Great Commoner

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The sober, somber Council chamber was filled with the sounds of waiting: the hum-buzz of bored conversation in the gallery, the deep, snoozy breathing of weary spectators who had fallen asleep, nervous coughs, the rustling of papers. Only those with very sharp ears could hear, above these sounds in Westminster's Central Hall, the pacing footsteps of the future.

At any moment, UNO--mankind's fragile new device of peace--might fall apart beneath the weight of Russia's postwar drive to translate victory into expansion.

It was almost two hours since the Security Council had adjourned for "five minutes." The five major members, still bickering over Greece, were having it out in a back room, guarded by red-and-blue Royal Marines. Those who were waiting knew that UNO was in crisis; few suspected how serious the crisis was. (Behind the closed doors Britain's bear-like [250 Ibs.] Ernest Bevin threatened to leave the room and to make Britain leave the Council. They did not know that Russia's sharp, suave Andrei Yanuarevich Vishinsky retorted that he was all ready to withdraw from the Council if the Soviet Union's honor and dignity were further impugned.)

Day of Crisis. At the core of UNO's first great test was, as many had predicted it would be, the Security Council's veto power. Russia's Vishinsky, in his best prosecutor's manner, had formally accused the British of endangering the peace by maintaining an army in Greece. Bevin had bellowed Britain's demand for clear acquittal of this charge. When it looked as though Bevin would win, Vishinsky threatened to use his veto.

The sweating councilors had tortured their brains and their vocabularies to contrive a verdict that was no verdict at all. One suggestion: let the Council note the debate, along with a British promise to withdraw the troops. Cried Bevin: "Really, I am not so childish as to fall for that." Another suggestion: let the Council declare that Britain's troops in Greece were no danger to peace but would be withdrawn, anyway. Cried Vishinsky: "I will vote against it!"

Next day, the nearly fatal deadlock was not so much broken as spiked. The U.S.'s placatory Edward R. Stettinius had produced a compromise which both London and Moscow would accept. Vishinsky was willing to drop his charges against Britain--provided that this Russian retreat was not mentioned in the Council's official resolution. Bevin took a long, hard look at the record, decided it spoke for itself, and withdrew his demand for an explicit "not guilty." The final statement, accepted over much relieved smiling and handshaking, merely informed the world that a debate had taken place.

The Russians went to bat again the morning after--this time for Indonesia. The Ukraine's Dmitry Zakharovich Manuilsky started off mildly enough, charging on the basis of newspaper clippings that Britain was "endangering genuine national aspirations." Quipped Bevin: a newspaper has three functions: to amuse, to entertain, to mislead. The joke was ill-timed, and Vishinsky grimly pounced on it. The Briton had to listen while the totalitarian defended Britain's free press: "The fact that there is a free press in Britain entitles us to place some credence in [it]."

Then Vishinsky proposed that a UNO commission of inquiry be sent to Java. Blustered Bevin: "His Majesty's Government will not take that." The best hope of compromise seemed to be outside the Council; the Dutch Government offered Indonesians self-determination "in our time."

As in his rip-roaring collective-bargaining days, Labor Leader Ernie Bevin shouted and pounded the table--but he did not stop bargaining. He "gave it to 'em for fair" (a favorite Bevin phrase), and the Russians were not happy. But they were still in UNO, and UNO was still in one piece. The piece was much more of a piece than it had been before.

Game of Darts. UNO had shown the Russians that the Security Council could not be used for petty tactical maneuvers. It had not, of course, really reconciled the basic forces in conflict between Great Britain and Russia; the forces were irreconcilable. It was UNO's job to deflect and cushion such forces, prevent them from colliding and exploding into World War III. The London meeting made it plain that the nations, pressed from below by war-sick peoples, had accepted UNO as the place of settlement--at least for the present.

Ernest Bevin did more than any other man in London to lift UNO above its fears. Many an emissary from smaller nations had come to London with ideals as high as Bevin's, and higher eloquence. But Bidault, for instance, dared not speak up; French Communists were too strong, and France too weak. The world's most powerful nation was represented in London first by U.S. Secretary of State James Byrnes, a habitual compromiser, and then by Stettinius, a competent, sincere negotiator. But they expended their energies on conjuring up patchwork formulas.

Bevin rose above their level, tossed aside the numbing, ambiguous grandiloquence of traditional diplomacy which made international dialogue sound remote and unreal. He spoke as no statesman had ever spoken before in international councils. He spoke, and his example made others speak, as though UNO were not a precarious assembly of many nations, but a parliament of respectable and genuine power. He spoke up to the Russians as a great many plain people in pubs and corner drugstores had often wanted to speak. Gasped one European delegate: "My God! We are playing chess, and Bevin is playing darts!"

Lessons of Life. Ernie Bevin is that kind of a man--impatient with the chessboard's strategic subtleties. Life had used him roughly from the first, had given him callouses where other men would have had scars. Born 65 years ago to bitter poverty in Winsford, a Somerset village, Ernie Bevin got an early introduction to strife and independence.

He was orphaned at six, and one of his first memories is of trotting behind his mother's coffin to the village church, listening while Anglicans and Nonconformists argued whether Mrs. Bevin--a Methodist--should get a churchyard burial. At ten he went to work as a farm laborer, at sixpence a week. He struck for a raise, was promptly fired, promptly went to work for a farmer who paid him a shilling. The farmer could not read, and Ernie read Hansard's parliamentary reports to him in the evening--for which he got overtime pay in the form of jam on his Sunday pudding. His soft, slow, West Country voice carefully repeated the fiery imperialist speeches of Joseph Chamberlain at the apex of the Empire's glory in the last years of Queen Victoria's reign.

Decades later, when his own speeches appeared in Hansard, Bevin was considerably peeved at being edited by that venerable publication. Once, when he publicly urged the King of Greece to put "no more sprags in the wheel," Hansard changed it to "spokes."* Better than Hansard's editor, Ernie Bevin knew a sprag from a spoke for, as he pointed out, he had been a drayman's boy himself--after he left the farm and went to the "big town" (Bristol).

A drayman's boy was only one of Ernie's many jobs: he was page boy, shop clerk, salesman and tram conductor. He took night courses at a Socialist free school, denounced the ills of the workingman over rum and coffee, got interested in Bristol's dockers and their struggling union, formally entered the labor movement on Christmas Day 1908 by setting up a pitch in front of Bristol Cathedral and badgering wealthy worshipers for pennies to feed the unemployed.

When his friendly enemy Winston Churchill made him Minister of Labor in 1940, Bevin was head of the Transport and General Workers' Union--one of the world's largest labor unions (over 1,000,000 members).

Years of Battle. Bevin owed his rise to a great many common man's qualities, which he has to an uncommon degree. He was uncommonly strong--once he threw an obnoxious opponent off the Bristol dock. He was uncommonly rude, at times --once, as a guest at a superb luncheon, he expressed his appreciation to his banker hosts: "You chaps had better do your best now, because when we come to power we will smash you." He was uncommonly ruthless--at the 1935 Party Congress, when he dreaded the rising danger of Naziism, he did not hesitate to crush Labor's beatified pacifist, George Lansbury. Bevin mocked, while tears were streaming down the old man's face: "George Lansbury has been dressed up in the robe of a martyr for years, waiting for somebody to set fire to the faggots. I have done it!"

Bevin has a common man's simple faith in giving the worker more to live for and more to live with, a common man's gruff self-consciousness before his social "betters," and a common man's simple but ferocious hatred of dictatorship. Yet he is himself uncommonly inclined to be dictatorial, likes power, is sweepingly impatient. Through the years, he has acquired the conviction that he was more than a dockside agitator, and acquired with it some sense of being a man of destiny.

Bevin leads a rather lonely life with his placid, greyish wife Florence, usually stays at a small, homelike flat on the top floor of the Foreign Office. He is rabidly jealous of his privacy and coldly forbidding toward most reporters. Confided one London correspondent last week: "The only way to get him is to call the Foreign Office switchboard and say in a firm voice: 'The flat, please.'"

Union of Diplomats. After last year's smashing Labor victory, the victors got together to pick the portfolios for the new Cabinet. Clement Attlee, of course, would be Prime Minister, for only under his soothing leadership could country-bred Ernie Bevin work together with the "Cockney Sparrow" Herbert Morrison, whose warmth has won him a far larger personal following than Bevin's. Bevin himself wanted the power of the purse. Said he: "Give me five years as Chancellor of the Exchequer, and I will so alter this country that no one will ever change it back." Reticent, scholarly Hugh Daiton, who considers himself insufficiently appreciated as a foreign-affairs expert, wanted to go to Whitehall. Attlee agreed, but later, during a solitary lunch, he mulled things over, and decided that he had the line-up backwards. Whitehall needed a strong man--Ernie Bevin.

Bevin turned out to be a much better boss than musty old Whitehall had hoped. He knew much more about Whitehall's business than it had expected. By & large, he left the coterie of career diplomats alone. Bevin is still short of topnotch diplomatic personnel. His star ambassador is Sir Archibald Clark Kerr, recently recalled from Moscow where, the Foreign Office felt, he was being wasted.

Bevin displays little humor and geniality around the office ("Life is Real, Life is Ernest" soon became a common quip). He likes a drink and a chat, but is pathetically awkward at making friends. Nevertheless he won underpaid Foreign Office hearts by going to bat for a general salary raise. When a friend suggested that the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Hugh Daiton, might object, Bargainer Bevin roared: "I'll take the worthy doctor by his pants and swing him around my head till I get it!"

Decline of Empire. When Bevin sat down after his first foreign policy statement in the House of Commons, one of his colleagues on the Government bench dryly remarked: "He's picked up all of Eden's principles and dropped nothing but his aspirates." (Commoner Bevin still occasionally drops his aitches; during the war he whipped on his workers with "Give 'itler 'ell!") Different as Ernie Bevin is in manner and method from urbane Anthony Eden, and from all the kid-glove and silk-hat diplomats before him, he has not veered from Eden's course. He growled to a friend not long ago: "Everyone is expecting me to change our foreign policy. What these people forget is that facts never change."

But facts replace each other. The hardest fact was that the British Empire had indeed changed since the bright and brassy days when young Ernie started to read his Hansard. Old Ernie took over Britain's foreign affairs at a time when the country was facing a slow and perhaps agonizing battle for survival. The second Battle of Britain would not be as dramatic as the first. The skies over the Empire would not be as black as in Churchill's finest, darkest hour; but they would be a lasting grey. The uniquely delicate bonds and balances of the Empire were being strained and upset as never before.

The 65 years of Bevin's life have marked the decline of Britain from the world's first industrial and naval power to a position of strategic dependence on the U.S. At the time Bevin was born, Britain was able to make more armaments than all of the rest of the world put together. When Bevin became Foreign Secretary, Britain could not make a tenth of the world's output of weapons. Yet from her days of pre-eminent power Britain had inherited over 13 million square miles of empire with 450 million people--and with them a sense of responsibility which, while often laggard and defective, was nevertheless more genuine than that displayed by any other colonial nation. Socialist Bevin faces the rising tide of Asiatic nationalism; 1946 is likely to see another major crisis in India's ferment. Democrat Bevin faces a Russia which has become the strongest power on both the Asiatic and European continents and which, by pressing on Britain's lifeline in the Mediterranean, threatens to secure an interior position between the homeland and Britain's vital bases in the East.

Price of Peace. The Balkans--except Greece--are already in the widening Soviet orbit. The Russians all but have their hands on Iran's oil, and certainly have their eyes on the pipeline in the Levant states, which last week asked UNO for withdrawal of British and French troops. Russian diplomatic radar is feeling out the Arab League. Turkey is under pressure to let Russia dominate the Dardanelles. Russia's good friend Tito is still clamoring for Trieste on the Adriatic, and Russia herself is clamoring for a one-panel trusteeship in Tripolitania.

The price of victory had been high for Britain. The price of peace might be higher still. How much could Ernie Bevin afford to pay? How much could he afford not to pay? Those questions would define the hostory of the next quarter-century.

It was clear already that Ernie Bevin had not become the king's Foreign Secretary to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire. Socialist or no, Bevin meant to fight for the king's Empire. As always, he would drive a hard bargain. Above all, he would fight--as he had fought last week in UNO, for a way of dealing with Russia that did not involve giving in to every Russian demand.

The things that divide Russia from Great Britain could not be expressed in old terms of Empire alone. Bevin is not ridden by doctrines and dogmas, but he has a fierce hatred of Communism. He knows Communism inside out, for he has fought it and crushed it within Transport House. Last week, when Soviet President Kalinin denounced Europe's "reactionary Socialists" and their false devotion to democracy, Bevin knew that Kalinin put his name at the top of the list. Bevin understands that the gap between Russia and the West is really unbridgeable so long as Russia defines democracy in terms of a single party, a single list of candidates, a secret police and a controlled press. He knows that the West's brand of freedom is no longer welcome in a great many parts of the world today, but he still believes in it, and when he shouted in UNO he did so in the conviction that freedom need not whisper anywhere.

Resurgence of Principle. Had the conflict been merely that of two empires, the methods of power politics might have sufficed, even though Britain was no longer the world's greatest power. But a conflict of principle called for a forum above the level of "absolute sovereignty." To him, that forum was UNO.

Bevin is no Utopian internationalist. He is fighting for one world, but he is also fighting for king & country. With this sane and simple paradox--which is as sane and simple as Ernie Bevin--he had captured the imagination of millions who believe firmly in both nationalism and world government. Many saw him suddenly as the great defender of the West. To some extent he was--though capitalists who counted on Bevin to preserve the West of free enterprise were likely to find some day that they had bought a large and ferocious pig in a poke. Bevin believes with his party that men can live freely within a controlled system. Should this proposition prove untenable, British Socialism will probably prove less durable than British freedom.

But in Ernie Bevin's philosophy, liberty and socialism do not contradict each other. His early poverty had led him to prize economic security above economic opportunity. Britain's waning power after two wars persuaded Bevin and his countrymen that sovereignty must be bent to fit a pattern of world order. They knew also that UNO could not be built on a foundation of immoral compromises with expediency. As Britain's ancient strength declined, its ancient principles must take, at least in part, the place of power.

Britons had always fought best in adversity. In London in 1946 they had discovered a champion who fitted a rallying cry from the Lay of the Battle of Maldon:

Thought shall be the harder,

Heart the keener,

Mood shall be the more,

As our might lessens.

* -Sprag: a "billet of wood or a rod used . . . for checking a vehicle from running backward."

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