Lord Wrath

When Lord Reith, the autocratic founder of the British Broadcasting Corporation, died four years ago at the age of 81, he was covered with honors. During his 16-year reign (1922-38) at the BBC, he had built it into one of Britain's most revered institutions; in return, the towering (6 ft. 6 in.), beetle-browed son of a Presbyterian minister had been rewarded with knighthood, a barony, the Order of the Thistle and a public reputation as one of the great moral pillars of the realm.

Those who knew the private John Reith were less sure whether he was a pillar or a petty tyrant. BBC employees fairly quaked in his presence; he once told a chief engineer who was named as the innocent party in a divorce case: "My son, you have strayed from the paths of righteousness. Our ways must part forever. You are dismissed." Now the private man has been mercilessly unwreathed in his startlingly venomous diaries, whose publication he arranged out of what one critic described as an impulse toward "posthumous suicide." They reveal him as a splenetic, mean-spirited misanthrope who, by his own admission, "loathed the common people" and lacked "all ordinary human kindliness."

Crabbed Hand. The Reith Diaries, painstakingly edited by Oxford Historian Charles Stuart, is a 525-page distillation of more than 2 million words that Reith had written in his tiny, crabbed handwriting over a 60-year period. Most frequently, Reith's targets were people who stood between him and the pinnacles of power that he thought were his natural habitat. His first run-ins were with the BBC board of governors. He dismissed Lord Clarendon, the first chairman, as "a stupid ass" and Board Member Mrs. Ethel Snowden as "a truly terrible creature."

When Reith left the BBC in 1938, he hoped to be appointed ambassador to Washington or possibly Minister of War. Occasionally, he nurtured even grander ambitions: "I hope if I were Prime Minister, I would have the strength to stake it all on Christ." When asked instead to reorganize Britain's airlines into a single state-owned corporation, Reith felt slighted. He found it degrading to work under Air Minister Kingsley Wood, whom he described as "a bally crook" and a "little swine." In May 1940, Prime Minister Winston Churchill appointed him Minister of Transport, but Reith's satisfaction was undermined by bitterness that the more important Aircraft Production Ministry was given to Lord Beaverbrook. "To no one is the vulgar designation shit more appropriately applied" is the way Reith tidily sums up Beaverbrook.

Reith's most corrosive rancor was reserved for Churchill. Stranded in his "useless position" at Transport, Reith seethed while Churchill put together his "rotten" wartime coalition full of "humbugging and sycophantic" ministers. "It is dreadfully difficult to trust in God as I should," he wrote when Churchill took over the War Ministry himself rather than offering it to him. Increasingly frustrated by his view from the sidelines, Reith worked out his rage toward Churchill in a string of scribbled epithets ("cur," "coward," "loathsome cad," "blasted thug") and capped it with a curse: "To hell and torture with Churchill and all the lousy swine of politicians and civil servants."

Patient Wife. Reith enjoyed a moment of "jubilation" when Churchill was defeated in the 1945 general elections. But postwar gratifications, other than those that came from the understanding of his patient wife Muriel, were few. As Reith saw it, the vagaries of history as well as the stupidities of men seemed bent on frustrating him. Hoping that he would be appointed Viceroy of India so that he could demonstrate his ability to run something really big, Reith was crestfallen when in 1947 Lord Mountbatten was sent to manage Britain's evacuation of India: "So that is the job I most wanted on earth gone for good."

Reith extended his Swiftian disdain for humanity to himself. The saddest and most redeeming entry in his ill-tempered chronicles is Reith's admission: "I have always known that I had a horrid character and disposition. And now I am querulous and embittered and small and shrunken and can't see even near the horizon. Believing nothing and without faith or hope, [I am] stifled and strangling and submerged by the pettiness of my own preoccupations."

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