Reflecting on Things Past

By Peter Lord Carrington, Harper & Row, New York, 1988. 406 pp. $22.95.

Reviewed by Russell Warren Howe

No one could accuse Lord Carrington of calling a spade a spade, if there's an alternative. It would probably be a "farm implement which has rendered sterling service for centuries and will assuredly continue to do so despite. . . " The measured cadences of diplomatic language appeal to this wellborn public servant (high, commissioner to Australia, leader of the House of Lords, defense secretary, chairman of the Conservative Party, foreign secretary, secretary-general of NATO) who today is a partner of Kissinger Associates.

A late starter, and no scholar, he chose Sandhurst over Oxford and spent World War II in the Grenadier Guards. Yet what has evolved is a judicial mind—confidently self-deprecating, and seeing all points of view.

This makes his few strong opinions all the more interesting—his beliefs in the European Community and the Commonwealth, in reform of the House of Lords, and above all his passionate devotion to the Palestinians, which matches his support for the refusal of the natives of the Falkland Islands to accept the imposition of a foreign culture and language by an Argentinian junta. (Sovereignty, he reminds us, "is over people, not land.")

People More Important Than Politics

On Palestine, he seeks a return to the 1947 partition plan, with compensation for lost property. A few years down the line, he implies, the Israelis will be wondering what they were worried about.

Politicians, he writes, feel most at ease when quarreling with other politicians. They are "apt to think that [their] opinions and comments, and those of political commentators in the media, are the dominant, even the sole, indicators of relations between countries. It is not so."

In Palestine, Israel and elsewhere, Carrington sees tolerance between peoples as more significant than the postures of leaders. Leading a squadron of tanks into Germany in 1945, he distinguishes between an odious leadership and patriotic German soldiers whom the fate of birth had made his opponents, now condemned to defeat. The future secretary-general of NATO wrote: "And yet they fought. Their discipline was remarkable. Their soldierly instincts, their tactical training and sense, were capable, right to the end, of teaching us a sharp lesson if we took liberties. They were superb fighting men, the men of the Wehrmacht against whom we fought; and my admiration and respect for them has never diminished."

Carrington opposed the Anglo-Franco-Israeli invasion of Suez in 1956. (In a very rare use of a strong adjective, he calls Eden "neurotic.") He backed the French and British arms ban on Israel in 1967, and the European Community's Venice declaration a decade later. "The Arabs had and have an intractable problem," he points out. "The problem is the expropriation of the Palestinian homeland." He defends Syria's President Assad, a level-headed man ... whom I respect." He is critical of American wrong headedness. But even there, he finds a novel attenuating factor: Because Israel depends entirely on American support, he says, withdrawing it completely would only unbalance the equation in the opposite direction.

Nevertheless, he thinks America missed a major opportunity at the time of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, "when the tide of world opinion ran so strongly against Israel that the US might have brought decisive influence to bear. If they had been tough with Israel then ... they might have brought all parties to the negotiating table, and perhaps moved on to ... fundamental issues of Palestine." He adds: "At its most vulnerable to criticism, American policy has allowed itself to be excessively dictated by Israel... I doubted whether 'Camp David,' a genuine and courageous attempt to improve relations in the area, could ever get beyond a certain point because it didn't deal with the crux issue, Palestine."

Saw PLO As Key to Peace

He scores Washington's on-again, off-again support for the Saudi eight-point plan of 1982, which implicitly recognized Israel, and recalls how this brought "Euro-American and particularly British-American relations to a somewhat chilly condition, in which Haig in a series of speeches and interviews implied that this sort of [European] behavior could make the Americans think twice about their contribution to European defense."

Britain, he notes, "could hardly plead lack of historic connection [to the problem] since modern Israel largely owed its existence to our own initiative, a fact the Arabs seldom ignored." He was sure that the PLO had to be involved in any settlement... [it] represented the majority of Palestinians. They could not be ignored. If there were ever to be any sort of productive negotiation, it must include them. That was the sentiment with which I arrived at the Foreign Office in 1979."

There is much else in this book that shows his gradualist, unemotional dedication to "people" causes, notably in South Africa and Rhodesia which he negotiated into independent Zimbabwe while the right wing of his party held meetings festooned with "Hang Carrington!" banners. He sees greater value in a Commonwealth which is no longer a British club, but that contains cultures which, while not always following Westminster rules, still share a common past.

Like all good men, Carrington is unwaveringly loyal to friends in disgrace. He praises Sadat's hospitality to the dying shah, and heaps warm praise on Lord Profumo, whose political career died in the tabloids over his momentary relationship with a courtesan ("a single peccadillo").

Not surprisingly, this is not a book of vengeance or scandalous revelations, hyped by publishers' editors, of the sort with which the high clowns of the White House monetize their fall from power; and his anecdotes are the stuff of after-dinner speeches. He recalls a feisty Scottish ambassador reproving a visiting Prime Minister Macmillan for scoffing at how Edmund Muskie had forfeited his run for the presidency by crying because his wife had been accused of alcoholism.

"How would you feel, Sir Harold, if you were addressing a meeting and someone yelled 'Lady Dorothy is an old drunk'?" the venturesome envoy inquired. Said Macmillan: "Oh, I'd have shouted back You should have seen her mother."'

Russell Warren Howe is a Washington-based free-lance journalist who writes regularly for newspapers in the US and abroad. He is also the author of numerous books and articles on the influence of special interest groups on American politics.