Victim of Appeasement

One day last week Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden announced that Sir Robert Vansittart would retire as his Chief Diplomatic Adviser June 25, when he reaches the age of 60. Thus ended the public career of the man who, more than any other man, shaped British foreign policy during the fateful decade of the '305.

Over a fireplace in Sir Robert's country house, Denham Place, Bucks, hangs the portrait of an ancestor, Henry Vansittart, who was Governor of Bengal. That was the Vansittart who once sent his brother a live baboon, which the brother promptly presented to an organization both men belonged to, the Hell Fire Club, where the baboon was given the Eucharist at every meeting. Blasphemy had burned out of the family by the time Robert Gilbert Vansittart came along, as the conquering spirit had burned out of most Englishmen.

Robert Vansittart, like all British diplomats of his time, was schooled to hold the Empire together.

At 21 he wrote a play in French, Les Pariahs, which ran 100 nights at the Theatre Moliere in Paris. Then he turned to diplomacy and began his smooth ascent in the Foreign Office.* In 1920 he became private secretary to mammoth, crusty Foreign Secretary Lord Curzon. In 1928 he became Principal Private Secretary to Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin. In 1930 he became Permanent Under Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, and that was when his power began. Though Foreign Secretaries came & went, Sir Robert's influence remained so strong that it was said he was one of the three men who really ruled Britain. (The others: Sir Warren Fisher, Permanent Secretary of the Treasury, Sir Maurice Hankey, Secretary of the Cabinet and Clerk of the Privy Council.) Sir Robert had a hand in all the steps that led to Britain's isolation: the knifing of Locarno (when Britain would not support France against the German occupation of the Rhineland); the Anglo-German Naval Pact of 1935 (when Britain made a deal behind France's back); the Hoare-Laval deal over Ethiopia (when Britain sabotaged the League of Nations); British hostility to Franco-Russian alliance (when Britain first alienated Russia); British support of Belgium when she broke her British and French alliance (when Britain made it clear that she wanted to avoid war in Europe); British encouragement of the Henlein party in Czecho-Slovakia and of Yugoslavia's rapprochement with Italy and Germany (when Britain helped to break up the Little Entente). These moves were all based on two fundamental misconceptions : 1) Russia was more dangerous than Germany; 2) Hitler could be bought off with a little.

A meeting with Hitler in 1936 made Sir Robert question appeasement, and for a while in 1937 and 1938, when Anthony Eden was Foreign Secretary, it looked as though British policy were stiffening to the point of making a stand somewhere.

Between Galahad Eden and Appeaser Neville Chamberlain was Sir Robert, trying on the one hand to come to terms with Germany, on the other to set a limit to British retreat. He came into conflict with both Eden and the appeasers, and at the end of 1937 he lost his job as Permanent Under Secretary. The title of Diplomatic Adviser meant exactly the opposite.

The announcement last week of his coming retirement caused hardly a ripple of interest. Only the Manchester Guardian saluted him, and the Guardian's praise showed more clearly than denunciation that all British policy in the 1930s was based on hypocrisy, equivocation and confusion :

"He was sound on the Spanish question and did all in his power to make nonintervention a reality. Although his nature was not at all in tune with the Spanish Republican cause, he was convinced that the victory of the Nationalists would not be in the interests of the British Empire

"The approach of the second World War was foreseen by none more clearly, or with deeper anguish, than by those Germans who had a sense of the old tradition of the common European heritage and a knowledge of international affairs. They saw in Sir Robert the one hope of peace."

* Nevertheless, during his 39 years in the foreign service, Sir Robert wrote three novels, eight plays', four volumes of poetry.

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