Choosing a US ambassador to London - 16 July 1993

It's not often that a piece of news is at once good and bad or, say, sad but encouraging. Some of you may recall that earlier in the year at a time when everyone was slightly aghast at President Clinton's early boo-boos or clangers, I rushed with haste to praise him for a move that revealed, I thought, a gift for diplomatic shrewdness – we'd not suspected any.

You know that one of the routine but tricky and burdensome jobs that a new president takes on is to riffle through hundreds of memos and letters and recommendations and reports from all the divisions of the State Department and then make his choice of several recommended ambassadors for each country even when the recommendation is forwarded eagerly by the man himself.

Mr Clinton was slow to fill the main posts, I'm not sure even today whether the ambassadorships to Rome and Madrid have been filled, but then I think back and recall that all presidents are late in appointing ambassadors, all that is except the sainted Roosevelt, which reminds me I must tell you a story, which had from its good taste to stay bottled up while any of the actors in it, including the radio officer of the Queen Mary, were alive.

1936 will always be remembered by nostalgic or grieving Democrats as the year when Franklin Roosevelt was re-elected by a landslide never matched until Richard Nixon buried the Democrats in 1972, only two years before he was driven out in disgrace. All right, so 1936 Roosevelt's opponent was a small amiable canny governor of Kansas one Alfred Landon, he promised to save America from the New Deal, which had involved dispensing vast sums of money to the poor, the unemployed, the disabled, the dispossessed – sums of money Mr Roosevelt, emulating the bankers, had acquired on paper. That's to say he decided to live on the advice on John Maynard Keynes on borrowed money, a policy that became a habit for the next 50 years. Needless to say, the people loved the New Deal and I have to say that in the pit of the Great Depression they needed it. Well in the result, Mr Roosevelt was returned by 46 states against Mr Landon's two. There was an old American folk saying based on the results of many elections that the state of Maine was a true barometer of the national mood, as Maine goes so goes the nation, but the fact that in 1936 only one other state as well as Maine went against Roosevelt, it caused the maxim to be revised: as Maine, goes so goes Vermont.

In the very morning after the election, Roosevelt sat down with a piece of paper to rearrange or redistribute his ambassadorships. In those days London, the so called Court of St James's, was the jewel. Roosevelt had hardly had time to think who was going to replace Mr Bingham of Kentucky, a tycoon and a generous contributor to the Democratic Party chest when a call came into the White House from the good ship Queen Mary, then on the high seas steaming towards New York. The call had been put in by Mr Joseph Davies another very rich tycoon who hearing the election results over the ship's wireless conceived a raging lust for London, for the embassy, he too had contributed generously to Roosevelt's recent campaign and his hopes were high. Mr Roosevelt was ready for him, but affected to be surprised by the privilege of a call from the Great Cunada. In those days, radio calls were pretty squawky not to say inaudible, but Mr Davies's voice came over and its squeakiness did not distort his message, he wanted London and he was ready to accept that call to duty.

President Roosevelt assured him and I can hear his high fluting tenor now that Joe you're a great man and you would be a fine ambassador, but the price comes high, I'm afraid Joe, he bellowed, you can't have London for $60,000 but it'll buy Moscow. It was possibly the last place the high-living Mr Davies cared to live but he took it and he fortified himself against the muscovite austerity by sailing his great yacht across the Atlantic through the Baltic Seas and on into then Leningrad and having its great cargo unloaded, hundreds of gallons of ice cream, mountains of beef to keep them alive and well throughout his bleak mission to Moscow. It's been too often the custom to put London up for auction so to speak instead of giving this always important and delicate post to a highly trained career man. By the way, ever since I've known Washington, the career foreign service has always griped about the low proportion of career people in the important capitals as against the high proportion of fat cats.

Mr Bush, I regret to say, has as bad a record as anyone, but it has to be said that he didn't appoint a superior career man to London where he still is Mr Raymond Seitz. I talked about him as I say earlier in the year and congratulated Mr Clinton on having the judgement to leave him there. I learned only a month or so ago, that good judgment was not Mr Clinton's first reflex, he offered it first to a former vice president and failed Democratic nominee for president Mr Walter Mondale who we all thought had gone into silver haired retirement way out west in the big rock candy mountains, but no he wanted an embassy. He turned down London and wanted and got Tokyo. So it was only then that Mr Clinton decided to let the admirable Mr Seitz stay on without knowledge of the Mondale opening, everybody praised Mr Clinton for keeping Mr Seitz on we all hoped for the rest of his term or should I say his first term I don't know.

Anyway, the word, the news pretty reliably confirmed is that Mr Clinton has chosen another ambassador to the Court of St James's and that he will replace Mr Seitz in the fullness of time, which I'm happy to report is quite a fullness soon after the New Year. I'm even happier to say that the new man is not a wealthy fast-food purveyor or a generous manufacturer of silicon chips, he's an old distinguished sailor, formerly chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, the post now held by General Colin Powell who is a famous first in the sense of being the first black man to be the top American soldier. Admiral William Crowe spelt like Crow with an 'e' but pronounced Crowe, he is a formidable character seen by all of us as the host and friend of the top Russian Admiral in a memorable television programme a year or more ago and the subject too of a television profile in which we learned that he is a very odd, I mean refreshingly original, sailor diplomat linguist scholar and all round greatly sensible man.

These days what with the president's hotline and the instant availability of the presidential jet, ambassadors have nothing like the power they once had but it would be true to say today that an ambassadorship in certain capitals is what you make it. In the great capitals certainly the ambassador can no longer be the sole voice of the president, but when there are difficulties of policy with the allies, he can be mightily influential,

And today, the emergence, the difficult birth of the European Community and the suddenly disputed status of NATO and its forces offer a large opening to just such a man as Admiral Crowe.

We haven't talked about NATO as a vital but imperilled defence body, that there are many experts in the United States, people knowledgeable about Europe, its old and present defences, former NATO commanders who are much disturbed since the new chaos of the Balkans and the revival you might say of the plot of 1913, who are disturbed that the NATO nations have not rallied together to declare and assert that they must be the first European line of defence and in some places of attack. If NATO gips at the coming conflicts in Middle and Eastern Europe, then we could discover too late that we have repeated the sin of the 1930s, the sin of appeasement. There was a a sentence came from the present American Secretary of State Mr Warren Christopher the other day, which bore a nightmare resemblance to a famous sentence of Mr Neville Chamberlain in the late '30s.

Mr Christopher more or less excused the impotence of American and allied policy in Bosnia by saying it was a faraway country in a place remote from our essential interests. The New York Times, by the way, has called for Mr Christopher's resignation seeing him as the rudderless skipper of Mr Clinton's voyage into European security policy, perhaps Admiral Crowe should replace Mr Christopher instead of Mr Seitz.

I digress; there are one or two substantial reasons why Admiral Crowe is as good a man as the United States could summon to the London embassy. Almost 20 years ago, he lived in London to do a a doctoral thesis for Princeton on the history and role of the Royal Navy. In 1980, he was appointed NATO Commander for Southern Europe. Three years later, he was Commander of all American Naval Forces in Europe. I don't know if Mr Clinton had it in mind, but the opportunity is now Admiral Crowe's the opportunity to make the London embassy the watch tower of European security, a stabiliser to the wobbling NATO. We shall see.

I notice that a royal commission in London has proposed great even alarming changes in the British system of justice, a footnote questions whether judges should soon dispense with their wigs. This came up during the sessions of the Philadelphia Convention that wrote the United States Constitution. Thomas Jefferson was in Paris but he peppered the Convention with advice and suggestions including the idea of a written Bill of Rights, he begged successfully the delegates to abandon the British habit of judges wigs; we do not want, he wrote, to see our judges look like mice peeping out of oakum.

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