Challenging Zeus

Senior civil servants are generally expected to be shadowy figures, influential rather than powerful, discreet rather than flamboyant, probably — in Gladwyn’s generation at any rate — educated at Winchester. To describe such a being as a Titan might seem an oxymoron. The Titans, it will be remembered, were a family of giants who had the temerity to challenge Zeus and duly got their comeuppance. In this well-researched and thoughtful book Sean Greenwood convinces one that in the case of Lord Gladwyn — not least in the ill-judged challenge to the superiority of Zeus — this far-fetched analogy is amply justified.

Greenwood identifies three fields in which Gladwyn’s contribution was of signal importance: the setting up of the United Nations, the evolution of Nato and the development of Britain’s policy towards Europe. The temptation for a biographer must always be to confuse post hoc and propter hoc — because Gladwyn took a particular view about a certain subject and that view became the official policy of the British government, Gladwyn must therefore have been responsible. Greenwood resists the temptation nobly. So far as Nato was concerned, for instance, though Gladwyn’s role in its establishment was certainly most significant, ‘political ideas are scarcely ever the property of one individual: they are as often as not part of the climate in which a reasonably sensitive political animal lives and moves’.

Greenwood has no qualms in pointing out when Gladwyn’s judgment was faulty. He was surprisingly slow in abandoning the cause of appeasement, was for a long time an ardent admirer of Mussolini and favoured concessions to Hitler that might have bought him off and diverted his aggressive tendencies towards the East. During the Suez Crisis Gladwyn seems to have been offended more by the fact that he was excluded from the negotiations than by the policy of covert collusion with the Israelis.