Word: edens
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...splendid in the Savile Row tradition, he looked and talked like an MGM image of a British diplomat. But his long career in politics and foreign policy involved problems of substance more than niceties of style. An important, long chapter of British history closed last week when Robert Anthony Eden, the first Lord Avon, died at age 79 of liver failure at his manor house in Alvediston, Wiltshire...
Prime Minister of Britain from 1955 to 1957, Eden served his country as Foreign Secretary three times. He won an outpouring of public respect by resigning that post when he disagreed with Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's prewar policies. He gained further acclaim under Winston Churchill-serving, in effect, as Britain's wartime chief of staff, Churchill's alter ego and, as Oxford Historian Michael Howard puts it, "the loyal adjutant who skillfully executed his master's grand strategy." Seldom was a man so groomed for his country's highest political office. Yet when...
...ever a Briton was born and bred for success, it was Eden. The third son of Sybil and Sir William Eden, a country gentleman and master of hounds, Anthony Eden had a perfect pedigree for membership in the British ruling class: Sandroyd Preparatory School, Eton and Christ Church, Oxford, where he won first-class honors in Persian and Arabic and pulled a respectable oar. Before entering Oxford, young Anthony saw action in France with the King's Royal Rifle Corps during the first World War; at the age of 20 he became a brigade major...
...Eden was similarly precocious in politics: he won a seat in Parliament at 26, became Lord Privy Seal at 34, Minister for League of Nations Affairs at 37 and Foreign Secretary less than a year later. As Foreign Secretary from 1935 to 1938, he raced to get ahead of the swiftly moving events in a radically changing Europe: the resurgence of Germany under Hitler, the Italian invasion of Abyssinia (now Ethiopia), and the Spanish civil...
...threat of war involving all Europe mounted, Eden's dissatisfaction with the way Chamberlain was dealing with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy prompted him to quit the Foreign Ministry, thus jeopardizing a promising political career. "The essence of our actions at home and abroad must be firmness and courage," he said at the time. "All must be ready to defend it." After replacing Chamberlain in 1940, Churchill returned Eden to his old post as Foreign Secretary. At the fateful conferences of Yalta and Potsdam, which set the frontiers of postwar Europe, Eden was always at Churchill's elbow...