Portraits and Miniatures(85)

Ramsay MacDonald (1924 and 1929-35) attached considerable importance to political theory, but found more parallels in biological evolution than historical precedent for the form of socialism that he wished to introduce. Neville Chamberlain’s (1937-40) practical and somewhat intolerant mind did not much require the support or the recreation of history.

Nevertheless, I think that on balance this group of early twentieth-century Prime Ministers knew more history than do their successors of the last decade or so, and they were certainly buttressed by other ministers - Lloyd George by Curzon, Milner and H. A. L. Fisher, MacDonald by Haldane and Sydney Webb, the early Baldwin by Churchill and L. S. Amery, the later Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain by Halifax and Duff Cooper, to take some random examples - who knew incomparably more than do those who are ministers or likely ministers today. The case for secular decline can therefore be regarded as substantially if not overwhelmingly proved for Britain. And the early part of the twentieth century was already a significant decline from the habits which had prevailed in the nineteenth century.

What about other countries? First the United States. The American pattern of decline is much less clear. The early Virginian and Massachusetts Presidents are naturally thought of as gentlemen of eighteenth-century squirearchical culture, as at home amongst their books as in the saddle and the open air. And of Jefferson, the two Adams, Madison and probably Washington, this must be allowed, although with the exception of John Quincy Adams’s diary their literary output was exiguous, even if, in the cases of Jefferson and Madison at least, its constitutional impact was vast. Their minds were set in a constitutional and historical mould by the objective circumstances of creative flux in which they lived. James Monroe does not seem to me to be in the same category of library culture, although his doctrine has echoed down a century or more.

Nor were the mid-century Presidents between Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln acquired his considerable historical knowledge rather in the way that Harry Truman did seventy years later: through solitary, sometimes unselective reading more than through structured teaching or the interplay of ideas with members of a group of equals who were interested and informed. But as a composer of memorable prose and an importer of the sweep of history into oratory he was clearly in a different category from Truman. Truman’s ‘the buck stops here’ and ‘if you can’t stand the heat get out of the kitchen’ are good adages but not exactly of the quality of ‘four score and seven years ago our fathers called forth upon this continent a new nation …’

After Lincoln we have to wait until the turn of the century before we get back into significant historical hills let alone into the commanding peaks of knowledge. I suppose the twentieth century might be very crudely categorized by saying that Wood-row Wilson knew a vast amount, that Theodore Roosevelt (in a not very applied way), Truman (in a plodding way), and Kennedy (perhaps more through associates than by detailed study) knew quite a lot; that Taft, Hoover, Lyndon Johnson, Nixon and perhaps Carter knew some, Coolidge and Ford a little, and that Harding, Eisenhower and Reagan have practised a very rigid economy of historical reading. Bush ought to have picked up some at Phillips’ Andover Academy and at Yale, but I do not think it was very profound, and he certainly cannot be counted a master of structured historical or any other sort of prose.

In Europe I have mostly found the French to be more interested and better informed than the Germans and most others, although with the Belgians and some Italians inclining more to the French category. Both President Giscard and President Mitterrand combine knowledge and interest, although the former has more detail and the latter, like de Gaulle in this respect, more sweep. De Gaulle indeed was as dominated by a sense of historical sweep and destiny as was Churchill. Helmut Kohl looks likely as the Chancellor of German unity to make a lot of history, but has no great interest in it as a study. But nor did Helmut Schmidt, who was the most constructive statesman of my time as President of the European Commission. I think that for someone of Schmidt’s generation the immediate past constituted a noxious barrier which discouraged him from retrospective peering. Adenauer almost was history. He was first Mayor of Cologne in 1917, forty-six years before he ceased to be Chancellor. He was first mooted as Reichskanzler in 1921. Even so I do not think he was a great amateur of history.

Does this catalogue tell us much about how desirable a qualification for statesmanship is historical knowledge? On the whole, and surprisingly cautiously, I think it can be said that those with knowledge and interest performed better than those without, with, on the European side of the Atlantic, Lloyd George and Schmidt providing notable exceptions one way, and Eden a less certain one the other. On America I am more hesitant to pronounce.