Admiral William J Crowe - 25 March 1994

I'm told I've hung up some sort of record by never mentioning an issue, a topic, a scandal that has been obsessing Washington, the media and the Congress for a couple of months or more Ð Whitewater.

Well, I've deliberately ignored it, in the belief, firm but perhaps temporary, that the president is being hounded by people itching to smell mischief. So far, I agree with an American humorist and with a former Republican senator. Old Senator Goldwater says, let the president get on with the presidency. Russell Baker says, so far it don't amount to a hill of beans. Well, maybe two hills. If and when it amounts to more, there'll be lots of time to say so.

Meanwhile, there's something better to talk about Ð good news. Good news for Britain, indeed good news for NATO and for Europe. On Wednesday an announcement from the White House received all of three short paragraphs at the bottom of an inside page in the New York Times. The announcement of a new American ambassador to Britain. There was a time, I have to admit, it was before the Second World War, when this sort of announcement was front-page headline news, supplemented inside the paper by a six-column biography of the great man. But, I have to say, those were also the days when the British New Year's Honours were also front page American news. Today they go unnoticed, unreported, unless a rock star has got an OBE. Why, a newly arrived and observant young Englishman asked me, why this down-playing of the UK? He'd not been here long. It's not down-playing, I said, it's entirely benign neglect. And the reason?

The reason was given to me, I now realise, over 30 years ago, down in Palm Beach, when the newly elected President Kennedy announced to the White House press corps that he was going to visit Paris, Ireland and Berlin. That evening I was having a drink with one his three or four closest aides, one of the intimate bunch of old Boston cronies we used to call the Irish Mafia and I asked him, why isn't the president going to London? He wasn't in the least embarrassed to say quite blithely, well no, let's face it, London doesn't matter that much any more. That is a line which then, and ever since, any president and/or any presidential aide, would rather cut his throat than admit to saying. However, since then there has developed a new, not special, but necessary relationship with Britain, as with Germany, as the reliable ally and especially with Britain in the Gulf, in NATO, in Bosnia and I believe in the coming re-grouping of the power structure of Europe.

So now, the announcement. In the New York Times the first sentence reads: a retired admiral has been nominated to be ambassador to Britain. Designating the new ambassador as a retired admiral is rather like describing Lady Thatcher as a former woman MP. The man is Admiral William L Crowe, spelt like crow with an 'e' but rhymes with how and he is, has been, a giant behind the scenes, behind the scenes of the military-political complex. I must say at once that he's replacing the best ambassador Washington has sent to Britain since David Bruce of 30 years ago. With respect, as private secretaries say when they are about to advise the king to abdicate, with respect, there have been one or two men who turned out to be surprisingly good but London always attracted storms of arriviste, wealthy, pushy types and succeeding presidents, Democrats and Republicans, but mostly Republicans, gave the London post to men, businessmen usually, with absolutely no experience in diplomacy or of reporting one country to another, but they had contributed whacking great sums to the election campaign of the new president.

Career men hardly ever got a look in until what, three years ago, a first-class career diplomat, Mr Raymond Seitz, was appointed and is there now. I talked about him soon after the election of Mr Clinton and said what a good thing it was that the new president had chosen to keep him on. These congratulations were, I'm afraid, premature, for I learned later that president Clinton had offered the job to Mr Walter Mondale, former senator, former vice president of the United States under Jimmy Carter. He, it seems, turned it down. He wanted more exciting or more exotic fish and is now the American ambassador to Tokyo. However, Ambassador Seitz has won golden opinions from the in-people who matter and his service in London will be remembered by more people than the men and women who man or woman the desks at the State Department.

The great thing is that Mr Seitz's departure will not mark a reversion of the old habit of rewarding a party fat cat. Admiral Crowe's most conspicuous office was as chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, America's top brass. His appointment came about in a rather dramatic, rather typically Reagan way. In 1984 Admiral Crowe was appointed commander of all the Pacific and Indian Ocean services. This is such a colossal job, one that both Alexander the Great and Napoleon would certainly have had to turn down, pleading incompetence. That well it was too enormous and complicated and specialised to describe, so I don't remember it ever appearing in the papers. We never knew and no profiles were ever written about the man who now commanded one hundred million square miles of ocean, about half the globe.

Well some time in 1984, President Reagan called on the admiral to give a briefing to him and to the secretary of state and the secretary of defence and the head of the National Security Council. Tell them about the strategic and political status of the Pacific, particularly the South Pacific today. The admiral, this placid, massive bulldog of a man, talked quietly and fluently, without notes, for 90 minutes and at one point President Reagan leaned over to the secretary of defence and whispered, if we're ever going to need a new chairman of the joint chiefs, here's our man. Well the need came quickly. Next year the chairman retried and President Reagan promptly nominated and got Admiral Crowe. He was the first joint chiefs chairman who had not served in the Second World War, for the simple reason that while the equally phlegmatic Admiral Nimitz was running the largest naval battle in history, little William Crowe was a 16- year-old, which makes him now 69.

So, William Crowe, son of a Kentucky lawyer who moved, in the boy's childhood, to Oklahoma. The son saw enough of the law to not to want to follow his father's footsteps. He applied for the United States Naval Academy, was accepted and graduated in June 1946, along with his classmate, Jimmy Carter. He seems to have decided on his concentration or major early on, went, I suppose with Carter, to submarine school and soon was a submarine commander with the US Atlantic fleet.

Then in the early 1950s he did, what for any sailor or soldier, was an extraordinary thing. He requested a leave of absence to get a wider education. He took an MA in education at Stanford University and then took a PhD in political science at Princeton. His dissertation, by the way, was entitled Policy Routes of the Modern Royal Navy, so the Admiralty boys had better start boning up. Back in the service, he commanded a diesel submarine, became the naval adviser in South Vietnam and after the Vietnam collapse, took a big leap as deputy director of Naval Strategic Planning in East Asia. Subsequently he commanded a task force in the Persian Gulf and then was Commander-in-Chief of the NATO forces in Southern Europe. And so on to look after those hundred million square miles and the chairmanship of the joint chiefs.

He had firm ideas about what was wrong with the power structure of the armed forces command. The chiefs of the army and of the navy and of the air force and the marine corps were chiefly occupied in protecting their own turf, by way of prestige and defence contracts. This led, Admiral Crowe felt, to wearisome duplication of everything Ð effort, paperwork, vanity. He was successful in seeing, with the help of the Republican Senator Goldwater and the Democrat Sam Nunn, seeing that a new bill made the chairman, not the first among equals and the only Chief Military Adviser to the President, the Secretary of Defence and the National Security Council. He was consequently in on all the arms reduction talks, after he's been ignored at Reykjavik. He was also privately irked to be kept in ignorance, as so many top people were, except Colonel North, of the whole messy Iranian arms for hostages deception. In a historic moment in 1988, Admiral Crowe had a visit and many meetings with the chief of the Soviet's Armed Forces and they made the first joint enquiry into the ways of their avoiding military confrontations around the world.

Admiral Crowe, giving the lie to his rather fearsome bulldog appearance is an affable and modest man, deceptively wary and learned. He likes to con naive Brits by professing innocence on many matters in a broadened Oklahoma drawl. He also is fluent in French and German, his favourite sports are chess and tennis. I'm not saying he built the Panama Canal single-handed but if you ever need a man to command by day a hundred million square miles of ocean, and by night play chess with the French ambassador to South Korea, Admiral Crowe is your man.

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