We are left with the question of whether this correspondence itself contributed to what Eden himself felt was a misunderstanding between the two men. Did Eden read too much -or too little -between the lines of a presumed friendship? Would formal diplomatic channels not have been less open to misinterpretation?
Convention holds that the art of letter-writing is both noble and dead. Boyle comments on the "contrast to email and the coarser forms of instant communication of later times". He finds in the letters "a yearning for a lost art and a gentler, more courteous means of interchange of views and ideas". The dealings of great men are, by implication, more reliable when conducted by the pen than by the voice, or that epistolary travesty, the email.
I find this view similar to that of a Victorian romantic harking back to the days of knightly jousting, when men were brave and the lance more intimate than the Maxim gun. The Eden-Eisenhower letters could well be seen as a case history of the danger of allowing statesmen to deal informally in matters of peace and war.
Clearly they could not be secret. Most appear to have been dictated personally by the principals, edited by secretaries, then signed. But during the Suez crisis they were clearly substantive policy statements. Many were apparently drafted by officials, and circulated round departments for comment before transmission. The contents had to be accurate since they were speaking parts in the drama of events.
But they remained cursory. They could not be balanced expressions of the totality of understanding between two governments. Like email "flares", they risked a built-in bias against understanding.
Letters between statesmen are not as between lovers or business partners. These missives were critical and time-sensitive. They contained many pleasantries about health and holidays, spouses and colleagues. But for the most part they are exchanges of importance. Despite their illusion of comradeship, they lack the immediacy and nuance of the telephone. It is astonishing that Eden and Eisenhower could exchange five letters and not one phone call on ultimatum day, October 30.
Small wonder there are mentions of messages "crossing with yours".
Whether or not the Eden-Eisenhower correspondence contributed to the collapse of Anglo-American relations over Suez, it was clearly unable to restore them. It is significant that Eden came to crave a personal meeting, which Eisenhower felt obliged to deny him. For all the sophistication of electronic communication, the greatest innovation in diplomacy since Suez has been in summit conferences, in regular face-to-face meetings. In five centuries, no one has been able to improve on the Field of the Cloth of Gold, well replicated by the extravaganzas of the G7.
Suez was the coda to Britain's imperial era. Dulles's predecessor, Dean Acheson, was able to reflect that Britain had "lost an empire but not found a role". But connoisseurs of historical irony may smile. As similar tensions surface in the region again, the roles of Europe and America during Suez seem eerily reversed. We are left wondering with Hegel whether governments ever learn from history. They stumble across the well-trodden sand as if visiting it for the first time. As these letters show, they make the identical mistakes. But now they leave only coffee cups. Sofa diplomacy deposits no sofa correspondence in the archive.
