of snow-white hair and brilliant eyes that never leave the face of the person he is addressing. His voice is husky and uneven because of his deafness. He lip-reads French, Turkish and Greek, and is learning English; they say he is the hardest of Kemal’s hard gang, and would if necessary sentence his best friend to death and attend the execution.172 Explaining the legacy of Atatürk, she went on: The wonderful things he has done for his country without ranting and roaring had really sunk into the souls of the illiterate sullen people he had ruled with a rod of iron and an enlightenment that comes to few. ‘Look what Atatürk has done for me! (I didn’t think it was much – an overworked little waiter in an Ankara hotel). Under the Sultans I shouldn’t be able to read or write. I speak French, Italian, Greek and a bit of German and can read and write them. He has lifted me and millions like me out of our ignorance . . . We would follow Atatürk anywhere and be glad to die.’ I told him Atatürk had given them education, inspiration and a future to live for and there was no one better than Ismet to carry on the tradition.173 Ismet’s political orientation was reflected in his home, described as ‘light and spacious – full of Chinese porcelain, colourful paintings, handsome rugs, and modern furniture – in contrast to the old style, crowded with heavy furnishings.’174 The pillars of Atatürk’s state were said to be nationalism, democracy, evolutionism or gradualism, laicism and etatism; Turkey’s economy was not well served after the war by the last preference. In 1948, asked about the status of the religious minorities, he told C.L. Sulzberger: There is legal equality for all citizens and this is strictly upheld, giving no grounds for complaint. Past differences are disappearing and are being forgotten. Turkey is a lay state and the traditions behind the original minority difficulties were religious. Time is required to heal old wounds.175 Ismet’s wartime foreign policy earned the gratitude of Stalin. His refusal to join the Axis at the darkest time for Allied fortunes in 1941 kept Germany from reaching the Suez Canal and Iraq from the north and kept the Italian fleet out of the Black Sea. Peter Drucker observed in 1940 that: ‘Mastery over Turkey is the only way in which

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Hitler can hope to win lasting victory without knocking out England . . . If the Nazis can get to the rich oil wells of Mesopotamia, they have broken through the British blockade.’ Inönü was the chief obstacle to this, Drucker observed: He is reputed to be the most skilful diplomat in Europe and one of the best administrators . . . Inönü is not known to have made a single enemy . . . a politician who loses favor with him is simply sent away as Minister to Siam or as Consul to South Africa . . . He has never held good cards, but he has always, so far, played his cards better than the others.176 His policy in the war was described as one of the major feats of diplomatic tight-rope walking. The country seen on the map of 1941 forms a great oblong pad of poorly developed territory jutting out into Nazi-dominated Europe, entirely surrounded by Axis or pro-Axis forces. In 1938, just before his death, Atatürk had cautioned: ‘A world war is near . . . If during this period we act unwisely or make the smallest mistake, we will be faced with an even graver catastrophe than the armistice years.’177 As President, Inönü retained firm control of foreign policy, meeting with the relevant officials five or six times weekly and personally reviewing all diplomatic correspondence. He was an exponent of extreme caution, delay and the waiting game: ‘Let us first live through the night, then let us live through the morning, and not by years, months, or weeks . . . there is always safety in patience.’178 In April 1939, he was concerned about a possible Italian attack on the Dardanelles by reason of Italy’s aggressive posture in the Dodecanese and Albania;179 the pact with Britain and France had Italy as its original focus of concern. He was not impressed by last-minute Italian assurances, resulting from pressure by Germany, that Italy’s ambitions in the Balkans were satisfied by the acquisition of Albania.180 He remarked to the German Ambassador: ‘If Mussolini did not inform your government, that is a further proof for us that Italy apparently needs to pay no attention to German opinion.’181 The pact was preceded by receipt of a British guarantee in May 1939; at the same time guarantees were extended by Britain to Poland, Romania and Greece. On April 13, Sir Hugh [Knatchbull-Hugessen] was empowered to offer Turkey a guarantee against any attack by Italy in return for a Turkish alliance and assistance with the question of Bulgarian and Romanian security generally. This the Turks accepted in three days flat.182 The Turks insisted on an Anglo-Turkish declaration making clear that they were not guaranteeing Romania against the Soviet Union, a far-sighted statement since the Soviet Union annexed Bessarabia a few months later, at the time of the StalinHitler pact.183 Goebbels found this ‘anything but pleasant for us . . . Turkey is now

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more or less lost, as far as we are concerned.’184 Inönü’s view of Hitler’s aggressions was: You can get away with this once or twice, but in the end those states will band together and tell you to stop, and they will reclaim every inch, and more, that you have taken without justification. That is what is going to happen.185 What a great mistake, what madness, Hitler has committed. With her technology, her industry, and her superior labour force, Germany was on the way to controlling the world. Attempting to dominate through conquest, she will lose it all.186 This faith was not held by many in Europe in 1939. At the end of April, after the Turks had reluctantly received Von Papen as German Ambassador, they rebuffed his advances and in early May received General Weygand, to whom they declared: ‘Your security is ours.’ They urged on Weygand the importance of arms shipments and of an Anglo-Soviet alliance. Although Turkey was bound by a secret treaty with the USSR of 1929 not to enter into a British alliance without Soviet permission, it treated that permission as having been given, and entered into the tripartite pact with Britain and France.187 On the following day, Goebbels was cheered by an article in Izvestia which ‘reproves the Turks and confirms GermanRussian friendship in very clear terms’. During the period of desultory negotiations between Britain and France on the one hand and the Soviet Union on the other that preceded the Stalin-Hitler pact, Inönü vigorously sought to promote Anglo-Soviet agreement, and offered to have Turkey participate in the pact.188 After the Nazi-Soviet pact, ‘Saracoglu did go to Moscow, where Molotov and Stalin kept him waiting for several days and then tried to bully him into abandoning the alliance with Britain and France but in vain.’ In the negotiations leading to the pact, the Soviets had tried to get the Nazis to agree to Russian absorption of Kars and Ardahan, military control of the Bosporus, and ultimately Soviet rule over Eastern Turkey.189 Bulgaria would need to join a military alliance with the Soviet Union and permit Soviet bases on its territory; Turkey would be required to accept Soviet bases on its territory, including the Dardanelles; Germany would stand aside if the Soviet Union pursued its strategic objectives in the Balkans and the Dardanelles by force.190 Turkish friendship toward Russia has still to recover. ‘Atatürk’s Turkey would accept aid and friendship between equals, but she would be no one’s satellite; least of all Stalin’s.’191 In September 1939, Inönü signed a mutual assistance treaty with Britain and France containing a suspense clause absolving Turkey from full performance until its armaments needs were met; he likewise permitted French reconnaissance flights over the Baku oil fields.192 He refused to allow a French battleship to dock to load the

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Polish gold reserves because of the precedent this would set as a breach of maritime neutrality, instead permitting the gold to be shipped to Syria by rail. He temporarily shut down a newspaper urging concessions to the Germans. Inönü was concerned about the extreme weakness of the Turkish forces on the Greek border: ‘The Turks were sleeping in dugouts and were equipped with artillery drawn by horses so hungry they would eat the paint off walls.’193 The treaty had been preceded by a declaration of friendship on May 12. The British Ambassador recommended that the suspense clause be accepted lest the Turks yield points in Moscow to obtain a Russian guarantee.194 The Turkish Foreign Minister was in Moscow while General Kazim Orbay represented Turkey at the treaty negotiations in London, arriving with a large shopping list to present to an under-armed Britain; the British, determined to ‘give him cutlets instead of cannon’ elaborately entertained him, according him a lengthy audience with King George VI, who made a final successful appeal for the treaty, which was signed on October 19.195 The members of Orbay’s mission came close to being treated as ignorant natives, suddenly offered a shopping spree at Harrod’s and unable to judge for themselves what was genuinely necessary and what was not. [The British] offered only twenty anti-aircraft guns and fifty Fairey Battle light bombers, whose obsolescence was to be demonstrated . . . in France a year later.196 Although Inönü did not fully honour his treaty of alliance with Britain and France, he was excused from doing so by Britain.197 When Italy declared war on France in 1940, the British and French invoked the pact, but were met with the argument that Italy’s alliance with Germany and Russia following the Stalin-Hitler pact would cause Turkish entry into the war to be a stance against the Soviet Union. ‘When we were considering whether or not to enter the war, we looked, and, lo and behold, there was an article in the treaty protocol preventing us from entering and that was the end of the problem.’198 Had Turkey honoured her treaty obligations and had she entered the war on the Allied side in 1940, it is obvious that she would have suffered a swift and crushing defeat at German hands, that another route to the Suez canal and India would have been opened up to the Axis, and that the Allied cause would have been in dire peril.199 In 1940, the journalist John Gunther referred to Inönü as one of the best diplomats of modern times. In the autumn of 1939 Ismet had to make a tremendous decision – whether to sign up with the British or the Russians. He chose the British, but he very carefully left himself loopholes and reservations. Turkey is not obliged to fight against Russia.200

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The Russian negotiations were broken off when the Turks refused demands to guarantee Russia against a German attack and to modify the Montreaux Convention. At the time of the invasion of France, Inönü rejected French demands that Turkey enter the war pursuant to the 1939 agreement: ‘How could a country withdrawing from the war force another to join in it?’ A formal declaration of non-belligerency was altered by dropping the words ‘for the present’; this was designed both to accommodate the Axis and signal to the Allies Turkey’s sense of vulnerability if the French fleet passed to the Axis. It also refrained from referring to the Anglo-Turkish pact; Inönü explained to Hugessen that there was no point in provoking the Soviets as they might ultimately be on the Allies’ side. The British were convinced that Turkish alliance or benevolent neutrality ‘all depends on whether we can assure her that the Germans and Italians will not be able to use the French fleet’. ‘Saving Turkey’s loyalty was a major factor in the British decision to destroy the French fleet’ at Mers el Kebir.201 At the time of the Italian invasion of Greece in October 1940, the Turks warned the Bulgarians not to intervene against Greece, thus depriving the Italians of an ally without intervening themselves. In November 1940, the Turks undertook a partial mobilisation, including blackouts in Istanbul and Ankara and the relocation of government offices to the countryside.202 Their view was nonetheless that of Foreign Minister Saracoglu: ‘No victory could give us what . . . years of peace have bestowed upon us, and no responsible man could lightly let these magnificent achievements disappear in the flames of an armed struggle.’203 In January 1941, Churchill urged Inönü to allow the British to station ten air squadrons in the country to interdict German oil supplies from Ploesti and if necessary Russian oil from Baku, without result.204 Inönü declared: ’I am not Enver Pasha; they cannot drag me into a war.’ 205 One Foreign Office official noted in February 1941: ‘I fear my suspicions of Turkey are confirmed. They have given us no concrete proof that they have any backbone at all.’206 In that month, Turkey begged off coming to the aid of Greece on the ground that its military weakness would render it a liability; in late March Churchill vainly suggested cooperation between Greece, Turkey and Yugoslavia.207Inönü agreed that it was necessary and appropriate for the British to send troops to Greece, despite the odds against them. Inönü, like Sforza, accurately predicted to the Italians that if they entered the war ‘[Italy’s] coasts will be ruined, she will go hungry, she will lose her islands and become cut off from her colonies’. The Germans were similarly warned: ‘Military and economic hegemony only serve as files to sharpen the hatred of the oppressed masses.’208 Eden cautioned Inönü that Germany would try to seize Turkey, which Hitler had considered but rejected doing in 1940, the plans being referred to by the Germans as ‘Operation Marita’; in November 1940, the Germans decided to plan for an invasion of Russia rather than one of Turkey.209 On February 17, 1941, over British objections, Turkey signed a non-aggression pact with Bulgaria, which facilitated Bulgaria’s joining the Axis on March 1, 1941.210At the time of the German occupation of Bulgaria, Ismet sought and obtained a personal letter from Hitler promising that German troops would be kept at least 20 miles from the Turkish frontier.211 This

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corresponded to the 30-kilometre demilitarised zone along the Thracian border provided for by the Lausanne Treaty. At that time, Ismet observed: Too little is known about the aims of the New Order; the Führer’s decision not to let the Russians get to the Straits is very wise . . . I told him in the nicest possible way that our experience of 1914 had not been brilliant.212 Inönü never met with Hitler. In February 1941, there was an unsuccessful attempt by persons who appeared to be Soviet agents to assassinate Von Papen; the Turks vigorously prosecuted the perpetrators, resisting Soviet pressures for leniency until the entry of Turkey into the war.213 A student of the episode observed: ‘Turkey’s refusal to knuckle under was a prelude to standing firm against the Soviet attacks on its sovereignty that would occur after the war.’214 The American Ambassador observed: ‘The Turks are so proud of the relatively recent independence and integrity of their courts that they felt they could not do otherwise without affronting public opinion.’215 In March 1941, the American Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, cautioned the Turks not to put too much faith in the assurances they had received at the time of the German occupation of Bulgaria; Hitler has ‘a stock on hand of similar communications . . . to countries whose seizure he has in mind for the future’.216 In the same month, the Turks and Russians signed a reciprocal declaration of neutrality. In May 1941, the Turks were unresponsive to a bidding war in which both the British and Germans offered them the Dodecanese Islands, the Germans in addition offering frontier rectifications in Thrace. Describing the German offer to the British Ambassador, Saracoglu smilingly observed: ‘What he offered me was not enough. I must have Scotland as well!’217 Inönü also signed a non-aggression treaty with Germany in June 1941, ratified on 6 July218 which contained guarantees of borders, economic cooperation, and a radio and press truce; Goebbels noted that: ‘London says that we had expected more and so the treaty is a failure.’219 At the same time, the Turks gave Britain a verbal commitment not to allow German troops or war matériel to pass over their territory.220 The Turks also took the precaution of destroying the bridges between European Turkey and German-occupied Bulgaria.221 The Germans represented this as neutralising 50 Turkish divisions. In May, the Turks had allowed the Germans to make small shipments to their allies in Iraq after much stalling and when ‘it was too late to be of any use’.222 A draft treaty was prepared by the Germans in late May which would have given Germany transit rights in exchange for territorial concessions to the Turks in Bulgaria, several islands, and ‘the advancement of Turkish interests’ in Syria and Iraq. Turkish interest in this arrangement is said to have ended when the Japanese began to aid the rebel Iraqi government. The Turks had no interest in becoming embroiled with Japan.223 At the end of the month, the British crushed the revolt in Iraq. In June, Churchill and Ismet had a secret meeting at Adana in Turkey. In a memorandum of the meeting, Churchill noted:

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I find him a very agreeable man and we made friends at once. Indeed, he was most warm and cordial in all his attitude and he and his ministers reiterated again and again that they longed for the victory of England. I made it clear that I did not wish them to enter the war in any circumstances which would lead to Turkish disaster . . . but that when the circumstances were favourable I was sure it would be in the interests of Turkey to play her part.224 The Turks, Alexander Cadogan of the Foreign Office wrote, were relieved to find that we aren’t pressing them to do anything definite. [I] never saw men so resolutely disinclined to be drawn into a war. They were friendly and pleasant and I am sure their sympathies were genuinely with us, but when the conversation began to veer towards anything like practical action on their part, it seemed that they found more than usual difficulty in hearing what was said. As for post-war plans for the United Nations, ‘Turkey . . . was looking for something more “real” . . . All the defeated counties would become Bolshevik and Slav if Germany was beaten.’225 Even at that early stage, it was said of the Turks that ‘their chief preoccupation was with the post-war world and the position in it of the Soviet Union’.226 Since they did not desire the total victory of the Axis, then allied with Russia, nor one for the Allies, which would remove any nearby counterweight to Russian expansion, Inönü made repeated offers of mediation, 227 which were as welcome and successful as Wilson’s similar offers in the First World War, and for the same reasons. Ambassador Steinhardt protested to his government about the presence in Turkey of more than a hundred Office of War Information propagandists: ‘Every decision of even the slightest importance rests with four or five men in Ankara who are impervious to propaganda of any kind.’ 228 In order to maintain this imperviousness and preserve Turkish neutrality, Inönü’s son Erdal reported that his father ‘refused to watch a single film made for propaganda purposes during the entire war’.229 The conference at Adana took place against the advice of the British Foreign Office, and was characterised as ‘one of the oddest and least fruitful political encounters of the war, for the Turks were unwilling to be seduced from their neutrality’.230 The Turks were described by another British observer as ‘nondescript people, obviously delighted with the whole affair, and having none of the pomposity of ministers in some countries. They put on no airs, and the arrival was more like a family welcoming a relation than an official reception.’ At the departure, [Inönü] might have been saying goodbye to his dearest friends . . . The President was a charming man, white-haired and rather deaf, but alert and intelligent. The Turks were incorrigibly behind the times and are unlikely ever to catch up, now that they no longer have Mustapha Kemal to drive them along. However they are stubborn and loyal and not easily frightened . . . they

24. Churchill and Ismet at Adana (Library of Congress)

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will act when they think wise. They certainly will not act until they feel sure of being on a certainty. Steinhardt reported: ‘The Turks have been calm and steady. You must not expect too much of an army that has no tanks, only about 200 miscellaneous serviceable planes, and very limited artillery . . . I have formed a profound respect for both [Inönü and Saracoglu].’231 After departing, Churchill exclaimed ‘Ismet kissed me’, leading an official of the Foreign Office to suggest that that was all that he had got from the conference. The American Ambassador, Laurence Steinhardt, took a different view: ‘The Adana Conference was a great success. The Turks are not afraid of the Germans any more.’232 Steinhardt also voiced ‘astonishment at the courage of the Turks in including the names of the high-ranking military officers who were present’ in the communiqué.233 Inönü separated the political and military questions; as to the latter: Their Oriental nature showed in the keenness with which they entered into this aspect of the business, which was the only thing they were really interested in. They asked no questions at all about the progress of the war . . . it is evident that they are convinced that Germany’s days are numbered and that their main preoccupation is the state of Europe following or during the German collapse and what Russia may do. It was this that made them so ready to agree to this meeting. They wanted to be sure of our support if Russia turned nasty.234 Inönü was also acutely aware that Turkish entry into the war on the Allied side would give rise to German bombing of the rail-ways and industry and a march on the Dardanelles and on Istanbul that the ill-equipped though numerous Turkish army would have had difficulty in resisting. Under the Adana agreement, the Turks ultimately obtained from a hard-pressed Britain 350 tanks, 300 anti-aircraft guns, 300 field guns, 600 mortars, 500 anti-tank guns, 100,000 rifles, 48 self-propelled guns and a million anti-tank mines.235 The German invasion of the Soviet Union inspired enormous relief in Ankara. Foreign Minister Saracoglu’s remark to German Ambassador Von Papen is well remembered: ‘Ce n’est pas une guerre, c’est une croisade.’ Ismet’s sons reported that on learning the news, he started to smile. Then moments later he burst out laughing; on he went for minutes on end, unable to contain himself . . . Obviously my father wasn’t laughing because a new war had started. What cheered him up and turned his relief into laughter was the fact that the potential dangers that had been weighing on his mind and been the cause of constant anxiety to him over the past months, had all of a sudden lifted and vanished.236 Von Papen in his memoirs declared: ‘I had a perfect understanding with the Turkish statesman; our friendship pact took second place to the Anglo-Turkish alliance, but

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the obligation in the latter to enter the war would be fulfilled only in extreme circumstances.’237 He reported: ‘Turkey is in transports of joy.’238 Another observer said: ’The Turkish ideal is that the last German soldier should fall upon the last Russian corpse.’239 In September, both Britain and the Soviet Union promised to respect Turkey’s territorial integrity. In the following month, the Turks agreed to supply 90,000 tons of chrome to the Germans in 1944 and 45,000 tons in 1945. In April 1943, the Turkish-German trade agreement was renewed, though the Turks had delayed some deliveries because of slow German shipments of arms, which included 20 cannon and 100,000 shells. In 1943, the Germans had got 46,783 tons as against 325,046 for the British.240 The Turks refused to make any earlier or larger deliveries, pleading prior commitments to the British, who had declined to enter into a 20-year contract with the Turks. Chrome was indispensable to the manufacture of armour plate; the Turks got much of it back in manufactured form, having negotiated for arms shipments from the Germans. At the low point of Allied fortunes, the Turks began to give some support to a Pan-Turanian movement, anathema to Atatürk’s principles,241 a project revived by the imprudent Turgut Ozal in the 1980s. This was designed to give Turkey a contingency plan in the event of a German victory, and ceased after Allied successes. In August 1944, after breaking diplomatic relations with Germany, Inönü declared: ‘We are Turkish nationalists but we are also the enemy of the precepts of racism in our country. The Turanian idea is a harmful and sick development of recent times.’ By June 1942, the Turks felt sufficiently secure about the prospects of a German invasion to reopen the Bulgarian rail-way bridges.242 At the low point of British fortunes in early 1942 there were changes in domestic policy inspired by the Germans, but Inönü went out of his way to demonstrate his British sympathies. After asking the British Ambassador to a race course for a brief conversation: He asked me to stay, saying he particularly wanted me to see the next [principal] race with him from his box. He led me to the very front of the box in full view of everyone in the grandstand and of the crowds below . . . It was not till I got back to the Embassy that I learnt that Tobruk had fallen a few hours before. But the President had been aware of it and his gesture was intentional.243 In November 1942 a state trade monopoly was established;244 in the same month Inönü told the National Assembly: ‘We wish the victors of this war to be civilization and humanity.’245 The Ambassador regarded him as ‘a man of the highest principles and honor and a true friend of ours.’246 According to some writers, this did not prevent the Turks from sharing in the fruits of espionage conducted on behalf of the Germans by the British Ambassador’s valet, who may also have been cooperating with the Turkish secret police; even a German official thought that: ‘Through this material Turkey had tried to warn Germany about the foolishness of continuing the war . . . The Cicero documents demonstrated to those not blinded by fanaticism that the Allies’ unity and determination would continue until total victory.’247

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By May 1943, Allied victories led the American Ambassador to report that: ‘The Government here, fully supported by the people, are now completely on the Allied side. The shift from their pro-German leanings of a year ago has been striking.’248 In August 1943, the Turks seriously considered intervening in the Balkans if necessary to prevent chaos there; at the same time, they decided to assert no claim to the Dodecanese Islands, in part to improve later relations with Greece, which had not benefited from the controversy surrounding the capital levy.249 Steinhardt had cautioned: ‘Any intimation that the United States and Great Britain will not attempt to impede Soviet entry into Bulgaria might well cause the Turks to reconsider their neutrality. Turkish policy will revolve entirely around the Russian angle.’250 With the collapse of Italy and the entry of German troops to retard the progress of the Allies, any serious threat of a German invasion of Turkey had been removed, though Germany retained the capacity seriously to damage Turkey from the air. In July 1943, Steinhardt took the Turkish view that ‘Istanbul and Izmir would be laid in ashes, Thrace and the Straits seized before the British could take effective steps.’251In November 1943 at Tehran and again in July 1945 at Potsdam, Churchill had voiced sympathy with Soviet aspirations in the Straits.252 In December 1943, Churchill and Roosevelt assembled at the Cairo Conference,253 where they met with Inönü and indicated that on February 15,1944, the Allies would request permission to ‘fly in’ troops to Turkey. ‘If reply negative – Allies direct all resources to another theatre and must abandon hope of wartime cooperation with Turkey.’ If the reply was positive, a sea route to Turkey would be opened, importations would be stepped up, the British would swiftly reinforce anti-tank and armoured units, and an agreed plan would be executed.254 In late 1943, the Turkish Foreign Minister, Menemencioglu, advised Von Papen that the continuance of diplomatic relations would be endangered if a planned deportation of 10,000 Jews in the south of France who were former Turkish citizens took place.255 Turkish diplomats vigorously protected Jews with a claim to former Ottoman citizenship, repeatedly invoking the principle set forth in Article 39 of the Treaty of Lausanne: ‘Differences of religion . . . shall not prejudice any Turkish national in matters relating to the enjoyment of civil or political rights.’256 At the Casablanca conference in 1942, primary responsibility for Turkey had been assigned to the British; thereafter, the Turks strenuously sought to involve the Americans also. In December 1943, Inönü met Churchill and Roosevelt in Cairo; the British Ambassador to Turkey later wrote that when he left for Cairo, Inönü had obtained the authority to go to war from the party in government, though he did not use it. Cadogan still took a jaundiced view: Snatch [Sir Hugh Knatchbull-Hugessen, British Ambassador in Ankara] still keeps on saying how well the Turks are coming along. I keep on saying so they are but in the wrong direction. They used to say they would come in when the moon turned blue, now they say they will when it turns pink . . . they sought the advantages of belligerent states for the peacemaking and the

25. Roosevelt, Churchill and Inönü at Cairo (Library of Congress)

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supply of arms, without the inconvenience of heavy involvement in the fighting.257 Ambassador Steinhardt remarked on the Turks’ ‘extreme reluctance to have . . . highly lucrative trade exchanged overnight for bursting bombs . . . since the Middle Ages, Turkey has enjoyed no such prosperity.’ 258 Inönü teased Knatchbull-Hugessen; observing him reading a book entitled The Years of Endurance, he inquired: ‘Does that refer to your period as Ambassador here?’259 The Turks sought huge quantities of arms, including 126 fighter planes, 500 tanks and 66,800 tons of petrol – quantities far beyond the carrying capacity of Turkey’s single-track railway. KnatchbullHugessen was relieved by the outcome of the conference: ‘I had been afraid that the Turks would be faced with a demand for the physically impossible. The final solution seems fair all around and I think practical.’260 On his return to Turkey, Inönü declared to the officials greeting him at the railroad station: ‘Don’t worry, friends, there has been no change in our situation.’261 Cordell Hull took a more sanguine view; the Allies, who were getting ready for the Normandy invasion, did not have more military supplies to give Turkey, and the breach of relations, in addition to depriving Germany of chrome shipments (which were suspended in April 1944 after the Maritsa bridges were destroyed by the Allies, aided by Greek partisans)262 was also accompanied by the expulsion of about 2,000 German agents and the allowing of high-altitude flights to Russia by the Allies.263 The suspension of chrome shipments to Germany on 20 April 1944 was lauded by the London Times, the Turks being credited with having ‘cut the Gordian knot with one masterful stroke’.264 The importance attached to them was evidenced by a formal memorandum from the American Joint Chiefs of Staff in April 1944: ‘The U.S. Chiefs of Staff believe that on military grounds, no promising measures to curtail Turkey’s exports to Germany should be omitted solely because their implication might lessen the possibility of Turkey’s entering the war as an ally.’265 The suspension of chrome shipments was viewed in the State Department as ‘the most complete and important single victory over the Axis which has been won in the field of economic warfare’.266 After the Cairo conference, Roosevelt observed: ‘If he were in the Turkish President’s shoes, he would demand such a price . . . that to grant the request would indefinitely postpone Overlord.’ These views were also those of Roosevelt’s aide Robert Sherwood, Admiral Leahy and the American chiefs of staff, who were afraid that Turkish entry into the war would disrupt American logistics. 267 Inönü’s persuasiveness with the Americans was such that Steinhardt pronounced the Cairo Conference ‘a great success’ in a letter to Roosevelt, while happily noting that Inönü had a ‘respect bordering on reverence for the President’s greatness. It was a most happy occasion for me to hear this tribute to our President from a man whose character and intelligence I have come to admire very much.’268 At dinner, Inönü is said to have asked Churchill to explain what measures were being taken to protect the Conference from air attack. After receiving a lengthy enumeration of fighter aircraft, anti-aircraft units, and radar centres, he rejoined: ‘So, if that’s the only way

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you have of protecting this place, then why can’t you accept that the cities where so many of my people live cannot be defended without a sufficient number of aircraft?’ This led Roosevelt to exclaim to Churchill: ‘Look how he caught you out!’269 The British were eager for Turkish entry to support Churchill’s objective of Western dominance in the Mediterranean and Central Europe. Inönü ‘proposed to go to war if the Allies insisted, but only if they supplied the necessary arms and above all sent a British or Anglo-American force into the Balkans’.270 The Turks lived in ‘the hope of a vehement denial that Britain and the U.S. have abandoned the Balkans to the Russians’.271 Inönü complained of the failure to deliver the full Adana list of arms, spoke of mud in Thrace, the timing of Turkey’s call-ups of military classes, and the absence of his military advisors, whom he had carefully left at home. He explained a weak point in the present Turkish military position. At the beginning of November one class had been released from the colors. A new class of recruits was now being called up. On the basis of a decision by February 15th, Turkey would have to strengthen the army by two or three classes. Another point was that at the present date the period of mud in Thrace had not begun. The President went on to say that he had explained the situation as he saw it. His technicians were not with him and he could not go further into detail.272 He elaborately thanked Roosevelt ‘for having occupied with so much grace and skill the role of intermediary and moderator between the opposing theses that separated the British and the Turks’. On February 3, the British, who had lost all hope of timely Turkish intervention, ceased arms shipments. After the war, in his memoirs, Churchill was magnanimous about the Turks’ position. [He] understood . . . how perilous the position of Turkey had become . . . They had none of the modern weapons which from May 1940 were proved to be decisive. Aviation was lamentably weak and primitive. They had no tanks or armoured cars and neither the workshops to make and maintain them nor the trained men and staffs to handle them. They had hardly any anti-aircraft or anti-tank artillery. Their signals service was rudimentary. Radar was unknown to them. Nor did their warlike qualities include any aptitude for all these modern developments.273 Ambassador Steinhardt had similarly observed in May 1943 that the ‘Army is pitifully weak in mechanized transport and [the] Air Force is virtually nonexistent’.274 The Cairo Conference is viewed by some historians as the high point of British power in the war; after it, a seriously distressed Churchill contracted pneumonia and spent a prolonged period of recuperation in Morocco. The New Statesman paid musical tribute to the disappointing conference with a ‘Chanson Inönü’:

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Last night, ah yesternight when Papen came to dine The shadow of the Big Three seemed to spread Athwart the feast between the Sauerkraut and wine; But though he wooed me with Teutonic passion, And through long Cairo Nights I kept my head, I have been faithful to the Allies in my fashion Long, long I have directed the Ballet Ankara My star attractions both sides strove to please At Cairo and Adana they praised my repertoire And though impervious to belligerent passion Through all sweet seductions of strip-tease I have been faithful to the Allies in my fashion I have danced ‘Facade’; I have danced ‘Rendezvous’ I have danced varieties of the pirouette I have repeated ‘Les Divertissements Inönü’ The object of unprecedented passion I have been doped with Third Reich drugs – and yet I have been faithful to the Allies in my fashion I have ogled all alike with eyes of the gazelle Dancing with many veils before the maddened throng But when the Allies rushed me, and my yashmak fell They knew me unresponsive to their passion And said my entertainment was too long I have been faithful to the Allies in my fashion I cried for bigger contracts and for stronger arms When the Big Three were kneeling at my feet Surely I must defend my unprotected charms But something suddenly has killed their passion Yet though I only dance the ‘Turkish Suite’ I have been faithful to the Allies in my fashion.275 In June 1944, after a controversy over German troop transports being allowed through the Dardanelles, Foreign Minister Menemencioglu was replaced to propitiate the British, after an episode in which German ships, with his permission, had been permitted to enter the Aegean through the Bosporus;276 he had declared in February that Turkey’s neutrality would not be abandoned while he was at the Foreign Ministry. His replacement has also been ascribed to the Allied bombing of the Bulgarian bridges connecting Turkey to Europe; Turkey no longer had anything to gain economically from Germany, and her chances of frontier revisions in Thrace were also reduced. ‘The broken bridges of Bulgaria turned the diplomat [Von Papen] and the minister [Menemencioglu] into

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caretakers of disillusioned hopes and outworn policies.’277 Ambassador Steinhardt had advised that: ‘The best means of bringing the Turks up short is to destroy the bridges over the Maritza River.’278 Upon the breach in August 1944, Inönü characteristically told Von Papen: ‘If I can serve in any way as mediator in this conflict I am actively at your disposal.’ Inönü’s breach of relations with Germany greatly encouraged Allied opinion. The New York Times regarded it as an action ‘by the world’s coolest calculator of political chances’279while the New York Sun acclaimed ‘the shrewdist and best informed foreign office remaining outside the present conflict’.280 At this time, the British did not press for a declaration of war since only from one to three air squadrons could be provided to the Turks, leaving Istanbul vulnerable to incendiary attack.281At the same time, Inönü discharged the Turkish Ambassadors to Romania and Bulgaria, the first for selling visas to Romanian Jews, the second for selling them to Bulgarian fascists. Inönü announced to the first: ‘You have been a good businessman and made enough money. I think it is time for you to retire.’282 In September 1944, in the hope of stimulating Turkish entry into the war, the British seized several of the Dodecanese Islands but were driven out by German air power due to their inability to fly from Turkey. The Turks were unimpressed by this gesture, and were still fearful of a bombing of Istanbul from German bases in Bulgaria, but went considerably beyond the obligations of a neutral in assisting the British evacuation, the operation being personally supervised by the Foreign Minister. The British Ambassador during this period, Sir Hugh Knatchbull-Hugessen, suggested that Britain sever diplomatic relations with Turkey, decrying ‘extravagant demands for material made solely to avoid a declaration of war’.283 In mid-September, the Turkish Ambassador in Washington informed Secretary Hull of Russian pressures, declaring that: ‘Britain does not desire Turkey to go to war, and the [US] government has been backing up Britain in her position.’284 The British at Tehran had anticipated Soviet pressure, but ‘still expected that Soviet demands over the Straits would involve only free passage, not control and defense rights.’ In January 1945, Turkey opened the Straits as a supply route to the Soviet Union; in February 1945, about three weeks before a deadline set by the Allied leaders as a condition for participation in the San Francisco conference, Turkey declared war on Germany; at the time, the British and Americans were in Cologne and the Russians within 50 miles of Berlin. Inönü observed: We make no claims about the impact of our declaration of war. The course of action that we followed during the many nightmarish years before we declared war was such as to foster the victory of our allies. Our going to war with the Germans and the Japanese was only at the request of the Allies. It must have had some significance for them since they requested it of us.285 During the same period, beginning at the end of 1944, Inönü sought unsuccessfully to organise a Balkan federation with Greece and Yugoslavia as a counterweight to

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Soviet penetration of the Balkans; this scheme foundered on Yugoslav sympathy with Russia but became a reality ten years later. The Potsdam Conference alarmed the Turks by encouraging Russian claims for revision of the Montreaux Convention. ‘In the end,’ as one commentator observed, ‘the Turks did not lose an inch or fight – or fail to win total American backing and an acceptance of their vision.’286 In November 1945, Inönü explained the nonaggression pact with Germany by pointing out that when it was executed Germany was at the gates of Istanbul, Britain feared invasion of the British Isles, Russia had a non-aggression pact with Germany, and America was not in the war . . . We declare openly that we have no debts to pay in land or the rights of Turks. A less charitable commentator observed that: ‘Turkish diplomacy during the war was a brilliant accomplishment by all standards except those of honesty and integrity.’287 Churchill sensed that Inönü’s stubbornness at Cairo marked the end of Britain’s role as one of the three great Allied powers. As for Hitler, it has been said that: ‘The Italians and the Vichy French were handicaps to the Führer, but it was the Turks who turned German diplomacy in the area impotent, sterile, and sour.’288 The Postwar Period Inönü, on being told that he must be breathing a sigh of relief at the end of the war, exclaimed: ‘What are you saying? The situation is nothing like that. We’re heading straight into the darkness.’289 In the post-war period, Inönü called for American assistance to deter Russian claims to two provinces in the Caucasus. The Russians in March of 1945 refused to renew the 1925 non-aggression treaty with the Turks and in June demanded restitution of the provinces of Kars and Ardahan and bases on the Straits. Turkey’s invocation of the 1939 treaty of mutual assistance with Britain was regarded as ‘the height of cheek’ by the British Foreign Office. ‘They did have to admit that there was nothing in the 1939 treaty that specified it was for use only against Germany.’ Turkey emerged from the war years with a distinctly favourable balance of payments as a result of the large gold loan she had procured from the Allies in 1939 and from the export of strategic commodities to both sides in the war.290 In June, the British asked the USA to remonstrate with the Russians, giving rise to a visit by the USS Missouri to the Bosporus in November 1946 to bring back the body of a Turkish Ambassador (of this, Inönü said: ‘Munir Bey served Turkey all his life. And now he is continuing to serve Turkey in death’), the so-called Truman Doctrine in March 1947, and a Balkan defence pact with Greece and Yugoslavia in the early 1950s. According to his son Erdal: Inönü’s calculation was as follows: The Russians had suffered heavy losses against the Germans. Now they needed extensive occupying forces in Germany,

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Poland, Romania and Bulgaria. Russia’s burned and destroyed cities, roads, and factories needed manpower. Russia was also going to send troops to the Japanese front to claim a share in the spoils there. Apart from this, it would be difficult for the Soviets to risk an armed attack just as the San Francisco conference was convening. Finally, the Russians knew perfectly well that if they did undertake an armed attack, we would be fighting to the last iota of our strength. He was pleased that the war in the Far East had ended before Russia could make claims for their contributions in winning it. In September 1947, Inönü required the resignation of Peker, the repressive Prime Minister, in response to American pressure. The Truman Doctrine was carried further than George Kennan would have liked: If the Turks do not lose their nerves, if they keep their internal political life relatively clean and orderly and refuse to become involved in negotiations with the Russians on a bilateral basis over complicated questions such as that of the Straits, they will probably continue to enjoy a temporary and precarious immunity to Russian pressure . . . Aid to Greece was therefore important as a support for stability in Turkey . . . [there was] no rationale for the mounting of a special aid program for Turkey itself . . . the Pentagon had exploited a favorable set of circumstances in order to infiltrate a military aid program for Turkey into what was supposed to be primarily a political and economic program for Greece. In September 1948, the Turks under Inönü asked to join NATO, desiring a permanent American guarantee and playing upon American fears that the Turks would be forced to give the Soviets free passage into Iran and the Middle East. The reciprocal nature of the NATO treaty, in Kennan’s view, ‘obscure[s] the purely defensive nature of the pact’.291 In 1955, Turkey joined Britain, Iraq, Iran and Pakistan in the Baghdad Pact; the United States was not a member because of Israeli concerns and a desire not to alienate Egypt. In 1960, Inönü was asked to contribute to a volume entitled Perspectives on Peace along with 11 other eminent students of foreign affairs selected by the Carnegie Endowment, including Harold Nicolson, Salvador de Madriaga, Dag Hammarskjold, Paul-Henri Spaak and Jean Monnet. His short article on ‘Negotiation and the National Interest’ sounded themes familiar throughout his career. Peaceful settlement requires ‘a modicum of common sense, goodwill and self-restraint’. The First World War was inevitable by 1910: The powers concerned believed it was impossible to solve through negotiations the political conflicts which had been accumulating for forty years; they had come to rely exclusively on the military approach for a way out . . . it was considered impossible and futile from the start to discuss the nature and

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solutions of international disputes . . . illustrated by the half-hearted way in which the international Court of Arbitration at The Hague was launched [an opinion which Einstein shared]. The League of Nations was established primarily with the aim of consolidating the position and the gains of the victorious powers. Turkey, after the First World War, and thanks to the National Revolution was able to solve many of her problems through negotiation – problems that were vital for herself, although they may be of minor importance in a worldwide context . . . Turkey was able to negotiate her own peace treaty at Lausanne, in contrast to the other Central Powers, who were not given a say in the drafting of the peace treaties . . . Turkey endeavoured to gauge the justifiable and reasonable limits within which results could be obtained through negotiations. By refraining from laying claims to Arab countries, by appreciating that it would be unavailing to insist on some of her justified claims in Thrace, by cherishing no illusion about reparations, and by being accommodating on matters that could be postponed, Turkey won a treaty that yielded positive results . . . none of the powers taking part was eager to engage in a new war . . . Provisions involving disarmament and economic and financial restrictions, which were included in other peace treaties, could not be forced on Turkey at Lausanne. However, we had to accept restrictive provisions concerning the defence of the Straits that were to leave Turkey powerless against aggression. Finally, at Montreaux, ‘Turkey’s repeated arguments were confirmed by world events.’ Turkey did not use force to resolve the Alexandretta and Straits problems: ‘Although the heir of an empire, Turkey refused the many tempting opportunities and suggestions to lay claims on her neighbours’ territories after the First World War and during the Second.’ After World War I, disarmament was to have been accomplished first by the defeated states and then gradually extended to all Members of the League . . . it came about that the idea of disarmament was regarded mainly as a means of weakening an existing or potential enemy. The failure of the League and the Kellogg-Briand Pact resulted when: The leaders of the have-not countries fed their people on the accusation that the Pact and the League were merely excuses for maintaining the status quo. Even the victorious powers became dissatisfied . . . Italy and Japan were particularly disappointed . . . Great Britain, having lost her dominant position in Europe to France and to the alliance system around that country, was also dissatisfied . . . For a long period between the two world wars, the

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Soviet Union was considered the main source of potential trouble . . . The Western democracies . . . came to consider the emerging Nazi and Fascist regimes as more hostile to the Soviets than to themselves, and thus took a rather detached view of the growth of Axis power . . . the Nazis thought that the United States was too grieved and disillusioned by the outcome of the First World War . . . the dominant impression was that war had become inevitable – and this conviction in itself is sufficient for the outbreak of war. The Germans attributed their former defeat to the simultaneous declaration of a war on two fronts and to material and moral internal sabotage, which could be avoided in future by an effective propaganda organization and an administration to deal without mercy with traitors . . . the military assumptions on which hopes had been pinned were not sound. War did spread all over the world. Addressing post-war events, Inönü pertinently observed that: It is a fundamental principle of its existence that the United Nations never be used against the founding great powers . . . The Atlantic Pact should be seen in the light of the errors made by the West before the Second World War . . . Americans now undertook defence commitments in peace-time. The Cold War arose ‘from differences among the victors about the benefits to be derived from victory in the war . . . [The Soviets] later admitted in official statements that their policy toward Turkey at the end of the war was mistaken.’ Considering that bombing can proceed with precision even between continents, the probable destructiveness of nuclear war is readily apparent to the simplest judgment. Events we have already witnessed in the cold war could easily have caused actual war in the nineteenth century, or even in the earlier parts of the twentieth . . . considering how impulsive were the actions leading to both world wars, it is hard to count on man’s ability permanently to avoid fatal mistakes. In words with some application to the start of the second Iraq War, Inönü observed: The extreme height of military expenditure is itself a danger for peace, because if the possibility of maintaining the necessary military strength over a long period diminishes on either side, it may compel that side to start action as soon as it feels sufficiently prepared . . . If the illusion prevails that the war will end quickly and the enemy will be destroyed rapidly, the possibility that insecure and tense periods may lead to war will be great.

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Foreseeing German unification, he observed: ‘The right of Germany to live as a free and democratic nation cannot be denied; this right was not contested even in the heated days of the war.’ Reaching an agreement over control measures is . . . the prime requisite in disarmament negotiations . . . the tendency to oppose inspection on the grounds that one’s country would be subjected to foreign control and observation is weakening . . . mankind should be taught ceaselessly, in every possible way, that at the present stage of civilization nations are under a compulsion to, and should be able to, co-exist peacefully. Lauding peaceful gestures between Eisenhower and Khrushchev, but with some caution which the Cuban missile crisis proved justified, he observed: ‘It will also be fortunate if the confidence of the smaller countries within the respective alliances is confirmed that they will not be betrayed and deceived by the big powers during their conversations.’ If nations keep up contacts, keep discussing, then time will finally erode their hesitation and resistance. Impatience, especially as regards important problems between large groups of powers, is unnecessary and harmful. If the last fifteen years’ experience has saved us now from the deadlock created by the idea that face-to-face discussions are futile, than all these years have not passed in vain.292 The Cuban Missile Crisis In 1959, the United States had been permitted to install Jupiter missiles in Turkey in the post-Sputnik era when for political reasons it was eager to install intermediaterange missiles in Europe, notwithstanding the vulnerability of land-based missile sites. The NATO allies and some Americans were initially reluctant to have Turkish sites because of the assumed war-like propensities of the Turks, whose prudence in foreign policy was not well understood.293 Prior to and during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, the Russians demanded withdrawal of the missiles from Turkey and made a formal request on 25 October 1962; Inönü, who was said by Barton Bernstein to be at the head of ‘an uneasy new coalition, shored up by the Turkish military and by American economic aid’, personally drafted a letter of rejection. In the days prior to this, the Turks, perceiving that the continued existence of the bases would come under pressure, sought an acceleration of US military deliveries of aircraft and aircraft parts. When the Russian Ambassador threatened that failure to remove the missiles would make Turkey’s cities primary targets in the event of war and that: ‘If you don’t think we are ready to make war over Cuba, you are mistaken’, Inönü tersely replied: ‘Don’t make me laugh.’294 In fact, as was revealed 20 years later, the United States verbally agreed to remove its missiles from Turkey in a matter of months after the removal of Soviet missiles from Cuba as a quid pro quo for the end of the missile crisis. During the crisis

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deliberations, and unbeknownst to the Turks, the United States had decided that a Soviet attack on the Turkish missile sites following an American attack on the Russian sites in Cuba would not be followed by further escalation.295 On the day that the Soviet agreement to remove missiles from Cuba was announced, the Turkish Foreign Minister sought assurances that the US would do nothing concerning Turkey without consultation. In December, at a NATO conference, the US sought Turkish consent to removal. The Defense Minister expressed concern; the Foreign Minister sought alternate assurances. On January 5, the US offered to accelerate deliveries of nuclear-capable F-104G aircraft to Turkey; the Turks suggested the basing of Polaris submarines in Turkish waters with Turkish personnel on board; this the US rejected as inconsistent with its pending proposals for a multilateral NATO force. On 23 January the Turks formally agreed to withdrawal of the missiles; by 15 March the US agreed to accelerated delivery to Turkey (at the expense of Taiwan) of the F-104G aircraft. By the week of 25 April the Turkish missiles had been removed; two Polaris submarines were on station by April 12, and one visited Izmir on 14–15 April; the Polaris deterrent was of greater military value than the Jupiters. Differences over Cyprus Turkey for a time was in almost automatic post-war alignment with the United States. This included dispatch of a Turkish brigade to assist the United States in Korea, ‘the price Turkey had to pay to shake off the stigma of unreliability that still hung over her as a result of her wartime policy’.296 Britain and Turkey ‘though indifferent to the fate of Korea . . . supported the principle of collective action that they might later invoke in their own defense.’297 Inönü did not oppose the dispatch of troops, but was sharply critical of the government’s failure to seek approval of it by the Grand National Assembly. When he presented the Treaty of Lausanne to that body in 1923, he had declared, in language with a certain contemporary resonance: ‘It is not the prerogative of a person or a committee to make decisions on a struggle of life or death. This is a decision to be made only by the nation.’298 This alignment came to an abrupt end in 1964, when Turkey responded to Greek nationalist agitation on Cyprus by threatening military intervention. (Inönü had regarded the Turks in Cyprus as a lost cause at Lausanne.) This led to a statement by President Johnson: I hope you will understand that your NATO allies have not had a chance to consider whether they have an obligation to protect Turkey against the Soviet Union if Turkey takes a step that results in Soviet intervention without the full consent and understanding of the NATO allies. This threatened removal of the Western guarantee that provided the whole basis of post-war Turkish foreign policy was widely resented in Turkey. Inönü’s response was a subtle threat to join the non-aligned movement assembling before the Bandung Conference in 1955: ‘A new world can be constructed and Turkey find its rightful

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place in it’,299 together with a formal response declaring that: ‘The contents as well as the tone of your message has been most disappointing for your ally Turkey. It has also brought to light important differences of views on matters relating to the alliance ties between our two countries.’300 Inönü also bluntly observed: If NATO members should start discussing the right and wrong of the situation of their fellow member victim of a Soviet aggression, whether this aggression was provoked or not, and if the decision on whether they have an obligation to assist the member should be made to depend on the issue of such a discussion, the very foundations of the Alliance would be shaken and it would lose its meaning.301 An EU association agreement was sought as early as 1959 and was signed in 1963. Another rejoinder to the Johnson letter was the first visit to Moscow by a Turkish Foreign Minister for 20 years, culminating in a trade agreement with the Soviet Union in 1965. At around the same time, it was widely rumoured that the American CIA was seeking to support new leadership in Turkey in the person of Suleiman Demirel. In November 1964, Turkey partially re-oriented its foreign policy by signing a cultural treaty with the Soviet Union; the Soviets then built a steelworks, an aluminum smelter and a petrol refinery in Turkey.302 In December 1963, the Turks voiced opposition to any revision of the Cyprus constitution, and in March 1964 the National Assembly authorised the use of troops in Cyprus and the denunciation of a treaty with Greece. In June 1964, Inönü visited the United States to meet with President Johnson, and on his return journey met with Prime Minister Home and General de Gaulle, securing their recognition of the continuing validity of the 1960 treaty between Greece, Turkey and Britain relating to Cyprus, which later became the basis of Turkish military intervention, which persists to this day. In July 1964, Inönü met with the Shah of Iran and the President of Pakistan in Istanbul. In August and September there were Turkish air strikes against Greek positions in Northern Cyprus and in December a UN General Assembly resolution, passed 57 to five with 54 abstentions, requiring nonintervention by Turkey. Former American Secretary of State Dean Acheson then proposed a compromise acceptable to the Turks but rejected by Greece: unification of Greece and Cyprus, with a Turkish base on Cyprus, compensation payments to Cypriots, and cession of the island of Castellarizzo to Turkey. On 15 July 1974 the regime of the Greek colonels proclaimed enosis, leading to a landing of Turkish troops on 20 July, the fall of the Greek junta and its counterpart, the Nikos Sampson regime in Cyprus, and the annexation by the Turks of some additional land for bargaining purposes, which is still held.303 Last Days When Inönü’s government fell in 1965, and Suleiman Demirel and the opposition

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Justice Party came to power, Inönü worked with Demirel and moderated his criticism, assuring his party that Demirel was not ‘another Menderes’ and behaving as a loyal opposition until his programme was rejected by the RPP shortly before his death, leading him to resign as party leader, after 34 years, in May 1972.304 In 1968, he voiced criticism of some tendencies in Turkish foreign policy: he favoured a federal rather than unitary state in Cyprus, favoured impartiality between the Arabs and Israel, and was dubious about new NATO doctrines of flexible response and proposals for a multilateral nuclear force. Though America’s goal had been to strengthen deterrence by making the nuclear threat more credible, most allies preferred to base deterrence on the opposite course – increasing the magnitude of the adversary’s risk by sticking to a strategy of massive retaliation, no matter how nihilistic the consequences.305 The assessment of his career by the former Soviet Foreign Minister, Andrei Gromyko was not an unjust one: Admittedly Inönü served in the interests of the bourgeoisie and landowners, and did not exactly hurry his country along the path of social reform, but nevertheless the traditions of the People’s Republican Party, that is, Atatürk’s party, survived and urged the country forward. Inönü’s retirement from political life made the goals set by Atatürk harder to achieve and Turkey’s entry into NATO made this achievement even more difficult . . . I was amazed by his clarity of mind, even though [in 1965] he was in his ninth decade. ‘Far from everything that is happening in Turkey has my approval. Even less does it correspond to the precepts of my late mentor. But I hold to the belief that Turkey must and can build relations with her mighty northern neighbour on the basis which Lenin and Atatürk understood so well.’306 Inönü died on 25 December 1973 at the age of 89, after having been weakened by an eye operation in 1971. He was survived by a daughter, Ozden Toker, who administers the Inönü Foundation, which issues publications and is organising a museum in Ankara, and by two sons, Omer, a businessman, who died in 2004, and Erdal, a graduate of the California Institute of Technology and a theoretical physicist and winner of the Wigner Medal, who followed his father into politics as a leader of the RPP,307 and who died in late 2007. Inönü had urged his children to go to university in Turkey, and to go abroad only for graduate work, to limit the risk they would not return to Turkey.308 Erdal was described as a person with neither deep emotional nor idealistic commitment to a political movement nor was he a person of great ambitions in politics; rather, he tended to define his role as one of responding to a call and performing a duty . . . to hold the party together in the difficult days following military rule in the early 1980s. As an

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earnest, moderate and easy-going person [Erdal] Inönü was loved and respected even by those who did not vote for him.309 The Atatürk-Inönü legacy in foreign policy lives on. During the first Gulf War in 1991, the then Prime Minister, Turgut Ozal, allowed the Americans the use of the air base at Incirlik for offensive operations against Iraq; Inönü’s son Erdal, then head of the opposition Social Democratic Party, led peace marches to the base in opposition to this policy, and criticised premature closure of an Iraqi pipeline,310 and the military refused to agree to any ground operations against Iraq, two high officers resigning to make this point. 311 On the ensuing problem of Kurdish refugees, Erdal declared: And who is responsible for this disgraceful sight? Surely not us. Those responsible are in the West, in your country. We spoke out so often, we tried so hard, saying, Find a solution to the Kuwait crisis without going to war. You didn’t listen, you said a quick solution was imperative so your economic situation would not be impaired, and you declared war. Then you provoked the Iraqi Kurds and then in the end you left them in the lurch again . . . You caused this situation, you fix it!312 For him, as for his father and Atatürk, wise policy was founded on ‘recognition [of] all the personal rights and democratic freedoms of people of every origin without distinction . . . the recipe for averting disintegration [is] not granting collective rights to the ethnic minorities.’ In November 1991, Erdal Inönü became Deputy Prime Minister in a coalition government and Acting Prime Minister for a month pending elections, and in March 1995 became Foreign Minister for a six-month period. Despite some American compensation, the breach of relations with Iraq was highly costly to the Turkish economy, and the new Kurdish enclave in northern Iraq exacerbated Turkey’s problems with its Kurdish population. In February and March 2003, Turkey was under pressure by the United States to become involved in the second Iraq war. On February 6, the Grand National Assembly voted 308 to 193 to allow American use of Turkish airspace, with the 177 members of the Republican Peoples’ Party in solid opposition. On 1 March a resolution allowing American troops to be stationed in Turkey and Turkish troops to be used in the war failed to secure the required majority in the Grand National Assembly, there being 264 in favour, 251 against and 19 abstentions, with the RPP being joined in opposition by several dozen members of the governing party. Later resolutions, adopted over RPP opposition on 20 March and 7 October reaffirmed the opening of air space and allowed the dispatch abroad of Turkish troops; since the Iraqi Kurds rejected the use of Turkish peacekeeping forces, the policy of avoiding expansionist entanglements thus continued.313 Inönü’s legacy may well have been best expressed by the historian Andrew Mango, who noted that for 50 years, the Turkish economy has had an average annual growth of six to seven per cent, some three times the rate of population increase. ‘Alone in

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the area, Turkey has not suffered any man-made, politically caused human and material losses since the end of the First World War.’314 It is no accident that the heroes of Eric Ambler’s four pre-war espionage novels included two Russians and two Turks. 315 Inönü’s Turkish state, it has been said, ‘promised (and in some ways, delivered) even more benefits, and demanded even more exclusive loyalty in return, than most Western states do.’316

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CONCLUSION

A book such as this requires an apologia. It describes five very different men, whose careers overlapped, but whose public influence was spread over nearly 90 years. It describes their actions, and reactions, in what some may find to be tedious detail. What excuse is there for this? The book rests on an empirical premise: that we should not go to history, or biography, for or with predetermined answers. Nor is it the biographer’s function to place white hats or black hats on his subjects, judging them according to contemporary standards or contemporary preoccupations. We are concerned here, as too few writers on contemporary politics are, with ‘the crooked timber of humanity’. ‘The use of history,’ Judge Learned Hand once wrote, is not to teach us to deal with specific occasions as they arise [but] to tell us what we are; for at our birth we are nearly empty vessels and we become what our traditions pour into us . . . Our nation was founded on the postulate . . . that men, though subjected to no imposed control, will conduct themselves more wisely and more justly than under any available domination . . . Its implications are among the most unwelcome that men are called upon to accept. They are that truth is attainable only by trial and error, and a readiness ever to re-examine and reappraise. That does violence to our deepest animal bent, which demands some immediate and positive response to every emergency. Doubt and scrutiny, the most serviceable of man’s tools, were the last that he acquired. He has never quite reconciled himself to their use; they are always repellent and painful . . . Each generation must decide how far it will seek refuge in eternal and immutable verities rather than grope its way through the tangle of human passions and human credulity.1 Most of the issues that mankind sets out to settle, it never does settle . . . [Each] disappears because replaced by some compromise that, although not wholly acceptable to either side, offers a tolerable substitute for victory; and he who would find the substitute needs an endowment as rich as possible in experience, an experience which makes the heart generous and provides his mind with an

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understanding of the hearts of others . . . Out of such a temper alone can come any political success which will not leave behind rancor and vindictiveness that are likely so deeply to infect its benefits as to make victory not worth while . . . wisdom is to be gained only as we stand upon the shoulders of those who have gone before. Just as in science we cannot advance except as we take over what we inherit, so in statecraft no generation can safely start at scratch. The subject matter of science is recorded observation of the external world; the subject matter of statecraft is the soul of man . . . The imagination can be purged and the judgment ripened only by an awareness of the slow, hesitant, wayward course of human life, its failures, its successes, but its indomitable will to endure. The five men we here consider conducted themselves in this spirit. Their legacy is found in part in their written works. Sforza’s Makers of Modern Europe, Einstein’s Tudor Ideals and Divided Loyalties and Rumbold’s Peel Commission Report are still worth reading, as are Bernstorff’s Memoirs. It is found also in the spirit in which each of them approached and analysed the problems of his time, a record that is tendered here. We will find in their lives none of the ‘patriotism plus inferiority complex’ which for Rumbold constituted the basis of modern nationalism. Nor were they eager for economic boycotts, the usual ‘immediate and positive response to every emergency’ fashionable in our time, which leave isolated and pathological hermit kingdoms in their wake.3 Still less did they forswear negotiating with dictators;4 Sforza preached understanding of dictators: ‘What is a poor dictator to do?’5 Nor was war, even victorious war, a source of glory. [America] slipped down from a Wilson to a Harding . . . laboring as they did just then under such depression and shock, they would have been quite capable of swallowing even a Daugherty . . . After the heroic period of Washington . . . came Aaron Burr; after Lincoln, the carpet-baggers . . . [The War] became an open school of lies, calumnies and hatreds . . . Democracy was bound to suffer fatally from this, since Democracy is essentially rooted in mutual toleration . . . Dictatorships are essentially a continuation of the state of mind which war let loose.6 This book is tendered in the faith that: ‘The ability to compare different times in the past with each other and with our own time is one of the principal powers that insulate us from the frenzied preoccupations of the day and from barbarism, which is incapable of comparison.’7

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NOTES

Preface 1 2 3 4

W. Kristol and D. Brooks, ‘What Ails Conservatism’, Wall Street Journal, 15 September 1997. G. Liebmann, The Little Platoons: Sub-Local Governments in Modern History (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1995). J. Mann, Rise of the Vulcans (New York: Penguin, 2004). J. Stephen, Essays by a Barrister (London: Smith, Elder, 1862), quoted in W. James, ‘What makes a life significant’, in James, Talks to Teachers (New York: Norton, 1958), 190.

Chapter 1 1 2 3 4 5 6

7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

16

L. Einstein, The Italian Renaissance in England (New York: Columbia U. Press, 1902). Theodore Roosevelt to Mrs David Einstein, 17 February 1903; John Hay to Mrs David Einstein, 18 February 1903; Elihu Root to Lewis Einstein, 24 February 1903, 1/3. H. Kissinger, Diplomacy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994), 38–41. Department of State to Seligman Brothers, 12 June 1903, 1/3. Einstein, Italian Renaissance, 16. Pico della Mirandola, A Platonick Discourse Upon Love (1914); Giovanni della Casa, Galateo of Manners and Behaviours (1914); Albrecht Dürer, Memoirs of Journeys to Venice and the Low Countries (1913); Erasmus, Against War (1907); Leonardo da Vinci, Fragments (1907); Philip Sidney, Defence of Poesie (1908); Leonardo da Vinci, Thoughts on Art and Life (1906); Petrarch, The Ancient World (1907); Philip Sidney and Hubert Longuet, Correspondence (1912). J. Mackail, Preface to Erasmus, Against War (Boston, MA: Merrymount, 1908), xxxiii–iv. Quoted in ‘Einstein Letters Read, Wealthy Manufacturer Bitterly Opposed His Son’s Marriage’, New York Times, 26 November 1913, 7. Einstein to Helen Einstein, 13 February 1907, 1/8. ‘American Will Case: Lady Waldstein’s Legacy’, The Times, 4 December 1913, 7. ‘Closes Hearing on Einstein Will’, New York Times, 4 December 1913, 9. Holmes to Einstein, 24 June 1911, in J. Peabody (ed.), Holmes-Einstein Letters, vol. 1 (London: Macmillan, 1964), 59. ‘Lady Waldstein Claims $1,250,000’, New York Times, 2 December 1913, 1. Holmes to Einstein, 29 January 1914, in Peabody (ed.) Holmes-Einstein Letters, vol. 1, 87–8; see also Holmes to Einstein, 5 December 1913, in id., 83–4. See ‘Judge’s Decision in Lady Waldstein’s Favour’, The Times, 15 April 1914, 8; see also New York Times, 14 April 1914, 4, and 17 April 1914, 4; for other articles see ‘Court to Interpret Einstein’s Will’, New York Times, 24 November 1913, 5, and ‘Lady Waldstein Denies Agreement’, 3 December 1913, 13. ‘Lady Waldstein and Her Co-Trustees’, The Times, 17 December 1913, 5; letter, New York Times, 31 March 1915, 10.

228 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

32 33 34 35 36 37 38

39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52

DIPLOMACY BETWEEN THE WARS Walston v. Commissioner, 8 T.C. 72. New York Times, 5 March 1915, 1. Ray Stannard Baker, diary entry for 1 December 1918, box 124, Library of Congress, quoted in Gelfand, ‘Lewis Einstein: American diplomatist’, in L. Einstein, A Diplomat Looks Back (New Haven, CT: Yale U. Press, 1968), xxv. Holmes to Marchioness of Tweeddale, 4 April 1931, in Peabody (ed.), Holmes-Einstein Letters, vol. 1, 322–3. Id., 35, 39–40, 44, 65, 70. Id., 105, citing Einstein to Knox, 17 October 1910. Id., 86, 89. Einstein to Secretary Knox, 17 October 1910, 1/11. L. Einstein, ‘The United States and Anglo-German rivalry’, 60 National Review 736 (1913), reprinted in 58 Living Age 323 (1913). Einstein, Diplomat Looks Back, 212; see the correspondence in 1/13. G. Kennan, Fateful Alliance: France, Russia, and the Coming of the First World War (New York: Pantheon, 1984). Gelfand, ‘Lewis Einstein’, xv. Id., 212. L. Einstein, Roosevelt: His Mind in Action (London: Murray, 1930), 219; see also R. Van Alstyne, American Diplomacy in Action (Stanford, CA: Stanford U. Press, 1944), 255–6, 258. L. Einstein, A Prophecy of War (New York: Columbia U. Press, 1918). See also T. Roosevelt, ‘The foreign policy of the United States’, 107 Outlook (22 August 1914), 1011–15; T. Roosevelt, ‘The World War: its tragedies and its lessons’, 108 Outlook (23 September 1914), 169–78. T. Roosevelt, Preface to Einstein, A Prophecy of War, 12. Id., 8. R. Buehrig, Woodrow Wilson and the Balance of Power (Princeton, NJ: Princeton U. Press, 1955), 180. G. Kennan, American Diplomacy, 1900–1950 (Chicago, IL: Chicago U. Press, 1984), 70–3. G. Kennan, Preface to Einstein, Diplomat Looks Back, viii. Richard Leopold (Dept. of History, Northwestern University) to Einstein, 26 March 1951, 3/ 35. Van Alstyne, American Diplomacy in Action. See also J. Grenville and G. Young, Politics, Strategy and American Diplomacy (New Haven, CT: Yale U. Press, 1966); R. Leopold, ‘The problem of American intervention’, World Politics (April 1950); E. Earle, ‘Power politics and American world policy’, 58 Political Science Quarterly, 103, n. 10 (1943) (referring to Einstein’s 1913 article as ‘a semi-official statement of American policy . . . well known to most students of American foreign relations’). Francis Biddle to Einstein, 15 March 1952, 4/3. Einstein, ‘The war and American policy’, 64 National Review 357 (November 1914). See J. Wheeler-Bennett, The Nemesis of Power: The German Army in Politics (New York: St. Martin’s, 1954). Einstein, Roosevelt, 225. L. Einstein, ‘American peace dreams’, 64 National Review 837 (January 1915). Roosevelt to Einstein, 19 February 1915, published in Einstein, Roosevelt, 249–51. L. Einstein, ‘The Contraband Difficulty’, The Times, 31 December 1914, 9. See also ‘The Contraband Dispute: An American’s Admonitions’, Morning Post, 5 February 1915, 5. L. Einstein, ‘The Origin of the War’, The Times, 4 August 1917. Einstein, A Diplomat Looks Back, 128. H. Rumbold, The War Crisis in Berlin, July–August 1914 (London: Constable, 1940), ch. XII. Einstein, A Diplomat Looks Back, 134. Id., 136–7. Id., 141. L. Einstein, ‘Armenian massacres’, 111 Contemporary Review 486 (April 1917).

LEWIS NE OTES INSTEIN 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88

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L. Einstein, Inside Constantinople During the Dardanelles Expedition (London: Murray, 1917), vi. L. Einstein, ‘The Turkish problem’, Westminster Gazette, 1 November 1918, 1. L. Einstein, ‘Mandate for Constantinople’, 109 Nation 727 (1919); ‘The Armenian mandate’, 110 Nation 762 (1920). L. Einstein, ‘A Way Out of Mandates’, New York Times, 2 November 1919, 5. Report of the American Military Commission to Armenia, in Documents on the Foreign Relations of the United States, 1919, vol. 2, 841 ff. Documents on the Foreign Relations of the United States, 1920, vol. 3, 784. Congressional Record, 66th Congress, 1st Session, vol. 58, pt. 7, 7050–4; 66th Congress, 2nd Session, vol. 59, pt. 4, 3792. See generally J. Winter (ed.), America and the Armenian Genocide of 1915 (Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 2003). L. Einstein, ‘Loss in the Exchange Situation’, New York Times, 2 December 1919, 12. Holmes to Einstein, 27 August 1917, in Peabody, Holmes-Einstein Letters, vol. 1, 146–7. Einstein, Tudor Ideals (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1921), xii–xiii. Id., 14. Id., 53. Id., 58. Id., 65. Id., 114. Id., 139, 152, 155. Id., 143. Id., 268–9. Id., 280. Id., 162, 166–7. Id., 258, 273, 324. Id., 173, 186. Id., 246–7. Id., 291, 296. Id., 297–8, quoting J. Brereton, Relation of the Discovery of Virginia (London: J. Bishop, 1602), 19. Id., 75. M. Howe (ed.) Holmes-Pollock Letters: The Correspondence of Mr. Justice Holmes and Sir Frederick Pollock, 1874–1932, vol. 2, 77. 11 Yale Review 416, 420 (1921). Holmes to Laski, 27 August 1921, Holmes-Laski Letters: The Correspondence of Mr. Justice Holmes and Harold J. Laski, 1916–1935, vol. 1, 364. Laski to Holmes, 9 September 1921, id. 367; see H. Laski, book review, 31 Nation and Atheneum 475 (1 July 1922). Republican Campaign Text Book for 1920, 231–2; 115–17. Einstein to Holmes, 15 January 1920, in Peabody (ed.), Holmes-Einstein Letters, vol. 1, 190. Einstein, A Diplomat Looks Back, 201. See for example Documents on U.S. Foreign Relations, 1927, vol. II, 543–4 (consular rights treaty); 1925, vol. II, 39–45 (loan agreements); 1925, vol. 2, 32–8 (extradition treaty); 1925, vol. I, 126 (war debts); 1923, vol. I, 868 (trade agreements). See the review of Eistein, A Diplomat Looks Back by Robert Berkvist, New York Times, 20 October 1968, BR 50. On Einstein’s activities in Prague, see M. Zimmerman, Lewis Einstein: Twentieth Century Diplomat and Critic of Foreign Policy (unpublished master’s thesis, Coe Library, University of Wyoming, Laramie), citing US State Department, Foreign Relations of the United States (Washington: GPO, 1923), vol. I, 876–7; 1925, vol. I, 126, 129–30; 1925, vol. II, 132 (debt settlements); 1922, vol. I, 556–7; 1925, vol. II, 39–43; 1927, vol. I, 312 (flotation of loans); 1923, vol. I, 866–72; 1927, vol. II, 539– 44; 1928, vol. II, 692–7, 707; 1928, vol. II, 710–17 (tariffs); 1928, vol. II, 286 (arbitration). Holmes to Einstein, 15 April 1930, in Peabody (ed.), Holmes-Einstein Letters, vol. 1, 307–8.

230 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136

DIPLOMACY BETWEEN THE WARS J. Grew, Turbulent Era: A Diplomatic Record of Forty Years, 1904–45 , vol. 2 (ed. W. Johnson) (London: Hammond & Hammond, 1953), 850. Hughes to Einstein, 11 July 1924, quoted in M. Pusey, Charles Evans Hughes, vol. 2 (New York: Columbia U. Press, 1963), 601. Laski to Holmes, 17 January 1926, in id., 821; Holmes to Laski, 29 January 1926. Laski to Holmes, 2 October 1928, id., 1096. Holmes to Laski, 12 April 1930, id., 1240. Lewis Strauss to Einstein, 3 October 1929, 3/1; Einstein to James Wadsworth, 20 April 1927; Kellogg to Einstein, 1 June 1927, 3/1. Einstein to Cotton, 25 November 1929, 3/6. Einstein, A Diplomat Looks Back, 207. L. Einstein, ‘Hoover’, 130 Fortnightly Review (O.S.) (124 N.S.) 577 (1928). Einstein, A Diplomat Looks Back, 176–87. Einstein to Cotton, 13 January 1930, 3/7. Einstein to Cotton, 13 January 1930; Cotton to Einstein, 14 January 1930, 3/7. Einstein, A Diplomat Looks Back, 212. Holmes to Einstein, 30 November 1918, in Peabody (ed.), Holmes-Einstein Letters, vol. 1, 173–5. Laski to Holmes, 30 May 1930, id., vol. 2, 1254. Laski to Holmes, 26 July 1930, id., 1276. Holmes to Einstein, 10 June 1930; 2 July 1930, in Peabody (ed.), Holmes-Einstein Letters, vol. 1, 309–12. L. Einstein, ‘Lewis Cass’, in S. Bemis (ed.), The American Secretaries of State and Their Diplomacy , vol. 6 (New York: Knopf, 1927–9 ), 295–384. Einstein, A Diplomat Looks Back, 213. Einstein, Roosevelt, 41, 46, 51, 54, 62, 64, 96, 107, 136, 157, 227–8, 240. Id., 131–2. Id., 145–7. Holmes to Einstein, 17 October 1930, in Peabody (ed.), Holmes-Einstein Letters, vol. 1, 318. Laski to Holmes, 30 November 1930, in Peabody (ed.), Holmes-Laski Letters, vol. 2. Times Literary Supplement (12 March 1931), 200. Einstein to Butler, 20 January 1931, 3/9; Einstein to Moley, 22 May 1933, 3/11. Einstein to Hull, 19 and 22 July, 1933, 3/11. Einstein to Hull, n.d., 3/10. Einstein to Hull, 27 November 1934, citing L. Einstein, ‘Japan and American policy’, Journal of the American Asiatic Association (January 1915), 3/12. Einstein, A Diplomat Looks Back, 216. L. Einstein, ‘Disarmament and bootleg armaments’, 233 North American Review 27 (1932). L. Einstein, ‘French Security’, The Times, 10 September 1932, 6. L. Einstein, ‘The Conference’, The Times, 3 July 1933. Einstein to McDonald, 25 November 1933, 3/11. Einstein, A Diplomat Looks Back, 217. L. Einstein, ‘Uneasy Europe: Peaceful Revision of Treaties’, The Times, 18 November 1933. L. Einstein, ‘The cult of force’, North American Review (December 1933), 501ff. L. Einstein, Divided Loyalties (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1933). Book review, New York Times Book Review, 13 August 1933, 3. Laski to Holmes, 13 June 1933, Peabody (ed.), Holmes-Laski Letters, vol. 2, 1443. Book review, Times Literary Supplement (15 June 1933), 405. Book review, 77 New Republic 78 (29 November 1933). Einstein to Holmes, 29 March 1932, 3 June 1932, in Peabody (ed.), Holmes-Einstein Letters, vol. 1, 339, 342–3. Einstein to Holmes, 18 September 1932, in id., 347. Einstein to The Times, 13 December 1933, 3/11. L. Einstein, ‘Herr Hitler’s Middle Europe plans’, 152 Spectator 39 (12 January 1934). Einstein to Hull, May 1934, 3/12.

LEWIS NE OTES INSTEIN 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177 178 179 180 181 182 183 184 185 186

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Einstein to Frankfurter, 29 June 1934, Frankfurter papers, reel 32. Einstein to Hull, 11 June 1934, 3/12. Welles to Einstein, 18 September 1934, 3/12. Einstein to Hull, 27 June 1934, 3/12. Einstein to Hull, 17 July 1934, 3/12. Einstein to Hull, 28 September 1934, 3/12. Einstein to Hull, 16 October 1934, 3/12. L. Einstein, ‘Former U.S. Minister’s Apt Question’, Morning Post, 1 December 1934, 10. Einstein to Hull, 11 January 1935, 3/13. Einstein to Hull, 18 February 1935, 3/13. Einstein to Hull, 1 March 1935, 3/13. Einstein to Hull, 2 April 1935, 3/13. Einstein to Hull, 24 May 1935, 3/20. Einstein to Hull, 27 June 1935, 3/14. Einstein to Hull, 20 September 1935, 3/14. Einstein to Hull, 12 November 1935, 3/14. Einstein to Hull, 20 December 1935, 3/14. Einstein to Hull, 7 February 1936, 3/16. Einstein to Hull, 19 February 1936, 3/16. Einstein to Hull, 31 March 1936, 3/16. Einstein, letter, The Times, 16 May 1936. Einstein to Hull, 7 July 1936, 3/16. Einstein to Hull, 30 October 1936, 3/16. L. Einstein, ‘Czech and German’, The Times, 2 February 1937. Einstein to Hull, 21 April 1938, 3/20. Einstein to Hull, 10 May 1938. Einstein to Hull, 27 May 1938, 3/20. Einstein to Hull, 15July 1938, 3/20. Einstein to Hull, 28 July 1938, 3/20. Einstein to Hull, 7 October 1938, 3/20. Einstein to Hull, 4 November 1938, 3/20. Einstein to Hull, 15 November 1938, 3/20. Einstein to Hull, 23 May 1939, 3/22. Einstein to Hull, 27 June 1939, 3/22. Einstein to Hull, 31 July 1939, 3/22. Einstein to Hull, 5 December 1939, 3/22. L. Einstein, ‘The Munich Agreement: a retrospect’, 23 History 331 (March 1939). L. Einstein, ‘The Sumner Welles Mission’, The Times, 14 February 1940. L. Einstein, review of C. Webster (ed.), Select Documents on Britain and the Independence of Latin America, 1812–1830, 24 History 169 (September 1939). L. Einstein, review of R. Seton-Watson, Munich and the Dictators, 24 History 186 (September 1939). L. Einstein, review of G. Morris, A Diary of the French Revolution, 24 History 356 (March 1940). Einstein, A Diplomat Looks Back, at 216. Id., 217. L. Einstein, review of W. Medlicott, British Foreign Policy Since Versailles, 25 History 272 (December 1940). L. Einstein, review of M. Hentze, Pre-Fascist Italy: The Rise and Fall of the Parliamentary Regime, 25 History 274 (1940). L. Einstein, review of J. Mackintosh, The Paths that Led to War in Europe, 1919–1930, 25 History 281 (1940). Einstein to Hull, 15 March 1941, 3/24. Einstein to Lord Davies, 20 December 1941, 3/24. Einstein to Winant, 7 January 1942, 3/26. Einstein to Winant, 20 January 1942, 3/26.

232 187 188 189 190 191 192 193 194 195 196 197 198 199 200 201 202 203 204 205 206 207 208 209

210 211

DIPLOMACY BETWEEN THE WARS Einstein to Winant, 23 January 1942, 3/26. Einstein to Winant, 29 January 1942. Einstein to Winant, 8 February 1942; 23 February 1942, 3 /26. Einstein to Winant, ‘Russia and Central Europe’, n.d., 9/7. Welles to Einstein, 13 August 1947, 3/31. Einstein to Winant, 14 May 1942, 3/26. Einstein to Winant, ‘Polish relations with the Soviet’, 10 June 1942, 3/26. L. Einstein, ‘Isolationist prospects’, 171 Spectator 144 (12 February 1943). L. Einstein, ‘Potsdam, Russia, and Central Europe’, 164 Fortnightly 154 (September 1945). Einstein, A Diplomat Looks Back, 225–9. L. Einstein, ‘Anglo-American relations and security’, 166 Fortnightly 42 (July 1946). L. Einstein, ‘Communists in Tuscany’, 14 New English Review 6, 551 (June 1947). L. Einstein, ‘The next Allied talks’, 165 Fortnightly 13 (January 1946). L. Einstein, ‘Declining values in civilization’, 167 Fortnightly 101 (February 1947). L. Einstein, Historical Change (Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 1946), 9–11, 13, 15, 18–20, 22–3, 29–31, 33, 37, 40, 42–3, 47, 52, 58, 62, 66, 70–2, 74, 78 , 84–5, 87, 89, 94, 96–8, 105, 109, 115–18 ,127. L. Einstein, ‘Orphan island’, Economist, 2 July1955, 28. L. Einstein, letter, ‘End of Alliance’, Paris Herald-Tribune, 14 March 1956. G. Dallas, 1945 (New Haven, CT: Yale U. Press, 2005), 621, 626. L. Einstein, letter ‘Arsenal of Ideas’, Washington Post, 10 January 1958. A. Taylor, ‘Watching the World Go By’, New York Review of Books, 10 October 1968, 18. Preface to Peabody (ed.), Holmes-Einstein Letters, vol. 1, ix. Obituary, ‘Mr. Lewis Einstein: Diplomatist and Man of Letters’, The Times, 13 December 1967, 12. He is said to have urged Mark Howe to edit the correspondence. Howe, who had a possessive attitude toward the Holmes papers, delayed publication of the correspondence with Einstein. See R. Mennel and C. Compston, Introduction to Holmes and Frankfurter: Their Correspondence, 1912–1934 (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1996), xxxvii, n. 94. Einstein, Preface to Peabody (ed.), Holmes-Einstein Letters, vol. 1, xix, xxiv. Einstein, Scattered Verses (Florence: Tipografia Giuntina SA,1949), 23–4.

Chapter 2 1 2 3

4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

James Dunlop Smith to Lady Minto, 12 July 1908, in M. Gilbert, Servant of India: A Study of Imperial Rule from 1905 to 1910 as Shown through the Correspondence and Diaries of Sir James Dunlop Smith (London: Longman, 1966), 165. ‘Sir H. Rumbold, 72, Ex-Diplomat Dies, Among the First British Officials to Warn of the Danger of Hitler’, New York Times, 25 May 1941, 37. M. Gilbert, Sir Horace Rumbold: Portrait of a Diplomat, 1869–1941 (London, Heinemann, 1973), xiii. For reviews of this biography, see G. Brook-Shepherd, Sunday Telegraph, 23 December 1973; C. Snow, Financial Times, December 21, 1973; A. Rendel, The Times, 11 January 1974; C. Sykes, Books and Bookmen, January 1974; A. Taylor, Observer, 9 December 1973. Gilbert, Sir Horace Rumbold, 41. Id. Id., 58. Id., 67. Id., 71. Rumbold to Rumbold, 6 November 1904, quoted in Gilbert, Sir Horace Rumbold, 49. Rumbold to Rumbold, 19 November 1904, quoted in id., 49. Rumbold to Rumbold, 1 August 1904, quoted in id., 49. Rumbold to Rumbold, 22 May 1904, quoted in id., 49. A. Fitzroy, Memoirs (London: Hutchinson, 1925), 200 (entry for 27 April 1904).

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47 48 49 50 51 52

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Gilbert, Sir Horace Rumbold, 81–2, citing diary entries. Id., 84, citing diary entries. Rumbold to Cromer, 17 December 1910, quoted in id., 87. Rumbold to Rumbold, 31 March 1911. Rumbold to Rumbold, 18 February 1911. Rumbold to Rumbold, 14 May 1911. This and the two preceding references are cited in P. Lowe, Great Britain and Japan, 1911–15: A Study of British Far Eastern Policy (London: Macmillan, 1969), 24, 40–2, 52, 125, 179, 304, 316–17. Diary entry, 18 March 1911, quoted in Gilbert, Sir Horace Rumbold, 90. Rumbold to Rumbold, 18 February 1913, quoted in id., 97. Id., 99, 101. Id., 109. Id., 111–12. Id., 113. Id., 118. Id., 120–1. Id., 126. S. Fay, Origins of the World War: After Sarajevo (New York: Macmillan, 1930), vol. 2, 263–4. Rumbold to Harold Nicolson, 15 May 1930, 37/201. Gilbert, Sir Horace Rumbold, 171. Rumbold to Hardinge, 19 November 1917, Hardinge 7/121. S. Roskill, Hankey (London: Collins, 1970), vol. 1, 507; see also D. Lloyd-George, War Memoirs (London: Odham, 1936), vol. 2, 1498–1509, 1975–6. Rumbold to Hardinge, 21 April 1918, Hardinge 37. W. Calder and C. Sutton (eds.), The Memoirs of Prince Max of Baden (London: Constable, 1928), vol. 1, 247–8. V. Rothwell, British War Aims and Peace Diplomacy, 1914–18 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971), 16. Rumbold to Hardinge, 3 June 1918, Hardinge 38/100. Rumbold to Foreign Office, 7 September 1917, FO 371/2941, cited in Doerries, Imperial Challenge (trans. C. Shannon) (Chapel Hill, NC: U. of North Carolina Press, 1989 ), 238, n. 39. Rumbold to Curzon, 19 January 1920, FO 688/3: No. 41 (draft), quoted in Gilbert, Sir Horace Rumbold, 191. Rumbold to his mother, 18 October 1919, Rumbold Papers, 26/42. Rumbold to Hardinge, 27 October 1919, id., 26/55; Rumbold to Kerr, 6 December, 1919, id., 26/79. Rumbold to Hardinge, 1 February 1930, id., 26/142, referring to earlier recommendations. J. Bradley, Allied Intervention in Russia (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1921), 199–201. Rumbold to Parodi, 29 December 1919, Rumbold Papers, 26/123. Gilbert, Sir Horace Rumbold, 195. Lloyd-George to Rumbold, 27 January 1920, Lloyd-George Papers, House of Lords Record Office, 100/3/6. See also G. Craig, ‘The British Foreign Office from Grey to Austen Chamberlain’, in G. Craig and F. Gilbert, The Diplomats: 1919–1939 (New York: Atheneum, 1971), vol. 1, 31. Gilbert, Sir Horace Rumbold, 212. Rumbold to Foreign Office, 26 February 1920, 26/181. See also Rumbold to Gregory, 6 May 1920, 26/217. Rumbold to Philip Kerr, 10 June 1920, 26/30. Rumbold to Leeper, 9 July 1920, Rumbold Papers 27/54; Rumbold to Hardinge, 19 July 1920, 27/61. Rumbold to Curzon, 2 June 1920, Lloyd-George Papers, 201/1/7. E. Woodward and R. Butler (eds.), Documents on British Foreign Policy, 1919–1939 (hereinafter DBFP) (London: HMSO, 1956 ff), vol. VIII (1958), no. 55, 502–6.

234 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93

94 95

DIPLOMACY BETWEEN THE WARS DBFP, vol. VIII, (1958), no. 59, 524–30. Rumbold to Hardinge, 10 July 1920, Hardinge 42/64. Rumbold to Constantia Rumbold, 27/80. Rumbold Papers, 27/84. Lloyd-George to Rumbold, 19 July 1920, Lloyd-George Papers, 57/6/4. See Rumbold to Foreign Office, 7 July 1920; DBFP, Series 1, nos. 313–4. Rumbold to Curzon, 24 July 1920, DBFP, Series 1, no. 352. Rumbold to Lloyd-George, 4 and 6 August 1920, Lloyd-George Papers, 105/1/38, 57/6/16. Lloyd George to Rumbold, 7 August 1920, Lloyd-George Papers, 105/1/45. Rumbold to Lady Rumbold, 5 August 1920, Rumbold Papers, 27/. Lloyd George to Rumbold, 9 August 1920, Lloyd-George Papers, 202/2/2, 57/6/19. E. D’Abernon, The Eighteenth Decisive Battle of the World: Warsaw, 1920 (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1931), 69. Id., 72. Rumbold to Hardinge, 17 August 1920, Hardinge 43/. Rumbold to Lady Rumbold, 17 August 1920, Rumbold Papers 27/, quoted in N. Davies, White Eagle, Red Star: The Polish-Soviet War 1919–1920 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1972 ), 220–1. Rumbold to Hardinge, 28 August 1920, Hardinge 43/84. Rumbold to Curzon, 28 August 1920, FO 688/2, N.547 (draft), quoted in Gilbert, Sir Horace Rumbold, 213. N. Davies, Europe (New York: Oxford U. Press, 1996), 934–5. Report of the Franco-British Mission to Poland, July–August 1920, Rumbold Papers, 27/140. Rumbold to Charles Arbuthnot, 1 September 1920, Rumbold Papers, 27/150. Radcliffe to CIGS, 18 September 1920, Rumbold Papers, 27/177. Gilbert, Sir Horace Rumbold, 215. Rumbold Papers, 27/169. A. de Wiart, Happy Odyssey (London: Cape, 1950), 109. Roskill, Hankey, vol. 2, 184 (entry for 18 September 1920). A. Taylor, The Course of German History (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1945), 221. H. Kissinger, Diplomacy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994), 261. Rumbold to Curzon, 7 November 1920, quoted in Gilbert, Sir Horace Rumbold, 217. N. Henderson, Water Under the Bridges (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1945), 105. C. Caldwell (ed.), Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson: His Life and Diaries (London: Cassell, 1927), vol. 2, 267. A. Ryan, Last of the Dragomans (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1951), 152. Rumbold to Curzon, 17 September 1922, cited in Gilbert, Sir Horace Rumbold, 262. Quoted in id., 262. Roskill, Hankey (London: Collins, 1970), vol. 2, 286. Henderson, Water Under the Bridges, 109. Rumbold to Oliphant, 21 September 1922, quoted in M. Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill (London: Heinemann, 1967–82 ), vol. 4, 837. G. Isaacs, Rufus Isaacs: First Marquess of Reading (London: Hutchinson, 1945), 231. H. Nicolson, Curzon: The Last Phase, 1919–1925: A Study in Postwar Diplomacy (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1934), 285. Id., 275. Quoted in Gilbert, Sir Horace Rumbold, 269. Id., 272. See also R. Blake, The Unknown Prime Minister (London: Eyre & Spottiswood, 1955), 447–8. Bonar Law’s letter appeared in both The Times and the Daily Express for 6 October 1922, Lord Beaverbrook causing its appearance in the latter publication. A similar view was expressed after the initial break-up of the Lausanne Conference, in A. Beaman, ‘Lausanne and its lessons’, 93 Nineteenth Century 318 (1923). T. Ataov, Introduction to 1993 Turkish Yearbook of International Affairs, vi. J. Grew, Turbulent Era: A Diplomatic Record of Forty Years, 1904–45 (London: Hammond, Hammond, 1953), vol. 1, 536.

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Id., 292. K. Jeffrey and A. Sharp, ‘Lord Curzon and the use of secret intelligence at the Lausanne conference’, 1993 Turkish Yearbook of International Affairs 79, 86–7. M. Dockrill, ‘Britain and the Lausanne conference, 1922–23’, 1993 Turkish Yearbook of International Relations 11, quoting Rumbold to Curzon, 24 May 1923. Id., 16. Grew, Turbulent Era, vol. 1, 572. Rumbold Papers, 31/96 (1 May 1923). Rumbold to Lord Stamfordham, 5 May 1923, Rumbold Papers, 31/99. Rumbold to Curzon, 7 July 1923, DBFP, Series 1, nos. 660, 929, quoted in Dockrill, ‘Britain and the Lausanne conference’, 15. Rumbold to Curzon, 13 July 1923, FO 371/9086, no. 268, quoted in Gilbert, Sir Horace Rumbold, 296. Dockrill, ‘Britain and the Lausanne conference’, 17, n. 48. Curzon to R. Graham, 14 November 1922, DBFP, 273–4. D. Wilder, The Chanak Affair (London: Hutchinson, 1969), 349. The text of the treaty appears in Cmd. 1929 (1923). Curzon to Grace Curzon, 23 December 1923, in G. Curzon, Reminiscences (London: Hutchinson, 1955), 209–10. G. Waterfield, Professional Diplomat: Sir Percy Loraine 1880–1961 (London: Murray, 1973), 72. Id., 304. Id., 310. Id., 318. Nicolson to Vita Sackville-West, 27 June 1929, quoted in Gilbert, Sir Horace Rumbold, 325. Rumbold to Foreign Office, 19 December 1928, DBFP, Series 1a, V, 589. Rumbold to Foreign Office, 30 November 1928, id., Series 1a, V, 504. Rumbold to Foreign Office, 24 December 1928, id., Series 1a, VI, 1. Id., 321. Rumbold to Ronald Lindsay, 4 October 1929, 37/57; Rumbold to the King, 9 October 1929, 37/59. Rumbold to Lord Stonehaven, 10 October 1929, 37/67. Rumbold to Foreign Office, 19 December 1929, DBFP, Series 1a, V, 588. Rumbold to Foreign Office, 3 January 1929, id., Series 1a, VI, 27. Rumbold to Foreign Office, 19 March 1929, id., Series 1a, VI, 211. DBFP, Series 1a, VII, 261. Rumbold to Orme Sargent, 28 February 1930, 37/145. Rumbold to D’Abernon, 9 September 1930, 38/53. Rumbold to the King, 23 October 1930, 38/86. Rumbold to Orme Sargent, 23 January 1931, 38/140. Gilbert, Sir Horace Rumbold, 343. Rumbold to Orme Sargent, 25 September 1931, 39/23. Rumbold to Rowe Dutton, December 15, 1931, 39/67. Quoted in F. Von Papen, Memoirs (London: André Deutsch, 1952), 203. R. Boothby, I Fight to Live (London: Gollancz, 1947), 100–1. Gilbert, Sir Horace Rumbold, 351, n. 1. See also Rumbold to Orme Sargent, 4 December 1931, 39/55. G. Martel (ed.), The Times and Appeasement: Journals of A.L. Kennedy, 1932–39 (Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 2000), 89. Rumbold to Anthony Rumbold, 13 December 1931, 39/63. Rumbold to Foreign Office, 4 August 1932, DBFP, Series 2, vol. V, no. 9. Von Papen, Memoirs, 198. Rumbold to Foreign Office, 19 July 1932, quoted in Von Papen, Memoirs, 2. Rumbold to John Simon, 5 January 1932, 39/81.

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140 Gilbert, Sir Horace Rumbold, 356. See also M. Gilbert, Britain and Germany Between the Wars (London: Longman, 1964), 72. 141 Rumbold to Wigram, 30 January 1932, 39/171. 142 Rumbold to Tony Rumbold, 2 September 1931, 39/1. 143 Henderson to Rumbold, 17 February 1932, 39/140. 144 See D. Marquand, Ramsay MacDonald (London: Jonathan Cape, 1977), 748. 145 John F. Kennedy to Blair Moody, 10 March 1942, JFK Pre-Presidential Papers, Kennedy Library, Box 74, quoted in N. Hamilton, JFK: Reckless Youth (New York: Random House, 1992), 486. 146 Quoted in Von Papen, Memoirs, 204. 147 Rumbold to J.L. Garvin, 9 June 1932, 39/103. 148 Gilbert, Sir Horace Rumbold, 361. 149 Rumbold to Vansittart, 14 June 1932, 39/208. 150 L. Amery, My Political Life: The Unforgiving Years, 1929–40 (London: Hutchinson, 1955), vol. 3, 126. 151 Birkenhead, Halifax (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1965), 340–1. 152 Id. 153 DBFP, 2nd Series, vol. 1, 569, quoted in Roskill, Hankey (London: Collins, 1970), vol. 2, 507–8. 154 E. Eyck, The History of the Weimar Republic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard U. Press, 1952), vol. 2, 207–457, pays Rumbold the unusual compliment, for a foreign diplomat, of repeatedly quoting him as an aid to his historical narrative. 155 Martel (ed.), The Times and Appeasement, 43. 156 Rumbold to Wigram, 26 July 1932, 39/248. 157 Rumbold to Simon, 26 July 1932, in DBFP, 2nd Series, vol. 4, No. 6. 158 Screws v. United States, 325 U.S. 91 (1945) (opinion of Frankfurter, Jackson and Roberts, JJ). 159 Rumbold to Simon, 19 November 1932, in DBFP, 2nd Series, vol. 4, no. 32. 160 Rumbold to Simon, 7 December 1932, in DBFP, 2nd Series, vol. 4, no. 44. 161 DBFP, 2nd Series, vol. 4, nos. 220–1. 162 Rumbold to Simon, 28 January 1933, in DBFP, 2nd Series, vol. 4, no. 228. 163 C. de Gaulle, The Enemy’s House Divided (trans R. Eden), (Chapel Hill, NC: U. of North Carolina Press, 2002). 164 Rumbold to Simon, 28 January 1933, DBFP, 2nd Series, vol. 4, no. 229 165 Rumbold to Wigram, 7 February 1933, 40/100; Rumbold to Simon, 7 February 1933, in DBFP, 2nd Series, vol. 4, no. 238. 166 Rumbold to Simon, 7 February 1933, DBFP, 2nd Series, vol. 4, no. 239. 167 Rumbold to Vansittart, 24 February 1933, 40/127. 168 Eyck, History of the Weimar Republic, 370. 169 Vansittart, minute, 1 March 1933, VNST 2/5. 170 Rumbold to Simon, 7 March 1933, DBFP, 2nd Series, vol. 4, no. 258. 171 Rumbold to Knox, 13 March 1933, 40/150. 172 Rumbold to Simon, 15 March 1933, DBFP, 2nd Series, vol. 4, no. 265. 173 Rumbold to Simon, 21 March 1933, 40/160. 174 Rumbold to Simon, 28 March 1933, DBFP, 2nd Series, vol. 5, no. 5. 175 Rumbold to Simon, 5 April 1933, DBFP, 2nd Series, vol. 5, no. 21. See also Rumbold to Simon, 13 April 1933, DBFP, 2nd Series, vol. 5, no. 30. 176 Rumbold to Ralph Wigram, 29 March 1933, 40/161, quoted in H. Nicolson, King George V (London: Constable, 1952), 521. 177 Rumbold papers, 40/172. 178 Rumbold to Knox, 40/175. 179 Rumbold to Simon, 13 April 1933, DBFP, 2nd Series, vol. 5, no. 30. Quoted in P. Conwell-Evans, ‘Sir Horace Rumbold on Germany’, 128 Nineteenth Century 144 (1940). 180 The dispatch, FO 3990/319/18, is reprinted in H. Rumbold, The War Crisis in Berlin: July-August 1914, 344–58, and is also to be found in the Churchill Papers, CHAR 2/273, and in DBFP, 2nd Series, vol. 5, no. 30.

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181 P. Neville, ‘Rival foreign affairs perceptions of Germany, 1936–39’, 13 Diplomacy and Statecraft 137 (2002). 182 Vansittart, minute, 6 May 1933, VNST 2/3. 183 R. Wigram to Churchill, 26 March 1936, Churchill Papers, CHAR 2/273; see Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, Companion Volume V, (London: Heinemann, 1967–82), 79. 184 Rumbold to Londonderry, 12 April 1938, 42/. 185 J. Barnes and P. Barnes, Hitler’s Mein Kampf in Britain and America: A Publishing History, 1930–39 (Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 1980) 186 Gilbert, Sir Horace Rumbold, 380. 187 Id., 382. 188 Id., 452. 189 Rumbold to Foreign Office, 11 May 1933, included in a collection of dispatches distributed on 17 January 1936 as CP 13/36; see Roskill, Hankey (London: Collins, 1970), vol. 3, 84ff. 190 Documents on German Foreign Policy, 1918–45 (London: HMSO, 1949, vol. 1), Series C, Document 223, 11 May 1933, no. 2368/493960/62. 191 Vansittart, minutes on Rumbold dispatch of 10 May 1933, 12 and 16 May 1933, VNST 2/4. 192 H. Trevor-Roper (ed.), Hitler’s Table Talk, 1941–44 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1953), 488 (entry for 16 May 1942). 193 Id., 383. 194 Rumbold to Simon, 30 June 1933, 41/4; also in DBFP, 2nd Series, vol. 5, no. 229. 195 Rumbold Papers, 18 January 1930, 37/130. 196 Vansittart, minute, 7 July 1933, VNST 2/5. 197 R. Vansittart, The Mist Procession (London: Hutchinson, 1958), 476–8. 198 Hankey, memorandum, 24 October 1933, CAB 63/47, quoted in Roskill, Hankey (London: Collins, 1970), vol. 3, 84. 199 Id., 84 (4 October 1933), vol. 3, CAB 63/46. 200 Henderson, Water Under the Bridges, 52. 201 Curzon to Rumbold, 15 September 1919, Rumbold Papers, 26/33. 202 Rumbold to Hardinge, 18 February 1933, 40/116. 203 Rumbold to Tyrell, 31 December 1930, 38/130. 204 40/147. 205 Vansittart, The Mist Procession, 445; M. Jaroch, Too Much Wit and Not Enough Warning: Sir Eric Phipps als britischer Botschafter in Berlin von 1933 bis 1937 (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1999). 206 S. Templewood, Nine Troubled Years (London: Collins, 1954), 299. 207 ‘Loss of Ambassadors’, The Times, 26 February 1934, 15. 208 Rumbold to Phipps, 2 June 1933, PHPP 2/23. 209 Gilbert, Sir Horace Rumbold, 388. 210 Rumbold to Orme Sargent, 13 June 1934, 41/. 211 Bruning to Rumbold, 1 July 1934, 41/105. 212 K. Middlemas and J. Barnes, Baldwin (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1969), 889, quoting J. Wrench, Dawson (London: Hutchinson, 1955), 325. 213 Rumbold to Dawson, December 13, 1935, quoted in Wrench, Dawson, 327. 214 A. Eden, Facing the Dictators (London: Cassell, 1962), 302. 215 Gilbert, Sir Horace Rumbold, 395. 216 Rumbold to Dawson, 13 June, 1936, quoted in Wrench, Dawson. 217 The Times, 29 December 1936, 14. 218 Ormsby-Gore to Halifax, July 1936, CO 733/319, quoted in Gilbert, Sir Horace Rumbold, 400. 219 M. Jackson, A Scottish Life: Sir John Martin, Churchill and Empire (London: Radcliffe, 1999). 220 H. Nicolson, Diaries and Letters, 1939–45 (London: Collins, 1967), 40 (entry for 24 November 1939). 221 J. Lees-Milne, Harold Nicolson (London: Chatto & Windus,1980), vol. 2, 342, 380.

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222 Gilbert, Sir Horace Rumbold, 404. 223 M. Cohen, Churchill and the Jews (London: Frank Cass, 1985), 79. 224 Report of the Royal Commission on Palestine, July 1937, Cmd. 5479. See Peel, ‘The report of the Palestine Commission’, International Affairs (September–October 1937), 761; The Times, 8 July 1937. 225 C. O’Brien, The Siege: The Story of Israel and Zionism (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986), 226. 226 W. Laqueur, Thursday’s Child Has Far to Go: A Memoir of the Journeying Years (New York: Scribner, 1992), 184. 227 Rumbold to Tony Rumbold, 6 February 1938, 42/93. 228 J. Barnes and D. Nicholson (eds.), The Empire at Bay: The Leo Amery Diaries 1929–45 (London: Hutchinson, 1988) (entry for 23 February 1937). 229 M. Urofsky and D. Levy (eds.), The Letters of Louis D. Brandeis (Albany, NY: State U. of New York Press, 1978), vol. 5, 590, 602–3. 230 Weizmann to Sir John Shackburgh, 31 December 1937, in B. Litvinoff (ed.), Letters and Papers of Chaim Weizmann (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1979), vol. 6, 281, 285. 231 B. Wasserstein, Britain and the Jews of Europe, 1939–45 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1979); see also Litvinoff (ed.) Letters and Papers of Chaim Weizmann, vol. 6, 60–7, 106–9; 122–5; 132–9; 166–7; 332–9. 232 G. Meir, My Life (New York: Dell, 1975), 150. 233 H. Rumbold, ‘Palestine’, in United Empire (November 1937). The responses to this speech by Weizmann and others are also instructive. 234 See the Commons debate at 326 Parliamentary Debates (Commons), No. 150 (22 July 1937). 235 See the Lords debate at 126 Parliamentary Debates (Lords), nos. 94, 95 (20–21 July 1937). 236 Palestine: Statement of Policy, July 1937, Cmd. 5513. 237 See D. Popper, ‘Liquidating the Palestine Mandate’, 13 Foreign Policy Reports, No. 16 (1 November 1937) 238 Palestine Partition Commission: Terms of Reference, Cmd. 5634 (4 January 1938). 239 Report of the Palestine Partition Commission, Cmd. 5854 (1938). 240 Wasserstein, Britain and the Jews of Europe, ch. 18, n. 231. See also Palestine: Statement by His Majesty’s Government, Cmd. 5893 (November 1938). 241 Rumbold to Tony Rumbold, 22 February 1939, 43/52 242 B. Litvinoff (ed.) Letters and Papers of Chaim Weizmann, vol. 6, 25; see also 81, 322, 341. 243 Rumbold to Tony Rumbold, 15 March 1939, 43/56. 244 Palestine: Statement of Policy, Cmd. 6019 (May 1939). 245 M. Jackson, A Scottish Life, 100–1, n. 219. 246 ‘Jews and the New State’, The Times, 22 May 1939. See generally M. Gilbert, Exile and Return: The Emergence of Jewish Statehood (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1978). 247 The Times, 24 May 1939, 17. 248 See 43/110, 115, 123; The Times, 1 August 1939, 13e; 10 August 1939, 11b; 7 September 1939, 5b; T. Sjöberg, The Powers and the Persecuted: The Refugee Problem, 1938–47 (Lund: Lund U. Press, 1991); ‘War Complicates Refugee Financing: Rumbold Chairs British Group; Coordinating Foundation Had Reached Last Barrier’, The Times, 20 October 1939, 9. 249 Report of the British Guiana Refugee Commission to the Advisory Committee on Political Refugees Appointed by the President of the United States, Cmd. 6014 (Report), 6029 (Appendices) (May 1939). 250 J. Charmley, Lord Lloyd and the Decline of the British Empire (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1987), 207–8. 251 Id., 431. 252 Hankey to Wilson, 15 March 1938, Cabinet Papers 21/540, quoted in Gilbert, Sir Horace Rumbold, 433. 253 Rumbold to Tony Rumbold, 29 April 1938, 4l/. 254 Gilbert, Sir Horace Rumbold, 436. 255 Rumbold to Tony Rumbold, 20 August 1938, 42/. 256 Rumbold to Tony Rumbold, 6 September 1938, 42/.

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257 J. Harvey (ed.), The Diplomatic Diaries of Oliver Harvey, 1937–40 (London: Collins, 1970), 150, 152. 258 Rumbold to William Rumbold, 21 September 1938, 42/188. 259 Rumbold to William Rumbold, 22 September 1938, 42/191. 260 Lady Rumbold to Tony Rumbold, 2 October 1938, 42/199. 261 Gilbert, Sir Horace Rumbold, 438. 262 Rumbold to Constantia Rumbold, 18 February 1939, 43/49. 263 Rumbold to Churchill, Churchill Papers, CHAR 2/358A/40, reprinted in M. Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, Companion Vol. V, 1393. 264 Churchill to Rumbold, 19 March 1939, Churchill Papers, CHAR 2/358A/54, reprinted in M. Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, Companion Vol. V, 1398. 265 Rumbold to Tony Rumbold, 6 April 1939, 43/69. 266 Rumbold to Halifax, 28 March 1939, Halifax Papers, FO 800/315; Rumbold to Halifax, 1 July 1939, Halifax Papers, FO800/316 (draft), quoted in Gilbert, Sir Horace Rumbold, 434–5. 267 Rumbold to Tony Rumbold, 21 August 1939, 43/138. 268 H. Dalton, Memoirs, 1931–45 (London: Frederick Muller, 1957), 244 (entry for 4 April 1939). 269 Gilbert, Sir Horace Rumbold, 445. 270 Id., 446–7. 271 Id., 447. 272 Rumbold to Tony Rumbold, 28 September 1939. 273 Rumbold to Tony Rumbold, 6 December 1939, 43/189. 274 Rumbold to Tony Rumbold, 28 August 1940, 44/56. 275 Rumbold to Tony Rumbold, 8 October 1939, 43/170. 276 Rumbold to Henderson, 15 April 1940, Henderson Papers, FO 800/270, quoted in Gilbert, Sir Horace Rumbold, 449. 277 Id., 453–4. 278 Id., 454, and see 44/91. 279 Eden, Facing the Dictators, 602. 280 The Times, 31 May 1941. 281 Bruning to Lady Rumbold, 3 June 1941, 44/165. 282 J. Parker, Father of the House: Fifty Years in Politics (London: Routledge, 1982), 18. 283 P. Ziegler, Mountbatten (London: Collins, 1985), 407. 284 H. Hardy (ed.), Isaiah Berlin: Flourishing: Letters 1928–64 (London: Chatto & Windus, 2004), 377 (entry for 31 July 1941). 285 A. Duncan, The Reality of Monarchy (London: Heinemann, 1970), 247–61. 286 R. Bassett, ‘Foreign Office Pays Penalty for its Pension Rules: Emperor’s Portrait Up for Sale’, The Times, 9 July 1984, 1.

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F. Harris, Latest Contemporary Portraits (New York: Macaulay, 1927), 250. Id., 253. L. Cecil, The German Diplomatic Service, 1871–1914 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton U. Press, 1976), 93. Id., 217. J. Bernstorff, The Memoirs of Count Bernstorff (New York: Random House, 1936), 32. Id., 38. Id., 73. G. Kennan, The Decline of Bismarck’s European Order: France, Russia, and the Coming of the First World War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton U. Press, 1981). G. Kennan, Fateful Alliance: France, Russia, and the Coming of the First World War (New York: Pantheon, 1986).

240 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44

DIPLOMACY BETWEEN THE WARS Harris, Portraits, 257–8. Bernstorff, Memoirs, 50. Id., 71. Id., 93. Id., 94. R. Vansittart, Lessons of My Life (London: Hutchinson, 1943); see also Bernstorff to Bulow, 16 April 1904, no. XX, 19, in E. Dugdale (ed.), German Diplomatic Documents, 1871–1914, vol. 3 (London: Methuen, 1930). G. Ritter, The Sword and the Scepter: The Problem of Militarism in Germany, vol. 2 (Coral Gables, FL: U. of Miami Press, 1970), 145. Wolf to Bernstorff, 20 February 1904; and see Bernstorff to Wolf, 22 February 1904, Lucien Wolf Papers, nos. 1840, 1842, folder 23, record group 348, microfilm MK 502. Wolf to Sir Eric Barrington, 30 November 1914, no. 1891 in id. See also nos. 1892– 1917. Mensdorff to Berchtold, quoted in H. Young, Prince Lichnowsky and the Great War (Athens, GA: U. of Georgia Press, 1977), 46. Bernstorff, Memoirs, 103 Id., 104. C. de Gaulle, The Enemy’s House Divided (trans. R. Eden), (Chapel Hill, NC: U. of North Carolina Press, 2002), 99. J. Bishop, Theodore Roosevelt and His Time, Shown in his Own Letters (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1920), 286 (entry for 6 May 1908). R. Pound and G. Harmsworth, Northcliffe (London: Cassell, 1959), 422–3. Bernstorff to Bethmann-Hellweg, 21 July 1911, in Dugdale (ed.), German Diplomatic Documents, vol. 4 (London: Methuen, 1930), 29 (doc. no. XXII, 233). Bernstorff, Memoirs, 123. B. Hendrick (ed.), Life and Letters of Walter Hines Page, vol. 1 (London, Heinemann, 1924), 402 (entry for September 3, 1914). Id., 410, Page to House, 10 September 1914. E. Spears, Liaison 1914: A Narrative of the Great Retreat (London: Eyre & Spottiswood, 1930), 469. ‘Bernstorff, the most conspicuous member of the diplomatic corps at Washington’, 59 Current Opinion 19 (July 1915). B. Lennox (ed.), Diary of Lord Bertie of Thame, vol. 1 (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1924), 353 (entry for May/June 1916). D. Lloyd-George, War Memoirs (London: Odham, 1936), 1004–5. C. de Chambrun, Shadows Like Myself (New York: Scribner, 1936), 197–8. Fisher to Mrs. R.W. Lovett, 7 October 1914, in A. Marder (ed.), Fear God and Dread Nought: The Correspondence of Lord Fisher, vol. 3 (London: Cape, 1959), 62. Page to House, 12 November 1915. Grey to Asquith, 12 May 1914, quoted in K. Robbins, Sir Edward Grey (London: Cassell, 1977), 316; and see H. Lasswell, Propaganda Technique in World War I (London: Kegan Paul, 1927), 34–7, 140, 148–57. Spring-Rice to Grey, 22 September 1914, quoted in G. Trevelyan, Grey of Fallodon (London: Longman, 1937), 304. Spring-Rice to Grey, 5 December 1917, in S. Gwynn (ed.), The Letters and Friendships of Sir Cecil Spring-Rice: A Record, vol. 2 (London: Constable, 1929), 358. J. Wheeler-Bennett, The Nemesis of Power: The German Army in Politics (London: Macmillan, 2nd ed. 1964), 85, n. 2. Bernstorff to Bethmann-Hellweg, 26 August 1916, in ‘German Plotting in America: Bernstorff Disclosure’, The Times, 27 February 1919, 9. J. Bernstorff, My Three Years in America (London: Skeffington, 1920). Id., 11. Id., 16. Id., 17.

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68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83

241

Id., 19. Id., 28. Id., 91. F. Von Papen, Memoirs (London: André Deutsch, 1952), 34. Holmes to Pollock, 12 October 1917; M. Howe (ed.), Holmes-Pollock Letters, vol. 1 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard U. Press, 1961) 248. See generally J. Witcover, Black Tom: Imperial Germany’s Secret War in America, 1914–1917 (Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin, 1989), ch. 6. Von Papen, Memoirs, 45. Witcover, Black Tom, 128–9. Id., 47; see also F. Von Rinteln, The Dark Invader (London: Lovat Dickson, 1933), 83–4. Id., 50; see also Brewing and Liquor Interests and German and Bolshevist Propaganda, Hearings before a Subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee, 65th Congress, 2nd Session. Id., 116. Von Papen, Memoirs, 42. Harris, Portraits, 262. C. Cruttwell, A History of the Great War 1914–1918 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1934), 379. Id., 146; see also Page to House, 26 August 1915, in Kendrick, Life and Letters, and a subsequent pledge (the so-called ‘Sussex pledge’) ‘to suspend the submarine war at least for the period of negotiations’, Kendrick, 149–50 (entry for April 26, 1916). Spring-Rice to Dominick Spring-Rice, 17 September 1915, in Gwynn (ed.), Letters and Friendships, vol. 2, 286. Spring-Rice to Grey, 13 January 1916, in id., 308–9. Bernstorff, Memoirs, 174. Id., 190. Id., 130. Vansittart, Lessons, 253, n. 15. Lloyd-George, War Memoirs, vol. 1, 978. Quoted in F. Fischer, Germany’s Aims in the First World War (London: Chatto & Windus, 1967), 299; the attitude of the Allies, as described by Page, was equally unhelpful: ‘The Entente powers cannot make peace without victory.’ Kendrick, vol. 2, 214. W. Calder and C. Sutton (eds.), The Memoirs of Prince Max of Baden, vol. 1 (London: Constable, 1928), 62–4. Grey of Fallodon, Twenty-Five Years, 1892–1916, vol. 2 (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1925), 131. Summarised in Witcover, Black Tom, 206–7. Lloyd-George, War Memoirs, vol. 1 (London: Odham, 1936), 666. W. Sharp, The War Memoirs of William Graves Sharp (London: Constable, 1931), 164. Harris, Portraits, 269. Quoted in V. Cowles, The Kaiser (London: Collins, 1963), 379. B. Tuchman, The Zimmermann Telegram (London: Constable, 1959), 125. G. Mallaby, From My Level: Unwritten Minutes (London: Hutchinson, 1965), 128. Quoted in Gwynn, Letters and Friendships, vol. 2, 379. P. Devlin, Too Proud to Fight: Woodrow Wilson’s Diplomacy (Oxford: Oxford U. Press, 1974), 641. Lloyd-George, War Memoirs, vol. 1, 983–5. See also Spring-Rice to Balfour, 23 February 1917, in Gwynn, Letters and Friendships, vol. 2, 381. J. Hammerton (ed.), A Popular History of the Great War, vol. 4 (London: Fleetway House, 1920), 93. Id., 305–7. Frederick Dixon to Balfour, 13 July 1917, Lloyd-George Papers, House of Lords Record Office, 111/1/34. Tuchman, Zimmermann Telegram, 125. Details of the interception were published in 1928;

242

84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125

DIPLOMACY BETWEEN THE WARS see W. Flynn, ‘Tapped Wires’, Liberty, 2 June 1928. The recordings are said to be with the Frank L. Polk Papers at Yale University. N. Thwaites, Velvet and Vinegar (London: Grayson & Grayson, 1932), 140, 150ff, 170, 246. T. Cooper, Walter Hines Page: The Southerner as American (Chapel Hill, NC: U. of N. Carolina Press, 1977), 366. Harris, Portraits, 264–5. R. Vansittart, The Mist Procession (London: Hutchinson, 1958), 167–8. Cruttwell, History of the Great War, 379. Devlin, Too Proud to Fight, 150. Quoted in Witcover, Black Tom, 209–10. Tuchman, Zimmermann Telegram, 111. Bernstorff, Memoirs, 352. De Gaulle, Enemy’s House Divided, 2. J. Rohl (ed.), 1914: Delusion or Design: The Testimony of Two German Diplomats (London: Eleh, 1973), 73, n. 69. Bernstorff, Memoirs, 128. C. Barnett, The Collapse of British Power (London: Eyre Methuen, 1972), 560–72. L. Cecil, Albert Ballin: Business and Politics in Imperial Germany (Princeton, NJ: Princeton U. Press, 1967), 125. See the eulogy of Ballin by Bernsdorff: ‘Bernstorff, ein Lebensbild Albert Ballins’, 8 Deutsche Einheit 46 (13 November 1926), 1084–6. Id., 154. Boy-Ed to Chief of Admiralty Staff, 10 October 1917, quoted in J. Doerries, Imperial Challenge; Ambassador Count Bernstorff and German-American Relations, 1908–17 (trans. C. Shannon), (Chapel Hill, NC: U. of N. Carolina Press, 1989), 238, n. 37. Ritter, Sword and the Scepter, vol. 3, 483. J. Wheeler-Bennett, Hindenburg: The Wooden Titan (London: Macmillan, 1936), 107. Id., 155. Id., 154. Id., 176. Bernstorff, Memoirs 144–5, 156, 162, quoted in I. Friedman, Germany, Turkey and Zionism, 1897–1918 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1977), 411. Id., 178. Id., 180. Id., 187. Id., 188, Id., 194. Id., 196. Id., 202. See E. Weisband, Turkish Foreign Policy, 1943–45: Small State Diplomacy and Great Power Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton U. Press, 1973), 95–100. Friedman, Germany, Turkey and Zionism, 369. Id., 373. Id., 69. Id., 217, 226. Id., 418–19. See Von Papen, Memoirs, 76 (entry for 7 December 1917). Id., 205, 210–11. Bernstorff to Hertling, 30 March 1918, quoted in Friedman, Germany, Turkey and Zionism, 391. V. Dadvian, German Responsibility in the Armenia Holocaust: A Review of the Historical Evidence (Watertown, MA: Blue Crane, 1996), 230. Fischer, Germany’s Aims, 561. Ritter, Sword and the Scepter, vol. 4, 291–2. G. Dyer, ‘The Turkish armistice of 1918’, 8 Middle Eastern Studies 143, 313 (1972).

LEWIS NE OTES INSTEIN 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 169

243

Bernstorff, Memoirs, 243. Id., 244. Id., 246. A. Taylor, The Course of German History (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1945), 180. Bernstorff, Memoirs, 253. Book review, 157 The Spectator 646, 16 October 1936. Doerries, Imperial Challenge, 215. E. Eyck, A History of the Weimar Republic, vol. 1 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard U. Press, 1962), 95. Bernstorff, Memoirs, 253. Bernstorff to Maximilian Harden, 26 June 1919, quoted in Doerries, Imperial Challenge, 239, n. 48. Id., 258. Id., 259. R. Cooper, Failure of a Revolution: Germany in 1918–1919 (Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 1955), 279. Id., 265. F. Carsten, Britain and the Weimar Republic (London: Batsford, 1984), 75. Wheeler-Bennett, Hindenburg (London: Macmillan, 1936), 233. Eyck, History of the Weimar Republic, vol. 1, 139. J. Wheeler-Bennett, The Nemesis of Power: The German Army in Politics (London: Macmillan, 2nd ed. 1964), 68. See The Times, 9 June 1922, 16. Id. Book review, 14 American Political Science Review 736 (1920). Bernstorff, Memoirs, 173. Book review, 14 American Political Science Review 736 (1920). Book review, 36 Political Science Quarterly 707 (1921). C. Gauss, book review, 3 Review 190 (1 September 1920). E. Sperry, book review, 26 American Historical Review 99 (1920). Book review, Boston Transcript, 10 July 1920, 6. Book review, Springfield Republican, 9 August 1920, 6. N. Hapgood, book review, 111 Nation 132 (1920). Book review, New York Times, 4 July 1920, 25. J. Bernstorff, ‘The New Diplomacy’, Neue Freie Presse, Vienna, 30 May 1920, reprinted in 306 Living Age 133 (17 July 1920). J. Bernstorff, ‘Harding and Germany’, in Die Hilfe, reprinted in 309 Living Age 263 (30 April 1921). B. Frye, Liberal Democrats in the Weimar Republic: The History of the German Democratic Party and the German State Party (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois U. Press, 1985), 124. Bernstorff, Memoirs, 219. Id., 272. Wheeler-Bennett, Nemesis of Power, 38. Taylor, Course of German History, 200. Bernstorff to Maximilien Harden, 5 July 1919, quoted in Doerries, Imperial Challenge, 240, n. 55. M. Eksteins, The Limits of Reason: The German Democratic Press and the Collapse of Weimar Democracy (Oxford: Oxford U. Press, 1975), 146. R. Clark: The Fall of the German Republic: A Political Study (London: Allen & Unwin, 1935), 73–4. H. Kissinger, Diplomacy (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994), 271. Id., 283. Taylor, Course of German History, 186, 193. Bernstorff, Memoirs, 285–8.

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170 H. Gordon, The Reichwehr and the Weimar Republic, 1919–26 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton U. Press, 1957). 171 B. Frye, Liberal Democrats in the Weimar Republic, 124, 219. 172 Bernstorff, Memoirs, 290–1. 173 Devlin, Too Proud To Fight, 149. 174 J. Bernstorff, ‘As between Ambassadors’, Das Demokratische Deutschland, Hamburg, 6 January 1923, reprinted in 316 Living Age 441 (24 February 1923). 175 Bernstorff, Memoirs, 134. 176 Book review, Times Literary Supplement, 10 October 1936, 801. 177 J. Bernstorff, ‘Germany and the League’, 2 Foreign Affairs 390 (1923). 178 Taylor, Course of German History, 196. 179 Von Papen, Memoirs, 55; for other references to this allegation, see Doerries, Imperial Challenge; Witcover, Black Tom, 155–60. 180 Leading article, The Times, 9 July 1926. 181 G. Murray, letter, ‘Count Bernstorff and the League’, The Times, 13 July 1926, 19. 182 F. Walters, A History of the League of Nations, vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford U. Press, 1952), 151. 183 Bernstorff, Memoirs, 299. 184 Id., 309. 185 Id., 311. 186 R. Divine, Roosevelt and World War II (Baltimore, MD: Penguin, 1970). 187 Eyck, History of the Weimar Republic, vol. 1, 319–20. 188 Taylor, Course of German History, 201. 189 Bernstorff, Memoirs, 333–4. 190 H. Lavsky, Before Catastrophe: The Distinctive Path of German Zionism (Detroit, IL: Wayne State U. Press, 1996), 100; J. Walk, ‘Das deutsche Komitee pro Palestina, 1926–33’, 52 Bulletin des Leo Baeck Institut 162, 169, 169, n. 4, 174, 180, 180, nn. 57–8, 186–7, 191 (1976); Weizmann to Friedrich Sthamer, 9 November 1927, in B. Litvinoff (ed), Letters and Papers of Chaim Weizmann, vol. 13 (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1979), 316. 191 ‘Says Germany Backs Palestine Movement: Count von Bernstorff Declares the Government and Public Opinion United on the Plan’, New York Times, 21 February 1930, 6. 192 Bernstorff to Hertling, 20 July 1918, in Friedman, Germany, Turkey and Zionism, 408–9. 193 Bernstorff, Memoirs, 336. 194 C. Webster, The League of Nations in Theory and Practice (London: Allen & Unwin, 1933), 189–90. 195 F. Walters, A History of the League of Nations, vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford U. Press, 1952), 440. 196 ‘German Scheme for Disarmament: Limitation of Material’, The Times, 27 April 1927, 13. 197 J. Wheeler-Bennett, Disarmament and Security Since Locarno, 1925–31 (London: Allen & Unwin, 1932), 73. 198 W. Rappard, The Quest for Peace Since the First World War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard U. Press, 1940), 383. 199 Leading article, ‘Regenerating the Reich’, The Times, 11 January 1928, 13. 200 Rumbold to Foreign Office, 18 January 1929 in Documents on British Foreign Policy, 1919– 39, vol. 6, Series 1a, No. 48 201 Bernstorff, Memoirs, 352. 202 ‘Aerial Warfare: German Proposal Outvoted’, The Times, 25 April 1929, 15. 203 A. Toybee (ed.), Survey of International Affairs, 1930 (Oxford: Oxford U. Press, 1931), 121–2. 204 Walters, History of the League of Nations, vol. 1, 440. 205 Id., 441. 206 Wheeler-Bennett, Disarmament and Security, 99. 207 Bernstorff, Memoirs, 346. See also Walters, History of the League of Nations, vol. 1, 440. 208 Rappard, Quest for Peace, 397.

LEWIS NE OTES INSTEIN 209 210 211 212 213 214 215 216 217 218 219 220 221 222 223 224 225 226 227 228 229 230 231 232 233 234 235 236

237

245

Kissinger, Diplomacy, 256, 277, 279–83. Id., 342–3. Id., 291–2. Id., 343. DBFP, Series 1a, vol. 6, nos. 381, 423. Wheeler-Bennett, Disarmament and Security, 89. Rappard, supra, 397. R. Cecil, A Great Experiment (London: Cape, 1941), 212–13. A. Von Dirksen, Moscow, Tokyo, London: Twenty Years of German Foreign Policy (London: Hutchinson, 1951), 246. J. Wheeler-Bennett, Disarmament Deadlock (London: Routledge, 1932), 6, 55. ‘Count Bernstorff: A Diplomat’s Memoirs’, The Times, 9 October, 1936, 6. J. Wheeler-Bennett, Disarmament Deadlock, 102. G. Kennan, Realities of American Foreign Policy (New York: Oxford U. Press, 1954), 20–1. Book review, Times Literary Supplement, 10 October 1936, 801. ‘A World Library at Geneva: Count von Bernstorff’s Collection Is to be Used by Summer Students of Political Affairs’, New York Times, 14 August 1932, VIII, 5:4. Bernstorff, Memoirs, 16–17. Id., 27 Id., 136. F. Butcher, book review, Chicago Daily Tribune, 10 October 1936. O. Villard, book review, 143 Nation 488 (24 October 1936). ‘Bernstorff Widow is Dead in Capital’, New York Times, 27 April 1943. ‘Bernstorff’s Wife Again U.S. Citizen’, New York Times, 28 May 1939, 13. ‘Von Bernstorff Dead in Geneva’, New York Times, 7 October 1939. Harris, Portraits, 264–5. Doerries, Imperial Challenge. ‘Mrs. Bernstorff Returns “To Die”’, New York Times, 15 October 1941. The Times, 15 October 1941, 3. ‘Berlin Society Scandal: Bernstorff Libel Case Opened’, The Times, 28 May 1918, 5. See also ‘Bernstorff’s Son Sued for Alleged Slander’, New York Times, 6 April 1918, 8; ‘Son of Bernstorff in Court Over Wife’, New York Times, 28 May 1918, 13. After an affair with Marguerite Vivienne Burton, the previously married American wife of an officer named Von Radeck, Bernstorff secured her divorce and married her. The episode was ‘said to be the first time a Prussian officer has declined to settle an affair of this kind by means of a duel’. Günther Bernstorff’s marriage in turn ended in divorce in December 1924; his wife then acquired as her fourth husband an American businessman several decades her senior, A. Wooley Hart, who died in 1941. She retained her title of Countess von Bernstorff, and was a leader of society in Bermuda. See New York Times, 28 February 1928, 17; ‘A. Wooley Hart, Coal Operator, 81’, New York Times, 27 November, 1941, 23. See Doerries, Imperial Challenge, 236, n. 16. While Bernstorff was Ambassador, Günther had worked for the New York office of Speyer & Co, which Bernstorff used as a depository for German propaganda funds; see Doerries, 248, n. 55; Spring-Rice to Tyrell, 27 January 1914, in Gwynn, Letters and Friendships of Sir Cecil Spring-Rice, vol. 2, 199, 201. Sir Edgar Speyer, the head of the London office of Speyer & Co, had his British naturalisation revoked and was deprived of his membership of the Privy Council (though not his hereditary knighthood) as a result of his refusal to answer questions about these activities. The then Lord Chief Justice, Lord Reading, refused to receive Lewis Speyer when Reading visited New York in December 1915: ‘He knew him to be the tool, if not the spy, of Bernstorff, and that was enough for him.’ See A. Fitzroy [Secretary to the Privy Council], Memoirs (London: Hutchinson, 1925), 613–14, 770. Subsequently, Günther married twice more, leaving no heirs. He died in Rio de Janeiro in 1947. K. Young (ed.), Diaries of Robert Bruce Lockhart, 1915–38, vol. 1 (London: Macmillan, 1973), 782.

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238 Harold Nicolson, obituary, 175 Spectator 126 (1945). 239 J. Lees-Milne, Harold Nicolson, vol. 2 (London: Chatto & Windus, 1980), 333.

Chapter 4 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36

M. Gallo, Mussolini’s Italy: Twenty Years of the Fascist Era (London: Abelard-Schuman, 1973), 81. The English and French drafts, the latter with emendations by Sforza, are in the Sforza archive at the Archivio Centrale di Stato in Rome (hereafter ‘Sforza archive’ ), Box 10, Turkey file. A. Montgomery, ‘Lloyd-George and the Greek Question, 1918–22’, in A. Taylor (ed.), Lloyd-George: Twelve Essays (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1971), 257, 272. C. Sforza, Contemporary Italy (New York: Dutton, 1943), 273. C. Repington, After the War (London: Constable, 1922), 5. See generally C. Sforza, Diplomatic Europe Since the Treaty of Versailles (New Haven, CT: Yale U. Press, 1928), 51–66. E. Vere-Hodge, Turkish Foreign Policy, 1918–1948 (Ambilly-Annemasse: Imprimerie Franco-Suisse, 1950), 34. R. Seton-Watson, Italy from Liberalism to Fascism, 1870–1925 (London: Methuen, 1967), 556. S. Deringil, Turkish Foreign Policy During the Second World War (Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 1989), 70. Id., 38. Id., 65. R. Hovannisian, The Republic of Armenia, (Berkeley, CA: U. of California Press, 1996), vol. 2, 424. Documents on British Foreign Policy, 1919–1939, vol. XV, 30. D. Wilder, The Chanak Affair (London: Hutchinson, 1968), 105, 117. Hovannisian, Republic of Armenia, vol. 3, 110. Id., 59. Id., 55. Id., 66. D’Abernon, An Ambassador of Peace (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1930), 59. Seton-Watson, Italy from Liberalism to Fascism, 578. Memorandum, 22 September 1922, Sforza archive, Box 10. Id., 68, 187–9, 202. L. Caldwell (ed.), Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson: His Life and Diaries (London: Thornton, Butterworth, 1939), 271. Repington, After the War, 14–17, n. 5. Id., 156. I. Brown, Observer Profiles (London: Allen Wingate, 1948), 42 ff. M. Macartney and P. Cremona, Italy’s Foreign and Colonial Policy, 1914–1937 (New York: Oxford U. Press, 1937), 88. Id., 88–95. Sforza, Contemporary Italy, 187. H. Hughes, ‘The early diplomacy of Italian Fascism, 1922–1932’, in G. Craig and F. Gilbert, The Diplomats, 1919–1939, vol. 1 (New York: Atheneum, 1971), 210, 212–13. Quoted in Lord Riddell’s Intimate Diary of the Peace Conference and After, 1918–1923 (London: Gollancz, 1933), 275. Macartney and Cremona, Italy’s Foreign and Colonial Policy, 192–3. M. Di Casola, ‘Italy and the Treaty of Lausanne’, in 1993 Turkish Yearbook of International Affairs 65, 75, nn. 46–8, and authorities there cited. Seton-Watson, Italy from Liberalism to Fascism, 579. G. Pini, The Official Life of Benito Mussolini (London: Heinemann, 1939), 106. Gallo, Mussolini’s Italy, 122, n. 1. Id., 284–5.

LEWIS NE OTES INSTEIN 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86

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Seton-Watson, Italy from Liberalism to Fascism, 580. Id., 162. The Italian text of the telegram appears in C. Sforza, Pensier e Azione di una Political Estera Italiana (Bari: Gius Laterza e Figli, 1924), 282. Di Casola, ‘Italy and the Treaty of Lausanne’, 65, 67, n. 8, and references cited. B. Mussolini, Autobiography (New York: Scribners, 1926). Id., 187–8. Id., 195. C. Delzell, Mussolini’s Enemies: The Italian Anti-Fascist Resistance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton U. Press, 1961), 55. Id., 67. C. Sforza, ‘Fascism and Bolshevism: a legend’, 140 Contemporary Review 318 (1931). C. Sforza, ‘The Fascist decade’, 11 Foreign Affairs 107 (1932). C. Sforza, ‘How we lost the war with Turkey’, 132 Contemporary Review 583 (1927). C. Sforza, ‘Italians and Yugoslavs’, 150 Contemporary Review 319 (1936). C. Sforza, ‘Sonnino and his foreign policy’, 136 Contemporary Review 721 (1929). C. Sforza, ‘Italy and the Yugoslav idea’, 16 Foreign Affairs (1937). C. Sforza, Diplomatic Europe Since the Treaty of Versailles (New Haven, CT: Yale U. Press, 1928) Id., 9–10. Id., 50. J. Roth, The Radetsky March (London: Penguin, 1995); Hotel Savoy (London: Chatto & Windus, 1986) Id., 80. Id., 96–7. C. Sforza, ‘Panarabism and Zionism’, 148 Contemporary Review 208 (1935). C. Sforza, ‘The Near East in world politics’, in P. Ireland (ed.), The Near East: Problems and Prospects (Chicago, IL: U. of Chicago Press, 1942). C. Sforza, Makers of Modern Europe (London: Elkin Mathews & Marrot, 1930). Book review, Times Literary Supplement, 16 October 1930, 829. Sforza, Makers of Modern Europe, 4, n. 9. Id., 5. Id., 22. Id., 28. Id., 39. Id., 50–1. Id., 65. Id., 90. Id., 99. Id., 107. Id., 115. Id., 122. Id., 132. Id., 153. Id., 169. Id., 177. Id., 186. Id., 194. Id., 196. Id., 207. Id., 215. Id., 224. Id., 245. Id., 256–7. Id., 268. Id., 272.

248 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134

DIPLOMACY BETWEEN THE WARS Id., 280. Id., 283. Id., 312. Id., 313. Id., 322. Id., 331–2. Id., 335. Id., 340–1. J. Lukacs, Democracy and Populism: Fear and Hatred (New Haven, CT: Yale U. Press, 2005), 93. Sforza, Makers of Modern Europe, 363–4. Id., 372. Id., 377. Id., 398. C. Sforza, European Dictatorships (London: Allen and Unwin, 1932). Id., 6. Id., 251. Quoted in Current Biography (1942), 756. Sforza, European Dictatorships, 10. Id., 44–5. Id., 122. Id., 140. Id., 144. Id., 146–7. Id., 148. Id., 175. Id., 205. Id., 225. Id., 236. Sforza to Einstein, 31 August 1935, Einstein Papers, University of Wyoming, 3/13. J. Amery, Approach March: A Venture in Autobiography (London: Hutchinson, 1973), 82. Delzell, Mussolini’s Enemies, 189 Quoted in J. Tournoux, Pétain and de Gaulle (London, Heinemann, 1966), 109–10. Gallo, Mussolini’s Italy, 315, n. 1. C. Sforza, ‘Italian neutrality, 1914 and 1939’, 157 Contemporary Review 404 (1940). Sforza to Welles, 19 June 1941, at www.gutenberg-e-org/osc01/images/osc05ab.html. C. Sforza, ‘War legends: Italy and the Triple Alliance’, 142 Contemporary Review 686 (1932). See also C. Sforza, ‘The Vatican and the World War’, 151 Contemporary Review 696 (1937). C. Sforza, ‘Legend of Italian scepticism’, 145 Contemporary Review 438 (*1934). C. Roberts, Sunshine and Shadow, 1930–46 (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1972), 253–4. L. Fermi, Illustrious Immigrants: The Intellectual Migration from Europe, 1930–41 (Chicago, IL: U. of Chicago Press, 1968), 118. H. Ickes, Secret Diary, vol. 3 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1955), 319–20, 462–5 (entries for 15 September 1940 and 6 April 1941). Id. (entry for 12 April 1941). M. Freedman, Roosevelt and Frankfurter: Their Correspondence, 1928–45 (London: Bodley Head, 1967), 567. Brown, Observer Profiles, 42 ff. L. Lochner (ed.), Goebbels’ Diaries (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1948), 100 (entry for 26 March 1942). J. Miller, The United States and Italy, 1940–1950: The Politics and Diplomacy of Stabilization (Chapel Hill, NC: U. of N. Carolina Press, 1986), ix. ‘Free Italians: New Organization in Uruguay’, The Times, 17 August 1942. Sforza to Einstein, 30 September 1942, Einstein Papers, University of Wyoming, 4/14. See Nazioni Unite, weekly publication of the Mazzini Society (New York, 1942–6).

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135 Fermi, Illustrious Immigrants, 119. 136 C. Sforza, ‘Italy and her neighbors after the war’, 22 Foreign Affairs 106 (1943). 137 C. Sforza, ‘Totalitarian war and the fate of democracy’, 216 Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 65 (1941). 138 C. Sforza, ‘The diplomatic debacle: London and Paris before Munich’, 218 Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 36 (1941). 139 Sforza to Einstein, 8 March (n.d.), Einstein Papers, University of Wyoming, 4/14. 140 Sforza to Einstein, 19 November (n.d.), Einstein Papers, University of Wyoming, 4/14. 141 J. Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism: The View from America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton U. Press, 1972), 179 142 Miller, United States and Italy, 27. 143 Id., 257, 414 144 C. Sforza, ‘What free Italians think’, New Republic (9 August 1943), 189 145 Miller, 416, n. 142. 146 C. Sforza, The Totalitarian War and After (Chicago, IL: U. of Chicago Press, 1941). 147 C. Sforza, ‘The dilemna of the Fascists’, from Il Mundo, New York, in 359 Living Age 32 (1940). 148 L. Kinloch, 66 Library Journal 793 (15 September 1941). 149 Book review, 34 Commonweal 619 (17 October 1941) 150 L. Fernsworth, book review, New York Times, 26 October 1941, 3. 151 Einstein to Winant, 8 June 1942, Einstein Papers, University of Wyoming, 3/26. 152 Sforza to Einstein, 25 February 1943, Einstein Papers, University of Wyoming, 4/14. 153 Sforza to Welles, 21 November 1942, at www.gutenberg-e.org/osc01/images/osc05afa.html. 154 Einstein to Daily Telegraph, 11 December 1942, Einstein Papers, University of Wyoming, 3/26. 155 Miller, United States and Italy, 29–30, 43–5, and sources there cited. 156 See H. Tittman, Inside the Vatican of Pius XII (New York: Doubleday, 2004). 157 New York Times, 30 July 1943, set out in article form under the title ‘Sforza for Urging Italy to Join U.S.’ 158 Sforza to Hull, 30 July 1943, Hull papers, Library of Congress, 59. 159 W. Churchill, Closing the Ring (London: Cassell, 1951), 59, quoted in J. Burns, Roosevelt: The Soldier of Freedom (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1971), 391. 160 Hull, memorandum of conversation, 16 August 1943, Hull papers, Library of Congress, 59/30/563. 161 Sforza to Hull, 30 September 1943, in L. Zeno, Il Conte Sforza: Ritratto di un Grande Diplomatico (Firenze: Le Monnier, 1999), 408. 162 The letter appears in W. Kimball (ed.), Churchill and Roosevelt: The Complete Correspondence, vol. 3 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton U. Press, 1984), 439–40, and in Parliamentary Debates (Commons) for 8 December 1944. 163 Steed to Einstein, 18 January 1943, Einstein Papers, University of Wyoming, 3/27. 164 ‘Sforza’, New Yorker, 18 September 1943, 21. 165 Churchill to Eden, 9 September 1943. 166 Roosevelt to Churchill, 25 September 1943, CHAR 20/119/10; 28 September 1943, CHAR 20/119/42. 167 Roosevelt to Churchill, 30 September 1943, CHAR 20/119/62. 168 D. Dilks (ed.), Diaries of Sir Alexander Cadogan, 1938–45 (London: Cassell, 1971), 564, 566. 169 Quoted in H. Coles and A. Weinberg, Civil Affairs: Soldiers Become Governors (Washington, DC: Center of Military History, U.S. Army, 1964), 429. It was said that Sforza gave the British ‘good advice, which they failed to follow’; Miller, United States and Italy, 58, citing a minute by Anthony Rumbold, 1 October 1943, FO 371/37290.R9457. 170 PREM 3/243/8, 21 October 1943 and PREM 3/243/5, 25 October 1943, quoted in C. Ponting, Churchill (London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1994). 171 R. Murphy, Diplomat Among Warriors (London: Collins, 1964), 249. 172 J. Harvey (ed.), War Diaries of Oliver Harvey 1941–45 (London: Collins, 1978), 303.

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173 Id., 305. 174 E. Butler, Mason-Mac: The Life of Lieutenant-General Sir Noel Mason-Macfarlane (London: Macmillan, 1972), 170. 175 Id., 170. 176 Coles and Weinberg, Civil Affairs, quoting Taylor to Eisenhower, 15 October 1943. 177 C. de Gaulle, Unity 1942–44 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1959), 196–7. 178 Id., 179; see also A. Crawley, De Gaulle (London: Collins, 1969), 262–3. 179 Sforza to Einstein, 9 October 1943, Einstein Papers, University of Wyoming, 3/27. 180 Coles and Weinberg, Civil Affairs, 431, citing Mason-Macfarlane to Eisenhower, 26 October 1943 and 2 November 1943. 181 Id., 432, quoting Mason-Macfarlane to Eisenhower, 6 November 1943. 182 Sforza to Einstein, 13 October 1943, Einstein Papers, University of Wyoming, 3/27. 183 Eisenhower to Roosevelt, 10 November 1943, in The Papers of Dwight D. Eisenhower: The War Years, vol. 3 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins U. Press, 1970), 1556. 184 H. Macmillan, The Blast of War, 1939–45 (London: Macmillan, 1967), 732. 185 Eisenhower to Mason-Macfarlane, 1 November 1943, in Papers of Dwight D. Eisenhower. 186 Rumbold minute, 9 December 1943, FO 371/37296/R12803, quoted in Miller, United States and Italy, 77–8. 187 Sforza to Partido d’Azione, 17 June 1943, in Zeno, Il Conte Sforza, 408. 188 Sforza to Reale and di Nobili, 3 July 1943, in Zeno, Il Conte Sforza, 409. 189 Quoted in R. Mayne, ‘Schuman, De Gasperi, Spaak: the European frontiersmen’, in M. Bond, J. Smith and W. Wallace (eds.), Eminent Europeans: Personalities Who Shaped Contemporary Europe (London: Greycoat, 1996), 33. 190 P. Badoglio, Italy in the Second World War: Memories and Documents (Oxford: Oxford U. Press, 1948), 109. 191 Macmillan, Blast of War, 1939–45, 462. 192 De Gaulle, Victory, 1944–46 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1960), 19 (entry for 22 January 1944). 193 Sforza to Eden, 20 December 1943, in Zeno, Il Conte Sforza, 440. 194 A. Horne, Harold Macmillan, vol. 1 (London: Macmillan, 1988), 202. 195 A. Moorehead, Eclipse (London: Granta, 2000), 66. 196 See G. Dallas, 1945 (New Haven, CT: Yale U. Press, 2005), 434–4. 197 Lochner, Goebbels’ Diaries, 409–10 (entry for 9 November 1943). 198 Id., 410 (entry for 15 November 1943). 199 C. Harris, Allied Military Administration of Italy, 1943–45 (London: HMSO, 1957), 135. 200 Coles and Weinberg, Civil Affairs, 433. 201 See Zeno, Il Conte Sforza, 411. 202 Sforza and Croce to Eden, Hull and Molotov, 31 January 1944, in Zeno, Il Conte Sforza, 417–18. 203 Id., 439–40. 204 Mason-Macfarlane to Churchill, 17 February 1944, CHAR 20/157/41. 205 Churchill to Roosevelt, 9 February 1944, CHAR 20/156/74. Sforza’s letter to Berle of 23 September 1943 appears in Zeno, Il Conte Sforza, 410. He does not pledge support for the King, though declaring that: ‘Matters of internal Italian politics can and should be adjourned for the period of the struggle.’ 206 Sforza and Croce to Reale, 10 February 1944, in Zeno, Il Conte Sforza, 419–21. 207 Sforza and Croce to Churchill, 23 February 1944, in Coles and Weinberg, Civil Affairs, 443. 208 Churchill to Roosevelt, 8 March 1944, in id., 444. 209 FO371/43814/R1646, 2 and 4 February 1944, quoted in Miller, United States and Italy, 81. 210 Coles and Weinberg, Civil Affairs, 449. 211 Churchill to Macmillan, 8 April 1944, CHAR 20/161/53; Macmillan to Churchill, 7 April 1944, CHAR 20/167/48. 212 C. Hull, Memoirs, vol. 2 (Hodder and Stoughton, 1948), 1556. 213 Mason-Macfarlane to AFHQ, 21 April 1944, in Coles and Weinberg, Civil Affairs, 450–1. 214 Sforza to Richard Bauer, 3 June 1944, id., 451

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215 Butler, Mason-Mac, 163–5. 216 Charles to Churchill, 22 April 1944, CHAR 20/113/17; Churchill to Macmillan, 30 April 1944, CHAR 20/164/15. 217 Dilks (ed.), Diaries of Sir Alexander Cadogan, 637 (entry for 10 June 1944). 218 Macmillan, Blast of War, 501, n. 184. 219 Id., 462. 220 Churchill to Charles, 24 June 1944, CHAR 20/167/66; Charles to Churchill, 27 June 1944, CHAR 20/167/79. 221 Hull, Memoirs, vol. 2, 1563, n. 212. 222 E. Barber, Churchill and Eden at War (London: Macmillan, 1978), 177. 223 Mason-Macfarlane to AFHQ, 9 June 1944, in Coles and Weinberg, Civil Affairs, 464. 224 Barber, Churchill and Eden at War, 167. 225 Hull, Memoirs, vol. 2, 1556. 226 Churchill to Roosevelt, 12 June 1944, CHAR 20/167/96; Roosevelt to Churchill, 12 June 1944, CHAR 20/166 /106. 227 Hull, Memoirs, vol. 2, 1564 (entry for June 10, 1944). 228 Macmillan, Blast of War, 732, n. 184. 229 Sforza to Einstein, 9 September 1944, Einstein Papers, University of Wyoming, 3/28. 230 Taylor to Hull, 15 September 1944, forwarding a memorandum on Italian politics by the American musician Albert Spalding. 231 Sforza to Einstein, 24 November 1944, Einstein Papers, University of Wyoming, 3/28. 232 Barber, Churchill and Eden at War, 167. 233 Churchill to Roosevelt, 6 November 1944; id., 167. 234 Sforza to Einstein, 5 January l944, Einstein Papers, University of Wyoming, 3/28. 235 Churchill to Ambassador in Washington, 4 December 1944, CHAR 20/176/61. 236 Burns, Roosevelt, 391. 237 Miller, United States and Italy, 122–3. 238 Eleanor Roosevelt to FDR, 6 December 1944, quoted in J. Lash, Eleanor and Franklin (London: André Deutsch, 1972), 919. 239 Taylor to Roosevelt, 13 December 1944. 240 Badoglio, supra, 157. 241 Coles and Weinberg, Civil Affairs, 470–1. 242 United States Office of Strategic Services, R and A Branch No. 2688, Treatment of Former Fascists by the Italian Government: An Analysis of the Process of Defascistization in Italy from July 1943 to March 1945 (Washington: GPO, 1945). 243 Miller, United States and Italy, 135. 244 Coles and Weinberg, Civil Affairs, 472, reporting on a meeting with Sforza on 30 July 1944. 245 Harris, Allied Military Administration, 209. 246 Memorandum, 27 July 1945, in Coles and Weinberg, Civil Affairs, 476. 247 T. Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (New York: Penguin, 2005), 48. 248 R. Bosworth: Mussolini’s Italy: Life Under the Dictatorship, 1915–1945 (London: Allen Lane, 2005), 543–4. 249 Macmillan, Blast of War, 559, n. 191. 250 J. Barnes and D. Nicholson (eds.), The Empire at Bay: The Leo Amery Diaries 1929–45 (London: Hutchinson, 1988), 1021 (entry for 7 December 1944). 251 H. Macmillan, War Diaries: Politics and War in the Mediterranean, January 1943–May 1945 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1984), 258, 357. 252 Summary of Macmillan’s remarks to American and British correspondents in Rome, December 1944, in Coles and Weinberg, Civil Affairs, 512. 253 J. Colville, The Fringes of Power: Downing Street Diaries, 1939–55 (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1985). 254 R. Murphy, Diplomat Among Warriors (London: Collins, 1964), 268. 255 Quoted in V. Brittain, Pethick-Lawrence: A Portrait (London: Allen & Unwin, 1963), 119.

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256 I. Thomas, ‘The case of Count Sforza’, 167 Contemporary Review 71 (1945). 257 N. Nicolson (ed.), Harold Nicolson: Diaries and Letters, 1939–45 (London: Fontana, 1970), 421–2. 258 Coles and Weinberg, Civil Affairs, 506. 259 Barber, Churchill and Eden at War, 180–1. 260 W. Laqueur, Europe Since Hitler: The Rebirth of Europe (Harmondsworth: Penguin, rev. edn. 1982), 68. 261 J. Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism, 395. 262 E. Wiskemann, The Europe I Saw (London: Collins, 1968), 223. 263 Obituary, ‘Count Carlo Sforza: A Great European’, The Times, 5 September 1952, 7. 264 H. Michel, The Second World War (London: André Deutsch, 1975), 515. 265 Anthony Rumbold, minutes, 2 February 1944, FO371/43814/R1646, quoted in Miller, United States and Italy, 101. 266 R. Sencourt, ‘Count Sforza’, 183 Contemporary Review 11 (1953). 267 Stettinius to Truman, 13 April 1945; Kimball (ed.) Churchill and Roosevelt: The Complete Correspondence, vol. 3 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton U. Press, 1984), 633–6. 268 G. Kolko, The Politics of War: The World and U.S. Foreign Policy, 1943–45 (New York: Random House, 1968), 46. 269 Id., 59, n. 34. 270 F. Campbell and G. Herring (eds.), The Diaries of Edward R. Stettinius, Jr., 1943–46 (London: New Viewpoints, 1975), 182. 271 Id., 232. 272 Orme Sargent to Churchill, 23 October 1947, CHUR 2/57B. 273 C. Sforza, ‘Italy, the Third Force, and the Marshall Plan’, 26 Foreign Affairs 450 (1948). 274 Sforza to Einstein, 31 October 1949, Einstein Papers, University of Wyoming, 3/33. 275 A. Bullock, Ernest Bevin: Foreign Secretary (London: Heinemann, 1983), 536. 276 The text of the treaty is in J. Wheeler-Bennett and A. Nicholls, The Semblance of Peace: The Political Settlement After the Second World War (London: Macmillan, 1972), 657–709. 277 Miller, United States and Italy, 222. 278 His remarks at the ratification ceremony stressing the new long-term American commitment to European security appeared in the New York Times of 5 April 1949. 279 For the text, see Wheeler-Bennett and Nicholls, Semblance of Peace, 716–20; on Sforza’s initial attitude, see Miller, United States and Europe, 267 280 M. Del Pero, ‘Containing containment: rethinking Italy’s experience during the Cold War’, 8 Journal of Modern Italian Studies 548 (2003), 3; also published as Working Paper No. 2, The Cold War as Global Conflict, International Center for Advanced Studies, New York University (April 2002); quoted in K. Mistry, ‘The partnership between the Democrazia Cristina and the United States, 1947–48’, 49th Parallel: An Interdisciplinary Journal of North American Studies, Summer 2004, 12. 281 FRUS, 1948, III, 49–342; 1949, IV, 1–280; V, 125, cited in Del Pero, supra, 7. 282 Miller, United States and Italy, ix. 283 Del Pero, ‘Containing containment’, 20. 284 Brown, Observer Profiles, 42 ff. 285 See 1947 Foreign Relations of the United States (Washington: GPO, 1972), doc. 111, 254, n. 37. 286 W. Lipgens, A History of European Integration, 1945–47 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1982), 502. 287 H. Hughes, The United States and Italy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard U. Press, 1953), 251ff. 288 C. Esposito, America’s Feeble Weapon: Funding the Marshall Plan in France and Italy (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1994). 289 Del Pero, ‘Containing containment’, 6. 290 Id. 291 Sforza to Denver World Institute of 1951, Sforza archive, box 6, folder 29. 292 Judt, Postwar, 81–2. 293 Mistry, ‘Partnership’, 5.

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294 D. Acheson, Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1970), 328. 295 See Sforza to Acheson, 17 September 1950, in Zeno, Il Conte Sforza, 495–6: ‘Having fought so many years for a federated Europe, I saw it so near during your speech of last Friday, which contained more than it appeared.’ 296 Sforza to Einstein, 26 January [1949?], Einstein Papers, University of Wyoming, 4/16. 297 A. Varsori, ‘De Gasperi, Nenni, Sforza and their role in postwar Italian foreign policy’, in J. Becker and F. Knipping (eds.), Power in Europe? Great Britain, France, Italy and Germany in a Postwar World, 1945–50 (Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 1986), 89 ff. 298 FRUS, 1947, III, 784–8. 299 The Times, 11 May 1948, 3. 300 The Times, 6 November 1948, 3 (Greece); 19 November 1948, 3 (Austria). 301 Sforza to Einstein, 30 September [1949?], Einstein Papers, University of Wyoming, 4/16. 302 Quoted in Mayne, ‘Schuman, De Gasperi, Spaak’. 303 V. Mallet to Foreign Office, 1 June 1950, in R. Bullen and M. Pally (eds.), Documents on British Policy Overseas, vol. 1 (London: HMSO, 1974), Series 2, doc. 21. See generally E. Dell, The Schuman Plan and the British Abdication of Leadership in Europe (Oxford: Oxford U. Press, 1995). 304 K. Young, This Blessed Plot (London: Macmillan, 1998), 63–4. 305 Wheeler-Bennett, and Nicholls, Semblance of Peace, 447–50. 306 Memorandum on the Italian colonies, Sforza archive, Box 5, folder 22, pt. 4. 307 Harris, Allied Military Administration of Italy, 1943–45, 229, referring to a speech by Eden, in Parliamentary Debates (Commons), 8 January 1942. 308 Id., 672, 678, 723–4. 309 ‘Sforza’, New Yorker, 15 October 1949, 17. 310 Sforza archive, Box 4, folder 18. 311 Cox to Sforza, 4 October 1950, Sforza archive, Box 4, folder 18. 312 Sforza to Bevin, 23 March 1951, in Zeno, Il Conte Sforza, 504–6. 313 Sforza, memorandum, 24 August 1948, Sforza archive, Box 4, folder 128. 314 Id. 315 Book review, ‘Cinque anni a Palazzo Chigi’, Times Literary Supplement, 21 August 1953. 316 Sencourt, ‘Count Sforza’, n. 266. 317 Vansittart, Mist Procession. 318 Id., 281. Lord D’Abernon wrote of Rathenau: ‘Like Mephistopheles he had one dominant weakness, an egregious vanity – a determination, if he could not rule in heaven, to shine on earth.’ D’Abernon, An Ambassador of Peace (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1930). 319 ‘Sforza’, New Yorker, 15 October, 1949, 17. 320 ‘Count Carlo Sforza: A Great European’, The Times, 5 September 1952, 8. 321 Sencourt, ‘Count Sforza’. 322 Wiskemann, The Europe I Saw, 225–6. 323 Sencourt, ‘Count Sforza’. Obituaries of Sforza appear in: 27 U.S. Department of State Bulletin 405 (September 15, 1952); 60 Time 88 (15 September 1952); 40 Newsweek 71 (15 September 1952); The Times, 5 September 1952, 8. See also two Italian studies of Sforza: G. Giordino, Carlo Sforza: La Diplomazia, 1896–1921 (Milan: F. Angeli, 1987) and Zeno, Il Conte Sforza. 324 Welles to Einstein, 14 December 1948, Einstein Papers, University of Wyoming, 3/33. 325 Welles to Tachiani, 28 March 1949, Sforza archive, Box 4, correspondence file. 326 Sforza to Sumner Welles, 7 November 1950, Sforza archive, Box 9, folder 46. 327 Hughes, supra, 251. His son Sforzino (Galeazzo) Sforza was editor of European political affairs for the American National Broadcasting Company in 1941–2, and foreign press attaché to the Italian Prime Minister in 1945–6. After a period as a sculptor and magazine writer, he joined the Council of Europe in 1953 and held a number of high offices, including Deputy Secretary-General from 1968 until his death in 1977 at the age of 61. In 1951, Sforza noted with pleasure: ‘My son is well, and works hard for a united Europe.’ Sforza to Ermest Noth, Sforza archive, Box 5, correspondence file. Obituaries

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appeared in The Times and the New York Times for 29 December 1977; see also International Who’s Who (London: Europa, 1978), 1576. 328 Sforza to Kissinger, 29 February 1952, Sforza archive, Box 10, folder 48.

Chapter 5 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39

H. Armstrong, Grey Wolf: An Intimate Story of a Dictator (London: Arthur Barker, 1932), 234. M. Heper, Ismet Inonu: The Making of a Turkish Statesman (Leiden: Brill, 1998), 35. Id., 38. F. Vali, Bridge Across the Bosporus: The Foreign Policy of Turkey (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins U. Press, 1971), 84. A. Boyle, Trenchard (London: Collins, 1962), 442. F. Owen, Tempestuous Journey: Lloyd-George and His Times (London: Hutchinson, 1954), 652, quoting C. Harington, Tim Harington Looks Back (London: Murray, 1940). E. Inonu, Thoughts and Memories (typescript of English translation), ch. 1. D. Wilder, The Chanak Affair (London: Hutchinson, 1968), 358. V. Volkan and N. Itkowitz, Immortal Atatürk: A Psychobiography (Chicago, IL: U. of Chicago Press, 1984), 225. J. Grew, Turbulent Era: A Diplomatic Record of Forty Years, 1904–45, vol. 1 (London: Hammond, Hammond, 1953), 489. M. Dockrill, ‘Britain and the Lausanne conference, 1922–23’, 1993 Turkish Yearbook of International Relations, vol. 1, 2–3. Inonu, Memories and Reflections (English typescript), ch.1. L. Ronaldshay, Curzon, vol. 3 (London: Benn, 1928), 329, 342. Dockrill, ‘Britain and the Lausanne conference’, 7, 8, 16. W. Heinrich, American Ambassador: Joseph Grew (New York: Oxford U. Press, 1966), 97. Inonu, Memories and Reflections (English typescript), ch. 1. Heinrich, American Ambassador, 232. Lord Kinross, obituary, ‘Mr. Ismet Inonu: The Peace-winner at Lausanne’, The Times, 13 December 1973, 12. Inonu, Memories and Reflections (English typescript), ch. 1. G. Curzon, Reminiscences (London: Hutchinson, 1955), 166. N. Muir, Dimitri Stancioff: Patriot and Cosmopolitan, 1864–1940 (London: John Murray, 1957), 254. B. Clark, Twice a Stranger: How Mass Expulsion Forged Modern Greece and Turkey (London: Granta, 2006), xi–xii. Id., 4–5. Id., 106–7. Id., 23. Id., 44. Id., 94. Id., 59. Id., 69. Id., 95–7. Id., 149. Id., 170. Id., 173. Id. Inonu, Memories and Reflections (English typescript), ch. 1. J. Lees-Milne, Harold Nicholson, 1886–1929, vol. 1 (London: Chatto & Windus, 1980), 198. Dockrill, ‘Britain and the Lausanne conference’, 13. Heper, Ismet Inonu, 72. N. Henderson, Water Under the Bridges (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1965), 116.

LEWIS NE OTES INSTEIN 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51

52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81

255

P. Halpern (ed.), The Keyes Papers, vol. 2 (London: Allen & Unwin, 1980), 84. Keyes to Sir Ronald Lindsay, 10 September 1925, in id., vol. 3, 131–3. R. Keyes, Naval Memoirs: Scapa Flow to the Dover Straits, 1916–18 (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1935), 397–9; see also C. Aspinall-Oglander, Roger Keyes (London: Hogarth, 1951), 268. A. Taylor, English History, 1914–45 (Oxford: Oxford U. Press, 1965), 202. D. Basimevi, Histoire de la République Turque (Istanbul: Société pour l’étude de l’histoire turque, 1935), 64–65 Inonu, Memories and Reflections (English typescript), ch. 3. Bonar Law to Curzon, 8 January 1923, quoted in R. Blake, The Unknown Prime Minister (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1955), 488. S. Roskill, Hankey, vol. 2 (London: Collins, 1970), 326. F. Weber, The Evasive Neutral: Germany, Britain, and the Quest for a Turkish Alliance in the Second World War (Columbia, MO: U. of Missouri Press, 1979), 3. Clark, Twice a Stranger, 198. Republic of Turkey, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 70th Anniversary of the Lausanne Peace Treaty (Ankara: Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 1993), 1, 4, 8. Grew to Hughes, 6 August 1923, quoted in Grew, Turbulent Era, 601. See generally J. Vander Lippe, ‘The other Treaty of Lausanne’, 1993 Turkish Yearbook of International Relations, 31; E. Turlington, The American Treaty of Lausanne (Boston, MA: World Peace Foundation, 1924). K. Kruger, Kemalist Turkey and the Middle East (London: Allen & Unwin, 1932), 109. Weber, Evasive Neutral, 10–19 F. Walters, A History of the League of Nations, vol. 2 (Oxford: Oxford U. Press, 1952), 745. Armstrong, Grey Wolf, 238. Clark, Twice a Stranger, 194. Inonu, Memories and Reflections (English typescript), ch. 2. Armstrong, Grey Wolf, 334. ‘New Turkish Cabinet: Parting of Old Friends’, The Times, 10 November 1937, 13. Volkan and Itkowitz, Immortal Atatürk, 342. Clark, Twice a Stranger, 201. Republic of Turkey, 70th Anniversary, 40. D. Caclamanos, letter, ‘The Turkish President: Ismet Inönü’s Gifts’, The Times, 19 November 1938, 8. Armstrong, Grey Wolf, 170. Heper, Ismet Inonu, 80. H. Howard, ‘Atatürk’s successor: Inonu’ , 39 Asia 21 (1939). A. Eden, Facing the Dictators (London: Cassell, 1962). Weber, Evasive Neutral, 6. H. Knatchbull-Hugessen, Diplomat in Peace and War (London: Murray, 1949), 138. A. Mango, Atatürk (London: Murray, 1999). Id., 334. I. Shah, ‘The leaders of Turkey today’, 159 Contemporary Review 548 (1941). Republic of Turkey, 70th Anniversary, 18. Le Figaro, 25 July 1923, quoted by Erdal Inonu in Republic of Turkey, 70th Anniversary, 19. Republic of Turkey, 70th Anniversary, 29. Volkan and Itkowitz, Immortal Atatürk. Mango, Atatürk. For another generous appreciation, see M. Heper, ‘Ismet Inonu: a rationalistic democrat’, in M. Heper and S. Sayari (eds.), Political Leaders and Democracy in Turkey (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2002), 25–44. Knatchbull-Hugessen, Diplomat in Peace and War, 138. I. Grga and M. Grga, Atatürk (London: Joseph, 1962), 289 ff. FO 371/E7377/69/44. B. Rubin, Istanbul Intrigues (New York: McGraw Hill, 1989), 28.

256 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121

DIPLOMACY BETWEEN THE WARS M. Tamkoc, The Warrior Diplomats: Guardians of the National Security and Modernization of Turkey (Salt Lake City, UT: U. of Utah Press, 1976), 33. B. Lewis, The Emergence of Modern Turkey (Oxford: Oxford U. Press, 1961), 298 ff. Heper, Ismet Inonu, 183. Id, 50. N. Eren, Turkey Today and Tomorrow: An Experiment in Westernization (New York: Praeger, 1963). F. Frey, The Turkish Political Elite (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1965), 236; see also K. Gulek, ‘Democracy takes root in Turkey’, 30 Foreign Affairs 136 (1951). D. Rustow, ‘Modernization of Turkey’, in K. Karpat (ed.), Social Change and Politics in Turkey: A Structural and Historical Analysis (Leiden: Brill, 1973), 113. D. Rustow, Turkey: America’s Forgotten Ally (New York: Council on Foreign Relations Press, 1989), 130, n. 5. F. Vali, Bridge Across the Bosporus: The Foreign Policy of Turkey (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins U. Press, 1971), 83. I. Turan, ‘Politicians: populist democracy’, in M. Heper, A. Öncü and H. Kramer, Turkey and the West: Changing Political and Cultural Identities (London: I.B. Tauris, 1993), 132. C. Erogul, ‘The establishment of multiparty rule, 1945–7’, in I. Schick and E. Tonak, Turkey in Transition: New Perspectives (New York: Oxford U. Press, 1987), 102–3. R. Robinson, The First Turkish Republic: A Case History in National Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard U. Press, 1963), 142–3. Heper, Ismet Inonu, 208–9. Id., 213. Id., 220. Id., 47. N. Pope and H. Pope, Turkey Unveiled: A History of Modern Turkey (Woodstock, NY: Overbrook, 2004), 99. Tamkoc, Warrior Diplomats, 101. Pope and Pope, Turkey Unveiled, 116. Heper, Ismet Inonu, 25. E. Marsden, ‘Turks Accept Martial Law as Step to Stop the Drift to Anarchy’, The Times, 5 May 1971, 7. ‘Mr. Inonu Resigns as Party Chairman’, The Times, 9 May 1972, 6. ‘Turkey on Brink of Intervention by Military’, The Times, 6 November 1972, 7. Heper, Ismet Inonu, 19. ‘Turkish Crisis Grows after Senate Reject Compromise’, The Times, 26 March 1973, 1. See generally W. Weiker, The Modernization of Turkey: From Atatürk to the Present Day (London: Holmes and Meier, 1981). Heper, Ismet Inonu, 27. Id., 47–48. Id., 106. E. Vere-Hodge, Turkish Foreign Policy, 1918–1948 (Ambilly-Annemasse: Imprimerie Franco-Suisse, 1950), 188. Heper, Ismet Inonu, 173–4. M. Thornburg, Turkey: An Economic Appraisal (New York: Greenwood, 1968, repr. 1949), quoted in B. Lewis, The Emergence of Modern Turkey (Oxford: Oxford U. Press, 1961), 289. Armstrong, Grey Wolf, 259, 262. Grew, Turbulent Era, 871. Heper, Ismet Inonu, 52. Curzon to Ben Tillett, quoted in D. Dakin, Preface to Documents on British Foreign Policy, 1919–1939, First Series, vol. xviii, ix. ‘New Turkish Cabinet’, The Times, 10 November 1937, 13. Lewis, Emergence of Modern Turkey, 304. M. Hall, ‘Men around the Gazi’, 36 Asia 607 (September 1936). Id.

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122 R. Bianchi, Interest Groups and Political Development in Turkey (Princeton, NJ: Princeton U. Press, 1984), 120; see also O. Weigert, ‘The new Turkish labor code’, 35 International Labor Review 761 (1937). 123 M. Kaylan, The Kemalists: Islamic Revival and the Fate of Secular Turkey (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2005), 304, 311, 424, 426. 124 Inonu, Memories and Reflections (English typescript), ch. 12. 125 Kaylan, The Kemalists, 31–2. 126 Mango, Atatürk, 536. 127 See K. Karpat, Turkey’s Politics: The Transition to a Multi-Party System (Princeton, NJ: Princeton U. Press, 1959); M. Makal, A Village in Anatolia (trans. W. Deedes) (London: Valentine, Mitchell, 1954). 128 Inonu, Memories and Reflections (English typescript), ch. 5. 129 Heper, Ismet Inonu, 140–1. 130 Inonu, Memories and Reflections (English typescript), ch. 5. 131 C. Morris, The New Turkey: The Quiet Revolution on the Edge of Europe (London: Granta, 2005), 150. 132 Heper, Ismet Inonu, 50–1. 133 A. Mango, The Turks Today (Woodstock, NY: Overlook, 2004), 35. 134 S. Shaw, The Jews of the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic (New York: New York U. Press, 1998), 252–3. 135 Law 4305 of 1942; see The Times, 4 November 1942; 13 November 1942; 5 December 1942; 22 December 1942. 136 Karpat, Turkey’s Politics. 137 F. Okte, Varlik Vergias Faciasi (‘Tragedy of the Property Tax’) (Istanbul: Nebioglu Yayinevi, 1951), 64, quoted in Lewis, Emergence of Modern Turkey, 291, n. 6. 138 D. Brown, Preface to F. Okte, The Tragedy of the Turkish Capital Tax (London: Croon Helm, 1964), x, cited in H. Poulton, Top Hat, Grey Wolf and Crescent: Turkish Nationalism and the Turkish Republic (London: Hurst, 1997), 118. 139 L. Thomas and K. Frye, The United States and Turkey and Iran (Cambridge, MA: Harvard U. Press, 1952), 95–8, 115–17. 140 Okte, Varlik Vergisi Faciasi, quoted in G. Lewis, Turkey (London: Ernest Benn, 1955), 118–19. 141 Id., 98. 142 C. Sulzberger, ‘Turkish Tax Kills Foreign Business’, New York Times, 11 September 1943, 7. The article asserted that the tax was applied heavily to Greek, Yugoslav and Italian foreign nationals, less heavily to French, Germans and Bulgarians, and quite lightly to Americans and British. 143 H. Trevor-Roper (ed.), Hitler’s Table Talk, 1941–44 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1953), 462, 485 (entries for 6 and 15 May 1942). 144 Weber, Evasive Neutral, 23, n. 7. 145 1943 Documents on Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS), vol. IV, 1079–81, 1084–5. 146 See KNAT 1/14, 43 and 44, Churchill Archives, Churchill College, Cambridge, for this and subsequent diary entries. 147 C. Sulzberger, ‘Ankara Tax Raises Diplomatic Issues’, New York Times, 12 September 1943, 46; see also C. Sulzberger, ‘Turkey Is Uneasy Over Capital Levy’, New York Times, 9 September 1943. 148 C. Sulzberger, ‘Premier Defends New Turkish Tax’, New York Times, 10 September 1943, 8. 149 Rubin, Istanbul Intrigues, 207, n. 81. 150 E. Weisband, Turkish Foreign Policy, 1943–45: Small State Diplomacy and Great Power Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton U. Press, 1973), 232–7. Inexplicably, the German document cited by Weisband for this proposition is said to have been dated 16 June 1943, well before exposure of the tax in the Western press and repeal of the tax. Id., 236, n. 26. 151 Steinhardt to George V. Allen, 19 July 1943, Steinhardt papers, Box 81. 152 Ira Hirschmann to Steinhardt, 6 April 1944, Steinhardt papers, Box 44.

258 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177 178 179 180 181 182 183 184 185 186 187 188 189 190 191 192 193 194 195 196 197

DIPLOMACY BETWEEN THE WARS Weisband, Turkish Foreign Policy, 235, n. 20. Shaw, Jews, 255–6. Mango, Turks Today, 34. The Times, 4, 5, 6, 7 and 16 July 1934, cited in Poulton, Top Hat, 116. S. Shaw, Turkey and the Holocaust: Turkey’s Role in Rescuing Turkish and European Jewry from Nazi Persecution, 1933–45 (London: Macmillan, 1993), 15–16, 20. D. Brown, Foreword to Okte, Tragedy, x, citing Ankara Chancery to Southern Department, 4 June 1941, FO/371/30031/R5813; see also Poulton, Top Hat, 117. Republic of Turkey, Prime Minister’s Office, Decision No. 2/15132, approved 30 January 1941, quoted in Shaw, Turkey and the Holocaust, 261–3. Rubin, Istanbul Intrigues, 124. Shaw, Turkey and the Holocaust, 259. Id., 303. Rubin, Istanbul Intrigues, 220–1. Steinhardt to Chaim Weizmann, 30 December 1944, Steinhardt papers, Box 96, 304. Steinhardt to Paul Baerwald, 9 June 1944, Steinhardt papers, Box 82. Steinhardt to Max Lerner, 13 May 1944, Steinhardt papers, Box 82. D. Watt, How War Came: The Immediate Origins of the Second World War, 1938–39 (New York: Pantheon, 1989), 273. Knatchbull-Hugessen, Diplomat in Peace and War, 145. Vere-Hodge, Turkish Foreign Policy, 113. K. Middlemas, Diplomacy of Illusion: The British Government and Germany, 1937–39 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1972), 257. Vere-Hodge, Turkish Foreign Policy, 122. J. Packer, Deep as the Sea (London: Eyre Methuen, 1976), 92 (entry for 25 July 1938). Id., 99–100. Rubin, Istanbul Intrigues, 103–4. C. Sulzberger, A Long Row of Candles: Memoirs and Diaries, 1934–54 (New York: Macmillan, 1969), 396. P. Drucker, ‘Turkey and the balance of power’, 167 Atlantic Monthly 466 (1940). S. Derengil, Turkish Foreign Policy During the Second World War (Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 1989), 7. Id., 49–50. F. Von Papen, Memoirs (London: André Deutsch, 1952), 444–6. Weber, Evasive Neutral, 31 Watt, How War Came, 209. Id., 276. Derengil, Turkish Foreign Policy, 75. J. Goebbels, Diaries, 1939–41 (trans. F. Taylor) (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1982), 26 (entry for 21 October 1939). Inonu, Memories and Reflections (English typescript), ch. 6. Id., ch. 7. Watt, How War Came, 282. D. Irving, Breach of Security: The German Secret Intelligence File on Events Leading to the Second World War (London: Kimber, 1968), 72–3. Rubin, Istanbul Intrigues, 38. H. Kissinger, Diplomacy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994), 362–3. Watt, How War Came, 310–11. Id., 39. Pope and Pope, Turkey Unveiled, 73, quoting Kenan Evren. Knatchbull-Hugessen to Foreign Office, 20 September 1939, quoted in Derengil, Turkish Foreign Policy, 77. J. Wheeler-Bennett, King George VI: His Life and Reign (Macmillan, 1958), 423–4. Watt, How War Came, 306. Mango, Atatürk, 530.

LEWIS NE OTES INSTEIN 198 199 200 201 202 203 204 205 206 207 208 209 210 211 212 213 214 215 216 217 218 219 220 221 222 223 224 225 226 227 228 229 230 231 232 233 234 235 236 237 238 239 240 241 242 243 244 245 246 247

259

Inonu, Memories and Reflections (English typescript), ch. 6. Vere-Hodge, Turkish Foreign Policy, 191. J. Gunther, Inside Europe (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1940), 486. Orme Sargent in FO 371/R6641/316/44, quoted in Derengil, Turkish Foreign Policy, 101. Weber, Evasive Neutral, 62–3. Quoted in Rubin, Istanbul Intrigues, 32. Churchill to Inonu, 31 January 1941, in M. Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, vol. 3, Companion Volume (London: Heinemann, 1967–82),158. Derengil, Turkish Foreign Policy, 118. Dilks (ed.), Diaries of Sir Alexander Cadogan, 352. Churchill to Eden, 28 March 1941, in Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, vol. 3, 419; see also id., 403. Derengil, Turkish Foreign Policy, 98. A. Eden, The Reckoning (London: Cassell, 1965), 208. Weber, Evasive Neutral, 81. Von Papen, Memoirs, 471–3. Derengil, Turkish Foreign Policy, 55. Tamkoc, Warrior Diplomats, 208. Rubin, Istanbul Intrigues, 16. Steinhardt to Welles, 24 April 1942, Steinhardt papers, Box 38. Hull, Memoirs, 928–32. Rubin, Istanbul Intrigues, 46. Derengil, Turkish Foreign Policy, 477–9. Goebbels, Diaries, 419 (entry for 20 June 1941). A. Toynbee (ed.), Survey of International Affairs: The War and the Neutrals (Oxford: Oxford U. Press, 1956), 351. Weisband, Turkish Foreign Policy, 41, n. 28. Inonu, Memories and Reflections (English typescript), ch 7. Weber, Evasive Neutral, 93–9. Churchill to Attlee, 31 January 1943, Churchill Papers, CHAR 20/127. Dilks (ed.), Diaries of Sir Alexander Cadogan, 508–9. Fraser, Alanbrooke, 327–9. Von Papen, Memoirs, 477–8. Steinhardt to George Jones, 17 April 1944, Steinhardt papers, Box 82. Inonu, Memoirs, vol. 1 (unpublished typescript of translation), 11. Nicolson, Alex, 175. Steinhardt to Harry Hopkins, 5 July 1942, Steinhardt papers, Box 80. Steinhardt to Roosevelt, 5 March 1943, Steinhardt papers, Box 81. Steinhardt to Harry Hopkins, 15 February 1943, Steinhardt papers, Box 81. C. Richardson (ed.), From Churchill’s Secret Circle to the BBC: The Biography of Sir Ian Jacob (London: Brasseys, 1991), 181–2. Weisband, Turkish Foreign Policy, 180. Pope and Pope, Turkey Unveiled, 75. See also Inonu, Memories and Reflections (English typescript), ch.7. Von Papen, Memoirs, 495. Derengil, Turkish Foreign Policy, 123. Id., 134–5. J. Robertson, Turkey and Allied Strategy, 1941–45 (New York: Garland, 1986), 211. See Weber, Evasive Neutral, 107–17, 122–6. Rubin, Istanbul Intrigues, 115. Knatchbull-Huguessen, Diplomat in Peace and War, 179. Law 4305 of 11 November 1942. Knatchbull-Huguessen, Diplomat in Peace and War, 193. Id., 206. Rubin, Istanbul Intrigues, 246, 249.

260 248 249 250 251 252 253 254 255 256 257 258 259 260 261 262 263 264 265 266 267 268 269 270 271 272 273 274 275 276 277 278 279 280 281 282 283 284 285 286 287 288 289 290 291 292 293 294

DIPLOMACY BETWEEN THE WARS Steinhardt to Harry Hopkins, 18 May 1943, Steinhardt papers, Box 82. KNAT 1/14, 43, 44 (entry for 24 August 1943). Steinhardt to George V. Allen, 2 August 1943, Steinhardt papers, Box 81. Steinhardt to George V. Allen, 9 July 1943, Steinhardt papers, Box 81. Pope and Pope, Turkey Unveiled, 76, 81. See generally K. Sainsbury, The Turning Point: The Moscow, Teheran and Cairo Conferences, 1943 (Oxford: Oxford U. Press, 1985). Churchill to Roosevelt, 8 December 1943, Churchill Papers, CHAR 20/125/17. Von Papen, Memoirs, 522. Shaw, Turkey and the Holocaust. Dilks (ed.) Diaries of Sir Alexander Cadogan, 584. Steinhardt to George Allen, 18 January 1944, Steinhardt papers, Box 83. Quoted in Rubin, Istanbul Intrigues, 251. KNAT 1/14, 43 and 44 (entry for 10 December 1943). Inonu, Memories and Reflections (English typescript), ch. 9. Rubin, Istanbul Intrigues, 254–5. Hull, Memoirs, 1365–76. The Times, 23 April 1944, cited in Robertson, Turkey and Allied Strategy. Marshall to Hull, 25 April 1944, Steinhardt papers, Box 44. Livingston Merchant to Steinhardt, 6 June 1944, Steinhardt papers, Box 44. B. Rubin, The Great Powers and the Middle East, 1941–47 (London: Cass, 1980), 118–19. Steinhardt to Roosevelt, 5 March 1943; Steinhardt to Hopkins, 15 February 1943, Steinhardt papers, Box 81. Inonu, Memories and Reflections (English typescript), ch. 9. Weisband, Turkish Foreign Policy, 205. Steinhardt to Paul Alling, 3 April 1944, Steinhardt papers, Box 82. Proceedings of the Second Cairo Conference (Washington: GPO, 1945), 752–3. W. Churchill, Memoirs of the Second World War, vol. 2 (London: Macmillan, 1956), 484; vol. 3, 32–3, quoted in Toynbee (ed.), Survey of International Affairs, 39–46, 48, 71. Steinhardt to George V. Allen, 6 May 1943, Steinhardt papers, Box 82. New Statesman, 11 March 1944, quoted in Rubin, Istanbul Intrigues, 250. Rubin, Istanbul Intrigues, 262–3. Weber, Evasive Neutral, 208. Steinhardt to Paul Alling, 3 April 1944, Steinhardt papers, Box 82. Editorial, New York Times, 3 August 1944, Steinhardt papers, Box 44. Editorial, New York Sun, 2 August 1944, Steinhardt papers, Box 44. Robertson, Turkey and Allied Strategy, 236. Quoted in Rubin, Istanbul Intrigues, 264. Quoted in Von Papen, Memoirs, 514. Hull papers, memorandum of conversation, 18 September 1944, 61–2/32. Inonu, Memories and Reflections (English typescript), ch. 10. R. Denniston, Churchill’s Secret War: Diplomatic Decrypts, the Foreign Office and Turkey, 1942–44 (London: Sutton, 1997), 188. Weber, Evasive Neutral, 219. Id. Inonu, Memories and Reflections (English typescript), ch. 10. S. Deringil, ‘Turkish foreign policy since Atatürk’, in C. Dodd (ed.), Turkish Foreign Policy: New Prospects (London: Eothen, 1992), 2. G. Kennan, Memoirs, 1900–50 (London: Hutchinson, 1968), 316–17. I. Inonu, ‘Negotiation and the national interest’, in Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Perspectives on Peace, 1910–1960 (New York: Praeger, 1960), 135–50. P. Nash, The Other Missiles of October: Eisenhower, Kennedy and the Jupiters, 1957–1963 (Chapel Hill, NC: U. of N. Carolina Press, 1997), 45. Id., 137.

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295 Id., 126–7. On this subject, see also S. Hersh, The Dark Side of Camelot (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1997), ch. 20. 296 J. Landau, Johnson’s 1964 Letter to Inonu and Greek Lobbying of the White House (Jerusalem: Hebrew U. Press, 1979). 297 Kissinger, Diplomacy, 478. 298 Republic of Turkey, 70th Anniversary, 31. 299 M. Abramowitz (ed.), Turkey’s Transformation and American Policy (New York: Century Foundation, 2000). 300 Tamkoc, Warrior Diplomats, 272. 301 The correspondence is set forth in full in 20 Middle East Journal 386 (1966). 302 Mango, The Turks Today, 62. 303 Tamkoc, Warrior Diplomats, 281–2. 304 The Times, obituary, 27 December 1973, 8. 305 Kissinger, Diplomacy, 613–14. 306 A. Gromyko, Memories ( London: Hutchinson, 1989), 234. 307 See for instance R. Gurdilek, ‘Turkish Poll Restricted to Three Parties at End of Approval Deadline’, The Times, 25 August 1983, 6; R. Gurdilek, ‘Evren Faces Challenge on Constitutional Reform,’ The Times, 21 October 1985, 8. 308 Inonu, Memories and Reflections (English typescript), ch.3. 309 A. Gunes-Ayata and S. Ayata, ‘Turkey’s mainstream political parties on the centre-right and centre-left’, in D. Lovatt, Turkey Since 1970: Politics, Economics and Society (London: Palgrave, 2001), 100. 310 Mango, Turks Today, 90. 311 See P. Robins, ‘Turkish policy and the Gulf crisis’, in Dodd, Turkish Foreign Policy, 70. 312 Inonu, Memories and Reflections (English typescript), ch. 12. 313 Whitaker’s Almanac, 2003. 314 Mango, ‘Turkish policy’, 565. 315 E. Ambler, Intrigue: Four Great Spy Novels of Eric Ambler (New York: Knopf, 1943). 316 Clark, Twice a Stranger, 169.

Conclusion 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

L. Hand, ‘The use of history’, in I. Dilliard (ed.), The Spirit of Liberty (New York: Knopf, 3rd edn. 1960), 287–8. L. Hand, ‘A plea for the open mind and free discussion’, in Dilliard (ed.), Spirit of Liberty, 281–3. ‘Monsieur Clémenceau’s policy of the barbed wire round Russia has been morally useful to the Soviets, for it has furnished them with an alibi for the tremendous suffering of the Russians.’ C. Sforza, European Dictatorships (London: Allen & Unwin, 1932), 44–5. Cf. N. Podhoretz, ‘World War IV’, Commentary, September 2004. Sforza, European Dictatorships, 122: ‘A poor dictator is sick of his spies, of his secret police, of his pretended infallibility, he would like to go back but he cannot, he is a victim of the interests, the hatreds, the fears he has created.’ Id., 236. Jacob Burckhardt, quoted in L. Gossman, Basel in the Age of Burckhardt (Chicago, IL: U. of Chicago Press, 2000), 266–7.

262

DIPLOMACY BETWEEN THE WARS

LEWIS EINSTEIN

263

INDEX

A Prophecy of War (Einstein) 8, 10 Abyssinia 37 Acheson, Dean xii, 146, 167, 221 Action Party 154, 155, 157, 159, 163, 164 Adana Conference 204 Adenauer, Konrad 73, 121 Adrianople xiii, 176 Aehrenthal, Alois, Sforza on, 136 Albania 88, 132, 137, 162, 200 Albert, King 139 Alexander, King 48 Alexandretta 183 Algeciras Conference 3, 9 Algeria 155 Alliance system, Einstein on, 12, 28 Ambler, Eric 224 American Military Commission (Armenia) 16 Amery, Leo 82 Anderson, John 39 Anglo-German Naval Treaty 37 Anti-Semitism xiii, Rumbold on, 24, 28, 51, 57, 74, 76, 127 Sforza on, 142 Inonu and, 178, 195, 197 Ardahan 201, 215 Aristocracy, Einstein on, 2, 18 Armenia xiii, xv, 1, 14 Einstein on mandate 16, 135 rejection of mandate 17, 63 Bernstorff and, 111, 179 Armstrong, Hamilton Fish 145 Asquith, Margot (Lady Oxford) 74 Ataturk, Kemal xiii, xiv, 15, 63, 129, 135, 140, 143, 148, 174, 182, 185 Auerbach, Erich 194 Austria 35, 37, 39, 45, 69, 132 Austria- Hungary, Einstein on, 12, 14, 42 Rumbold on, 51, 54

Bernstorff on, 97 Sforza on, 131, 132, 135 Autarky xv Aydemir, Talat 190 Badoglio, Pietro 149, 151, 153, 160 Baghdad Pact 216 Baker, Newton 17 Baldwin, Stanley 70 Balfour, Arthur 105, 112, 137 Balkan Pact 215 Ballin, Alfred 109 Bandung Conference 220 Baring, Evelyn (Lord Cromer), Rumbold on, 52, 54 Barnett, Corelli 109 ‘Bathing Beauty Photograph’ 106 Bayar, Celal 183 Bech, Joseph 167 Belgium 38, 41, 55 Ben-Gurion, David 83 Benedict XV (Giacomo della Chiesa) 137, 140 Benjamin, Judah 4 Bernstein, Barton 219 Bernstorff, Albrecht xi, 128 Bernstorff, Alexandra (Princess LowensteinWertheim-Rosenberg) 128 Bernstorff, Gunther 128 Bernstorff, Jeanne (Luckemayer) 90, 105, 126, 127–28 Bernstorff, Johann xi, xii Rumbold on, 56 Chapter III, Portrait 92 Berthelot, Philip 131 Bethmann-Hellweg, Theophile 94, 107, 109, 126 Bevan, Aneurin 162 Bevin, Ernest 165, 167, 170 Bey, Munir 215

264

DIPLOMACY BETWEEN THE WARS

Biddle, Francis 11 Bismarck, Otto xiii Einstein on, 12–13, 30 Bernstorff on, 91, 129 Sforza on, 136, 143 Black List Committee 88 Bloodless Invasion (Einzig) 39 Blum, Leon 146, 165 Board of Economic Warfare 88 Bohlen, Charles xi Bonin-Venizelos Agreement 133 Bonomi, Ivanoe 160 Brandeis, Louis 83 Breen, Timothy 76 Brest-Litovsk, Treaty of, 56, 183 Briand, Aristede 129, 138 British Council 86 British Guiana, as refuge for Jews 86 Brock, H. I., 34 Brockdorff-Rantzau, Ulrich 113 Bruning, Heinrich 29, 36, 69, 71, 80, 89, 124 Bryan, William Jennings 16 Buchanan, James, Einstein on, 26 Bulgaria 43, 66, 110, 137, 174, 201, 203, 213 Bureaucracy 73 Butler, Nicholas Murray 29, 147 Cadogan, Alexander 124, 152 Cairo 92, 129 Cairo Conference 209 Calvocoressi, Peter Epigraph Cambon, Jules 146 Canada, Einstein on, 9 Capital punishment, Inonu on, xiii Carretta, Donato 160 Caribbean, Einstein on, 9, 44 Casablanca Conference 209 Cass, Lewis 26 Castelerizzo 133, 221 Caucasus, Bernstorff on, 112 Cecil, Robert (Lord Cecil) 123 Central America 26 Ceuta 66 Chamberlain, Austen 75, 137 Chamberlain, Houston Stewart 126 Chamberlain Neville 41, 87, 198 Chambrun, Clara 95 Charles, Noel 158 China, Einstein in, 6, 21, 29 Churchill, Winston 70, 72, 76 and Peel Commission 81, 82 and Rumbold 88, 94 on Bernstorff 104 and Sforza 149, 151, 156, 157, 159, 160, 163 and Inonu 203, 204, 212

Clemenceau, Georges 142 Colonialism, Sforza on, 8, 134, 153,169 Einstein on, 9, 16 Colville, John 162 Commager, Henry Steele 35 Communism 45 Sforza on, 142 Concentration camps xiii Constantinople xiv, 14 Containment, Einstein on, 32 Conwell-Evans, Philip 76 Cooke, Alistair Epigraph Cooper, Alfred Duff 38, 88 Coordinating Foundation 86 Costa Rica 8 Coulondre, Robert xi Coupland, Reginald 82, 84 Cox, Oscar 170 Craig, Gordon xi Craigie, J.D. xi Creel, George 21 Croce, Benedetto 152, 156 Cross, Wilbur 21 Cuban missile crisis 219 Cummings, Homer 29 Curzon, George xii, 57, 58, 63, 64, 129, 137, 176, 180, 181, 187 Customs unions xiv Cyprus xv Einstein on, 48, 174, 189, 220 Czechoslovakia 21 Einstein on, 24, 35, 36, 38, 39 expulsions, 42, 45, 88, 132 D’Abernon, Edgar (Lord D’Abernon) 60, 63, 129 D’Annunzio, Gabriele, Sforza on, 9, 132, 139, 167 Dallas, Gregor 48 Das Eine und das Andere Deutschland (Chamberlain) 126 Davies, Norman 61 De Gasperi, Alcide 164, 165, 166, 167 De Gaulle, Charles xiii, 43, 60, 152, 153, 175, 221 Decentralization, Sforza on, 142 Delors, Jacques 139 Demirel, Suleiman 181, 221 Democratic Club 116 Democratic Party (Germany) 116 Democratic Party (Turkey), 188 Denburg, Bernhard 116, 126 Denmark, 9 Devlin, Patrick (Lord Devlin) 96, 107 Diaz, Armando xv Disarmament Commission 29, 69, 71

LEWISINDEX EINSTEIN Divided Loyalties (Einstein) 34, 225 Documents on British Foreign Relations, 1919– 1939 xii Dodecanese Islands 146, 162, 165, 169, 181, 200, 204 Dollfuss, Engelbert 35, 48 Donmes 195 Drucker, Peter 199 Dudseele, Valentine (Countess Sforza) 134 Dulles, John Foster, Einstein on, 48 Ebert, Carl 196 Ebert, Friedrich 113 Ecevit, Bulent 190 Eden, Anthony xii, 44, 80, 82, 87, 89, 149, 153, 156, 164 Eighteenth Decisive Battle of the World (D’Abernon) 63 Einstein, Albert 121, 194 Einstein, David 4 Einstein, Florence (Lady Charles Walston) 5 Einstein, Lewis, dispatches of, xi, xii, Chapter I Portrait as child, 3 Portrait, 19 meets with Rumbold, 87 support of Sforza, 146 Einzig, Paul 39, 111 Eisenhower, Dwight 153, 219 Erasmus 4 Erim, Nehat 190 Eritrea 170, 171 Erzburger, Matthias 121, 126 Ethiopia 170, 183 European Dictatorships (Sforza) 141 European Union 221 Facta, Luigi 139 Failure of a Mission (Henderson) 89 Ferdinand, Tsar 96 Finland 44, 148 Fisher, Warren 78 Fiume 132, 139 “Flapper vote”, Rumbold and Churchill on, 70 Foch, Ferdinand 57, 137 Foreign service, Einstein on, 22 Forster, E.M. xii France xvi Einstein on U.S. and, 48, 74 and Ruhr, 113, 118, 119 Sforza on, 132, 139, 165 Inonu and, 201 Francois-Poncet, Andre xii Frankfurter, Felix 36, 145 Free trade xiv, xvi, 21, 29, 32, 37, 155 Gaither Report 49 Gallipoli 15, 134 Gauss, Christian 115

265

George V, King 93 George VI, King 202 Georgia 129, 135 Germany, Navy xii, xv diplomacy, xvi Einstein on, 4 and Armenians, 14 Einstein on rearmament, 30 on territorial ambitions, 32, 45 Rumbold and Bernstorff on navy, 52, 91 Rumbold on diplomacy, 55 Rumbold on World War I, 56 Rumbold in, 66 Bernstoff on fleet, 96 Sforza on, 148 Inonu on, 218 Gessler, Otto 118 Gibraltar 66 Gibson, Hugh 121 Gilbert, Felix x Gilbert, Parker 121 Giolitti, Giovanni 129, 139 Goebbels, Josef 78, 146, 155, 200, 201, 204 Goerdeler, Karl 39 Goering, Hermann xii, 78 Goncz, Arpad xii Great Britain, xiv, xv, xvi Italian Renaissance in, 1, 47 and Cyprus, 48 Sforza on, 144, 148 Inonu and, 198, 208 Greece xii, 15, 43, 48, 66, 112, 129, 184, 189, 221 Grew, Joseph 22 on Inonu, 65, 176, 182, 191 Grey, Edward 55, 101, 102 Gromyko, Andrei 221 Gunther, John 202 Gurcel, Cemal 190 Hague Convention of 1907, 123 Hammarskjold, Dag 216 Hand, Learned 225 Hanfstaengel, Ernst 115 Hankey, Maurice (Lord Hankey) 78, 87, 129 Hapgood, Norman 115 Harding, Warren 21 Bernstorff on, 116 Sforza on, 141 Hare, Camilla (2nd Mrs. Lewis Einstein), 49 Harington, Charles 64, 175 Harris, Frank 90, 104, 105 Harvey, Oliver 152 Haussmann, Conrad 116 Havel, Vaclav xii Hay, John 2

266

DIPLOMACY BETWEEN THE WARS

Henderson, Neville 63, 66, 71 Hitler on, 77, 78, 89, 180 Heuss, Theodor 116 Hindemith, Paul 194 Hindenburg, Paul 67 Jewish support of, 70, 71, 73 and Bernstorff 110, 118, 124, 126 Historical Change (Einstein) 46 Hitler, Adolf xi Einstein on, 35, 41, 52 Rumbold on, 67 meeting with Rumbold, 76, 195 Inonu on, 201, 203 Hoare, Samuel (Lord Templewood) 79 Hoare-Laval Pact 80 Holmes, Oliver Wendell 1 on Einstein will, 5 on Marchioness of Tweedale, 6, 17 on expatriation of Einstein, 25 on TR, 28 Einstein on, 49 Holocaust 15, 197 Home, Alec (Lord Home) 221 Hoover, Herbert, on Armenia 17 replaces Einstein 22 House, Edward 95, 101, 104, 107, 127 House that Hitler Built (Roberts) 87 Hugenberg, Alfred 73 Hughes, Charles Evans, Einstein on, 21 on Einstein 22 Bernstorff on, 101, 115 Hughes, H. Stuart 173 Hull, Cordell 1, 29, 36, 37, 41, 44, 149, 156, 204, 211 Humanist’s Library (Einstein) 4 Hungary 43, 45, 134, 137 Hurd, Douglas 185 Ickes, Harold 145 Inonu, Erdal 190, 205, 207, 215, 223 Inonu, Ismet xi on Greece, xii, 15 at Lausanne, 65–66, Chapter V Inonu, Omer 223 Interallied Mission 59 International Association of League of Nations Societies 120 International courts, Einstein on, 13 Hughes on, 22 Sforza on, 171 Inonu on, 217 Iraq 204, 223 Isaacs, Rufus (Lord Reading) 64 on Peel Commission, 84 Israel 12, 142, 222 Istria 132

Italian Association for Democratic Control 133 Italian Peace Treaty 165, 171 Italy xi, xvi Einstein on overpopulation 37, 42, 46,183 Jackson, Robert 72 Japan xi Einstein and Rumbold on, 8, 29,21 Rumbold on, 52, 88 Bernstorff on, 94 Sforza on, 135 Inonu and, 204 Jewish refugees xv, 197 Joffre, Joseph 30 Johnson, Lyndon 220 Jusserand, Jules 61, 95 Justice Party 190, 221 Kars 201, 215 Kellogg-Briand Pact 25, 218 Kennan, George xi on French warmongers, 8 on Einstein, 10–11 on causes of World War I, 91 on Preparatory Disarmament Conference, 126 on Italy and NATO, 166 on Turkey, 216 Kennedy, John 71, 175 Keynes, John Maynard 101 Khrushchev, Nikita 219 Kiel Canal 9 Kissinger, Henry, on TR, 2 on Poland, 63 and Sforza, 170, 173 Knatchbull-Hugessen, Hugh 196, 200, 203, 209, 211 Knox, Geoffrey 74 Kolko, Gabriel 165 Korea 220 Krassin, Leonin 139 Kuhlmann, Richard 110, 113, 126 Kulaks, starvation of, xii Kurds, 16, 190, 191, 198, 223 La Malfa, Ugo 154 Lansbergis, Vjlautas xii Laqueur, Walter 82 Laski, Harold 21, 22, 25, 35 Lausanne, Treaty of, xi, 34, 133, 177, 209, 216, 220 Law, Andrew Bonar xv on Chanak, 65 Sforza on, 137 and Mosul, 181 League for Regeneration of the Reich 121 League of Nations, Bernstorff and, 114, 118, 133

LEWISINDEX EINSTEIN League of Nations Committee on Refugees 80, 178 League of Nations Mandates Commission 82 Lenin, Vladimir 140 Libya 136, 170, 171 Lloyd, George (Lord Lloyd) 86 Lloyd-George, David 57 on Chanak, 65 and Peel Commission, 82 and Georgia 129, 137 Loraine, Percy xi, 66 Low Countries 44 Lukacs, John 45, 47, 140, 143 Ludendorff, Erich xiii and Bernstorff, 109, 114, 126 Lusitania 99 Luther, Hans 121 Maastricht, Treaty of, 146 Mac Donald, Ramsay 75 Macmillan, Harold 153, 154, 155, 157, 160, 162 Mackail, J.W. 4 Madriaga, Salvador 216 Makers of Modern Europe (Sforza) xii, 136, 225 Malaparte, Curzio 155 Manchuria 8, 54 Mandates, Einstein on 16 Mandel, Georges 147 Mango, Andrew 223 Mann, Thomas 121 Marne, First Battle of, xiv, 95 Marshall Plan xii, xv, 1 Einstein proposal, 17, 165, 166 Sforza and, 170 Martin, John 86 Marx, Wilhelm 118 Mason-Macfarlane, Noel 153, 157, 158 Matteoti, Giacomo 133 Max of Baden, Prince 113 Mazowiecki, Tadeus xii Mazzini Society 146, 147, 158 Mc Donald, James 32 Mediation, Einstein on, 36 Mein Kampf dispatch (Rumbold) 75, 87 Meineke, Friedricke 117 Memel 88 Memoirs (Bernstorff) 127, 225 Menderes, Adnan 189, 193 Menemencioglu, Numan 209, 213 Meri, Lennart xii Mers el Kebir 203 Mexico 26, 95 Michaelis, Georg 110 Millerand, Alexandre 57, 138 Moltke, Helmut, Einstein on, 8

267

Monarchy, Sforza on, 143 Churchill on, 152 Monnet, Jean 139, 216 Monroe Doctrine xv, 13, 41, 97 Montreaux, Treaty of 181, 185, 198, 203, 215 Moorhead, Alan 155 Morgenthau, Henry, Sr. 6, 14 Morris, Gouverneur 41 Moscow, Treaty of, 183 Mosul 181, 183 Mudania, Treaty of, 66, 175 Muller, Heinrich 69, 121, 124 Munich Agreement, Einstein on, 41 Rumbold on, 88 Inonu and, 185 Murphy, Robert 152, 162 Murray, Gilbert 12 Mussolini, Benito xi, xiii, xv, xvi, 9, 39, 67, 132, 134, 136, 143, 149, 184 Nansen, Frridtjof 178 Nation Party 188 Naumann, Friedrich 116 Nenni, Pietro 165, 170 Neurath, Konstantin 73, 76 Nicholas II, Czar 91 Nicolson, Harold xi, 81, 88, 89, 128, 162, 180, 216 North Atlantic Treaty Organization 165, 170, 218, 222 Noske, Gustav 121 Nyon Conference xiii, 183 O’Brien, Conor 82 Okte, Faik 195 Operation Marita 203 Orbay, Kazim 202 Organization for European Cooperation and Development 171 Orwell, George xiii Ottoman Empire xvi, 178, 195, 197, 209 Ozal, Turgut 207, 223 Pact of Rome 132 Page, Walter Hines 95, 119 Palestine xv, 52 Palestine Partition Commission 84 Palestine White Paper 84 Palmer, Mitchell 21 Pan-American Conference of Free Italians 146 Pan-Turanian Movement 208 Papen, Franz von xiii, 30 Rumbold on, 70, 71, 80 Bernstorff on, 98, 124 in Turkey, 196, 201, 209, 213 Paris, Treaty of 168 Parri, Ferrucio 154, 163 Paxkonferenze 113

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DIPLOMACY BETWEEN THE WARS

Peacemaking 1919 (Nicolson) xii Peel Commission xv, 52, 81 Map 85, 225 Peker, Recip 187, 216 Persia, Rumbold on, 51 Sforza on, 135 Perspectives on Peace (Inonu) 216 Philippines 16, 28 Phipps, Eric xii, 37 Hitler on, 77, 78, 79, 89 Pentagon Papers xi Pilsudski, Josef 30 Rumbold on, 63, Sforza on, 140, 142 Pius X (Giuseppe Sarto) 137 Pius XI (Achille Ratti) 61, 140 Pius XII (Eugenio Pacelli) 135 Poincare Raymond 137 Poland xv Einstein on, 36 expulsions, 42, 44, 45, 52 Rumbold on, 57–63, 69, 82, 142 Pope, Generoso 145 Port Baros 132 Portsmouth, Treaty of, 2 Potsdam Agreement 45, 209, 215 Preparatory Disarmament Conference 121–26 Preventive war 39, 218 Pro-Palestina Committee 120 Progressive Republican Party 183 Propaganda, Einstein on, 42 Bernstorff on, 97 Protectionism, Rumbold on, 52 Ralli, Helen (Mrs. Lewis Einstein), 4 Portrait, 31 death, 49 Ralli, Marguerite (Marchioness of Tweedale) 6 Rapallo, Treaty of 129, 132, 134 Raritan Woolen Mills, 4 Rathenau, Walther xiii, 118, 171 Rauschning, Hermann 89 Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act 29 Reichstag, Bernstorff and 116 Reinsurance Treaty 91 Renaissance, Einstein on, 1 Reparations, Rumbold on, 69, 71 Sforza on, 131, 165 Inonu and, 178, 184 Repington, Charles 132, 133 Republican People’s Party 186, 190, 222, 223 Reuter, Ernst 194 Rhine High Commission 131 Rhineland, Einstein on, 38, 42, 67, 69, 185 Rhodes 132, 133 Ribbentrop, Joachim xi Roberts, Stephen 87

Rockefeller Report 49 Roosevelt, Franklin, meets Einstein, 36, 41, 144 on Sforza, 152 on Inonu, 211 Roosevelt, Theodore 1 on Einstein, 2, 10, 13 Einstein on, 27 on Bernstorff, 94, 115 Root, Elihu 2 Ropke, Wilhelm 194 Rosen, Frederick 114 Roumania 41, 43, 102, 132 Rumbold, Anthony 89, 157 Rumbold, Ethelred (Lady Rumbold) 87, 89, 179 Rumbold, Henry 182 Rumbold, Holly 182 Rumbold, Horace, dispatches of, xi on Papen, xiii on Chanak, xiii Chapter II, Portrait, 53 family Portraits 68, 175 Russell, Bertrand, Epigraph Russia, Rumbold on, 52 Bernstorff on, 81 Russo-Japanese War 9 Ryan, Anthony 63 Salisbury, Robert (Lord Salisbury) 12, 52 Salonika 15 Sampson, Nikos 221 Samuel, Herbert (Lord Samuel) 82, 86 Samuel, Stuart 57 San Giuliano, Antonino 134 Saracoglu, Sukru 196, 201, 204, 207 Saxe-Coburg, Simeon xii Schacht, Hjalmar 78, 111, 116 Scheidemann, Philip 121, 126 Schleicher, Kurt 30, 71, 72 Schuman, Robert xii, 165, 167 Schuman Plan xv, 116, 169, 170 Seeckt, Hans 68, 96 Self, Wilhelm 116 Serbia 137 Seton-Watson, Robert 88 Sevres, Treaty of, xi, 181, 183 Sforza, Carlo xi, xii renunciation of office, xiii on colonialism, 8, Chapter IV Sforza Line 131 Shaw, Stanford 196 Silesia 67, 131 Simon, John 37 Smith, James Dunlap 51 Smith, John 20 Socialism, Einstein and Bernstorff on, 24 Sforza on, 143

LEWISINDEX EINSTEIN Somaliland 170, 171 Sombart, Werner 121 Sonnino, Sidney 139 South Tyrol 169 Soviet Union xii Einstein on diplomacy, 49, 57, 60, 188, 201, 218 Spa Conference 52, 60, 129, 131 Spaak, Paul-Henri 216 Spain xv, 38, 52 Rumbold in, 66 Sforza on, 143 Speyer, James 95 Spingarn, Charles 5 Spitzer, Leo 194 Spring-Rice, Cecil 28, 89, 95, 96, 104, 106 Stalin, Josef, Einstein on, 45 and Inonu, 183, 199, 201 Stalin-Hitler Pact 88, 202 Stambulisky, Alexander 139 Steed, Wickham 81, 88 Steinhardt, Laurence 196, 197, 205, 209, 211, 212 Sternberg, Speck 90 Stettinius, Edward 164 Stimson, Henry 8 criticized by Einstein, 29 Strasser, Otto 89 Straus, Oscar 95 Stresemann, Gustav 67, 117, 121, 146 Strikker, Dirk 167 Students’ International Union 126 Sulzberger, Cyrus 195, 199 Switzerland, 56 Syria 135 Talaat Pasha 14, 110, 112, 179 Taiwan 12 Taylor, Alan 49, 63, 113, 117, 119, 148 Taylor, Myron 149, 161 Tehran Conference 209, 214 The Totalitarian War and After (Sforza) 147 Thomas, Ivor 162 Thrace xiii, 66, 176, 179, 204, 211 Titoni-Venizelos Agreement 133 Togliatti, Palmiro 161 Toker, Ozden 223 Trianon, Treaty of, xi Trieste 169 Truman, Harry 166 Truman Doctrine 215 Tudor Ideals (Einstein) xii Epigraph, 17, 225 Turkey xii, xvi Einstein on, 77 Sforza and Rumbold on, 15, 52, 88

269

Bernstorff on, 91 Sforza on, 129, 135, 136, 183 Ukraine 142 Ulster, 9 United States xiii, xvi Rumbold on immigration policy, 82 Bernstorff on, 97 Van Alstyne, Richard 11 Van Zeeland, Paul 86 Vandervelde, Emile 139 Vansittart, Robert xi, 37, 74, 75, 77, 78, 93 on Bernstorff, 105, 148 on Sforza, 171 on Ataturk, 185 Varlik Vergesi 194 Venizelos, Eleutherious 129, 184 Versailles, Treaty of, xi, 13, 121, 137 Victor Emmanuel, King xiii, 144, 151, 155, 158 Village Institutes 193 Villard, Oswald 127 Walston v. United States, 6 Warren, Whitney 95 Weber, Max 121 Weizmann, Chaim, on Peel Commission, 82, 84, 121 Welles, Sumner 36, 41, 44, 144, 149, 172 Weygand, Maxime 60, 201 Wheeler-Bennett, John 96, 125 Wigram, Ralph 76 Wilhelm II, Kaiser 14, 90, 93, 109 abdication, 113 Wilson, Henry 132 Wilson, Horace 87 Wilson, Woodrow, Einstein on, 7 on Armenia, 16 and Lusitania, 9 and Bernstorff, 100, 102, 112, 119, 127, 141 Winant, John, and Einstein, 42, 148 Wise, Stephen 83 Wiskemann, Elizabeth 164, 171 Wolf, Lucien 93 Wolff, Theodor 116 Wood, Edward (Lord Halifax), 71, 87, 88, 89, 161 World Crisis (Churchill) 94 World Economic Conference, 31 Yemen 174 Yugoslavia xv Einstein on, 43, 129, 132 Sforza and, 169 Zara 132 Zimmermann Telegram xiii, 98, 105 Zionism, xvi Bernstorff and, 111, 120–21 Sforza on, 135, 146

270

DIPLOMACY BETWEEN THE WARS