SWIMMING WITH THE BIGGEST FISH AROUND

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP99-00418R000100170005-9
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 2
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: May 10, 2012
• Sequence Number: 5
• Publication Date: February 12, 1989
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/05/10: CIA-RDP99-00418R000100170005-9
Swimming With the
Biggest Fish Around
STAT
SPECIAL RELATIONSHIPS
A Foreign Correspondent's Memoirs
From Roosevelt to Reagan.
By Henry Brandon.
Illustrated. 436 pp. New York:
Atheneum. $24.95.
By Robert MacNeil
THROUGHOUT American history, European ob-
servers have come and gone, tossing off snap-
shots of America, some brilliant, some mali-
cious. Few have stayed in place long enough to
see this country evolving. That is the value of Henry
Brandon's subtle and penetrating memoir, "Special
Relationships " A veritable mole among foreign corre-
spondents, he burrowed into official Washington for
nearly 40 years for The Sunday Times of London. He
first came here at the start of World War 11, as the
flower of American world leadership was budding. Like
an avid botanist, he watched it come into bloom and,
with some melancholy, saw it begin to wither.
Since Mr. Brandon's employer was British, a paral-
lel and ironic theme is Britain's struggle against its own
decline in power, its clinging to the wartime closeness
with the United States that is one of the "special
relationships" of the title. Mr Brandon dryly observes
British prime ministers pirouetting in and out of Wash
ington, trying to dance the choreography set by Church-
ill and Roosevelt.
Ironically, history came full circle. Suddenly Ron-
ald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were parodying
Roosevelt and Churchill: U.S. War Materiel Bolsters
Thatcher's Mock-Churchillian Defiance in the Falk
lands; Thatcher Coaches Reagan on Dealing With thF-
Russians. Britain rediscovered its role as part of Eu
rope just as the United States began to grope for one
Robert MacNeil is a co-host of public television's
"MacNeill Lehrer Newshour." His memoir, "Word-
struck," will be published in the spring.
The Washington Post
The New York Times EooEC QP lick)
The Washington Times
The Wall Street Journal
The Christian Science Monitor
New York Daily News
USA Today -
The Chicago Tribune
~b Sg
Mr. Brandon sees a persistent decline in the quality
of American leadership and points to the changing role
of the press as one cause. The news media are more
powerful, "much less awed by authority than they used
to be." he writes. Journalists, he says, "have become
almost as influential in the development or the destruc-
tion or official policy as the executive or the legislature.
They have become an arbiter of society, judge rather
than commentator, advocate rather than analyst."
A part of the Washington press corps yet still an
outsider, Mr. Brandon notes new "pressures for news,
for intormation, for ferreting out official dirt." He
think.- the press now has "little tolerance of human
shortcomings and fallibility" and that its relationship
with government has become so confrontational that
the news media are affecting the ability to govern:
"Trust in and respect for government have lamentably
deteriorated, and this deterioration has made gover-
nanct even more difficult than it already was."
Mr. Brandon is dismayed by an American system
thai hf says "has to be whipped into a frenzy to make it
work He is horrified by what he sees as an irrational
element that occasionally grips American policy mak-
ers, for instance the members of the China lobby,
-whose passionate belief in the Nationalist Chinese
regime," he writes. "surpassed their American patrio-
tism" after World War II. He believes that "fear of
communism ... remains a latent threat to the balance
of the American cast of mind." He speculates that both
the Korean and the Vietnam wars might have been
avoided had Truman recognized Communist China
when Britain did in 1949.
AT gives "Special Relationships" its spice
as well as its authority is how close Mr.
Brandon got to so many of the people who
shaped postwar policy and society, Ameri-
can and British. He ate, partied, visited, holidayed,
played tennis and swam with the biggest fish around:
Dean Acheson, Anthony Eden, Harold Macmillan, John
F. Kennedy, Walter Lippmann, Henry Kissinger. Mr.
Kissinger and President Kennedy were close friends of
his. Others, like Henry Luce, Richard Nixon, George F.
Kennan, John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles, apparent-
ly found Mr. Brandon irresistible as a confidant. For
collectors of Washington anecdotes, this book is a feast.
Page -O
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/05/10: CIA-RDP99-00418R000100170005-9
 Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/05/10: CIA-RDP99-00418R000100170005-9
Allen Dulles, the Director of Central Intelligence in
the Eisenhower years, confided to Mr. Brandon that as
-a young diplomat in Bern he was too busy plavin
tennis to meet a "bearded fellow whose name was
Lenin," three days before he returne to usLi a u -
les's dour brother, John Foster, asked by the author
what he thought about position papers prepared by
Secretary of State Acheson, his then boss, suddenly
hurled a stack of them into the air and said, "Words,
nothing but words!" The imperious Acheson, who was
refused a martini before lecturing at the dry Brookings
Institution, said, "No martini, no lecture." He got the
martini. Senator John Kennedy mortified a flat-chested
dinner partner by loudly remarking on the more gener-
ous endowments of another guest.
But these are not the jottings of a social butterfly
playing at journalism. Born in Czechoslovakia, a natural-
ized British citizen, Mr. Brandon brought to diplomatic
correspondence a shrewd European eye, a sophisticated
nose for politics, a gift for language. He practiced a
special form of interpretive journalism that often be-
came part of the diplomatic dialogue between Washing-
ton and London: an idea would be floated in the press on
this side of the Atlantic and then reacted to on the other.
Mr. Brandon records one final "special relarion-
ship" - his love affair with this country and Washing-
ton. His feelings were certainly not unrequited The
American Establishment warmly reciprocated and
valued his judgment - to such an extent that he was
even asked to join the Committee on the Constituti,u-_ii
System, which was set up to suggest reforms of the
Constitution in preparation for its bicentennial
year. Yet, however fond of America he is, Mr. Br in-
don's value is that he sees this country through ,
different prism.
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/05/10: CIA-RDP99-00418R000100170005-9