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uring World War II, Winston Churchill had heard very good things about Isaiah Berlin, later one of the most eminent liberal thinkers of the 20th century. Berlin worked for British intelligence services in Washington. His reports were legendary. Churchill instructed that when Berlin went to London, he should be invited to lunch at Downing Street. But someone confused him with the great songwriter Irving Berlin, and when he passed through London, he was invited to 10 Downing Street. Churchill asked him what decisive operation he had recently been involved in: "White Christmas," Berlin —Irving— replied. Churchill later commented: "This man does not speak, by far, as well as he writes."
The compilation of those reports as Washington Dispatches does not belong to the corpus of Isaiah Berlin's thought. It is, rather, the closest thing to journalism that Berlin experienced. It was about collaborating in the British campaign for the United States to abandon neutrality and enter the war. His denial of historical inevitability is latent there. This impersonal interpretation of historical change grants the ultimate responsibility for what happens to superpersonal, transpersonal entities or forces, whose evolution is considered unprecedented in human history. That was, ultimately, the Third Reich that was supposed to last a thousand years.
American public opinion was favorable to the Allies, but 80% opposed entering the war, until the attack on Pearl Harbor. He arrived in New York, sent by the Ministry of Information in 1941. The following year, he was transferred to the Foreign Office. He remained at the embassy in Washington until 1946. In his reports, so appreciated by Churchill, he describes American society of the day very lucidly, with a great sense of detail and synthesis. He opens the door to the present without clearing it, pregnant with almost excessive topicality. Berlin is constantly on the lookout, like a journalist in pursuit of the most significant data, of the relevant circumstance in organizations as disparate as trade unions, black associations, or Jewish institutions. He recounts strikes and racial conflicts. He meets the great columnist Joe Alsop. Also the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. He follows the twists and turns of the isolationist press.
In 1980, in the foreword to his book Personal Impressions, Isaiah Berlin will emphasize that for his generation—the youth of the 1930s—in a Europe with a political climate dominated by Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Salazar, and various dictators in Eastern Europe and the Balkans, the policies of Chamberlain and Daladier offered no hope, and for that reason the only point of light came from Roosevelt's New Deal.TheWashington Dispatches(1981), have, if you will, an anecdotal value regarding Berlin's thought, but very illustrative of his relationship with political reality, the accumulated politics that ends up becoming history. He manages to integrate confidential information, the analyses of great columnists like the august Walter Lippmann or the cunning Drew Pearson, technical reports from the Administration, constant contact with high officials and with those who are someone in Washington's offices. The criterion is radically indeterministic, focusing on the influence of human beings, on their strategies and errors. Almost everything is there, especially from that day in late 1941 when Washington declared war on Japan after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Churchill visits Washington, MacArthur resists in the Philippines, President Roosevelt gives his "fireside chat."
Battle of the Coral Sea, advances in the war industry, Stalin asks for the Second Front, De Gaulle asserts himself, Madame Chiang Kai-Shek speaks in the Capitol, and so on until the death of Roosevelt and Truman in the White House. It is no small feat. In 1980, in the prologue to his book Personal Impressions, Isaiah Berlin will emphasize that for his generation —the young people of the 1930s— in a Europe with a political climate dominated by Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Salazar, and several dictators in Eastern Europe and the Balkans, the policies of Chamberlain and Daladier offered no hope, and for that reason the only point of light came from Roosevelt's New Deal.
In his diaries —1942-2000—, the historian Arthur Schlesinger, one of his best American friends, recounts how Berlin congratulated him because in a Times Literary Supplement survey he had said that Hannah Arendt was one of the most overrated writers of the century. Years later, Schlesinger brought Arendt and Berlin together. The meeting was a total disaster. For Berlin, Hannah Arendt was too solemn, portentous, Teutonic, and Hegelian. She believed that Berlin's wit was frivolity. Berlin did not believe that History had a script and that every planned paradise ends up being hellish. There, the great risks are optimism and fatalism: History advances linearly towards a goal of achievable perfection or ineluctable evil. Two determinisms.
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