Ambassador Raymond G H Seitz - 26 March 1993

In all this week's turmoil of bad news and intimations of chaos, there is one solid piece of good news and one item that may allow me to go out on a note of quiet hilarity. The good news, a topic I thought of a good deal since November and not dared to talk about for the obvious reason of not wanting to abuse a reporter's job by seeming to be a pushy lobbyist.

Every time the White House changes tenants, several thousand human beings suddenly acquire delusions of grandeur, from a dream of becoming United States Ambassador to Britain or Russia, all the way down to a fantasy of waking up as fourth inspector of customs at Baton Rouge, Louisiana. In between these extremes are, I don't know the precise figure, but perhaps as many as 10,000 jobs in the federal civil service and also the privilege of appointing about 400 federal judges. All these jobs are at the disposal of the new president, inevitably the president new or old cannot possibly know in every creek and hamlet of the continental United States who is best qualified to be a judge or a postmaster or a local tax collector. Inevitably then, the president has to trust to an acquaintance or the friend of a Democrat of a friend in this city or that village. Inevitably, the system works by cronyism; it is called, in the president's case, patronage.

President Clinton has been so busy with so many serious matters that he still has several hundred empty jobs, patronage jobs to fill and one of them rather late in the day to be addressed is that of United States Ambassador to the Court of St James's, British newspaper sub-editors please copy. I was shocked last week to see an English paper and a Tory one at that, print what at one time was always barely tolerated as a typical American illiteracy: the Court of St James. However, pedantry aside, to some of us the job of American ambassador to Britain is a matter of perhaps more sentimental concern than the weight it can carry in the modern imbalance of power.

Now the ambassadorial jobs around the world are in obscure places and in countries with little political clout filled by career men and women who entered the foreign service in their youth and eventually got a reputation for being spectacularly knowledgeable about the economics of Upper Volta and one day such a type will be ambassador if the country rates an embassy or minister to Upper Volta or to a neighbouring nation.

If I appear to jest, I hasten to apologise, the best qualified people to be ambassadors to the big powers also are career foreign service men and women, but in the United States they seldom if ever get to the big bow-wow capitals: London, Paris, Bonn, Moscow, Tokyo. From a time way back there in the early jungle days of American politics when presidential campaigns began to depend on the intravenous feeding of large doses of money, it became the unavoidable duty of the elected president to reward old moneybags for services rendered, so for ever and a day the big posts in the big capitals went to the most generous fat cats. Never mind if they knew nothing of the politics and couldn't speak the language of the country to which they were posted.

Now you'll say yes, but surely the president can only nominate an ambassador, he still has to be confirmed after an appearance before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. That's true, but I know of only one case of a rewarded fat cat being turned down by the confirming committee and that was in Roosevelt's time. In fact, a Franklin Roosevelt appointee, he was a Democrat of course, a rich man who wanted very much to be american ambassador to Australia. Somebody on the Foreign Relations Committee must have had something in for this man, quite apart from his fitness to be ambassador. Within an hour of the nominee's appearance, one senator asked him if he would bear in mind when he got to Australia the contribution that sunburnt army veterans from the outback that made to the allied victory in the Second World War. The what, queried the nominee, the outback. The nominee consulted an advisor at his elbow "I'm sorry, I thought you'd said something like outback." That's right, he'd never heard of it. Tell me Mr Fat Cat, what's the capital of Australia? The man hadn't the faintest idea, his innocence about Australasia was so gross and the papers so delightedly fed on it that it was not possible to let the nomination go through. Roosevelt withdrew it and I'm sure backstage took it out on who ever had first put up the man's name.

Now theoretically the choice is always between a career man and a very rich man and here's the snag, the nasty problem a president would face who decided say to fill all the European capitals with career men, they would have to be maintained in the ambassadorial style by the taxpayer as happens in most other countries. The multimillionaire will maintain himself. I remember one ambassador to Britain who told me that his entertainment allowance for one year paid for an Independence Day reception at the Regent's Park residence for maybe 500 people to be served, wait for it, lemonade punch. The other 95% of the embassy entertainment he paid for himself.

For the longest time, there were two politicians, two famous puritans, one a Methodist senator from Oklahoma and the other a Baptist congressman from Brooklyn, New York who were chairmen respectively of the relevant committees to confirm, they were united by a common crusade, they would see to it that no bill would be passed that allowed any embassy to claim what other nations call "entertainment allowance", which of course runs in most places to well several hundred thousand dollars a year. Senator Kerr and John J Rooney did not call such largesse an entertainment allowance, they called "booze allowance" – they were both, of course, teetotallers and were haunted by the fantasy of embassy parties at which several hundred guests lay around in a swinish stupor at the expense of the American taxpayer.

The first president I knew to challenge this chokehold on the system was John F Kennedy, he wanted something that in those days was un-wantable, he wanted in Paris a particular top man, career man who knew a great deal about the history of France and of the Soviet Union and who was so fluent in Russian that he acted during the Second War as interpreter between Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt at epoch-making conferences. President Kennedy also wanted as an ambassador to India a leading economist, a professor who had supported the Kennedy campaign.

At Christmas time after his election, Kennedy invited both Senator Kerr and Congressman Rooney to come down to his father's house in Palm Beach and spend a few carefree days in the sun, they were about to be conned, persuaded at least, to believe that neither Mr Chip Bohlen nor Professor Galbraith were likely to stage drunken orgies in Paris and New Dehli, but Kennedy very much wanted them and that meant, since both were comparatively poor men, that meant voting a special large entertainment allowance during their time in France and India. Well, he got it.

After Kennedy, Johnson kept on one or two career men but pretty soon the system reverted to normal and under Reagan and Bush flourished exceedingly, enough to say that London when Britain was top dog was the top diplomatic post, it had never been filled by a career man until two years ago, when amazingly President Bush of all grateful buddies appointed a top state department career man Mr Raymond Seitz. The question, the misgiving that afflicted many knowledgeable people in the Foreign Office in London, in the State Department here and luckily among some influential Democrats who know Clinton, the fear was that Clinton would find himself bound to act according to form and give in to the cravings of one of the many rich contributors who simply would do anything to get to the Court of St James's.

Well he bravely resisted them; he has decided to keep Mr Seitz in London. This for Britons and Americans who still care for good realistic relations between the two countries is very good news, Mr Seitz is splendid at an ambassador's first job, which is to be a fair, disinterested reporter. That he has been, he knows British politicians of all stripes of opinion, he knows the country. All in all, he's been the best ambassador since the late David Bruce, one of the very few Americans I believe to be retained as ambassador by both a Republican and a Democratic president and he was by the way the only American in history to serve successively as American ambassador to Bonn, to Paris and to London, to be the best since David Bruce is to be as good as you can get.

Now for the promised titbit of hilarity or, if you like, simply a happy thought. I gather, in fact,I only recently discovered that British universities have taken on perhaps long ago, the American habit of calling old boys and old girls "alumni" and of putting out alumni magazine and of publishing in it cheerful or jolly notes from the old gang saying what they're up to, whom they married, children, jobs, hobbies, so forth. The Americans who once were Rhodes Scholars have such a good old boy magazine, I do not expect to read their homey notes about the Clinton's little girl, Chelsea.

However, the latest issue carried this item. "Bill Clinton writes to say that Chelsea's ballet skills are at a high level, Hillary is still busy, Bill adds that in November he was elected President of the United States".

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