In January 1939, prior to his appointment, Lothian had tried to persuade Roosevelt that the United States must assume responsibility for the preservation of democracy and peace. The Pax Britannica, based on overwhelming British naval strength, had prevented conflict between the great powers for almost one hundred years between the Battle of Waterloo and the First World War, but Britain was now too weak to perform this function. Roosevelt was unimpressed. ‘I wish the British would stop this “We who are about to die, salute thee” attitude’, he complained to his former Harvard professor, Roger B. Merriman.
Lothian was here the other day, [and] started the conversation by saying that he had completely abandoned his former belief that Hitler could be dealt with as a semi-reasonable human being and went on to say that the British for a thousand years had been the guardians of Anglo-Saxon civilisation – that the sceptre or sword of something like that had dropped from their palsied fingers – that the US must snatch it up… I got mad clear through and told him that just so long as he or Britishers like him took that attitude of complete despair, the British would not be worth saving.
Yet Roosevelt liked Lothian and had, in any case, decided that a professional diplomat was not the right choice at this critical time. (‘How can a man with a name like that ever get his personality across [in] this country?’ the president is supposed to have remarked after learning that the Foreign Office was considering the former Ambassador to China, Sir Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen.) On 28 March 1939, the president gave his consent and on 24 April the appointment was announced. ‘I am glad to know that Lothian is coming to us as British Ambassador’, the American educator Abraham Flexner wrote to the retired British civil servant Thomas Jones. ‘He will be the first British Ambassador since [James] Bryce who has been anything but a diplomatic clerk.’ On the other hand, his tête-à-têtes with Hitler had created a most ‘unfavourable impression’ in the US and it was going to require ‘some very cautious diplomacy on his part to wipe out the taint of that initial and long-continued blunder’.
As it transpired, Lothian justified the confidence of his admirers and confounded the expectations of his detractors. (‘It’s extraordinary how successful Lothian is now, when you think he was absolutely wrong all along about Germany,’ noted the Foreign Office’s Valentine Lawford in November 1940.) At the heart of his success was a flare for public relations. Prior to his departure he had assured MPs that he would ‘not make any but the dullest speeches’. Once across the pond, however, he established warm and informal relations with the press, spoke engagingly and often, and cultivated an image of a democratic aristocrat; a man who, despite being an English lord, drove his own car, bought his own train tickets and sported a battered grey fedora. The embassy social circle was greatly expanded. Lunches and dinners were opportunities to expound the British case, and junior diplomats were as likely to find themselves next to the Mayor of Kalamazoo as one of Washington’s society hostesses. Realising that most Americans thought the British stuffy and supercilious, Lothian took delight in twitting his hosts. ‘I hope you recognise your last king’, he would remark as isolationist senators passed the portrait of George III on the embassy staircase; or, ‘pay reverence to the true founder of the American Republic’.