Anthony Eden

"Did it have to come to this? The paradox is that when Europe was less united, it was in many ways more independent. The leaders who ruled in the early stages of integration had all been formed in a world before the global hegemony of the United States, when the major European states were themselves imperial powers, whose foreign policies were self-determined. These were people who had lived through the disasters of the Second World War, but were not crushed by them. This was true not just of a figure like De Gaulle, but of Adenauer and Mollet, of Eden and Heath, all of whom were quite prepared to ignore or defy America if their ambitions demanded it. Monnet, who did not accept their national assumptions, and never clashed with the US, still shared their sense of a future in which Europeans could settle their own affairs, in another fashion. Down into the 1970s, something of this spirit lived on even in Giscard and Schmidt, as Carter discovered. But with the neo-liberal turn of the 1980s, and the arrival in power in the 1990s of a postwar generation, it faded. The new economic doctrines cast doubt on the state as a political agent, and the new leaders had never known anything except the Pax Americana. The traditional springs of autonomy were gone."

"The most passionate advocate of absolute fidelity to the Covenant of the League in dealing with the Abyssinian question was, appropriately enough, the Minister for League-of-Nations Affairs, Anthony Eden. Eden, at thirty-seven, was the young man of the Cabinet, a representative of the new generation of public-school officer present here among ageing Victorians, a veteran of the trenches; idealistic, sensitive; something of a Brooke or a Sassoon. His were the kind of delicately and sensitively handsome features which would have well ornamented the wicket on the night when there was a breathless hush in the close, with ten to make and the last man in. The brave cause of the League could have hardly found a more appropriate standard-bearer; and, as Vansittart wrote, Eden's instincts "harboured few enthusiasms except for the League"."

"As Minister for League-of-Nations Affairs during the Abyssinian crisis Eden really acted as a second, and competitive, foreign secretary, urging his own policy in Cabinet, negotiating on England's behalf not only through the League at Geneva, but also directly with foreign governments, as with Mussolini in June. The springs of his policy are to be found in a pure internationalist faith, in a public-schoolboy's sense of honour and doing the right thing. Neither in his actions nor utterances at the time, nor even in retrospect in his memoirs, does he display any interest in, or understanding of, strategy or the world-balance of power, or the likely strategic consequences to England of his League idealism. He was indeed essentially another believer in "moral authority". In a memorandum written at Baldwin's request in the latter half of July, he argued that England must support the League, because otherwise "any opportunity that might still remain of bringing about peace by the use of the League's moral authority [author's italics] will be destroyed"."

"Eden, that picador of good causes."

"The deal between the French and the Israelis was struck in Paris on 1 October 1956. An eighteenth-century British cabinet would not have hesitated to join in... In contrast, Eden's cabinet was riven by moral squeamishness; so too were the house prefects of the Foreign Office... Eden as Prime Minister marvellously personified these ambiguities, being himself a pre-war moralising internationalist and apostle of the League of Nations, and a statesman-founder of the United Nations Organisation. Who can wonder that in the present crisis he was so edgy and indecisive? His was the dithers of a bishop nerving himself to enter a brothel."

"Eden...in the last year of his life, aged 79, and very ill, produced a minor classic in Another World. He found the writing hard going but exciting and exhilarating. Whereas his previous autobiographical volumes had been very long and lacking in sparkle, this was a concise and beautifully written little book which might easily have been the work of a young man. It is vivid, moving, even funny at times, but never sentimental. It is also remarkably modest and understated, making no mention at all of the author's winning of the Military Cross and other commendations for gallantry. As Eden's biographer justly concludes: "In a lifetime of achievement against the odds, perhaps this was the most wonderful of all.""

"Anthony's father was a mad baronet and his mother a very beautiful woman. That's Anthony—half mad baronet, half beautiful woman."

"I don't think any Secretary of State I served excelled him in finesse, or as a negotiator, or in knowledge of foreign affairs."

"Eden’s brief premiership was already in trouble before the fiasco of Suez brought it to an end. Despite winning his own mandate in the summer of 1955, Eden was in several respects unfit to be Prime Minister. He was insecure, hypersensitive, and prone to bursts of temper; his health – both psychological and physical (following a botched bile duct operation) was poor; and he had no experience of home affairs or knowledge of Whitehall beyond the Foreign Office."

"There seemed one strong young figure standing up against long, dismal, drawling tides of drift and surrender, of wrong measurements and feeble impulses. ... He seemed to me at this moment to embody the life-hope of the British nation, the grand old British race that had done so much for men, and had yet some more to give. Now he was gone."

"I still feel much happier with Eden as Foreign Secretary than I should with Brailsford, and so, I expect, do you."

"I remember we passed by 10 Downing Street. That’s the place where the prime minister of England lives. And I remember that a few years ago a man lived there by the name of Winston Churchill. One day he stood up before the world and said, “I did not become his Majesty’s First Minister to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.” And I thought about the fact that a few weeks ago a man by the name of Anthony Eden lived there. And out of all of his knowledge of the Middle East, he decided to rise up and march his armies with the forces of Israel and France into Egypt. And there they confronted their doom, because they were revolting against world opinion. Egypt, a little country. Egypt, a country with no military power. They could have easily defeated Egypt. But they did not realize that they were fighting more than Egypt. They were attacking world opinion, they were fighting the whole Asian-African bloc, which is the bloc that now thinks and moves and determines the course of the history of the world."

"Eden's position, first as Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs and then as Lord Privy Seal, was commanding. His fine war record, his charm, his versatility, his pre-eminence in debate, his appeal to men and women of all parties: all these made him an outstanding figure."

"Eden's appointment as Foreign Secretary in place of Hoare was well received, especially by the younger Members of the party. We had more confidence in him than in any other member of the Government."

"What is undeniable is that the Munich analogy has had a strong hold over statesmen and -women ever since and has been applied liberally to justify a whole range of policies. Anthony Eden, the British prime minister who succeeded Churchill, employed the analogy to disastrous effect when he tried to deal with Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Egyptian dictator in 1936. Like many leaders in what was then called the Third World, Nasser was prepared to take assistance from both sides in the Cold War. He bought arms from Communist Czechoslovakia but also tried to get a loan from the United States to build the Aswan Dam on the Nile. John Foster Dulles, the American secretary of state, was unable to get the loan 'through Congress. In retaliation and to raise the funds he needed, Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, which up to that point had been owned and managed by the British. Eden's reaction was unequivocal. As British foreign secretary in the 1930s, he had dealt with the dictators. Now he and the world were facing the same thing again. As he wrote in his memoirs, ‘'Success in a number of adventures involving the breaking of agreements in Abyssinia, in the Rhineland, in Austria, in Czechoslovakia, in Albania had persuaded Hitler and Mussolini that the democracies had not the will to resist, that they could march with the certitude of success from signpost to signpost along the road which led to world dominion.... As my colleagues and I surveyed the scene in those autumn months of 1936, we were determined that the like should not come again.” But Nasser was no Hitler intent on conquering his neighbours. Rather, he was a nationalist who badly needed resources to develop his own country and stake out a position of leadership in the Middle East. The British action in collusion with the French and the Israelis to seize the Canal Zone was not only badly conceived; it rallied the Egyptians and the wider Arab world to Nasser’s side. Furthermore, it infuriated the Americans who, far from seeing a repeat of the 1930s, worried about the moral impact on other Third World countries."

"I never saw a better dressed fool."

"Eden ha[s] put his country in a position where she sustained the greatest diplomatic reverse since Bismarck in similar circumstances had called Palmerston's bluff in the matter of Schleswig-Holstein...Further damage was done when Russia proved by her action in Spain, that she was not a good European as Mr. Eden had assured the world was the case."

"Unlike Chamberlain’s summits, the leaders came to Yalta with detailed briefing books and a body of specialist advisors, including all three foreign ministers, and in many cases they acted on policies already laid down. The deals on prisoners of war, for instance, or Soviet territorial demands in Asia had already been established in outline, while Maisky’s presentation on reparations followed the lines of a report he had drawn up over the winter. At a number of key points, however, the leaders took their own line. Stalin rejected the advice of Beria and others to offer the West more fig leaves on the Polish government. Ignoring his advisors, FDR succumbed to British pressure to accept three Soviet votes in the UN. And Churchill batted aside Eden’s apt questions about why the Western Allies needed to buy Soviet entry into the Far Eastern war. But the British foreign secretary was very effective in obtaining a greater role for postwar France than any of the Big Three, left alone, would have preferred. In September 1938, Halifax had— belatedly—exerted influence in Cabinet, but he never appeared at the conference table. Eden, in contrast, was a real presence at Yalta—vocal if rejected over the Far East, influential over France, and backing up Churchill robustly on Germany. He was far more significant at Yalta than his counterparts, particularly Stettinius. As Eden and Cadogan remarked, Stalin was indeed a skilful negotiator, letting the others do the talking and saving his succinct remarks for the right moment. Nevertheless Churchill’s more bombastic approach should not be underrated: it wore down the other two over France and German reparations. And Roosevelt pushed harder on Poland than the myths might suggest"

"He was ambitious, but not self-seeking, if by that we mean search for a self rarely found. Baldwin strongly recommended him to me; his mind was less capacious than his master's, but he used it to better advantage. Zealous, affable, intelligent, he had inherited from his father a temper mitigated by the restraints which careers impose on youth. He thus possessed early the making of "a good House of Commons manner". Desirous and deserving of praise, he avoided suspicions of brilliance or originality and pruned protusions with sense. He said the right thing so often that he seemed incapable of saying anything else."

"He had been at Eton, but the place had no magic for him as for me, and he never mentioned it. He spoke French but not much of France. We had common ground when he opposed retreats still dear to the cheaper press; but his instincts harboured few enthusiasms except for the League. It was the right one at the time, though he put more weight on it than I could advise."

"[T]he Italians wanted a deal... the Cabinet again decided to bypass diplomacy, and to send out Eden with the importance of a special mission. He was a good choice from our, but not from the Italian, standpoint. His future was assured in his own camp; he stood well with the Labour Party. "They say I'm the right man on the wrong side," he said to me. He learned early and instinctively all the things that please in Britain, and those things were right but not real, unsuiting him at this juncture as mediator with the wrong-minded. For fascists mocked the champion of Geneva Utopia, and called him Paradiso."