From the Head Fellow: A Spirited War Debate at KWF London Reunion
By Charles R. Eisendrath ’75The occasion was the first reunion of Fellowships’ alumni in Britain, and the setting was important. Fitzmaurice House, the rambling quarters of the Lansdowne Club in Berkeley Square, formerly belonged to Lord Shelburne, the Marquess of Lansdowne. It had been he, nearly alone among British peers, who argued publicly in favor of giving the American colonists their independence. It had been he, as Prime Minster, who drafted the Treaty of Paris (in “The Round Room” adjoining the bar where we gathered). And it had been he, this friend of America, who negotiated with Benjamin Franklin the final document in Paris that put Michigan in the United States. (In 1783, it could just as logically have become part of Canada.)
BBC alumni and quests reune at Lansdowne Club in London.
The topic of dinner debate that February evening was “the trans-Atlantic divorce” much in the news. Prime Minister Tony Blair was under siege for taking Britain to war in Iraq with the United States. France and Germany were just beginning to find ways back into the good graces of the Bush administration after refusing to take part. Most of the 13 Fellows around the table were from the BBC, and some guest/spouses were also British.
It would be understating things badly to suggest that opinion around the table was heavily against the war and Blair’s decision to join it. Hotly so, in fact. To have been otherwise would have been remarkable. Throughout a full week of intensive media consumption and journalism junky-ing, I found little support for the official U.S./U.K. position.
England taught many things when Julia and I lived there in 1969-70 on assignment for Time. One was the tradition of friendly but pointed debate over the last wine at dinner. The idea is to be a little provocative. As it happened, a perfect little provocation had been hatching in my thoughts in recent weeks.
Briefly put, I found the idea that Europe had no business aiding an American initiative just because of disagreement or even disapproval, was utterly preposterous. Yes, you read that correctly—preposterous. Here is why:
As Lord Shelburne could amply remind us, the two sides of the Atlantic have been trading world leadership for 200 years, in the sense of assuming the lead role on the global stage, whether to good reviews or otherwise.
Following the curtain-up of the Revolutionary War, Europe called the shots, often literally, as in the War of 1812. We tend to think of the Civil War as a purely domestic affair, but it wasn’t. At dinner, I mentioned the troublesome stances of Britain and France in the 1860’s. Both had textile industries that needed American cotton from the South the way U.S. refineries now need oil from the Middle East. They did not come actively to our aid until it was clear that “we” (the United States) would ultimately vanquish the Confederacy.
To many Europeans, a similar hanging-back-until-the-worst-was-over described America’s delayed entry into World War I. But from our shores, it seemed an exclusively European affair and a massively, stupidly pointless one, at that. Even then, however, American doughboys went “Over There, Over There,” as the popular song put it. Over 320,000 American troops joined the millions killed, gassed, maimed, and missing without ever having an idea why, other than “saving” France from Germany, which happened to be the largest single source of the American population!
In World War II, it took Pearl Harbor to draw us in, but although the strike came from Asia, American arms first went to “save” Britain and “liberate” France. The script remained the same throughout the numerous localized wars following joint endeavors even when the thinking behind it was fractious. This was famously the case in the Balkans. Only after American initiative did Europe deal with what was a strictly European affair.
So why should it seem odd, let alone outrageous, for Americans to assume help from Europe in dealing with Iraq? Was the American judgment that something new was required in the Middle East, even if badly and/or misleadingly explained, so different from the European decisions to change the map in various ways? Not so, I argued. The image of fathers, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers dying in Europe, in the cause of various European grudges, remains as vivid in the American psyche as the American cemeteries behind the beaches of Normandy.
Was there agreement around the table in Fitzmaurice House? Thunderous applause at the brilliance of my analysis? Of course not. I faced veterans of Wallace House, after all. What followed instead was engagement over an important subject, some of it heated, much of it edifying, all of it, as Lord Shelburne might have put it, most satisfactory.
Afterwards, around a lively fire going in the bar, one room away from where the treaty of American independence had been drafted, Sarah Ward-Lilley of the BBC approached me with a relieved look on her face. As managing editor for newsgathering, she has been organizing our exchange with the BBC but had never visited Ann Arbor. “You know,” she said, “I talk to our people before they go and do these mysterious things at Michigan, but I’ve never really understood what goes on there. I get it now.”
