Winston Churchill

We were fortunate to have with
us at the November Churchill Conference
a keen practitioner of Anglo-American relations.
Ambassador Seitz delivered the
First Churchill Lecture, excerpted in this
issue and published in full on our website.
His book should be read by every
American in Britain—and every Briton
who wishes to delve beneath the stereotypes
and really understand Americans.
Seitz is very careful about that
over-used term, "special relationship"; not
because it is wholly invalid but because,
he suggests, it is barely adequate. "When
I think about official relations," he writes,
"I find the term doesn't begin to capture
the breadth and depth of what otherwise
goes on between us." Churchill at Harvard
in 1943 mentioned the high points:
law, language, literature. Seitz fills in the
details: Britain is the largest foreign investor
in America. Six million Americans
and British visit each others' country per
year, and in the same amount of time
there are 3 1/2 billion minutes of Anglo-
American telephone conversation.
There is another important aspect
to his book, and that is its value in
the realm of statesmanship. Raymond
Seitz is, uniquely, the only career foreign
service officer ever appointed to the State
Department's top Ambassadorship, the
Court of St. James's, where he served two
Presidents of opposite parties. He is frank
and appealing on the implications of such
a role, how it affects one's performance.
He offers almost a textbook course on
what an Ambassador to London does
when confronted, say, by an Ambassador
to Dublin who declares that her turf includes
Northern Ireland.
Over Here acknowledges earlier
commentators on Anglo-America, most
of them much more biased than its author.
Harold Nicolson, Seitz recalls, said
that an American is "not the sort of person
we like." Samuel Johnson was "willing
to love all mankind, except an American."
Anglophobe James Russell Lowell,
by contrast, commented that Americans
are "worth nothing except so far as we
have disinfected ourselves of Anglicism,"
and the American drama critic John
Mason Brown, responding to a tactless
toast proposed by an English host, said:
"Mr. Chairman, you have observed that
while you don't care for Americans in the
mass, individual Americans are delightful
people. With the British, I find the reverse
is true." But, Raymond Seitz adds,
Opium for the People
Ron Helgemo
Betrayal at Pearl Harbor: A Television
Documentary aired on the History
Channel (USA), December 7th
On the anniversary of Pearl Harbor,
the History Channel, whose
programs vary between solid history
and opium for the people, ran a
BBC-produced documentary claiming
that President Roosevelt knew all about
the surprise attack and allowed it to happen
to get the United States into the war.
The program, as Arthur Balfour might
have said, contained much that is trite
and much that it true, but what was true
was trite, and what was not trite was not
true.
That "Betrayal at Pearl Harbor"
should not be taken seriously is manifestly
evident. Examples of why it shouldn't
begin with its interview of Robert
Ogg, which approaches dishonesty. The
producers fail to inform the audience that
Mr. Helgemo is President of the Washington
Society for Churchill, a CC Affiliate.
"Neither country knows as much about
the other as it pretends to."
Over Here is, I think, the best
American view of Britain since Robert
Deindorfer's Life in Lower Slaughter, a 25-
year-old book by a friend of mine, gone
now, God bless him, a copy of which I
presented to the Ambassador. Bob Deindorfer
moved in 1973 from large, filthy
New York to Lower Slaughter, Gloucestershire,
and charmingly noted, in a different
sphere of course, many of the same
things as Mr. Seitz: the blase British attitude
toward antiquity and one-track
roads, the soft beauty of an English
spring, the sound of an English choir, the
pulse-quickening sight of a spire above a
country village. He compared these to the
large scale, wholesale-sized American
countryside and eight-lane throughways,
the can-do attitude that nothing is impossible
and the best is yet to come.
Both the Deindorfers and the
Seitzes made the same decision, as the
former put it in 1974: "to stretch our foreign
assignment a bit longer, while wondering
how long, psychologically if not
tactically, bone-deep Americans can remain
abroad before renewing their subscription."
But Ray Seitz can't fool us.
He's hooked, like many before and no
doubt after him, by British ways, British
scenes, British politics, British manners,
British life. He gives himself away on the
flyleaf of his book, which pictures him in
a suit of English cut before a Regency
fireplace on a flowery carpet, surrounded
by three large dogs. He's a goner.
Alvin Toffler, the author of Future
Shock, had a comment about Bob
Deindorfer's book which amused Raymond
Seitz:
"If there's one thing I can't
stand it's an Anglophile, but unfortunately,
I love the British. Which is why I
found this book a lovely, insidious attack
on my precarious certainties. Anyone
who has dreamed of hiding out in
England during the decline and fall of
Western civilization will enjoy this
book—and deserve what he gets when
the barbarians knock."
Mr. Ogg is the infamous "Seaman Z" immortalized
by John Toland, an early conspiracy
theorist who wrote that Pearl Harbor
was plotted by Franklin Roosevelt.
"Seaman Z," whose story has
had a nasty habit of changing over the
years, claimed he heard "queer signals"
which could have been the missing Japanese
aircraft carriers. But he could only
have been hearing the carriers if the carriers
were broadcasting.
The Japanese themselves claim
their fleet (Kido Butai) never sent a single
message. They say they dismantled the
telegraph sending devices so a message
could not be sent. After the war, the
Strategic Bombing Survey found the
Japanese military's own after-action report,
which credits the success of the attack
to the fact that secrecy was maintained.
Among the reasons why secrecy
was maintained, radio silence comes first.
How could it be, for example, that Seaman
Z in San Francisco picked up signals
from the Japanese fleet but Hawaii, much
closer and lying between California and
the fleet, never heard it? continued >»
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