A Closer Companionship

In Manhattan last week, a distinguished British elder statesman rose to address the Foreign Policy Association. As wartime ambassador to Washington, Lord Halifax had been entrusted by Winston Churchill with a crucial job in building wartime cooperation between the U.S. and Britain. Halifax, now 70, spoke with grave pride of "the close companionship, in peace as in war, of your people and mine."

Said he: "The importance of this association to us both is so great, if we want to live our lives in the same sort of fashion as we have done up to now, that it is almost inconceivable to me that any future administration in Great Britain, or for that matter in the United States, would ever consciously and deliberately let itself do anything to undermine that partnership on which the defense of the free world so vitally depends. . . If in 1914 Germany had been confronted at the outset with an unbreakable association of Britain, her Commonwealth and the United States, built on the conviction that what affects one party to the association immediately affects all, would that war ever have happened?" Halifax thought not --nor would Hitler have invaded Poland.

"So today in 1951, so long as our present partnership endures. . . I believe we have a much better than even chance of keeping peace. But the opposite is true, too. If ever, in a mood of impatience with each other, or by allowing distrust and suspicion to spread like poison ivy,* or even perhaps by some single act of folly, we were to allow the friendship and cooperation of our peoples to fade, we might well wake up one morning to find that we had touched off the signal for the third world war to begin.

"The so-called 'cold war' had no recognizable beginning, and, I am afraid, has no foreseeable end . . . We must think in terms of a continuing partnership--or perhaps of something more than a partnership--a relationship which cannot be dissolved, between our two countries."

* This simile may require some explanation in Halifax's country. Poison ivy does not grow wild in Europe, although the Russians have cultivated some poison ivy plants in the famed Nikitsky Botanic Gardens near Yalta.

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