Over Here by Raymond Seitz Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 358pp, £20 in UK
Raymond Seitz was the very popular American Ambassador to Britain from 1991 to 1994. His tenure there was unique; he was the first nonpolitical (i.e. career diplomat) to receive the prestigious posting to the Court of St James. His years in London spanned part of the Bush presidency and the first two years of President Clinton's.
Ambassador Seitz is a self-admitted Anglophile, and he knows his territory. He had served twice in Britain before becoming ambassador, once as first secretary, then as minister. His relationship with Britain precedes his own diplomatic career. A cousin served as aide to the American Ambassador in the 1920s, and his mother, upon a visit to London, was presented at Court in 1927.
His book on Britain today romps through British society; it is urbane, witty, and knowledgable. He swats at the British and Americans even-handedly. Explaining the English aristocracy, he says: "None of Britain's first families seems to have so consistently and convincingly established the case against the hereditary principle . . . In the British aristocracy the gene pool always had a shallow end."
He patiently explains the things that make the British different from Americans. Time, for instance. "If time in Britain is vertical, time in America is horizontal . . . for most Americans, all history is ancient history and the best thing about the past is that it's over."
Ambassador Seitz gives us plausible and charming explanations of the British love of dogs, cats and horses. He explains cricket (oh, please!); he is brave enough to talk about the weather.
No one can write about Britain without covering the class system. "The old upper class hasn't been displaced," Seitz assures us. "It has simply moved over to make room for a more recent arrival on the social scene, a middle-class urban gentry, well-educated and professional, influential . . . Americans might call this breed `upwardly mobile'."
One of the best chapters of Seitz's book is the chapter on the British economy. He covers familiar territory, but his explanations are deft: the shock of the 20th century which left Great Britain stunned; the decline of the Empire which was "an easy, ready market, grossly protected, and once it fell away the British found themselves in a rough-and-tumble world for which they were ill prepared and ill suited", saddled with a "plethora of national benefit programmes which were socially admirable and economically unsustainable". "Her majesty's Government became a spendthrift National Nanny."
In the midst of this affable and thoroughly readable trek through British life, there is suddenly a strident note. Ambassador Seitz strongly disapproved of President Clinton's decision to grant a visa to Gerry Adams to visit the United States. Seitz blames the United States Ambassador to Ireland, Jean Kennedy Smith, for Adams's visa and blasts her for taking too active a role in Northern Ireland . . . his territory. He is quite out of character in this vilification.
Traditionally, it would be a gross intrusion of diplomatic boundaries for one envoy to make political connections in another's country. But Ireland, with its North and its South, is different, and policy there should reflect the difference. The fact that it doesn't - in an established and official manner - is destructive. There is no way an American ambassador to the Republic of Ireland can both represent the interests of her country - her main duty - and at the same time be au courant with the Northern peace efforts - the principal diplomatic issue in the Republic - unless she has access to the political climate of the North and of Britain.
When my late husband, Bill Shannon, was appointed Ambassador to Ireland, one of his main interests was the politics of Northern Ireland. He was eager to meet the players and to report his point of view to Washington. Accordingly, shortly after our arrival in Ireland, we made a trip to the North, arranged in part by our consul general in Belfast, and he met and talked with representatives from every political side. He found it invaluable, and duly reported back to the State Department. He was then told, in very stern terms, that that would be his last trip to Northern Ireland. Period. Fortunately, he was an old friend of the US Ambassador to Britain, so there was no friction in their relationship, and on our visits to London Ambassador Kingman Brewster stacked his guest list with people Bill would like to meet and talk with on issues relating to Northern Ireland. That worked, but it was apparent even then that the censure on ambassadorial trips from Dublin to the North was outdated.
As for the British government's outrage about the Adams visa, shared by Ambassador Seitz, I can only say that I, too, was initially dismayed. And for the same reasons that Seitz lists in his book. And I was wrong. Adams's coming to the States did crack the ice floe, the scene shifted; the cease-fire, annulled once, is back, and Protestants and Catholics are talking. Would they have talked anyway? Well, for twenty years they didn't. What they are saying and where it will all end, who knows? Ambassador Jean Kennedy Smith's comment, "History will tell", is all we know for now. It's better than killing.
Elizabeth Shannon is Director of the International Visitors Program at Boston University and the author of I Am of Ireland: Women of the North Speak Out; her late husband, William V. Shannon, was Ambassador to Ireland from 1977 to 1981