The Great Mr. Attlee
CATLIN, GEORGE
The Great Mr. Attlee As It Happened. By Clement R. Atllee. Viking. 312 pp. $5.00. Revieived by George Catlin British writer and diplomat; author, "The History of the Political...
...Yet, it is a work of art, no less consummate for being unconscious, if by that we mean that Mr...
...rather than leave the supreme issues to "mediocre" people...
...This book should he extremely useful in helping the vmerican reader understand what makes the British Labor party tick...
...Sensational revelations are not to be expected in an autobiography of this sort...
...historian...
...The only date in the book which he gets wrong is his own daughter's birth date...
...a "public school" man, raised as a Conservative, later transferring allegiance to Labor out of concern with the poor of London's East End and the neglected veterans of World War I; years of unspectacular, unpublicized work...
...The closest we ever come to emotion is when the author records the death of his intimate friend Ernest Bevin...
...It is all wonderfully consistent and of a piece, and ouite incredibly English in terms of what the English are supposed to be...
...In making appointments, he has a weakness for the Army-trained man and instinctively avoids the rhetorical and exhibitionistic...
...Here we have the record of a career which typifies the essential stability of Anglo-Saxon political life, and the portrait of "a great Englishman, forthright and courageous...
...finally, Prime Minister...
...Attlee writes that his death was "a great shock...
...Attlee, basically a shy man, holds that meetings between heads of state serve no useful purpose unless there has been a thorough job of preparation and that little then remains to be done...
...Nothing can be further from the long-haired doctrinaire than the man whom we see delineated here: descended from a line of wheat-millers ("for many centuries") and lawyers, with several missionaries along the way...
...He is the unself-conscious exponent of the stiff upper lip...
...Churchill, by contrast, enjoys a situation where, to use Roosevelt's words, "the three of us can and will clear away any obstacles...
...The party man is thus lost in the larger perspective...
...Statesman...
...Compared with Attlee's taciturnity and genius for understatement, Calvin Coolidge was garrulous...
...Attlee has given us a portrait, with not a line out of place, of exactly the man we had always imagined him to be...
...Of Aneurin Bevan we are told only that he "had it in him to do good service...
...Attlee tells us that he had originally planned to attend a football I soccer I match, "but when the day came the ground was too hard for football...
...The remark was indicative not only of one of the more pleasant aspects of English political life, but of the relationship between two contemporary statesmen who are as different in temperament as two men could be...
...Sir Winston is essentially an eighteenth-century type-and a flamboyant one at that...
...author, "The History of the Political Philosophies'' NOT LONG AGO, Britain's former Labor Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, received the "Freedom" of the City of London, England's traditionally Conservative financial center...
...Britain's greatest Foreign Secretary since Palmers-ton...
...Yet, it is in his silences that he is most formidable...
...in his own sphere, a greater man than his great ancestor, the Duke of Marlborough...
...InChurchill's Second World War we have a vast historical panorama painted by one who is...
...Recalling the circumstances in which he proposed to his wife...
...At the ceremony, Sir Winston Churchill, himself a Freeman of the City, referred to his long-time political adversary as "my right honorable and gallant friend...
...of "character" being what matters...
...His opponents are damned while he doodles...
...Some have described it as more like an expanded biographical notice taken from Who's Who...
...No one could be less flamboyant and self-dramatizing than Clement Attlee...
...The watchwords throughout are judgment and loyalty...
...Once a secretary of the No More War League, he yet remains the precise disciplinarian, the nrcheleal major of artillery...
...The temperamental difference between Attlee and Churchill affects their methods in high politics...
...bricklayer, painter...
...and then adds, typically, that "Ernest Bevin was first and foremost a great Englishman, forthright and courageous...
...To call Clement Attlee's autobiography a work of art may seem a bit exaggerated...
Vol. 37 • June 1954 • No. 23
