Word: lothian
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...Farm Bureau Federation was coming to an end; 4,000 members crowded the ballroom floor and the balcony, stood against the wall in the back. To the silent crowd a small, intense counselor of the British Embassy in Washington, Nevile Butler, read the speech of his chief, Lord Lothian, who was announced as too ill to deliver it himself. It was a powerful statement, ending with an expression of faith in a final democratic victory, and a projection of the stable democratic world that could come after the war. It was in some respects Lord Lothian's best speech...
...Lord Lothian was indeed ill; he was dying. In the big, red-brick Embassy in Washington the Ambassador, a devout Christian Scientist, lay suffering the final ravages of uremic poisoning that to his faith was real only to the material world, unreal to the world of the spirit. Since his return to the U. S. from London three weeks before, the hearty, ruddy-cheeked Ambassador had gone out little. But sometimes he would ask old friends in for brief, quiet talk, of no immediate relation to war and his work, as if wanting to reassure himself that they were still...
...news was withheld for several hours. Then President Roosevelt, cruising on the Tuscaloosa in the Caribbean, sent a message to King George VI: "I am shocked beyond measure to hear of the sudden passing of my old friend and your Ambassador, the Marquess of Lothian. I am very certain that if he had been allowed by Providence to leave us a last message he would have told us that the greatest of all efforts to retain democracy in the world must and will succeed...
Only when speculation about his successor began was Lord Lothian's success fully apparent.* He had arrived in the U. S. five days before the war began, at a moment when the U. S. was doubly suspicious of all foreign-especially all British-propaganda. At his death a major U. S. concern was how aid to Britain could be increased. Though no historian would credit that great shift wholly to the Ambassador, there was no doubt that he had been an integral part of it. He had been right in his analysis of U. S. opinion...
Last week, as public men began to assess Lord Lothian's contribution, their tributes differed in degree but not in kind: few diplomats in U. S. history have accomplished so much in so brief and difficult a period. Yet their tributes gave no indication that before Lord Lothian's brief U. S. career there had been a long ordeal of frustrations and setbacks that nothing in his manner suggested...