First Confession Page 11

  The relationship with Colin Powell, Madeleine’s successor in the Bush team, was more difficult. This was not because of him. He was one of the most decent and intelligent people I have ever met. The three people I have met who most exuded grace and natural authority were all African or of African heritage – Nelson Mandela, Kofi Annan and Colin Powell. The problem for Powell was that he was serving an administration which was doing some pretty crazy things. He never birked the task of defending the Bush administration, though I sometimes felt that there was a hint in his body language of what he really thought. It undoubtedly undermined his ability to speak up for sense that the Blair government was such a gung-ho supporter of some of the wilder Bush–Cheney schemes, above all in Iraq. I always assumed that there was something about being a soldier which made Powell go along with his commander-in-chief, even when he disagreed with the policy. On one occasion, when I was in Washington, a columnist on the local paper, the Post, wrote an article saying that European policy in the Middle East was anti-Semitic. I wrote a strong, angry rebuttal, which the paper published. Two days later I was being driven through Madrid to a meeting with the Spanish Prime Minister, José María Aznar. My mobile phone rang. It was the US State Department. The operator said, ‘I have the Secretary of State for you.’ He came immediately on the line. ‘Great piece in the Post today,’ he said. I would have had no difficulty following this general over the top.

  From Alabama and then Texas, Edward and I headed north for New York and at about this time Edward decided that he should go back to Oxford to sit the All Souls Prize Fellowship Exam. He had already got a congratulatory first-class degree, like getting a homerun at baseball or a century before lunch at cricket in a Test match at Lord’s. To win in addition the All Souls Fellowship (which he did in due course) would be like doing both back to back. Edward’s wholly understandable decision left me with a quandary: should I cut short my time in the United States and return home with him or should I stay on alone and find something else to do? I consulted Bill Coolidge and his formidable personal assistant, Mary, who handled the nuts and bolts of the scholarship programme, also acting as a kind but forceful aunt to its beneficiaries. Bill immediately suggested that I should go and see a friend of his in New York, who was fund-raising for the newly announced Republican candidate for the mayoralty, John Lindsay, and see if there was an opening for me on his campaign staff. There was. So I joined the team, working out of the Roosevelt Hotel on Madison Avenue and East 45th, and was offered a room in a mostly unoccupied apartment on 5th Avenue and 69th. This was another example of rather casually winning one of life’s lotteries, and it not only changed my life, but sent it off in the direction that has carried me all the way to writing this book.

  John Lindsay was a tall, good-looking Yale graduate and lawyer who had been elected for the so-called silk-stocking district of Manhattan (the Upper East Side) as a very moderate, independent-minded Republican congressman. He was sufficiently moderate to attract the support of New York’s small Liberal Party and the scathing hostility of the equally small but noisy Conservative Party. His main opponent was a machine Democrat called Abraham Beame, and as ever in New York it was the Democrats’ race to lose. The motto of Lindsay’s campaign was taken from a local journalist: ‘He is fresh and everyone else is tired.’ More imaginatively, Times Square had an advertisement in lights stating, as Mary Poppins might have said, that Lindsay was ‘supercalifragilisticexpialidocious’.

  Lindsay had assembled a team of sparky young men and women who went on to all sorts of glittering careers from politics to directing the Metropolitan Museum. I worked for a clever and charming graduate of Yale and Balliol, a lawyer from Texas called Sherwin Goldman. We prepared much of the briefing for Lindsay’s debates. Sherwin provided my first education in politics and a rolling seminar on New York. Civilized and well-read, he took me around town: jazz clubs, best restaurants, American Ballet Theatre, the Frick. I had a daily tutorial in politics, and evening and weekend seminars during a glorious East Coast autumn on New York’s contribution to civilization. Sherwin went on to become a successful impresario, helped run the New York City Opera and the Glimmerglass Opera Festival, gave my youngest daughter a backstage job at the City Opera before she went up to Cambridge, and – a happy finale – married his male partner once the law caught up with love. He has been a lifelong friend and would be surprised to know how great an effect he has had on my life. To my surprise, young and inexperienced as I was, I was taken seriously, greatly enjoyed what I was doing and found that I was good at it. I had found politics, or, rather, politics had found me.

  John Lindsay was a wonderful campaigner, never fearful of plunging into a crowd, however hostile it might be. He won the election and then, with a transport strike on his first day in office, had two torrid terms in Gracie Mansion. New York at the time was well-nigh ungovernable, drowning in debt and regularly capsized by awful unions. One of the best things that Lindsay was able to do was to keep the lid on the racial tensions which boiled over into riots in other cities in the late 1960s and early 1970s, a consequence in part of white, middle-class flight from city centres and growing deprivation, drug-dealing and crime there. This success was partly a result of Lindsay’s own personality and courage in dealing with incipient racial hostility. Lindsay graced politics but was probably better at getting elected than at governing. His journey across the political landscape eventually carried him all the way into the Democratic Party.

  He had begun his career in a Republican Party which still provided a home for conservatives with moderate views and a justified suspicion of ideology. Until the election of Bobby Kennedy as a New York senator in January 1965, there had been two Republican senators there, Keating and Javits, both of them internationalist moderates. The state’s Governor was Nelson Rockefeller. I rather doubt whether any of them could get chosen these days as a Republican candidate. Again and again over the following years traditional Republicans were stalked by right-wing zealots and cut down. As the party’s base became narrower, and the number of its party supporters diminished, the power of a fairly small band of militant activists became all the greater. This is a familiar pattern in democratic politics. Parties that lose mass support become prey to extremists. They become ripe for a wholesale takeover. That was eventually what happened to the Republican Party: taken over by a master of the process, with too few sensible leaders and members around shouting ‘caveat emptor’.

  During that summer of 1965, and working with American politicians in later years, there was no doubt which country in the world was top dog. Hubert Védrine, President Mitterand’s adviser and later French foreign minister, used to talk about American hyper-puissance. It rested on a combination of economic strength, demography, public support and the will of successive leaders and the establishment that they commanded.

  American economic power has been formidable. The USA, with 4–5 per cent of the world’s population, has accounted for between 20 and over 30 per cent of the world’s economic output for over 130 years. Partly because of their large populations, other countries have begun to catch up to the overall size of the American economy, but in terms of wealth per head they are still well behind. China – whose economy may now be bigger than America’s by some measures – has one fifth of America’s wealth per head. Moreover, the rise of other countries is to a considerable extent because they have benefited from the economic structures that the United States more than any other country began to put in place over sixty years ago, and because America has been such an open market for them. China’s exports to America grew by 1,600 per cent in one fifteen-year period at the height of that country’s breakneck growth spurt either side of the millennium. When I first visited the United States, its economy was about 36–7 per cent of the world’s. Today that figure stands at about 22 per cent. That is mainly an indication of how well the rest of the world has done, not – pace President Trump – how badly America has performed. So if you are placing a bet on who is going
to stay Number One, it must make sense to follow Damon Runyon’s rule. ‘The race is not always to the swift,’ he wrote, ‘nor the battle to the strong – but that’s the way to bet.’ Big economies, with great wealth per head of population, take some beating.

  The United States, of course, made a huge contribution to the defeat of Nazi Germany and Japan in the Second World War; many Americans died in Europe and Asia, and America’s naval might and industrial muscle were especially significant factors in eventual victory. In comparison with America, which only endured a direct attack on its territory in Hawaii, others took a heavier toll in human casualties and economic destruction. Ninety times as many people from the Soviet Union died – 27 million – as from the USA during the Second World War, and almost no one died in the USA from military action. Theodore von Laue, the brilliant German-American historian, whose Nobel Prize-winning physicist father was a hiking companion of Albert Einstein, sketched the political scene in 1945 in his book The World Revolution of Westernization: ‘At the end of the war, the United States was the only belligerent physically untouched by battle, its prosperity and system of government enhanced and its power in the world unprecedented. Whatever the country’s post-war stance, it had earned its pre-eminence in the world thanks not only to its civic virtues – much advertised at the time – but also to the privileged historic conditioning and geographical advantage that had made possible its immense cultural resources (including its virtues).’

  The key to America’s post-war leadership was responsible magnanimity, exemplified by the Marshall Plan. Naturally, this leadership was accompanied occasionally by almost as much hypocrisy and as many double standards as the Victorians had displayed. Democracy in other countries was never as popular in Washington when it produced left-wing governments. Sanctimoniousness travels far and wide without a passport. Equally, America’s role on the world stage was accompanied by criticism both from those who thought that America should do or give more, and by those who believed that it should do less. Sometimes both criticisms were deployed simultaneously. The left was very partial to this behaviour, so too in particular the French, who often seemed to be arguing in the same paragraph that the Americans should both be providing more assistance and not providing it at all. Why was America’s cheque not much larger, and why did Washington demean beneficiaries by offering it? Yet, overall, America behaved like no victor before or since. It set itself the task of building a better global order whose rules should apply to the victor as well as the vanquished. (The major exception to this was America’s refusal to participate in the international court system.)

  It was generous in shaping its strategy and in supporting it with dollars. After the First World War, despite Woodrow Wilson’s fourteen points to make the world better and safer (the American democratic response to Lenin), America had gone home, not wanting to be entangled again in Europe’s civil wars. The result was another European civil war. In 1945, President Truman and his colleagues recognized that it would be dangerous to do the same again. America’s security was closely tied to Europe’s, especially with the communist Soviet Union on the rampage. The worry, however, was that, if the USA retained a military presence in Europe without the Europeans sorting out their historic arguments, young Americans might once again find themselves fighting and dying to stop Europeans killing one another. There was an implicit bargain. America would work with its Western European Allies to open the NATO umbrella, whose purpose (according to its first British Secretary-General, Lord Ismay) was ‘To keep the Americans in, the Russians out, and the Germans down.’ In return, Europe would put behind it the decades of xenophobic nationalism that had led to two world wars. The original architects of what was to become the European Union were much better received in post-war Washington than London, as they hatched the plans for a historic reconciliation between France and Germany, with these countries lashed together at the heart of a European structure which belatedly Britain asked to join in 1961, the year before I went to Oxford. General de Gaulle vetoed Britain’s bid for a second and seemingly decisive time two years after my trip to the USA.

  America’s policy in Europe in the second half of the twentieth century was the greatest success story for its post-war geo-strategy – Western European countries helped the USA put in place global institutions and agreements like the United Nations, the Bretton Woods organizations and the WTO. In return, America gave great financial support through Marshall Aid for the rebuilding of Europe from the rubble of war. This assistance helped Europe not only to re-establish its industrial base and rebuild its cities, but to sustain alongside them the entitlement programmes that were at the heart of welfare democracy. The success of America’s strategy in Europe came eventually with the collapse of the Soviet Union and its Central and Eastern European empire. The Soviet Union fell, with its armaments still intact, because it simply did not work as a model which gave its citizens a decent life, nor as a way of government which attracted others – if they had much of a choice in the matter – to try to replicate it.

  Outside Europe, American policy was less effective. True, the case for capitalism, the rule of law and democracy slowly won converts around the world, and the global economic rules that others came to accept spread prosperity especially in East Asia. But, too often, Europe’s Cold War was allowed to turn into a series of hot wars or dangerous stand-offs in other continents, premised on the assumption that communism was everywhere on the march and therefore had to be everywhere resisted. Sometimes, America’s allegedly wise and special friends in Britain egged America on to act foolishly, for example in overthrowing Mossadeq in Iran in 1953 by persuading Washington that he was turning into a Russian communist stooge. Britain’s real grouse was that he was threatening to increase the domestic Iranian take from UK oil interests. At least Americans did not believe that London was right to regard Abdul Nasser as a threat to global freedom in 1956 when President Eisenhower pulled the plug on the British–French–Israeli invasion of Egypt. In the Middle East, however, as time went by, American policy was hijacked by Israel (both because of the folly of most Arab states and because of the ever-powerful diaspora politics of Washington). One of the smaller proxy wars during the Cold War flared into a big and dangerous confrontation in Vietnam. This was in its early stages when Edward and I were crisscrossing America. The tragedy of Vietnam was that communism was eventually defeated there, and elsewhere, not by American arms but by globalization and capitalism. It was a point understood to his credit by President Nixon, whose aim, pursued in a sometimes indefensible way, was to get out of the conflict and concentrate on bigger and more important issues, like the US relationship with China. Nixon was destroyed not by Vietnam but by the fact that the United States placed the rule of law over political power. This commitment to pluralism, accountability and due process has been one of the reasons for America’s global ascendancy for seventy or more years, helped by its military dominance which during the coldest days of the Cold War ensured a grim peace, with both Washington and Moscow understanding that a false move could trigger nuclear Armageddon.

  There are three pre-eminent reasons for America’s status as the principal world power for so long. First, the American system has by and large worked, delivering the economic benefits both for its own people and for others. Second, America has been able to deploy soft power as well as hard; it could get other countries to go along more or less with what it wanted them to do without the use of force. Third, America has been the only country that matters everywhere, to some extent because it is prepared to do so. This has required it to be serious and usually consistent everywhere too. America has not on the whole taken other countries by surprise.

  Americans have also usually chosen presidents who, perhaps in part because of their pre-eminence, are capable of gathering other global players into their tent. The two presidents with whom I had the closest dealings were rather different in this respect. President Clinton was a natural consensus builder, a reflection of the engaging p
ersonality of a man who loved to be loved, by men, women (of course) and I am sure cats and dogs too. George Bush Junior was a genial soul, and much sharper intellectually than the outside world usually reckoned. A friend of mine thinks that at school he would have been a natural towel-flicker in the changing room, rather small, a teaser, difficult to dislike, but probably not someone you would seek to emulate.

  Clinton pursued a pretty conventional policy overseas, probably more aware of the economic consequences of international politics than his serious and wiser predecessor, George Bush Senior, reluctant to be dragged into international conflict, yet not so sophisticated in his use of America’s global authority as the senior Bush had been. In action he was the most impressive politician I have ever seen. This was partly because of his high intellectual ability and the easy way in which he could conceptualize from anecdotes. He was extraordinarily articulate and entirely at home with the peaks and troughs of policy wonkery. But, above all, unlike many politicians, he clearly liked people; it is extraordinary how many politicians in my experience do not seem to like people – their voters – very much: a bit like doctors not being able to stand the sight of blood. Clinton could make the most cynical of hardened ‘pros’, the most resistant to political ham, go weak at the knees as he turned on the blowtorch of his charm. I recall one occasion at my first meeting of the UN General Assembly. On the first day, there is a rather grim lunch. The Secretary-General and the US President address the assembled heads of government, foreign ministers and UN hot shots. I was sitting at a table, about two rows back from the route the President took in and out of the room, with a group of foreign ministers from West Africa, the Gulf and Eastern Europe who had not been enthralling company over lunch. I had only recently published my report on policing in Northern Ireland, which the Americans had greatly liked. Spotting me as he was shepherded out of the room by bodyguards with bits of plastic in their ears, Clinton pushed through them and a crowd of other notables to give me a hug, tell me what a ‘helluva’ fellow I was, quite the greatest peacemaker since doves had first flown from the Ark. I modestly twinkled. For five minutes, maybe more, I would have followed him anywhere. What a wonderful operator! ‘You’ve just got to love him,’ someone said to me afterwards, and indeed you did.