During the summer of 1939, there was no doubt as to Britain’s most important diplomatic posting. Although the French army remained intact and the Maginot Line uncrossed, Britain’s relationship with the US would, it was commonly acknowledged, determine her ability to weather the coming storm.

Since the spring of 1930, the British Embassy in Washington – recently recreated in neoclassical splendour by Edwin Lutyens – had been occupied by Ronald Lindsay. A tall, imposing aristocrat, Lindsay was a diplomat of the old-school. A Wykehamist with an aptitude for languages, he had served in St Petersburg, Tehran, Paris and Berlin before becoming Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office in 1928. His tenure in Washington had been distinguished but undemonstrative. A reserved and formal man, he believed, like most British officials, that diplomacy is best practised in private. As such, he travelled rarely, seldom made speeches and waited until his final months in post before hosting a press conference. His determination to retire in the summer of 1939 was, nevertheless, regretted in the Foreign Office, not least due to the vexed question of who would replace him.

An obvious candidate was the former Permanent Under-Secretary, Robert Vansittart. A grand and cultivated civil servant, Vansittart had alienated both his political master, Lord Halifax, and his successor, Alexander Cadogan, through his opposition to appeasement, emotional memoranda and refusal to relinquish the Permanent Under-Secretary’s office after being promoted to the important-sounding but meaningless role of ‘Chief Diplomatic Adviser’. Another option was the Ambassador to Cairo, Miles Lampson. Halifax, however, expressed an early preference for a political appointment. His first choice was Philip Kerr, 11th Marquess of Lothian.

At first sight, Lothian was an odd choice to succeed Lindsay as principal resident of 3100 Massachusetts Avenue. A former colonial administrator, who had served as Private Secretary to Lloyd George during the Paris Peace Conference, his idealism and sense of mission led to an unfortunate tendency to tilt at windmills, the most notorious of which had been Hitler. Convinced that the Germans had legitimate grievances that could be ameliorated by revising the more egregious clauses of the Treaty of Versailles, Lothian had travelled to Berlin in January 1935 for talks with the Nazi leader. After two hours in the Reich Chancellery, during which Hitler harped on the dangers of communism, the animosity of France and his longstanding desire for Anglo-German friendship, the peer sent a typescript of his conversation to the Foreign Office along with his judgement that there was ‘quite clearly a political foundation for a settlement which will keep the peace of Europe for ten years on the basis of equality [of armaments] if we take the opportunity’. Two days later, in an article for The Times, the Marquess declared that the central fact in Europe today was ‘that Germany does not want war and is prepared to renounce it absolutely as a method of settling her disputes with her neighbours, provided she is given real equality’.

Predictably, this parroting of Nazi propaganda raised eyebrows among anti-appeasers in London. Vansittart (then Permanent Under-Secretary) raged against ‘these foolish and offensive busybodies’ who went off on self-appointed ‘peace missions’ to Berlin. The Foreign Office Minister, Viscount Cranbourne, thought Lothian’s idea of ‘smiling seductively on the present German Government’ in the hope of persuading it to moderate its policy, ‘pure bunkum’. Later, after Lothian paid a second visit to Hitler, in May 1937, and then condoned the German invasion of Austria, in March 1938, Foreign office officials began referring to the peer as ‘Lord Loathsome’.

Yet Lothian’s American credentials proved more influential than his support for appeasement, which, in any case, he renounced during the winter of 1938-39. Unlike most members of the British ruling elite, Lothian not only knew but liked America. As Secretary of the Rhodes Trust, during the interwar years, he had visited 44 of the then 48 states and established friendships with an impressive array of politicians, academics, businessmen and journalists. To Lothian, America was a land of excitement and opportunity, and it was his firm belief that the two great English-speaking blocs, the British Commonwealth and the United States, should become entwined for their own benefit and that of the wider world.

In January 1939, prior to his appointment, Lothian had tried to persuade Roosevelt that the United States must assume responsibility for the preservation of democracy and peace. The Pax Britannica, based on overwhelming British naval strength, had prevented conflict between the great powers for almost one hundred years between the Battle of Waterloo and the First World War, but Britain was now too weak to perform this function. Roosevelt was unimpressed. ‘I wish the British would stop this “We who are about to die, salute thee” attitude’, he complained to his former Harvard professor, Roger B. Merriman.

Lothian was here the other day, [and] started the conversation by saying that he had completely abandoned his former belief that Hitler could be dealt with as a semi-reasonable human being and went on to say that the British for a thousand years had been the guardians of Anglo-Saxon civilisation – that the sceptre or sword of something like that had dropped from their palsied fingers – that the US must snatch it up… I got mad clear through and told him that just so long as he or Britishers like him took that attitude of complete despair, the British would not be worth saving.

Yet Roosevelt liked Lothian and had, in any case, decided that a professional diplomat was not the right choice at this critical time. (‘How can a man with a name like that ever get his personality across [in] this country?’ the president is supposed to have remarked after learning that the Foreign Office was considering the former Ambassador to China, Sir Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen.) On 28 March 1939, the president gave his consent and on 24 April the appointment was announced. ‘I am glad to know that Lothian is coming to us as British Ambassador’, the American educator Abraham Flexner wrote to the retired British civil servant Thomas Jones. ‘He will be the first British Ambassador since [James] Bryce who has been anything but a diplomatic clerk.’  On the other hand, his tête-à-têtes with Hitler had created a most ‘unfavourable impression’ in the US and it was going to require ‘some very cautious diplomacy on his part to wipe out the taint of that initial and long-continued blunder’.

As it transpired, Lothian justified the confidence of his admirers and confounded the expectations of his detractors. (‘It’s extraordinary how successful Lothian is now, when you think he was absolutely wrong all along about Germany,’ noted the Foreign Office’s Valentine Lawford in November 1940.) At the heart of his success was a flare for public relations. Prior to his departure he had assured MPs that he would ‘not make any but the dullest speeches’. Once across the pond, however, he established warm and informal relations with the press, spoke engagingly and often, and cultivated an image of a democratic aristocrat; a man who, despite being an English lord, drove his own car, bought his own train tickets and sported a battered grey fedora. The embassy social circle was greatly expanded. Lunches and dinners were opportunities to expound the British case, and junior diplomats were as likely to find themselves next to the Mayor of Kalamazoo as one of Washington’s society hostesses. Realising that most Americans thought the British stuffy and supercilious, Lothian took delight in twitting his hosts. ‘I hope you recognise your last king’, he would remark as isolationist senators passed the portrait of George III on the embassy staircase; or, ‘pay reverence to the true founder of the American Republic’.

In private, he urged Churchill to act with openness and generosity towards the United States. In particular, he exhorted the British government to offer the US bases on colonial possessions in the Caribbean and North Atlantic in the hope of eliciting the transfer of 50 American destroyers in return. If Churchill was sceptical, the Colonial Office was scandalised. ‘All this is the doing of Philip Lothian,’ complained the Colonial Secretary, the die-hard imperialist Lord Lloyd. ‘He always wanted to give away the Empire and now has the perfect opportunity for doing so.’ But Lothian prevailed. The offer was made and the destroyers were handed over to the Royal Navy in the winter of 1940. It was an inequitable bargain, but one that set a precedent for further un-neutral action by the still neutral US.

At the same time, Lothian was trying to persuade Roosevelt, Congress and the American people that Britain, given enough US aid, could survive. This task was made easier by the Royal Air Force’s victory over the Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain. Admiration and sympathy for the beleaguered island ran high in the US. Yet, as Lothian wrote to the Conservative MP Victor Cazalet, ‘admiration and sympathy are not much good when one is fighting Hitler in the gate’. In particular, the ambassador was worried about Britain’s ability to pay for essential US war purchases. Forced by the Neutrality Acts to pay cash for all goods obtained in the US, Britain had spent more than $1.3 billion on American materiel in the 12 months between September 1939 and September 1940. On 23 November 1940, Lothian stepped off an aeroplane at New York’s LaGuardia airport and informed awaiting reporters that Britain was on the verge of bankruptcy.

Churchill deplored this confession of impending national insolvency, but was soon persuaded by the ambassador to set out Britain’s vital needs in a letter to the president. ‘His [Lothian’s] idea’, noted the Foreign Office’s David Scott, ‘was that this letter should be continuously in the President’s mind and that its existence and the knowledge that some day it might be published would act as a continual spur in meeting our requirements for fear lest it should be said in years to come, “he knew, he was warned and he didn’t take the necessary steps.”’ Roosevelt’s response was Lend Lease: a declaration of economic warfare by the US that would see some $50 billion worth of American goods being shipped to Allied nations between March 1941 and September 1945 and make an incalculable contribution to Allied victory.

Lothian had been integral to the two most important events in Anglo-American relations before Pearl Harbor. His popularity, both within the administration and outside, was considerable. ‘His great abilities, intensity of purpose and strong though charming personality made him virtually a perfect diplomatic representative’, enthused US Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, in his memoirs. Unfortunately, Lothian had allowed his friend and possibly lover, Nancy Astor, to convert him to Christian Science in the 1920s. In December 1940, he developed a kidney infection and, in accordance with his religious precepts, refused the medical treatment that would have cured him. He died on 12 December 1940. ‘Lothian’s death is a tragedy’, wrote the Secretary of State for India, Leo Amery, to the Viceroy, Lord Linlithgow.  ‘What he did do, and what no one else could have done so well, was to convince the Americans during these last six months that they were in real danger, that our defence was their defence, and, last but not least, that our defence was effective or could be made effective with their help.’

As in 1938-39, a variety of candidates were considered to fill the vacancy. Churchill favoured Lloyd George. This, as others understood, would have been a disaster. Although a dynamic war leader between 1916 and 1918, the ‘Welsh Wizard’ had degenerated into a vain and defeatist old man. Churchill’s motivation was part reverence for his old mentor, part desire to flatter the Americans with a big political figure. When Lloyd George refused (on health grounds), the prime minister alighted upon Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax. Here, the motive was not so pure. Although Halifax was undoubtedly a big figure, he was also Churchill’s former rival for the premiership and the last of the appeasers in the Cabinet. Halifax resisted the appointment with all his not very considerable might, but, in the end, yielded to the prime minister’s wishes. The Roosevelt administration, though acquiescent, was horrified. While Lothian had been a clubbable Liberal and Americophile, Halifax was a reserved Tory: a former Viceroy of India and ‘Man of Munich’, he looked upon his appointment as a form of transportation. ‘I felt as if my roots had been suddenly pulled up or much as a fish must feel when suddenly pulled up on to a bank,’ he recorded in his diary.

His tenure began with a series of gaffes that amounted to a diplomatic debacle. Telling reporters that he had discussed the Lend-Lease bill with the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, shortly after his arrival in Washington, he was accused of meddling in American politics. Later, attending a baseball game in Chicago, he seemed to disparage the national sport by observing that ‘it was a bit like cricket, except that we don’t question the umpire’s decision so much’, and then compounded the error by leaving an uneaten hot dog under his seat. Worst of all, he accepted an invitation for a day’s fox hunting in Pennsylvania. Embassy officials begged him not to go, but the viscount was determined and was duly castigated in the US press for enjoying himself while his countrymen were being bombed.

Americans baffled him. A man who by his own admission knew ‘nothing about people’, he was bewildered by these ‘crude… warm-hearted’ creatures, who called him by his Christian name (a privilege he denied his daughters-in-law) and invited him to visit their houses following only the briefest acquaintance. The political reverence for public opinion seemed to him disproportionate and cowardly, while the disjointed nature of the US government reminded him of a disorderly day’s rabbit shooting. His dinner with some 40 Republican Congressmen, most of whom were staunch isolationists, in June 1941, was a disaster. Looking ‘like a church mouse or a poor country cousin’, he submitted himself to an interrogation on appeasement, Britain’s unpaid First World War debts, her postwar plans, Lend-Lease and Anglo-American co-operation. Although his answers were commendably honest, their effect, if the notes of one Midwest Congressman are representative, was merely to reinforce existing prejudices:

General Impressions:

England is extremely selfish.

She will use anybody to help herself and having gained her ends will dump them overboard.

Their statesmen are very smart and have too much experience in power politics for our statesmen to deal with for our own best interests.

England looks out for herself first, last and all the time.

England has no intention of repayment of any past, present or future war debts.

England would like us to help her police the world – she to establish the policies – we to pay the bills.

More than ever before I am convinced [that] we should stay out of this war.

I had little respect for England before. I have much less now.

Realising that he was floundering, Halifax recruited his cousin Angus McDonnell to serve as Honorary Attaché. The second son of an Irish peer, with an irreverent sense of humour, McDonnell had come to know America during his time working for the railroad magnate Chiswell Langhorne. As a relation and Eton contemporary, McDonnell felt able to tell the viscount some home truths. When Halifax complained that he found Americans ‘odd’, McDonnell corrected him: ‘On the contrary, it is you who are odd. You have led a very sheltered life.’ Realising that Halifax was fundamentally shy, he arranged for him to meet small groups of senators and congressmen informally in his Washington apartment. When the ambassador was having trouble obtaining an interview with the president, McDonnell told him to telephone the President’s aide ‘Pa’ Watson, but insisted that he call him ‘Pa’. The attaché then watched as the viscount picked up the receiver and, as if overcoming an almost physical pain, managed to stammer, ‘Is that you, P … Pa?’

Most crucially, McDonnell made the ambassador leave Washington. Halifax’s tours, which eventually encompassed all 48 states, were the making of him. Although the ambassador found it disconcerting to be accompanied by so many policemen, there was little need for protection, as friendly crowds welcomed him to such isolationist strongholds as Milwaukee, Chicago and Kansas City. In Detroit, however, he was pelted with eggs and tomatoes by a group of anti-interventionist women, styled ‘Mothers of America’. Although the viscount maintained the silent dignity of ‘a French aristo in the tumbril’, the British Press Service in New York attributed to him the remark that his only feeling was ‘one of envy that people have eggs and tomatoes to throw about. In England, these are very scarce’. This inspired, apocryphal riposte marked the turning point of Halifax’s ambassadorship. Respected for his integrity and pitied for his suffering (his second son, Peter, was killed in action in November 1942, while his youngest son, Richard, lost both his legs in the Western Desert three months later), his departure from the US, in the spring of 1946, was mourned in Washington.

Both Lothian and Halifax were political appointments that entailed considerable risk. Both were aristocrats. Both had been appeasers. Both had met Hitler. But their skill, sagacity and obvious sincerity, once in post, meant that they would be remembered as two of Britain’s greatest wartime envoys.