The Pursuit of Power

By J. H. PLUMB

effect of age on power is a theme which has haunted my mind for some time now. After all, the world is still littered with aged and ageing politicians—de Gaulle, Mao, Tito, Franco, Johnson. It is a curiously appropriate moment for the theme of the last and conclud-

ing volume of my Life of Sir Robert Walpole

history—twenty-one years. This retention of power for so long fascinates active politicians* and, perhaps inevitably, they are more interested in how he obtained power and held it, rather than in how he came to lose it.

Walpole was a consummate wheeler and dealer—the best England has ever known. He judged every man's price, pampered the rather insignificant men who gave him uncritical sup- port, ruthlessly pursued those who showed him the razor-sharp edge of their criticism. He bent every man to his will: a man of vast over- weening personality, he could bully, cajole, plead, threaten, twist a man this way and that until he got his vote. His policy was stodgy, but worthy—prosperity, and, if possible, peace. As artful as LBJ at his best, he came so to dominate political life, particularly the House of Com- mons, that he became known simply as THE GREAT MAN. Envy and exchtsion caused a few men of talent to rouse a vociferous oppo- sition (the intellectuals, note, were largely against him), but'he slapped that down. Year followed year and King George II succeeded King George I, and oa and on he went.

Then in the middle-1730s his friends of a life- time began to die, and facei began to change in the Commons. The new faces were young, aggressive, hawk-like. They wanted to attack Spain, seize its empire, and so they magnified the dangers to British interests of Spain and its ally France. And the old xenophobic arguments were trotted out. Spaniards and Frenchmen were Catholics, Protestant-killers, their governments absolute and tyrannical. They threatened Eng- land's vital interests and the English way of life: and England's mission was to save the world. Freedom must be preserved,' which meant throwing the French out of Canada, the Carib- bean, India and—grabbing heaps of Spanish territory. Walpole loathed the idea, but he loathed losing power more. At sixty-two, it seemed quite* intolerable that he should give it up; by then he felt it was his for a lifetime.

So he went to war in the West Indies and made an awful mess of it Friends of a lifetime did not wait to die, they deserted. He was forced increasingly to rely on men who were repugnant to the few old allies who still stuck to him: and the nadir was reached when the toothless, rouged old queer, Lord Hervey, was made Lord Privy Seal. Suddenly everyone knew, except Wal- pole himself, that he had no future. It did not belong to him any more, that future that had been his for so long. Politicians, who can smell power like hounds, sensed it at once. Naturally he clung desperately to the vestiges of power, refused to read any portents, let alone- omens. He even did nothing to extricate himself from the war that would ruin, it seemed, his life's

*President Kennedy wolfed down the first volume of my Life of Walpole. For Harold Macmillan and the late Hugh Gaitskell he was the most enviable of Prime Ministers.

work. (It did not, of course; history is never so neat as that.) Still dressing himself with such care, as someone said, as if he were going to see his mistress, he strutted like some peacock to his corner in the House of Commons, ex- pecting, demanding, the incense that had wafted before his nostrils for so long.

But this huge fat man was an ageing hulk, and, riddled with gout, a rotten one at that.

And suddenly politicians could see him as he was; the charisma vanished, the manna dis- appeared. There he stood, an old, grey politician

with only a few years of life in him. He was no route to their future, only a cul-de-sac. In the end he had to be told to his face that he was finished. Only then did power fall from his grasping hands.

Of course it wasn't merely his age. Look at de Gaulle sailing on through his seventies, but then he symbolises an idea rigidly fixed in the context of the future—the Revival of France. And then there was Churchill, who, as Moran has shown in those marvellous diaries, became but half a man, yet his authority was based, not on wheeling and .dealing, but on historical principles, on a deeply human concept of destiny; by 1950 Churchill, like de Gaulle in the 'sixties, had become a symbol to mankind. The future can still be possessed by an ageing statesman so long as he is a symbol of an idea greater than himself, but never by a politician concerned merely with power. Then the stench of decay makes his underlings' nostrils twitch and they bolt for cover to await his inevitable collapse.

History never has true parallels, but there are echoes and resonances between one age and another. And LBJ's situation has some ominous overtones with Walpole's. Consider these facts. An escalating war without decision, implicit with ever-increasing involvement, a war never desired by Walpole that threatened everything that he had wished for. The hawks screeched for de- cisive action, irrespective of consequences, hilt Walpole knew well enough that behind Spain, France was formidably strong. But the hawks sloWly if certainly won. And Walpole felt the years, each one like ten: and there he was, oscillating between illness and health like a metronome.

And so he became the victim of a snow- balling sense that the future of no man's political career could any longer be secured by him. He was a bad investment for anyone under fifty.

And then came the sudden awareness that he was a liability to his party, indeed its greatest.

All of these things resonate across the centuries and echo loud in the White House. Will political death at the hands of his own party come just as suddenly to LW?

Certainly there is a sense that time is short, of whole generations quietly deserting. Long before the final blow came for Walpole, all youth had given him up as useless: he could not focus their ambitions nor stir their hearts nor minds. They, too, had found a new idol who was mobbed whenever he appeared—the young William Pitt—an orator whose biting

denunciations seared Walpole's reputation; a

man who risked his own future for the sake of what be so passionately felt, and indeed Pitt was consigned by his party for many years to the wilderness because of the flaming rhetoric by which he castigated Walpole. Yet his voice dominated not only his generation but his century.

Indeed, that is the saddest thing of all, we need a voice—more perhaps now than at any time in human history. A quarter of the world is either enjoying or is poised on the brink of fabulous affluence, affluence such as mankind has never known, but elsewhere there is only hunger, disease, privations which lead, naturally enough, to desperate remedies, to constriction of liberties for the sake of liberty to eat. If there was ever a time for magnanimity, clothed in a rhetoric of fire that could burn its way into the hearts of men who rule—not in the mansions of state, but in the wards, parishes and villages —it is now.

The power of language, sadly enough, is fad- ing and the art of inspiring millions of men to aspirations beyond their necessities and indul- gences is almost dead. For many millennia this was the work of the great religious leaders whose gnomic utterances seemed to unlock the signifi- cance and duties of human life. They belong to a vanished race, their last strange, feeble representative—Gandhi. And the race of revolu- tionaries, those hard bleak men who reconciled generations to misery and terror for the sake of unborn generations, seem to have found their apotheosis in the poems of Mao or the four- hour harangues of Castro, which are about as uplifting as the. disquisitions of Origen.

The hard historical truth is that the pursuit of power and all that it means in terms of wheeling and dealing has triumphed for most of the time over religious inspiration, revolu- tionary fervour or the vision of statesmen. In politics statesmen are as rare as politicians are common. And who will now bother to speak to and for generations not yet born when the most powerful position in the free world might come to them through the harsh realities of national politics? The Johnsons and the Wal- poles win. After Walpole's defeat, it was not Pitt who secured the prizes, but Walpole's own disciples, trained in his techniques and nurtured in his arts of manipulation. All they wanted was Walpole's clothes. They kept the war, and made it global.

These are sad thoughts: but then 1967 is a sad prospect. Increasing war, elusive victory, race riot and turmoil, an adolescent generation that is increasingly bewildered by a vision of life that contains satisfaction without hope, riches without magnanimity and achievement without purpose. What a change in a few brief years.