Roosevelt 100th anniversary

A new French ambassador has arrived in Washington, Monsieur Vernier-Palliez, and he's just made a revolutionary statement so astounding in a diplomat that it got his picture into the New York Times and a serious piece about the duties, the pleasures and the pains of being an ambassador.

I will not leave you hanging on the cliff any longer. This is what Monsieur Vernier-Palliez said, 'What I despise are futile parties where people stand around and don't have anything to say to each other.'

I think it's fair to say that anyone taking on the job of an ambassador, especially from a powerful country, must expect to spend half his time doing just that, especially today when the jet plane and the hot telephone line which make possible instant communication between heads of government have greatly diminished the political usefulness of ambassadors and, even more, of their staffs.

When I came to this country almost 50 years ago, if there was one foreign name that appeared in the papers and the new weekly news magazine called Time, it was the name of Sir Ronald Lindsay, the British ambassador to Washington. It was necessary, in those days before television, to give readers a mental picture of the man, of everybody in the news and Time never mentioned him without using one of the double-barrelled adjectives which its publisher had picked up from, of all people, old Homer. Week after week, you would read, ' To the White House, one day last week, went Britain's moose-tall Sir Ronald Lindsay.' He was six feet seven! He was always 'moose-tall'. He went there so often because, in those far-off days, Britain was the most powerful nation on earth, absolutely top dog and he always had something, some policy statement, some view, some anxiety of his government to present to President Roosevelt.

I doubt if, in those days, any president ever telephoned any other head of government. Certainly the fact that it took five days to cross the Atlantic made a face-to-face meeting between them likely only once in a lifetime when Washington or London or Paris was staging a full-dress disarmament conference or an economic powwow. And this difficulty, which would require the president to be a couple of weeks at least away from home, actually established a tradition whereby no president ever left the United States while he was in office.

Just think! On the night of 3 August 1914, Great Britain presented to the German foreign secretary in Berlin an ultimatum which was bound to be rejected, demanding the withdrawal of German troops from the Belgium they'd invaded. And who do you think did the presenting? A second secretary in the British embassy in Berlin! A young man, name of Harold Nicholson. Even second secretaries, ministers, military attachés, let alone ambassadors, were then the first line of communication between nations.

It's a very long way from the impotence of the embassies today which was neatly and bleakly summed up for me some years ago by the American ambassador to London. 'Today, there are only two things you need for this job – a perpetual grin and a lead stomach.'

I have at least one friend who turned down the plum of American ambassador to Great Britain because he couldn't face the prospect of having to give lunch three or four times a week to such as the visiting president of the Boy Scouts of America, the Democratic state chairman of Arizona and his wife, the ladies of the Camellia Club of Mobile, Alabama or any other group that had wangled from their congressman an invitation to Winfield House, the American ambassador's Regent's Park retreat. Some retreat!

Well, the new French ambassador is not going to lie down on his job, such as it is. In the first week, he found himself standing around for several hours eating and chatting with the Secretary of Defense, the Attorney General, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency and many other government magnificoes. This week, he had dates at the State Department and up on Capitol Hill with members of Congress.

Getting close to the American government is one thing. There's a big difference, he says, between meeting people who have interesting things to say and meeting people who just gather together for the purpose of being seen together. I'm sure that I leapt on this item because it strongly reinforces a prejudice of my own. Cocktail parties are a double torture since they force you to stand up and make chitchat with people you don't know and at the same time, dangle before you, while denying the opportunity to sneak off to a corner and have some sensible talk with a person you know or would like to know.

Well, in spite of the ambassador's admirable resolve, I'm afraid that for the reasons I've gone into, he'll soon find out that he's going to have to stand around saying nothing to people who have nothing to say but whom the administration dare not snub by refusing to let them meet the French ambassador.

Washington is a ceremonial city and since all the real work of government and diplomacy is done these days by little cabals of close advisers and by private telephone calls across the seas, the diplomatic corps and do-gooder groups and journalists and other worthy lobbyists for peace or prosperity, they have to be pacified with social occasions. I, myself, was privileged this past week to be present at two ceremonies so far apart in style and meaning that the collision of them in my mind afterwards set off some sparks of reflection that, I have no doubt, will be scattered through these talks for some time to come.

The first was a luncheon at the White House. You and I take lunch, the White House gives luncheons. It was to celebrate the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It was, at once, splendid and cosy and, I must say, a gallant gesture on the part of an administration that is dedicated to undoing the huge work that Franklin Roosevelt began 50 years ago.

President Reagan is at his best on such occasions. He made a graceful, generous, even moving, speech about the courage of what he called 'this American giant' in saving the country twice, once in the Depression and then in the Second World War.

There is no more beautiful house in America than the White House. Its proportions, its splendid eighteenth-century English and American and French furniture, the wealth of its portraits of famous Americans, the wide spaces and the succession of grand reception rooms have always made it a sunny place, but Mrs John F. Kennedy radically did over the public rooms in brilliant reds and golds and blues in the best federal style, which is the American counterpart both in time and grace of the Regency style in England. I have been in other government residencies and other palaces but I know no other that is at once so graceful, so grand and yet so intimate. It is a ravishing place and there is nowhere in America where it's possible, where indeed it's irresistible, to feel that you are living in a happy country conducting its government with eighteenth-century elegance.

Yet... I couldn't help feeling, also, that if you have lived 40-odd years in Beverly Hills and are now ensconced in the White House, it must take an actual effort of the imagination on the part of the president to exercise what Theodore Roosevelt called 'a sense of the continent' or to share with Franklin Roosevelt the recognition that 'I see one-third of a nation ill-fed, ill-housed, ill-cared for' – it's not that bad today. But once you're outside the White House and on the streets of a town that is 75 per cent black, you cannot blink the fact that it's bad enough and that if the present Reagan policy is enforced and if it really does cut drastically into the fundamental needs by way of food, housing, education, health, jobs, of the blacks and the poor and their children, the dreadful prediction of the black, James Baldwin, may come to be, that it's 'the fire next time'.

The second ceremony, just a few days away from the delightful ceremony at the White House, was one up in Harlem. For nearly 40 years, we, my wife and I, have employed – though employed sounds dry and unfeeling, better say 'have had working in the family' and as an intimate member of the family – one Emma Bowen, a coloured woman, we used to say a black, who was around the children when they were tots, who saw them come and go as schoolchildren, college students, mothers and fathers with children of their own. There was nothing of the Uncle Tom or Aunt Thomasina about Emma Bowen. She was a little, slow-moving, gentle woman given over to quiet work, much gossip, devotion to all of us and a cautious but witheringly shrewd judgement of human character. A religious woman who lived by faith and good works till she got very old and frail and settled into her apartment and, last summer, had a blinding stroke.

A week ago, she died at the age of 81 and we went up to the service at her church, standing like a proud ruin in the midst of the vast squalor and vice of Harlem on a street so gutted with fire, so crumbling with decay that it looks very much like the outskirts of Berlin the week after the Russians had come through and blasted it.

The service was conducted by an old parson, a man of enormous dignity and simplicity who, unlike 90 per cent of his white brethren, talked not Pentagonese, but the English language, spoken naturally with enviable purity. 'Goodness and mercy be with us all the days of our lives' we chanted. Goodness and mercy was what Emma Bowen, in her offhand way, lived by.

So we went out of the church and shook hands and were on our way, away from the ravages of an old suburb and the rotting houses and the pushers and layabouts on the streets and back downtown, not much more than a mile, to the handsome stretch of Fifth Avenue and the beauty of the park in the snow and the protected, slightly guilty, routine of how the other half – our half – lives.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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