Then come the national anthems, played by a smart Marine band. “God Save the Queen” commends itself, as usual, for its brevity and is, after all, the selfsame tune as the American standby “My Country Tis of Thee.” “The Star-Spangled Banner” takes longer. Written in 1814 after its author, Francis Scott Key, had watched the British bombard Fort McHenry in Baltimore on their way to burn Washington, it has a third verse which is increasingly omitted from official printings. Referring to the British, it declares: “Their blood has wash’d out their foul footsteps’ pollution.” It goes on to say:
No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave.
As a slight salve to British honor in the squalid matter of 1814, the music to the national anthem was composed by an Englishman named John Stafford Smith, who lived between 1750 and 1836. We have, alas, lost his original words, though the song was called “To Anacreon in Heaven” and was meant as a ditty for a young men’s drinking club, in a tavern as unlike the Beverly Hilton’s Red Lion as it is possible to imagine.
Since Ronald Wilson Reagan is no longer President, we are spared a rendition of “Hail to the Chief,” the words of which were taken from a ballad by Sir Walter Scott in The Lady of the Lake, and set to music by the Englishman James Sanderson. But we do get the Marine Hymn, one of the few official American ditties to which English people seem to know the words. Expressing as it does the first American ambition to be as far-flung as the coast of Libya and the heart of Mexico, it answers to some chord in the British breast; perhaps confirming that the errant former colony could still recognize the right colonial and martial stuff when it saw it.
The ex-Chief, Ronald Reagan, is only the fourth person to be honored by the Churchill Foundation. Previous recipients have been W. Averell Harriman (a mandarin among foreign service mandarins and a special confidant of the Atlanticist class as well as a relation by marriage of the Churchill family), H. Ross Perot, and Margaret Thatcher. Perot, who is usually described by nervous subeditors as “the eccentric Texas billionaire,” has run a foreign policy all his own on the gross revenues of innumerable corporations, and could by a stretch be said to have that odd word “swashbuckling” in common with Sir Winston.
Prince Philip, the social centerpiece of the night’s events, is in fact following in his son’s footsteps as a bridge builder of the “special relationship.” Prince Charles was the one who put the Churchill medallion around the neck of H. Ross Perot in 1986, and he also can claim to have bestowed the royal warrant upon Mr. and Mrs. Walter Annenberg. In their protracted struggle to acquire the patina of “class” for their operations and for their many charities and promotions, they have found the patronage of the Prince of Wales to be essential and continuous. When she was Ronald Reagan’s chief of protocol, Mrs. Annenberg once so far forgot herself as to curtsy publicly to Charles when greeting him at Andrews Air Force Base; an impromptu gesture of fealty that did minor damage to the stipulations of the American Constitution and which led to some growling from those who still remember the United States as a republic.
In Los Angeles at any rate, visiting British crowned heads get, as it were, two bites at the cherry. They can appear in the vestments of former British glory and pageantry, much as they do elsewhere, and represent the astonishing historic continuity of the United Kingdom. But they also constitute a uniquely appetizing morsel for those who live by the codes of stardom and who hunger for a star with “class” and magic. I found this out for myself by making an appearance on Sonia Live, the upbeat bicoastal chat show hosted by Sonia Friedman and transmitted on the Cable News Network with the Hollywood logo in the background. In front of a primetime audience of daytime viewers, I was asked to comment on the Charles and Diana marriage, and the rumors of its impending breakup. When I said that I thought the whole thing was a press bonanza, and that the obsession with monarchy was beginning to bore even the British, the tempestuous Sonia was appalled. “Mister Hitchens,” she intoned in reproof, “how can you sit there with that lovely English accent and say such a thing? That wedding was a fairy tale for all of us here.” It was as if I had offended a specifically Californian household god. Which in a way, I had. In 1988 it was announced that Princess Diana had been, by a large margin, the woman most often featured on the covers of American magazines in the course of that year. One could scarcely enter a supermarket without seeing her photograph on the rack, or barely utter a sentence in an English accent without inviting friendly inquiries about her. Across a swath of the imagination of America, it seemed, England was understood principally as the home of the Windsors; a sort of theme park for royal activities and romances. Without the monarchy, ran the unstated question, what would be the point of the old country?
This attitude, to which the British embassy defers as a matter of course, was amply catered for in November 1985, when Prince Charles and his bride paid an official visit to Washington. The much-hyped joint appearance was timed to coincide with an immense exhibition, “Treasure Houses of Britain,” at the National Gallery of Art. Taken together, the Prince and Princess and the country-house trove could have been designed to reinforce the impression of Britain as a museum run by people of a certain faint breeding, a museum, moreover, uniquely accessible to monied Americans. I can still recall the half-embarrassed frenzy which seized the nation’s capital in the days before the momentous opening; the pseudo-debutante flurry of “coveted invitations,” protocol crises, and etiquette hysteria.
Republican values were the loser in this carnival. The British Tourist Authority inserted a special supplement, consisting of one hundred and sixteen pages, into The Washington Post, in which the first paragraph misidentified John Adams as the third President of the United States. This did nothing to quell the general enthusiasm. The “Style” section of the Post forgot itself completely at the reception for the country-house owners, writing: “With guests like the Duke of Bedford and Lord Montagu of Beaulieu, the wave of Anglophilia continued to wash over the town. After all, laughed Chinese ambassador Han Xu, ‘they were here before.’ ‘I think Washington has always been Anglophile—since Churchill,’ said Clare Boothe Luce. ‘I think we’re all Anglophiles,’ noted Librarian of Congress Daniel Boorstin. ‘How can we fail to be Anglophiles? Unless we hate ourselves.’ ” (In 1961, Mr. Boorstin published a celebrated book called The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America.)
John Adams (the second President of the United States) wrote to Thomas Jefferson in July 1813: “I read in Greek a couplet, the sense of which was ‘Nobility in men is worth as much as it is in horses, asses or rams; but the meanest blooded puppy in the world, if he gets a little money, is as good a man as the best of them.’ ”
In reply Jefferson, the third President of the United States, wrote: “The passage you quote . . . has an ethical rather than a political object. I agree with you that there is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talents. . . . There is also an artificial aristocracy, founded on wealth and birth, without either virtue or talents.”
This correspondence might as well never have been written for all that Georgetown could have cared during that week. Gushed the Post in still another special spread: “Susan Mary Alsop, Senator Jay Rockefeller, Katharine Graham, Evangeline Bruce, philanthropist Ethel Garrett and Washington doyenne Polly Fritchey— there may not be titles before these names, but they are Washington’s social nobility, the kind of people who don’t pay a couple of pounds to visit the Treasure Houses; they stay there as guests. It will be old money, old power, old china and lots of familiar faces.” The echo of “social mobility” in the tautology “social nobility” is very, very distant.
But note, again, the latent connection between British “style” and American “class.” The existing Georgetown aristocracy, already heavily inflected with Anglophilia, so to speak recertifies itself as aristocratic by its ease of access, not to an exhibition about stately homes but to the homes themselves. Thus, b
etween the cult of vulgar celebrity and the cult of wellborn good taste, the English have the rather maddening ability to score twice. They can produce genuine dukes and real lineages to set against Dynasty, that most suggestively named soap opera. They can also produce a princess who eats lunch with John Travolta and Donald Trump, and a presenter named Robin Leach for that great yearning, fawning, televised exercise Life Styles of the Rich and Famous.
It may be no coincidence, then, that the era of Ronald Reagan was at once a celebration of the nouveau riche and a stage in the evolution toward a monarchic and ceremonial presidency. The ground for this had admittedly been manured well before, with the slightly risible term “Camelot” being coined to give a tinge of mystic English Arthurian splendor to the rather tacky and modern court arrangements of the Kennedy clan. Indeed, one of the more startling journalistic conventions, on the accession of a new American President, is the publication of his bloodline as it relates to the English monarchy. There is even an ornate appendix to Burke’s Presidential Families of the United States, entitled “Presidents of Royal Descent.” Starting with George Washington, who devoted most of his life not only to expelling the British monarchy but to ensuring that it could never return to America in mutated form, the tireless Burke “credits” him with a descent from Edmund Crouchback, John of Gaunt, and Henry III, with a collateral line tracing itself to Edward I, King of Scotland.
Thomas Jefferson is by various byways connected to David I, King of Scots. President Monroe is argued to have had the blood of Edward III and John of Gaunt coursing in his veins, while both William Henry and Benjamin Harrison descend from Henry III, and John Quincy Adams from Edward I. President Buchanan could be traced to the loins of Robert II, King of Scots. Even Abraham Lincoln is depicted as descending from Edward I through a rather tortuous Welsh byway, and President Grant could also count David I, King of Scots, as an ancestor. With a little creativity, President Garfield can be connected to Rhys ap Tewdr, founder of the Tudor dynasty, and Theodore Roosevelt to Robert III, King of Scots. Of all the nineteenth-century American Presidents, none were of other than English descent save the unassuming Dutchman Martin van Buren, who was also the first to be born an American citizen and one of the few to be elected President having been Vice President. The next Vice President to succeed directly to the White House was George Herbert Walker Bush, and the day after his election in 1988, Mr. Harold Brooks-Baker, publishing director of Burke’s Peerage, was widely quoted in the American press as disclosing that the President-elect was a distant relation of Britain’s reigning Queen Elizabeth II. Mary Tudor, said Brooks-Baker, had become an ancestor of the Bushes by her marriage to the Duke of Suffolk. “Most great American Presidents were of royal descent,” he purred, “but none as royal as George Bush.”
In lesser, cottage-industry ways, this obsession with tradition and kinship is replicated by the Edinburgh shops that will offer to trace the clan tartan of any American tourist, and by the many English parish churches down on their luck that turn a shilling by tracing the rural and feudal “roots” of credulous visitors. As Alexis de Tocqueville put it: “Aristocracy has made a chain of all the members of the community, from the peasant to the king.” As he also put it, perhaps prematurely: “Democracy breaks that chain, and severs every link of it.”
On this night in the Beverly Hilton, Ronald Reagan is not so much forging links as reinforcing them. The persona of Churchill, the presence of the royal family, the idea of the Atlantic alliance— these are powerful totems with which to work, set in the context of the sort of gala ceremony in which he excelled for eight years. In deference to the essential imagery of the Churchill-Roosevelt wartime alliance, the British consul’s handout for the evening politely repeats one of Reagan’s favorite fabrications: “His film career, interrupted by three years of service in the Army Air Corps during World War II, encompassed fifty-three feature-length motion pictures.” Reagan’s former agent Lew Wasserman is one of the many people in the audience who know this to be an artful fiction, but tonight Reagan is to receive at least the touch of the potent Churchill mantle, so a finest hour is mandated for him too and nobody will be so churlish as to note the missing prefix “un-” before the surreptitious word “interrupted.” It may be true that Reagan played an RAF hero in one of his movies, but he stayed firmly on the studio back lot until the conclusion of hostilities.
From this podium, Reagan will be led home and later conducted to the airport to fly to London, where he will be dubbed a Knight by Queen Elizabeth. Unmentioned in Burke because of his ancestry in the loam and sod of Ireland, he will therefore not be able to say, as Churchill once said in his address to both houses of Congress, that, other things being equal, he might have made it there on his own. Unless to the House of Lords.
The evening, in part a run-up to the Reagan knighthood, is doubly laden with the mythology of monarchy and Churchillism; the two most commanding elements of the postwar British influence on America, with a close third being Margaret Thatcher (already honored by this same Foundation) and the remainder being Liverpudlian and London entertainers, for whom Hollywood had already established a steady pattern of annexation and assimilation.
The Churchill Foundation, to judge by its letterhead and personnel, comprises various layers in the mille-feuille of Anglo-American sentimentality. At one end, there is Bob Hope, who was born Leslie Townes Hope in Eltham, Kent, in 1903 and who left England when he was four. Arch-comedian of the middlebrow, and golfing friend of the mafia of mediocrity that surrounded Eisenhower, Nixon, and Ford, he is the sort of sports-check Republican cliche-monger whom Pamela Harriman would not have in any of her houses. Yet the old-line Georgetown Democratic grande dames are also here, either in the flesh or in the spirit. Pamela Harriman graces a prominent table, and is quite possibly the only person present not to have voted with enthusiasm for the royally descended George Bush. Marietta Tree, former chatelaine of Ditchley Park and another widow of a wartime “special relationship” hero, is on the board. In between are more recent opportunists like Robert E. Wycoff, president of Atlantic Richfield, who served as chairman of the dinner and who split the tab with Robert Maxwell, a newspaper tycoon who can sympathize from experience with Walter Annenberg’s brush with the ethics police, and a man whose newspapers are devoted to the conservative version of the Atlanticist ideal. In a revealing speech, Mr. Wycoff’s deputy, John Loeb, describes the purpose of the gathering and of the Churchill Foundation as the recovery of American technological and scientific primacy: “Something we urgently need in these times when we are being outstripped by others in scientific education and achievement.” Churchill himself, who was repeatedly forced to give ground in the face of superior American scientific and technological firepower, might have permitted himself a scowl here. The Foundation, which like many others tends to reckon success in terms of Nobel Prizes, endows a scholarship at Churchill College, Cambridge—continuing a tradition of American business interest in that university which, although it does not match the Rhodes scholarships, goes back at least as far as the acquisition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica in the early years of this century.
Perhaps unaware of these gradations of Anglo-Saxondom and Anglo-Americanism, there is the winner of the annual Winston Churchill essay competition, sponsored by the Los Angeles Times. The boy comes from El Toro High School, which is in the catchment area of the Naval Air Station, and the subject of his essay is Churchill’s fondness for the idea of historic compromise. Who knows where he got the idea—the absorbing thing is the image of an El Toro High School senior, bent over the composition of a Winston Churchill prize essay in the year of grace 1989. This testifies to an impressive persistence not just in the iconography of Churchill but in the approved perception of the special relationship that goes with it.
The apotheosis of the approved version was expressed by Prince Philip as he prepared to invest the old entertainer with the silver medallion and chain of the award. He told Reagan that he “exemplified the spirit of th
at illustrious man in whose name we pay this tribute.” Reagan was regaled with praise for his “outstanding gifts of leadership, which helped the nation to regain its confidence, vigor, and sense of purpose and to recapture the respect of foreign friend and adversary alike.” He was exalted in his own favorite terms for his unswerving advocacy of “peace through strength.”
Prince Philip went on, in his speech to the gathering, to recall a moment in 1951 when he had visited Washington with his new wife, then still the Princess Elizabeth. The old King was still on the throne, and Sir Winston had just been elected Prime Minister again. A member of the Truman administration, eager to say the right thing, had congratulated the Prince on the reelection of his wife’s father. This joke is better than it sounds. The subliminal association between the various items that make up the inventory of Englishness is, as the Red Lion shows, an indispensable part of its appeal. And there is actual utility to this subliminal awareness. Ronald Reagan, the master of suggestion, is reckoned by experts to have turned in his best performance on the Normandy beaches on the anniversary of D-Day, neatly appropriating the Churchillian style in the process. As long ago as 1952, the Republican Party had sensed the potential of television in politics. As the historians of political advertising put it in their book The Spot, here is how the Eisenhower-Nixon campaign designed its pathbreaking electioneve TV pitch in 1952: “Film clips of Korea, Alger Hiss and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg—the convicted “atomic spies”—depicted the Democratic record; clips of Eisenhower with soldiers, with his family and with Winston Churchill suggested the Republican alternative.” Thus Churchill, who was in many ways a radical and an iconoclast as well as a Tory and an imperialist, and who fought tooth and nail against the rise of the American Empire, can somehow be made to “belong” to the Republican patriots who make up tonight’s audience, just as the House of Windsor can be claimed as part of the family by what the social pages call “L.A. royalty.”