The World of 1975

MR. ARMSTRONG:

Through the courtesy of the Honourable Kenneth R. Thomson, President of Thomson Newspapers Limited, we are highly privileged to have as our guest speaker this evening the Editor of The Times. In January, 1967, William Rees-Mogg was appointed Editor of the best known newspaper in the world and the oldest paper in the English language with a record of continuous daily publication.

The Times was first published in January, 1785, by one John Walter and was associated with his descendents until 1966, at which time it became part of the Thomson Newspaper group. It is interesting to note that The Times House Flag consists of eight black horizontal bars, over which is superimposed a caduceus. The bars represent lines of print on a page, and the caduceus was the winged wand entwined with serpents carried by Mercury, the messenger of the gods.

As Editor, our speaker has been guided by the basic policy of The Times, to be as comprehensive, as accurate and as objective as possible in reporting the world's news, to realize that life is more than the affairs of nations, the politics, accidents and sports of mankind and in addition to cover cultural aspects that in one way and another give expression to the spirit of man; to be an independent journal of opinion, tireless in the search of truth; and to be a record not only for present readers but for posterity, recognizing its duty to readers of a century hence. William Rees-Mogg embodies this policy as his creed of office.

Our speaker was born in Temple Cloud, Somerset, and educated at Charterhouse where he was a scholar, leaving exhibitioner and Head of School. He attended Balliol College, Oxford where he obtained a Master of Arts degree and he was President of the Oxford Union, 1951. He joined The Financial Times in 1952 and was Chief Lead Writer from 1955 to 1960, and Assistant Editor from 1957 to 1960. He was City Editor of The Sunday Times from 1960 to '61, and in 1964 was appointed Deputy Editor, which post he held until his appointment to his present position. He contested a by-election and a general election as a Conservative. His biographical notes do not indicate with what success. He was Vice-Chairman of the Conservative Party's National Advisory Committee on Political Education in 1961. He also served for two years in the Royal Air Force.

He is an author, having published two books, His Majesty Preserved in 1954 and Sir Anthony Eden in 1956. He is, in addition, a collector of books. We are pleased that our speaker is accompanied by his dear wife who graces this table with her presence.

Ladies and gentlemen, I am highly honoured to present to this audience William Rees-Mogg, Editor of The Times of London, who will address us on the subject, "The World of 1975".

Our guest of honour has agreed to answer questions.

MR. REES-MOGG:

Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen. It is a great honour for me to come here to address this joint meeting of your two Clubs and a great pleasure both for my wife and for me to be in Toronto. I did not know that I was going to be introduced as a messenger of the gods but I shall try to live up to that description.

I am told that the Empire Club of Canada not so long ago entertained Mr. Trudeau and is shortly going to entertain Mrs. Gandhi. Well, I am neither as eloquent as the one nor as good looking as the other-and you may place the compliments as you wish! But I shall do my best this evening.

I should mention that I am a retired politician, having been defeated by 21,000 votes on the first occasion and 22,000 votes on the second! I came to the conclusion that if I went on the progression would become steeper and it was better to retire while I was behind.

It has been a great pleasure to come here and see Toronto, a city which I think is in many ways a very remarkable one and one which I think has a lot to offer by way of example to those many other cities in the world which have faced similar problems in dealing with rapid expansion, dealing with the problems of industry and the problems of traffic and so on. You have, I think, a clean, free-moving, green city, and how you have managed to maintain that in this modern age is for you to say.

It is of course easy, perhaps fatally easy, for any Englishman who crosses the Atlantic to start getting things wrong. I am going down later in the week to Washington where I am sure that I shall get many more things wrong-Washington as a city being the father and mother of all confusion.

We had an unfortunate Ambassador there who got things wrong with the press and of course getting things wrong with the press is something to which I as a journalist am fully accustomed.

He was telephoned and asked what he wanted for Christmas and innocently enough he replied. He tuned into the radio next day to hear the following statement read out: "The Russian Ambassador says that for Christmas he wants peace on earth. The French Ambassador wants friendship between nations; but the British Ambassador wants a box of crystallized fruit" . . . which shows after all what practical people we are! The British Ambassador was the only one of the three who got what he asked for.

It is also a pleasure to come here to be able to express in public the debt that we on The Times owe to a Canadian family. In the late 1960's there were two great British institutions that, in common with a lot of other things in the country, were in a situation of very serious difficulty. One of them was The Times and the other was the Rolls Royce Company. We all know what things happened to the Rolls Royce Company and the fact that The Times has survived and is now moving into a position of I think considerable strength owes everything to the consistent and remarkable support that was given by the Thomson family through an extremely difficult period. This, I think, is not one of the least of the gifts that Canada has made to Britain and it is something for which I myself am extremely grateful.

Of course that period was a period. . . and it has still left some shadow behind . . . in which Britain was moving into a situation of very real and considerable depression and anxiety. There were a number of things that were practically wrong with the country. We had bad labour relations and they were tending to get worse. We had some inflation, a little worse than other European countries, and that was tending to get quite rapidly worse. This deterioration went on into the early 1970's. We had a low level of national investment, we had a not very strong balance of payments-sometimes looking very bad, sometimes looking moderately good; getting a bit better, getting a bit worse again.

We had, I think, at that time a feeling that other nations were mastering problems which we had failed to master, and we were also at that time in a middle phase. By the early 1960's the phase of Empire had come to an end. By the early 1960's we had taken the decision-not all of us, not unanimously-but the government of the day had taken the decision that Britain ought to join the European community, and had then been refused.

So we had ten years during which the Imperial phase of British history was finished and the European phase of British history had not yet begun, and those were a particularly difficult time in the life of the British people and in our life as a nation. This bad period is, I believe, now over. The decisive thing that had to be done, and the thing that was done against opposition and with difficulties much greater and margins much narrower than will ever be believed by historians, was to secure the British entry to the European community.

I am perfectly convinced that it was right both on regional grounds-and I think that we all recognize the strength of the regional pull in modern economic affairs-and that it was also right because Britain was not able to support on her own an effective world position.

At any rate that was achieved and it is now recognized throughout the European community that Britain is not only an effective member but a surprisingly successful member.

I have never thought that one should join a community and then start talking about who has the lead or who does not have the lead. It seems to me to be a misleading way of looking at something which must by its nature, if it is to succeed, become an effort in which nations work together without always putting the national interest first and without always saying are we leading? Are they leading? How can we gain the lead for ourselves?

But it is right, I think, to take pride in the fact that in the first year of entry it is already clear that Britain is able to bring in to the European community at least as much in experience and in political capacity as we are receiving in our turn from the European community.

It is not only the European community which shows an improvement in our affairs. Our economy still has its problems but then whose economy does not have its problems? We now have moved out of this unenviable position of looking to be the one nation in the world which does not know how to manage its affairs and have moved into a position where we seem at any rate to be handling our economic affairs as well as the other countries of the world, and handling some aspects at present with rather more success than the average for the world around us. We are no longer the most inflationary country in the world. We are no longer a country where it is impossible to build up a strong effort of industrial investment. These things are beginning to move in the right direction.

We are also in a situation where for the first time-and this is only now beginning to take firm hold in public opinion-we have a government which actually has growing confidence in it on the part of the British people. The latest opinion polls show that the government has moved ahead. They also show that the Prime Minister Mr. Heath is more popular than he has been at any time either as leader of the Conservative opposition or leader of his own government.

The British people are again beginning to believe, as they have not believed since the early 1960's, that there is nothing in their situation which marks them out as a country which will not be able to handle the problems of modern industrial life, and they believe that there are some things about this situation which will allow them to handle those problems at least as well as other people.

So that reporting to you on the situation in my own country it is, I think, legitimate and right to report in surprisingly favourable terms. Our position is not perfect, it will run into difficulties in the future and some of them will be similar difficulties to those in the past. We are still a country which has far more strikes than we ought to have, and trade unions who are not necessarily particularly far-sighted. At the same time there are more grounds to have legitimate optimism about the British situation than there have been in the past decade and this is a substantial and significant change.

It is not really about British affairs as we are moving into the middle 1970's that I wanted to talk to you this evening. It is how in Europe we are now seeing the world and what lessons might be derived from that. We see the world as having already changed from a postwar situation in which you had two great powers and the other powers mattered relatively little. We now see the world as one in which all powers should be seen as regional groups of power, sometimes coinciding more or less with nations. You can't have a region much bigger than China. Sometimes a power consists of several nations joined together. There is the region of North America in which the United States is obviously the great predominant force. There is the region of the Soviet Union with the Warsaw Pact countries reluctantly gathered on its boundaries. There is the Western European region moving more closely together and now concerting foreign policy and beginning to concert defence policy as well. There is the regional power of China and the great regional growing trading power of Japan.

So we have now, as we see it, these five powers, and the great question of the world must be how are these powers going to relate to each other? It is easy to see what happens when you just have two. The two glare at each other and focus their attention one on the other and that is the great clash of the world. But how will the five join together? It seems to me that when one groups them together they do not look quite as they seem. The most important fact-I think the fact with which we have to begin-is that the suspicion of the Soviet Union in China is absolute and even obsessive. Some people say "But look at those two Communist powers-will they not some day come back together and shall we not then be faced with a great Communist force dominating the world?"

I know of no people, except possibly the people of Bavaria, who also live on the boundary of Russian power, who regard the Soviet Union with the degree of suspicion and mistrust which every single Chinese official seems now to feel; fear even that they will be invaded, unlikely as that may seem.

To start off with, I think that the five powers are not going to form up in such a way that the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China actually work together rather than being suspicious and doubtful about each other.

The United States is always bound to suspect the Soviet Union and the Soviet Union is always bound to suspect the United States because these remain, as a result of their super power status, the only two powers capable of delivering modern nuclear attack on the scale which they alone can answer. That means that while they can come nearer together, can form temporary alliances, can trade, can deal with each other, there will always be an underlying doubt. These are the two great barons still and they will not let down their guard against each other.

One can start off, I think, by saying it is likely that the Chinese and the United States will continue to have a relationship with each other which will tend to get rather closer rather than more distant.

Then you have the situation in Europe. We are on the boundaries of the Soviet Union and we know it very well. No European can question whose tanks might-I believe they will not-roll across the boundaries of Europe. Europe therefore looks to the United States on the one hand as a military guard, and on the other already recognizes that the great power of the Chinese Army, which contains such vast masses of Russian troops on the Chinese frontier, has become a part of the collective world defence system upon which European security rests.

So we have China looking rather anxiously towards the United States, and rather keenly towards Europe, because Europe can supply China with many of the goods the super powers can supply but has no conceivable conflict of interest with the Chinese government. That is a position of natural connection and strength.

And then one has Japan. Japan, although nobody talks about it-and perhaps they don't talk about it because they think if they talk about it, it will be more likely to happen-though in my experience not talking about things does not often make them go away-Japan has a trading rivalry both with United States and with Europe. I don't know how you feel about the entry of Japanese goods into your market and the competition of Japanese goods against your exports but we feel quite anxious and we certainly find them very formidable competitors.

Japan, I think, does not know which way to turn. Traditionally there has been the Japanese desire to have a market in China. There is also the great need in the Soviet Union for investment goods which Japan can supply, and the possibility that the Soviet Union might be able to guarantee the supplies of oil of which Japan is going to be very short.

So perhaps one has a possibility, and this surely is one of the questions of the next two years, one of the fascinating things to watch, that in the end the five world power regions which are at present actually lined up four to one against the Soviet Union will shift and will line up three to two. The consequences if that happens in south-east Asia and in China, the consequences in the United States, the consequences of the balance of world power are obviously all of the greatest importance.

One comes then to the question, how well will the United States be able to adapt to this situation if it occurs? How skilful will the United States be in preventing it from occurring, and how strong is the United States going to be in the period immediately ahead of us?

We come to the issue which is causing this great turmoil in the United States, the issue of Watergate. We have been watching Watergate from Britain with two attitudes. One, the attitude, I am afraid, of only too many newspapers that it is always something of a pleasure to see other people in trouble, and it is a very tempting point of view to take. Then there is the point of view of the areas of government, which is also a view which we have been taking in The Times, that when your friends are in trouble it is not all that funny to laugh and we certainly feel profound regret that the government of the United States should have been suspended by what is, however important one thinks it, a secondary rather than a primary matter of state. By a secondary matter I mean a matter upon which neither the freedom, the security nor the prosperity of the United States essentially and necessarily depends. Those are the primary matters. Everything else in statecraft must be secondary.

I have been very much reminded of my experience in the United States in 1950 and 1951 and '52 when I went over just after having left Oxford to do a debating tour. In those days the great issue, the issue which we were asked about wherever we went, was the issue of Senator McCarthy-briefly eclipsed by the issue of General McArthur when he was dismissed by President Truman.

And the things have a surprising amount in common. I noticed that Senator Proxmire, who actually succeeded Senator McCarthy as the Senator for Wisconsin, did in fact compare the Watergate investigations taking place in the Senate Committee to the McCarthy investigations which took place in another Senate Committee.

They do have something in common. They have, of course, some details in common. It is extraordinary the way in which one is expected to memorize a cast of characters whom one has never heard of before and never wishes to hear of again. It sounds like an examination question. The right examination question on McCarthy would be: What was the name of the Army dentist who led to Senator McCarthy's downfall? I am prepared to bet five dollars there is no one in this room who can give me the answer to that question.

The question in Watergate is: Who were the five men who broke in and got caught? Anyone able to list more than three of their names again would be deserving of a prize.

One has much deeper than that the feeling that no one is getting justice. After all, these inquiries (and this was the art of Senator McCarthy's inquiry) are inquiries into no fixed charge, conducted at large, raking in evidence without examination of any kind or care about its relevance, with constant leakages of evidence from people who say that they are going to give it to one committee or another or to a grand jury at some future date.

These are not the conditions of justice. They are not the conditions of proper inquiry. They are not conditions in which anything, let alone the guilt or innocence of a president of the United States, can fairly and properly be established in a judicious atmosphere.

But there is something even deeper than that. The United States, with all her great merits-and I am half American so I can be acquitted of any desire to criticize her-is a country that does not take defeat well. They are accustomed to the idea that all problems can be overcome if enough energy, enough determination and enough manhood are put into overcoming them. And when a problem is not overcome, it is natural to the people of the United States to look for a reason, and usually to look for a sinister reason, for their failure as a nation.

Senator McCarthy was not created by the Communists in the State Department, although there had been Communists in the State Department. I think Alger Hiss was probably rightly convicted; Harry Dexter White, had he lived, would certainly have been rightly convicted. They-McCarthy, McCarthyism-were created by the loss of China. They were created because there had been this massive blow to the confidence of the United States almost immediately after the greatest military victory the United States had ever achieved. And it was natural for the American people to start to look around and say what is wrong with our society, what is wrong with our government that has allowed this to happen to us?

There is a slightly less direct connection but a pretty direct connection between the quite hysterical exaggeration that has been taking place about the significance of Watergate and the evidence about the President's complicity in it-and that evidence is not very strong. Again the United States has been through a great defeat and the Vietnam defeat, unlike that in China, was not only a political defeat but was a military defeat as well. The United States needs to have an explanation for a defeat so complete, so humiliating by so tiny and yet so ruthless a power. They have a President who is isolated, remote, intraverted, but in so many ways very gifted and they have turned on him. I believe myself that he will probably survive.

I recognize also, having those memories of the McCarthy period, that while this hysteria is actually one of the most odious things about the recurrent pattern of American politics it serves a psychological purpose. Just as grief serves a purpose in bereavement, so the belief that they have been betrayed helps the United States to get over a defeat.

Always in the past when the United States has been defeated, the United States has come back from defeat. I myself have no doubt at all-and it is essential to all our futures, to yours in Canada and to ours in Europe equally. I believe that the United States will come back and will come back as a strong and effective nation in the world. I believe also that the United States will again be the most powerful nation in the world but I would only add one rider to that comment, which is that I do not believe that we shall ever again in our lifetime see the United States like Secretariat riding home 31 lengths ahead to win the field.

Mr. Rees-Mogg was thanked on behalf of those present by Mr. L. S. McMahon, First Vice-President of The Canadian Club of Toronto.