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Great Contemporaries: Anthony Eden (Part 2), 1934-1938
- By FRED GLUECKSTEIN
- | July 21, 2022
- Category: Explore Great Contemporaries
In 1934, Anthony Eden’s position of the Lord Privy Seal was combined with the new position of Minister for League of Nations Affairs. In Geneva, Eden was a passionate advocate of the League’s principles, and proved himself an excellent diplomat and negotiator. Churchill watched his rise closely. Continued from Part 1…
Belly of the Beast
On 25 March 1935, Eden accompanied Foreign Secretary Sir John Simon to Berlin to see Adolf Hitler. Together they protested mildly against Hitler’s restoring conscription (military draft) in defiance of the Versailles Treaty. Eden was one of the few prominent allied leaders to furnish a personal impression of Hitler. Neville Chamberlain, after meeting the Führer in 1938, described him as “the commonest little dog “he had ever seen.1 Eden’s description was shrewder and more thoughtful:
Certainly he listened to what I had to say at each meeting, waiting patiently for the translation…. Hitler impressed me during these discussions as much more than a demagogue. He knew what he was speaking about and, as the long interviews proceeded, showed himself completely master of his subject. He never once had need to refer to [German Foreign Minister Konstantin] von Neurath or any official of the Wilhelmstrasse.”2
Ironically, in view of later history, the two-day visit had a moment of camaraderie. Dining with Hitler, who had been a lance corporal in the Great War, Eden learned they had been stationed opposite each other on the Somme front. Hitler drew a diagram of the position from memory on the back of a menu. His guest kept it as a souvenir. Eden proved to be the only English minister to meet with Hitler, Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt, albeit not simultaneously. None of the other three ever met the Führer.
First Cabinet post
Anthony Eden entered the Cabinet when Stanley Baldwin formed his third administration in June 1935. Baldwin offered him the position of Parliamentary Under-secretary of State at the Foreign Office. Under the new Foreign Minister, Sir Samuel Hoare, Eden spoke frequently on foreign affairs in the House of Commons.
After Mussolini attacked Abyssinia (Ethiopia) in October 1935, Hoare negotiated the so-called Hoare-Laval Pact with French Prime Minister Pierre Laval. In return for a truce, the plan called for partition: Abyssinians would lose 66% of their land, keeping only the mountainous regions with sea access, while Italy would gain the fertile farmland. Leaked to the French press in December, it drew immediate, widespread denunciation in Britain and forced Hoare to resign.
Eden traveled from the League of Nations in Geneva to meet Baldwin over Hoare’s replacement. Though his own name had been circulated, Eden said that under present conditions he did not want the job. Baldwin understood and agreed. Later, at 10 Downing Street, Eden suggested Austen Chamberlain for the post. Baldwin demurred. Eden proposed Lord Halifax, but Baldwin, he recalled, wasn’t having him, either: “Eventually he turned to me and said: ‘It looks as if it will have to be you.’”3
Foreign Secretary
On 19 December 1935, Anthony Eden succeeded Samuel Hoare as Foreign Secretary. Only 38 years of age, he was the youngest Foreign Secretary since Lord Grenville in 1791. Winston Churchill had misgivings. “Eden’s appointment does not inspire me with confidence,” he wrote to his wife. “I expect the greatness of his office will find him out.” Later, he told her, “I think you will now see what a lightweight Eden is.”4 These initial opinions would change. Soon they formed a mutual regard for each other and continued to agree over foreign policy.
In May 1937, Neville Chamberlain succeeded Baldwin as Prime Minister. Churchill recalled that Chamberlain, unlike Baldwin, had strong views about foreign affairs. He also freely asserted his right to discuss them with foreign ambassadors, Churchill wrote: “His assumption of the Premiership therefore implied a delicate but perceptible change in the position of the Foreign Secretary.”5
Clearly, Chamberlain wished to get on good terms with Hitler and Mussolini. He would, Churchill thought, avoid doing anything to offend them. On the other hand, Churchill knew Eden had won his reputation at the League of Nations by resisting Mussolini’s attack on Abyssinia. Eden, Churchill believed, felt and feared the Hitler threat, and was alarmed by the weakness of Britain’s armaments. “It seemed therefore to me from the beginning,” Churchill continued, “that differences would be likely to arise between these two leading Ministerial figures as the world situation became more acute.”6 Events proved Churchill correct. His belief in a split between Eden and Chamberlain was soon confirmed.
“Go home and take an aspirin”
After the 1938 Munich agreement, Eden remonstrated over Britain’s slow rearmament. Chamberlain “refused to listen to him,” Churchill wrote. “He advised him to ‘go home and take an aspirin’…the Foreign Secretary conceived himself to be almost isolated…. The Prime Minister had strong support…. A whole band of important Ministers thought the Foreign Office policy dangerous and even provocative.”7
Eden devotes a thick chapter of his memoirs to his next breach with Chamberlain. On 11 January. President Roosevelt wrote secretly to the Prime Minister, offering to try and save the peace. FDR proposed to address the smaller powers about the “frantic rearmament and the barbarities of modern warfare.” If Britain approved, he would chair a conference, formulate proposals to ease tensions, and discuss them with Germany, Italy, Britain and France.8
To Eden’s shock, Chamberlain spurned Roosevelt’s offer. It might, the PM replied, “cut across” British negotiations. Chamberlain had acted without consultation, except with his appeaser-advisor Sir Horace Wilson, who called Roosevelt’s proposal “wooly rubbish.” If FDR was disappointed, Eden was outraged. The President, “with all the authority of his position which is unique in the world,” had offered an incomparable opportunity to avert catastrophe.”9 It would not be repeated. Winston Churchill was even more censorious:
That Mr. Chamberlain, with his limited outlook and inexperience of the European scene, should have possessed the self-sufficiency to wave away the proffered hand stretched out across the Atlantic leaves one, even at this date, breathless with amazement. The lack of all sense of proportion, and even of self-preservation, which this episode reveals in an upright, competent, well-meaning man, charged with the destinies of our country and all who depended upon it, is appalling. One cannot today even reconstruct the state of mind which would render such gestures possible.10
“The vision of Death”
The final straw soon followed. Again without consulting Eden, Chamberlain announced that he planned to undertake direct negotiations with Mussolini. He proposed to trade de jure recognition of Mussolini’s conquest of Abyssinia for Italy’s “good offices” in pursuing a European settlement. Roosevelt had also warned against this.
Given previous Italian bad faith, Eden believed such negotiations required demonstrations of good intent. But the Cabinet continued to back Chamberlain. So on Sunday, 20 February 1938, Eden resigned. His departure had a profound impact on Churchill:
From midnight till dawn I lay in my bed consumed by emotions of sorrow and fear. There seemed one strong young figure standing up against long, dismal, drawling tides of drift and surrender, of wrong measurements and feeble impulses. My conduct of affairs would have been different from his in various ways, but he seemed to me at this moment to embody the life-hope of the British nation, the grand old British race that had done so much for men, and had yet some more to give. Now he was gone. I watched the daylight slowly creep in through the windows, and saw before me in mental gaze the vision of Death.11
Some thought Eden should challenge Chamberlain and bring down the Government, but Churchill counseled caution:
It seems to me vital that you should not allow your personal feelings of friendship to your late colleagues to hamper you in doing full justice to your cause, and above all you should not say anything that fetters your action in the future. You owe this not only to yourself—which you no doubt feel the least part of this matter—but to your cause which is also the cause of England.12
“The cause of England”
Eden took the cautious route and it proved to be the right decision. In Parliament he became increasingly aligned with Churchill’s anti-appeasers. In late 1938 he visited America to address the National Association of Manufacturers. His trip was encouraged by the enthusiastic pro-Munich U.S. Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy. Evidently Kennedy preferred to remember him as a Chamberlainite.
In Washington Eden had a “friendly talk” with an old friend, Senator Key Pittman (D.-Nev.). Neither discussed their conversation, saying they were just recalling old times. He also met with Under-Secretary of State Sumner Welles, who, Eden said, had “a lucid mind” and “the widest knowledge of European problems.” Welles took him to meet the President. It would be fascinating to know if they discussed FDR’s spurned offer to Chamberlain. Eden didn’t mention it in his memoirs. He did write:
I sensed that the President might have been slightly embarrassed about how to take this visitor who was not in agreement with his own country’s [neutral] foreign policy. In any event he was correct in avoiding that topic, while expatiating on the inferiority of the air-power of Britain and France compared with Germany’s. He kept insisting that we should strengthen ourselves in the air, and described his own intention to increase the armaments of the United States.[13]
War came as Eden and Churchill had feared, but neither thought it was a time for recriminations. In September 1939 both joined the Chamberlain government, Eden as Dominion Affairs Secretary, Churchill as First Lord of the Admiralty. Roosevelt duly wrote again, asking to be kept informed. But this time he wrote to Churchill.14
Concluded in Part 3
The author
Mr. Glueckstein, of Kings Park, New York, writes about people and places related to the Churchill saga.
Endnotes
1 Alfred Duff Cooper, Old Men Forget (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1953), 220.
2 Anthony Eden, Facing the Dictators 1923-1938 (London: Cassell, 1962), 61.
3 Ibid., 316.
4 Andrew Roberts, Churchill: Walking with Destiny (New York: Viking, 2018), 394.
5 Winston S. Churchill, The Gathering Storm (London: Cassell, 1948), 188.
6 Ibid.
7 Ibid., 195-96.
8 Eden, Facing the Dictators, 549.
9 Eden, Facing the Dictators, 555, 562, 568.
10 Churchill, Gathering Storm, 199.
11 Ibid., 201.
12 Robert Rhodes James, Anthony Eden: A Biography (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1987), 197.
13 Anthony Eden, The Reckoning (London: Cassell, 1965), 41.
14 Roosevelt to Churchill, 11 September 1939, in Gathering Storm, 345. FDR wrote: “…I want you to know how glad I am that you are back again in the Admiralty. Your problems are, I realise, complicated by new factors, but the essential is not very different. What I want you and the Prime Minister to know is that I shall at all times welcome it if you will keep me in touch personally with anything you want me to know about….” Churchill wrote: “I responded with alacrity, using the signature of ‘Naval Person,’ and thus began that long and memorable correspondence… lasting till his death more than five years later.”