Anne Armstrong appointed London envoy

Tucked away on page 47 of the New York Times the other day was a little three-sentence squib which announced, as briefly as possible, that Mr Robert Anderson, who's been the chief press spokesman for the press department, had been nominated by President Ford as United States ambassador to Morocco.

For some odd reason that I cannot explain, maybe I got up yawning and started riffling through the paper from back to front, this was the first item I spotted, way off there, three-quarters way through the Times which had 76 pages that day. My immediate response was a hackneyed one, though it's nonetheless true for that, it was to the tune of 'how are the mighty fallen'. 

I was recalling the days when the nomination of any ambassador to any country, even one as minute as Central Park, and I think there are two of them – Lichtenstein is one, what's the other? – well, those announcements were always big stuff, proclamations practically and always hit the front page. I suppose this was done on the principle that here was another fine, simple, upstanding American going off to try and defend American interests against those foxy foreigners and maybe everybody should know his name. But, as I first suggested years ago, right after the invention or installation of the hot line to Moscow or perhaps it was after the first flight of a jet airplane, ambassadorships are not what they were in majesty or political importance. 

I remember the first British ambassador to Washington I ever ran into. He was in print in the papers and magazines here at least once a week. That was, of course, 40 years ago and the British ambassador to Washington was a special case. After all, Great Britain owned about a third of the planet and was absolutely top dog and if the British ambassador telephoned the White House and said he'd like to see the president, the president didn't exactly snap to attention but he cleared the first half-hour he could on his calendar. And the White House press corps would break away from their little huddles and poker-playing sessions in the press room and sharpen their pencils and put on their jackets to be ready for a call from the president's press secretary. 

In those days, it was front-page news if the British ambassador appeared before the president and so much as hinted that His Majesty's Government took a dim view of such and such. The man I have in mind was Sir Ronald Lindsay. Any American who can read and run knew the name because, as I say, it was there all the time and it spoke for Britain and the government of the day. Sir Ronald was about six foot six inches and Americans who read Time, the magazine, got to know him through Time's definitive double adjective – 'moose-tall' they called him. He was a memorable type. 

But by now there must be Americans, old Americans, who'd have a rough time recalling any other British ambassador since then except, possibly during the Second War, the late Lord Halifax. I hasten to say that the obscurity of ambassadors today is not due to any perceptible decline in the quality or talent of the present-day ambassadors, it's due to what taxi drivers call 'progress'. That's to say, to the growth of useful gadgets, like the jet engine and transoceanic telephones on which you can dial the prime minister or the president in 15 seconds flat. 

In the days of 'moose-tall' Ronald Lindsay, no American president ever expected to meet a British prime minister in his lifetime. For one thing, there was a very old and firm tradition that sitting presidents do not leave the country. Woodrow Wilson was the first to do it in 1919 but then that was for the extraordinary purpose of saving mankind. Franklin Roosevelt broke it again on several wartime jaunts which were never publicised till they were over for security reasons, obviously. 

But, after him, once the jet was invented, the temptation of whizzing to Europe in something over six hours was too much for the presidents who now had, always revving up and gleaming on the runway, their very own private jet and between that and the ease of the long-distance hot line, the ambassador's goose was cooked. As everybody knows who's ever replaced a dishtowel with a dishwasher, you never go back and the more amusing and ingenuous the gadgets people invent, the more irresistibly we tend to use them for their own sakes. 

Today, if President Ford has a bright idea or a misgiving about something happening to Americans in England or simply some common interest that 10 Downing Street is working on, he says to a twinkling console in front of him, 'Please get Mr Wilson!' And within a minute, it's, 'Hello, Mr President,' and 'How you be, Prime Minister?' – possibly by now it's 'Hello, chum!' and 'Hi there fella!' Not much point in the British ambassador summoning his chauffeur and his protocol and driving to the White House and being closeted in the president’s office just to deliver a formal message from Her Majesty's Government about something the president has been chuckling over the phone about with his buddy, Her Majesty's first minister. 

Only a few years ago, the most merciless of Washington's journalistic snoopers thought it worth a mention that the president – not anyone alive – who'd then been in office a couple of years, thought it about time he had some ambassadors in. He hadn't seen them since they formally presented their credentials, so they were invited, one by one. And they were considerably miffed when they got to the White House to find that they'd been ordered up in a job lot, so to speak. The British ambassador was among them. There were about six or seven of them and the president gave them tea and a cookie and was mighty proud and pleased to see them all and, after 20 minutes or so, it was 'Goodbye' and 'Don't let it be so long again'. And then back to work. 

A year or two before that, an American ambassador who'd had the top job not only in one European capital, but in three, told me that the only qualifications required today for an American ambassador in the big jobs was a lot of money and an iron stomach. 

Well, it's time we started rustling last Wednesday's New York Times backwards again from the 47th page to the first and whoops! What do we find there? Just like old times, a three-column spread and a three-column headline which says, 'Anne Armstrong, a Top Aide to Nixon Expected to be Named London Envoy'. The Times always hedges against the possibility of a howler but there seem no doubt at all that the well-placed administration official who tipped them off was very highly placed indeed. The British embassy here, told that there'd already appeared a story to this effect in England said, 'It's a bit awkward for us since it's not been announced yet'. Well, by the time these words are crackling into your set, maybe it will have been announced. The Senate, of course, in accordance with the constitution’s precaution against presidents appointing spies or brothers-in-law or other prejudiced types, the Senate has to confirm Mrs Armstrong. 

She's not, by a long shot, the first woman ambassador. There have been, indeed, 14 others since the Second War. Six of them are, at this moment on duty overseas, including the most memorable, the most adorable American moppet of the century, Shirley Temple, now grown up and become the United States ambassador to Ghana. 

I think it was Roosevelt who, before the Second World War, appointed the first American woman ambassador ever, the daughter of William Jennings Bryan, Mrs Ruth Bryan Rohde and that was quite something at the time. It didn't suggest for a minute that the dawn of equal rights was breaking, only that Franklin D. did seem to have a penchant for appointing women to high posts. His long-time Secretary of Labour was the extraordinarily able Frances Perkins. I don't believe there has since been a woman in such a high and responsible Cabinet post. 

But Mrs Armstrong has seized the attention of the papers because we are still in the wake of International Women's Year and any woman appointed to anything outside a role in a Hollywood film is going to hog the spotlight for a little while as proof that the female of the species is on her way as an equal, independent, equally able, if somehow slightly different, member of the human race. The Times's headline description of Mrs Armstrong as 'a top aide to Nixon' is surely a little pejorative. She could just as well have been dubbed 'former Truman campaigner', for that's what she was as a young girl – oops, woman, sorry! – just out of Vassar in 1948 and an eager beaver for 'Give 'em hell, Harry!'. 

Mrs Armstrong is a Creole, a descendant, that is, of one of the old New Orleans French or Spanish families. Her father was a coffee importer named Armand Legendre and she went to school in Virginia and she was bright from the start, bright and managing, in a nice way. She was president of the student body. She got a job as an assistant editor on Harpers, the magazine, and maybe she could have gone soaring into the rarefied atmosphere along with Dorothy Thompson, Anne O'Hare McCormick and the other top women journalists. 

But one weekend she went to visit an old friend down in Texas on the huge King Ranch, which is about the size of Wales. A neighbouring rancher, who had a mere 18 square miles of land, was a fellow named Armstrong and Mademoiselle Legendre became Mrs Armstrong. After the Truman caper, she became a Republican and has been in politics for 23 years since the first Eisenhower campaign. She's been a national committee woman of the Republicans, a delegate to two conventions and the chairman of the Republican Party. She went to the White House in 1972 and has been an adviser to both Nixon and Ford on Spanish Americans in the country, on women and has done a lot of work on food and famine and on American foreign policy. 

All in all, I'd say that she's strikingly better qualified as an American ambassador than most political appointees. Since she's going to London, it's also a very lucky thing that the Armstrongs are very wealthy. Her confirmation goes, I should think, without saying. A senator who voted against her might once have been thought un-chivalrous but in the liberated air of today, he'd be branded by every woman in his state as an MCP – a Male Chauvinist Pig. 

Maybe some swine will raise a dissenting voice. There is the tiny loophole that Mrs Armstrong is, after all, white. If she were a black woman, there's not one senator in the hundred of them who would dare say her 'nay'.

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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