Michael Foot: 1913-2010

...He would pull books off the shelves with no uncertainty as to their placement, to recall a passage or offer a recommendation...

...As a scholar of Swift, Michael would have noticed that primary target of the rogue bomber in Dr...

...And it was to such intellectual work and polemics that Michael Foot was always returning—to literature and the literature of politics—with essays and reviews on Wordsworth and Coleridge, on Wilde and Joyce, on Charles James Fox and Thomas Paine, on Harold Laski and Richard Crossman...

...Yet he had deeper interests and wider resources than the run of politicians...

...When, sometime in the 1990s, I told Michael that I was writing a book about Burke, he was struck by the reference back to a family allegiance...

...He had fluent command of the facts, and he showed how the conduct of the war failed to match the principles invoked in its support...

...The shake of the head and the low muttering, and a laugh that had a wince somewhere in it, was another characteristic trait...

...A characteristic mark of restraint and self-correction...

...Yet Foot's Labour Party, under the leadership of Harold Wilson, also supported the Vietnam War...

...If he had a rival, it might have been Ian Gilmour—a Tory and a friend who had "the distinction," as Michael wrote, "of being the first offender thrown out of a Thathcherite Cabinet for ideological incompatibility...

...and his great two-volume life of Bevan carries lightly the authority of all his knowledge of character and of institutions, his gift of loyalty and his dedication to historical truth...

...I'm an American...

...He was in his prime in the decades between the Suez Crisis of 1956, which brought down the Conservative government of Anthony Eden, and the Falklands War of 1982, which sealed the popularity of Margaret Thatcher...

...And the demonstration went on undeterred...

...He performed the vital service," said the Guardian obituary, "of holding his party together when it was dangerously polarised" in the late 1970s and early 1980s...

...Strangelove, a favorite film of Michael's, and his recent work with Christiane Kubrick in the anti-nuclear movement...

...That there were unknowable accidents still waiting for us...

...Listening to Foot, I was conscious of a quality new to me...

...Michael had published a review of my book Hazlitt: the Mind of a Critic— two reviews in fact, a long version in America and a short version in England...

...Part of the exhilaration of a visit was the byplay between Michael and his wife, Jill Craigie—a documentary filmmaker and later a historian of feminism...

...His political engagements started in the late 1930s, with editorials against the appeasement policy of Neville Chamberlain and Lord Halifax, and lasted well into the second campaign for nuclear disarmament in the 1980s...

...I thought you took that marvelously,' I felt compelled to acknowledge...

...His library, until the stairs became a trouble to him, was the place for a serious talk with Michael...

...His writing conveys it well...

...The fine obituary by Mervyn Jones in the Guardian was headed, "Principled leader who held Labour together in the early 1980s, and a writer devoted to the cause of freedom...

...I'm sorry, Mr...

...He wrote about Randolph Churchill (whom he had beaten in an election in his home town of Devonport) and "the brilliant cascade of abuse" he endured throughout the campaign, which, as soon as Churchill learned he had lost, "subsided and all was sweetness and charm...

...Isaac Foot was a mainly self-taught man, with an enormous appetite for reading and a veneration, informed by deep knowledge, of the heroes of religious dissent and political opposition...

...But what most strikes me about him looking back is a somewhat different quality: his fearlessness and simplicity of spirit...

...He hated the clean sensation that political people, many of them civilized and peaceable, could persuade themselves to cherish regarding wars they were once pledged to support...

...Foot in that debate was speaking for himself...

...It was around 1990 (I think) that Irving Howe agreed he was someone we should supply with a complimentary subscription to Dissent...

...a smile here and a languid tone to silence pedantry...

...Yet he worried that I would come to defend everything Burke stood for—an occupational hazard for biographers of great men— and ventured a word of caution...

...There was, there is, a Foot pantheon—a list of heroes of imaginative genius and political and moral action whom Michael defended against every challenge or reproach...

...Jill was the purer leftist of the two and the one who said what had to be said about a political opponent before Michael issued a partial reprieve...

...He shook his head in wonder at the fable and muttered a plaintive affirmation, "Yes, it's tremendous what he got into it"—the managerial coolness that covers an irreducible mania and the unforgettable portrait of the human delusion that we can control the weapons we make to destroy ourselves...

...Along with his honesty ('Lies are so dull,' he would say) and his streaks of kindness, it was this reckless courage which shone most brightly...

...That people we might see as unredeemable still held in reserve some good after all, perhaps...

...But one might go further than that: no other figure seems so steady a link between the idealism of the Labour government of 1945 and the revival of the party's fortunes in the 1990s...

...Two he valued above the rest: William Tyndale and Edmund Burke...

...He tried to stop democracy: that's why he wrote against the French Revolution, and they're all wrong if they tell you otherwise...

...Michael's commitment to democratic socialism was unwavering, but his friendships covered an unpredictable array of writers, artists, philosophers, and politicians...

...So, for example, she was distressed by a half-hearted profession of political loyalty from Margaret Drabble in the 1992 election campaign...

...Her heart isn't in it...

...Is the trouble he's in as bad as it looks...

...These gifts are rare in themselves, rarer to find in a person of subtle intelligence and complex judgments...

...He had once written a warm appreciation of the novels of Disraeli, and when I asked if he stood by that judgment, he did not budge...

...Michael's demand from an American visitor was a rundown of one's opinion of the person or the institution or the policy in question...

...But his entire bearing, also, seemed the reverse of Kissinger's expertise, which took for granted the clichés of anticommunism and applied them to the case at hand...

...The subject was the Vietnam War—two Oxford students along with Foot spoke against the war, two Harvard students with Kissinger defended it...

...He came into his own with the victory of 1945 as a follower of Aneurin Bevan, the architect of the National Health Service...

...it's become nothing but a superstition...

...Sometimes friendships have a pre-history...

...Some time later, I saw him on William F. Buckley's Firing Line and was amazed again by his presence of mind and (a weapon more evident in the familiar setting) his sense of humor...

...They was an allpurpose term for the purveyors of conventional wisdom, a kind of error you could shoulder your way beyond by enough reading and enough thinking...

...The short-term effect, however, was his defeat by Margaret Thatcher in the election of 1983, and the passage of one of the party's best-loved personalities to the status of back-bencher...

...I saw Michael Foot on television, in December 1965, in a satellite debate with Henry Kissinger...

...He made them part of himself by rereading and by writing about them...

...Sometimes he would ask, "And what are they talking about these days at Dissent...

...He himself knew the penetration of Burke's mind too well to suppose him only a "founder of conservatism," and he could quote Burke on the all-importance of taking account of the characters of "men" and not just "measures...

...He had worked at Tribune when Orwell wrote his weekly column there...

...And when he found himself turning toward regret or jeremiad, there was often a swerve at the end and a one-word qualification: "Still...

...Tony Blair was, in a sense, Michael's protégé, and Blair's progress in the late 1990s and 2000s, to become the technocrat who purged the working-class traces from Labour and the apostle in foreign policy of the North Atlantic world order, was a deep disappointment to him...

...The Foots had been regular visitors to Yugoslavia, and they pointed out to me the role played in the heating of that crisis of the 1990s by Franjo Tudjman, the ultra-nationalist leader of Croatia, as well as by Milosevic himself...

...I am tempted to go further and I am stopped by Michael's voice: "Still...

...And what do you make of Bill Clinton...

...The names are a reminder of the completeness of the war consensus of 1965...

...An admirable public man, but one who never seemed a public face in person, Michael's most touching quality was his power of admiration...

...His father, Isaac Foot, had been a Liberal who supported Asquith in the wartime coalition under Lloyd George, but that was not the key to his father's influence on Michael...

...As for the Iraq War, Michael described it in terms no less unyielding than those he had once used about Vietnam...

...among modern democrats and socialists (for they, too, had a literature which Foot espoused and sought to gain readers for), Thomas Paine, H.N...

...Disraeli's "picture of the aristocrats" was "as good as Wodehouse, which is pretty good...

...No no, it's quite all right...

...Strangelove is "the ICBM missile complex at Laputa...

...Hazlitt was at the top, a temperamental preference, but it was a large list and generous in the loyalties it expressed: among British writers, Milton, Swift, Defoe, Byron, H.G...

...He said, in the warmest imaginable terms, that the book was good because there was so much of Hazlitt in it...

...Michael, I suspect, carried with him a larger portion of the lore of British politics over three centuries than any political mind in his generation could match...

...His reading in the magazine always seemed to be abreast of the current issue...

...What author of a critical study could ask for more...

...That this could be a deformation of mind for social democrats the career of Tony Blair appeared to prove...

...He taught the traditions of liberty on both sides of the Atlantic...

...You don't need to tell me all this, you know," said Buckley as Foot guided him through a precedent established in the American Civil War...

...Never was such a reward better deserved...

...Will we see them again in our time?—when, on the Left, political correctness has killed fearlessness, and on the Right a savage dema-goguery cuts down every impulse of charity...

...Looking into a biography of Kissinger, I see that the students who backed him on the pro-war team were the young Robert Shrum and Lawrence Tribe—self-conscious liberals then, no doubt, just as they are today...

...These assurances were always direct and matter-of-fact...

...David Bromwich is editor of Edmund Burke's selected writings On Empire, Liberty, and Reform and co-editor of the Yale University Press edition of On Liberty...

...I sent a note of thanks and got back a handwritten letter: "When you visit, I will show you the place of honour your book has in my library...

...Buckley," replied Foot, "but these history lessons seem to be necessary...

...That there was nothing to be done...

...More than a decade later, he wrote a scholarly study, The Pen and the Sword, on an episode in the life of Jonathan Swift...

...There is not a word of exaggeration there...

...Wells, Arnold Bennett...

...She said she was voting Labour because 'if I don't, my hand will fall off.' Don't you see, that means we've lost her, Michael...

...Yes,' he replied, 'I've had plenty of practice.'" Michael goes on in his eulogy on Churchill to speak about what it means in politics to have "a friend and enemy worth having...

...For Randolph Churchill was outrageous and endearing, impossible and unforgettable, a Churchill who scarcely ever tasted victory, and what super-Churchillian courage that must have called for...

...This return on himself was to be heard, once, even after an eloquent description of all that Thatcher's policies had done to ruin England...

...On my last visit, we talked about Dr...

...The politics of the magazine were known to Michael both by acquaintance and by his knowledge of its English counterparts...

...He had started as a journalist, writing for Lord Beaverbrook's Evening Standard, and served later as editor of the socialist Tribune...

...among Europeans, Montaigne, Rousseau, Stendhal, Heine...

...He was a great spirit and a great voice, in every sense that both of those words will bear...

...On the walls of his house in Hampstead were originals by the cartoonist Vicky—including a fair number not too ungently mocking himself...

...We became friends through a shared admiration for William Hazlitt, the great romantic critic and essayist...

...Brailsford, and Ignazio Silone...

...What did it mean...

...He had been co-author of the anonymous pamphlet Guilty Men, which supplied the names and traced the influence of the appeasers and was a bestseller in 1940...

...The long-term effect of Foot's wresting control of Labour from the charismatic bitterender Tony Benn may have been a breathing space for renewal...

...Michael Foot, too, had courage in abundance, and something oddly related, a love of adventure...

...The name "Enoch" (for Enoch Powell the Tory firebrand) was apt to come up in conversation as easily as Salman (for Salman Rushdie...