[Notices and Restrictions | Interview Transcript | List of Subjects Discussed]
Notice Numbers appearing in square brackets (ex. [45]) within the transcript indicate the pagination in the original, hardcopy version of the oral history interview. RESTRICTIONS Opened September, 1981 [Top of the Page | Notices and Restrictions | Interview Transcript | List of Subjects Discussed]
Oral History Interview with
August 12, 1970 by Theodore A. Wilson WILSON: You were in Washington at some extremely interesting and eventful times both during the war and then after for three years. EDWARDS: Yes. WILSON: One of the most difficult questions in studying this period is the matter of the change in American opinion which took place. I wonder if you might give me your impressions, since you were in Washington in the later stages of the war, on what you found to be the general American attitude about the postwar period. EDWARDS: Perhaps I could start by going back a little bit earlier, because it so happens my first connection with America was rather unusual for those days. I was a student at Princeton as a Davison scholar. Davison scholars came from Oxford and Cambridge in pairs to Harvard, Yale or Princeton. That was in 1925-26; I'm called the class of '26, and in fact I'm going back for my 45th reunion next year, so I have kept up my associations. This means that I'm able to look at the United States, as I might as well confess at once, as a devoted admirer; I love your country, and I have an immense admiration for it. I have seen a complete change of attitude and opinion towards the outside world in the 45 years that I've known the States. So, if you don't mind my just going back a little earlier? WILSON: No, please, yes. EDWARDS: In 1925-26, when I was first there, you were going through a period of what looked like unprecedented boom and it looked almost like unending boom. You virtually thought you'd found a clue to ever increasing prosperity. You paid out more wages; as you paid out more wages, demand increased; as demand increased, production went up to meet it; and that meant more wages still. That was the wonderful theory until, of course, 1929, when Wall Street crashed and suddenly the world in two years was involved in the most appalling depression that the world has ever met, starting from that Wall Street crash. A figure I'll always remember -- of significance to those of us who have to think in world terms -- is that British exports to the outside world in 1931-32 fell by 50 percent, which I think was exactly the same percentage as the fall in the American economy. Such was the influence of the American economy on world trade even in those days. This is significant, from the opinion point of view, because your exports then, and some say even now, are still such a marginal part of your total turnover, your total gross national product. In those days it was probably even less than now; I'm not quite certain of my facts there but it was somewhere in the neighborhood of 5 percent. The average American didn't really think about exports -- or imports for that matter. He didn't think they were particularly important, and therefore world trade didn't seem very important to you in those days. But this was the effect you had on us, for instance. When your economy went down, our exports to the whole of the rest of the world went down in almost the same proportion as your own GNP went down. So even in those days the world was much more interdependent, economically, than the majority of Americans realized at that time. In the war, I was mainly with the Ministry of Production, as we called it, which was the coordinating ministry at the top of our three separate war production ministries. They were the Ministry of Supply, which was responsible for military equipment; the Ministry of Aircraft Production; and the Admiralty which was responsible for the building of ships and other things for the Royal Navy, as well as for the running of the Navy itself. The Ministry of Production was a small, coordinating ministry, a planning ministry, basically, and therefore it dealt a great deal with Washington, at the higher levels, in particular, the WPB -- War Production Board -- and of course we sat upon the Combined Production Resources Board and the Combined Raw Materials Board which were, I think, Anglo-American... WILSON: Yes. EDWARDS: So we kept in Washington what was called the British Supply Office, which was the counterpart of the Ministry of Production in London, and it was through that office that I first became involved in information or public relations work in America. The object of our endeavors at that time, which was welcomed by your people, was to show that Britain's war production effort, although obviously small in comparison with American war production, was nevertheless still significant. And even though lend-lease was enormous and invaluable for us, reverse lend-lease -- what we did for you -- was far greater than Americans thought and understood, in the Pacific as well as in the European sector of the war. So I became involved in a lot of Anglo-American things at that time; I was half the time in Washington and half the time in London. I commuted across the Atlantic in those funny old flying boats which we used to fly across the water. It took 17 and a half hours I think non-stop from Ireland flying at 200 feet above the sea all the time. A most extraordinary performance. I don't know how we managed. Then after the war -- I was not a career civil servant -- the Foreign Office asked me if I would head up the British Information Services in the United States. I said I would for three years, and that's how I came to be there, 1946 to '49. Now the interesting part of this was that the Foreign Office asked me to do this because they thought the major postwar problems of Anglo-American relations would be economic and industrial -- and this was the side of life I had dealt with most of my life. This was the main reason I was chosen for it. In fact, of course, almost the first thing I was thrown into when I started the job was the issue of Palestine, followed by Greece. In other words, I was being called upon to deal with issues of foreign policy rather than economics. That was my first baptism. Later, however, the economic field took over. First, there was the British loan, then the Marshall Aid Program which of course, was the big thing. Finally, I was lucky enough to see the North Atlantic Treaty [establishing NATO] actually signed by Harry Truman. WILSON: Oh, you were? EDWARDS: I was actually present when it was signed. This was, from my angle as an Anglo-American so to speak, the consummation of all I'd ever hoped to see. WILSON: Yes, a commitment of the United States. EDWARDS: The United States for the first time was formally entering into the outside world, and abandoning isolationism, which was the predominant attitude before the war. WILSON: Did you think that some such commitment would come at the time, say in the late stages of the war? EDWARDS: Well, one way to answer that question is to reveal the way one worked. I used every year, sometimes every six months, to draw up strategic objectives for our information policy. These obviously started with the main objectives of British foreign policy. Insofar as America was concerned, the leading objective was to help America to become involved in a political and military alliance with Europe, the North Atlantic Treaty as we know it. When that actually was signed, right at the end of my three years, I did feel I had seen a complete revolution in American public opinion in my short life. WILSON: Very interesting. One of the first points that you made raises a question which confuses me in a way. It concerns this matter of the lack of awareness of the United States in the years before the war, and to some extent after, of its role in the international trading picture -- of its passive and to some extent active importance in world trade. There has been some speculation and some pseudo-historical analysis in recent years that one of the chief motivations of American policy in the postwar period was that of fear of the recurrence of depression, and that American business groups, during and immediately after the war, believed and took actions to insure that the United States would replace its war production by increased trade, by increased markets. Is that a correct analysis? Was there this sort of rather open fear of depression and thus... EDWARDS: Yes, I think there was always that fear of depression. I think it took quite a while to break down, actually. The contrast between American thinking now and what it was during the Truman administration, to my mind, is very marked. I mean, now you are completely a part of the international scene -- not a part, but the leader, the acknowledged, accepted leader. You're involved at every point, but in those days you were still only beginning to come in; there was still a lot of suspicion of the outside world, even in the era of Mr. Truman. I remember how astonished I used to be at the number of times American businessmen in particular used to use the phrase, "Well, you British, you always outsmart us." It never occurred to me that we could outsmart anybody, let alone that we could outsmart the Americans. But it was absolutely engraved in their minds that somehow we had such long experience in foreign affairs, in economic affairs, and world trade, investment, and all the rest of it, that we knew much more than they did and they were mere "babes in the wood," whereas we were very experienced and ready to "outsmart" them. This was the phrase that kept on coming up. Now this to me was quite an astonishing concept. I couldn't get the idea of... WILSON: It came up I suppose, in the controversy about Palestine and also... EDWARDS: Palestine was a very different problem. I don't know if you would want to talk about that for a moment. WILSON: Yes, I would... EDWARDS: This has little to do with economics. This time we are talking almost wholly about foreign policy. I can only give you my memory of it. I think it was the most difficult public relations thing I've ever had to handle in my life. We were responsible, after all, for Palestine under the Mandate of the League of Nations, which was subsequently transferred t |
