John Freeman, 1969–71

Abstract

At less than two years duration, the ambassadorship of John Freeman was the second shortest covered by this book. It took place, too, in a singularly uneventful period in Anglo-American relations, between the dramas of 1967–68 — when the devaluation of Sterling and Britain’s decision to withdraw from East of Suez were swiftly followed by the Tet offensive — and the ‘Nixon shocks’ over Sino-American rapprochement and trade control in 1971. Yet it was a controversial ambassadorship, a political appointment by Labour premier Harold Wilson that was heavily criticised from the outset. Freeman was lucky even to arrive in Washington in March 1969. He had been selected for the post over a year earlier, when the incumbent Lyndon Johnson or, when he withdrew from the race, Vice-President Hubert Humphrey was expected to win the 1968 race for the Presidency. Few could have predicted that victory would in fact fall to the Republican Richard Nixon, who had lost the 1960 election and then failed to win the Governorship of his home state, California. After the California result, Freeman, then editor of the New Statesman, had written Nixon off as ‘a man of no principle whatsoever except a willingness to sacrifice everything in the cause of Dick Nixon’. According to Nixon’s National Security Adviser, Henry Kissinger, the new President ‘swore that he would have nothing to do with Freeman’, a view reinforced by the former President Dwight Eisenhower, who argued that the appointment was an insult to the Presidency itself.