Ben Pimlott, the distinguished political biographer, attempted to leave his readers “happier, sadder, even a bit wiser.” That was done, he suggested, by understanding “an individual life, the forces that shape it and the motives that drive it, in the context in which it is placed” (Frustrate Their Knavish Tricks: Writings on Biography, History and Politics [London, 1994], 152, 157). Avoiding hagiography and ignorant second-guessing, political biographies can make us wiser if they examine the acquisition, maintenance, and uses of power. The tangled private and public affairs of those who make and influence policy uniquely reveal the circumstances that define political acts and their results. Lesser actors, with meaningful parts in crucial events, can also illuminate what is obscured and ill understood. For Victoria Schofield, a journalist especially interested in international affairs, John Wheeler-Bennett belonged to this second tier as an incredibly well-connected “witness to history” with a worldwide circle of politically powerful friends and acquaintances. Those contacts, she finds, enabled his establishment of international relations as a “new school of history writing” (21).
In 1921, when he was age nineteen, a European tour convinced John Wheeler-Bennett to study Britain's international position by studying those contemporaries responsible for determining and pursuing national interests. Four years later, at Lionel Curtis's British Institute of International Affairs, he began to edit and publish a fortnightly Bulletin of International News. By 1930, these collections of “information” were taken over by Chatham House, home of the independent Royal Institute on International Affairs, where they remain today. Wheeler-Bennett's diplomatic career had already begun in 1929 with a personal assistantship to Neill Malcolm, chairman of Chatham House and later the League of Nations' high commissioner for refugees. As preparation for writing Hindenburg: The Wooden Titan (1936) and Brest-Litovsk: The Forgotten Peace, March, 1918 (1938), Wheeler- Bennett inserted himself into the higher echelons of German life. From 1930 to 1934 he rented and operated a horse breeding and racing enterprise that enabled him to meet and cultivate the Chancellor Hermann Muller and statesmen of the Right and the Left, as well as generals, financiers, newspaper editors, and international journalists. His belief that the new Nazi government had come to stay and that Hitler was a sensible man vanished with the Night of the Long Knives on 30 June 1934. In 1939, he urged Sir Robert Vansittart, permanent undersecretary of state, to encourage the anti–Nazi German population, who he assumed were the majority, to rise against their government. The incentive was to be a promise not to dismember a Germany that returned to a just rule of constitutional law. That advice was rejected.
In the United States, Wheeler-Bennett served as assistant director of the British Press Services, in the UK Ministry of Information Services, and in the Political Warfare Mission. In the United Kingdom, he was a member of the covert Political Welfare Executive. Although he never attended a university, in 1938 he taught Louis Auchincloss; Larry Houston, a founder of the CIA; and Franklin Roosevelt Jr. at the University of Virginia Law School, while commuting to Harvard to oversee John F. Kennedy's master's thesis on Britain's appeasement policy. For his services during the war, he was awarded an Order of the British Empire. After the war, he was a founding fellow of St. Antony's College, Oxford and supervised philosophy, politics, and economics (PPE) at New College, Oxford, where Anthony Wedgewood Benn was his student. In the United States, he joined the faculties of the University of Arizona in Tucson and New York University. Among other obligations, he became the British editor-in-chief of the captured German archives and the historical adviser to the Foreign Office for its publication, as well as historical adviser to the Royal Archives. Munich, Prologue to Tragedy (1948); The Nemesis of Power: The German Army in Politics, 1918–1945 (1953); and King George VI: His Life and Reign (1958), for which he received a knighthood in 1959, were among his postwar books. While Schofield insists upon their importance and quotes approving reviews by some historians, she does not discuss their assumptions, biases, or historiographical place or what the books are about, except to say that they “provide a valuable insight into contemporary thought” (283).
There is no doubt that Wheller-Bennett knew and was sometimes befriended by the world's political elite, including Trotsky, Hitler, Hindenburg, Mussolini, Churchill, Truman, De Valera, Attlee, Eden, Mountbatten, Pope Pius XI, Chiang Kai-shek, and the British royal family. It might be easier to list those he never met. While Schofield briefly describes these engagements, we are rarely given insight into the thinking and conduct of these world shakers who appear almost as props in Wheeler-Bennett's travelogues. There is also little depth of analysis about the crises occurring in the countries he visited repeatedly. Moreover, most of the cited secondary sources were written about twenty years ago and include little of the enormous literature on the interwar years and WWII that have changed our understanding of the motivation and performance of these statesmen.
The whole of chapter 3, “International Traveller,” on Wheeler-Bennett's introduction to China, Japan, the Soviet Union, and other then exotic locales for Western travelers, is derived almost entirely from Wheeler-Bennett's unpublished memoir, “The Gorgeous East.” That memoir was remembered and written more than forty years after the events occurred. Most of chapter 6, “The Perils of War,” about his duties as personal assistant to Philip Kerr, Lord Lothian, the new British ambassador to the United States in 1939, is based on Wheeler-Bennett's Special Relationships: America in Peace and War (1975). Wheeler-Bennett recalled that Lothian asked him to travel throughout the country to be “his eyes and ears” (117) and to encourage the American people to support the war. Although Wheeler-Bennett indicates that his reports were valuable, none of them nor notes about them were found among Lothian's papers. Schofield acknowledges in her notes that when Wheeler-Bennett wrote his various memoirs, he was very elderly and ill. In her final chapter, “Memories,” she accepts the larger narrative while noting errors of fact.
Wheeler-Bennett was certainly a dedicated and apparently likable public servant, whose independent wealth and American marriage allowed him great freedom in overt and clandestine service to the political establishment. Did he understand the crises in which he participated and did his reporting and advising make any difference to policy or events? Was his thinking idiosyncratic or representative of identifiable opinions? Because the dominating interest of his political life was intelligence reporting, which is rarely public knowledge, Schofield relies upon Wheeler-Bennett's assurances about his own efficacy. But we have little corroboration about the contents or consequences of his actual contributions. Instead, Schofield's account of Wheeler- Bennett's incessant and intrepid travels and encounters is based almost entirely upon his own testimony, as well as the occasional laudatory comments of contemporaries. The author includes little self-reflection by Wheeler-Bennett and few critical comments by his peers. Schofield does provide a sprightly introduction to a unique personality and the unprecedented adventures characteristic of his charmed life. Her narrative would have been of greater interest to historians if it were a more nuanced assessment of Wheeler- Bennett within the special communities in which he lived and worked. Instead, the book is an example of the genre of political biography best described as posthumous autobiography.
